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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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The political war over Hurricane Helene is heating up. Elon Musk is accusing FEMA of blocking his attempts to deliver Starlinks to areas affected by the disaster. Right-wing Twitter/X is full of talk about various incidents in which purportedly people coming to the area to try to help and/or deliver supplies are being turned away by FEMA. Also full of talk about FEMA using money to support illegal immigrants. Some people are pushing theories that FEMA is deliberately withholding help.

How credible is any of this?

My guess is that FEMA is a typical semi-competent government agency that makes many blunders. It might be bad at coordinating with random people who want to help but are not government employees and it might thus institutionally prefer to just block off the area and try to handle everything without random people's assistance. This policy then causes the various incidents that are being talked about.

I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.

What do you make of it?

All these stories demonstrate is that the public has no idea what FEMA actually does. A friend of mine used to work for them, and spent over a year in Tinian working logistics in the aftermath of a Typhoon that barely made the news on the mainland. He told me that the only people FEMA will send to most places are administrators. The counties and municipalities handle the actual relief efforts, and above them is the state. FEMA's role is to provide funding, and the personnel they send are there to make sure the funding matches the planning that's done on the local level. They may provide an increased measure of assistance, but only if the localities in question can't handle it. That's why most of the direct FEMA work is done in places like Tinian, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, who can't really do it on their own. But FEMA isn't going to go into Florida and tell them how to handle hurricane relief. The states know their state better than FEMA and the counties know their county better than FEMA, and they aren't there to meddle. They may be doing a bit more than usual in Helene since the affected area isn't used to this kind of damage, but it's not like North Carolina isn't prepared to handle a hurricane. The posters below who say that no one has proven any examples of FEMA actually doing anything are probably right, because that's not what they're there for.

The posters below who say that no one has proven any examples of FEMA actually doing anything are probably right, because that's not what they're there for.

Hey, that's me!

If FEMA is just there to provide money, then they should actually do that instead of pleading poverty. And then get out of the way.

If the point of FEMA is to provide money, and they can't provide money in an actual disaster, then they have utterly failed. Seriously, just abolish the entire department and start from scratch. I can't think of any reason for this department as currently constituted to continue to exist. The buck must stop somewhere.

FEMA is not pleading poverty.

“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have." -Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, 2OCT24

FEMA is providing money. You can look at their monthly spending reports of how they allocate it for free.

How much is going towards third worlders settling in America again?

Out of the Disaster Relief Fund? Nothing, unless you consider Appalachia third world.

I never said disaster relief fund, I said FEMA. Why are you changing the conversation like that? Very strange Dean. We were talking about FEMA the whole time.

I never said disaster relief fund, I said FEMA. Why are you changing the conversation like that?

Because the conversation you replied to was about the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund, whether you wanted to change the topic or not.

Very strange Dean. We were talking about FEMA the whole time.

No, we were talking about FEMA's ability to provide money for disaster relief.

To quote what you were quoting was responding to,

"If the point of FEMA is to provide money, and they can't provide money in an actual disaster, then they have utterly failed."

FEMA's ability to provide money in a disaster is derived from the Disaster Relief Fund. Which is providing money in an actual disaster, and is not unable to do so for the immediate emergency.

So FEMA is supposed to provide money for disaster, but cannot, but is somehow able to shelter and feed millions of illegal migrants? Interesting. How many people know about this? How did this strange twist of fate occur? Is all of this funding issues easily transparent to the common citizen?

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The problem seems to be that they are also stopping other people from doing things -- the locals apparently feel that FEMA is literally worse than nothing. (and they are indeed being told by FEMA "how to handle hurricane relief" -- in that FEMA says they should fuck off and let only people authorized by them do the relief.)

As I recall the complaints were similar in New Orleans -- if FEMA is worse than useless in non-third-world parts of the country, maybe they should be looking at the chainsaw whenever somebody get around to taking action on the debt?

The problem is likely what @gorge suggested below: priority one of FEMA is to obtain control of the situation, and the other priorities (like actually assisting) are too hard.

And yes, they should get the axe.

The axe is obsolete.

One of the themes of Patrick McKenzie's legendary essay The Story of VaccinateCA is that the government is perfectly willing to let private citizens assist with emergency relief efforts if the government is allowed to take credit for it. Tweets like this are a declaration of war in that context. If you go into a disaster area with the intention of undermining the legitimacy of the official response, you are going to have a bad time.

The Story of VaccinateCA

One interesting passage that ties in to the anti-union post downthread:

One reason was that, while governmental actors could collaborate with volunteer-based organizations, they could not use the work of volunteers directly, due to a raft of considerations. One mentioned to me was union-negotiated labor rules. There is no one employed by the government whose job is calling pharmacists to get this information, true, but if that person hypothetically existed they would be a union member, which means that a volunteer doing that job is nonunion labor competing with them. Unions are extremely predictable in what they think of their employers using nonunion labor.

As Alejandro Mayorkas warns that FEMA doesn't have enough funds to last through Hurricane season, a reminder that the Jewish Lobby's campaign to secure over $300 million for federal handouts to Jewish synagogues and NGOs comes from the FEMA budget.

Oh no, Jews are lobbying for money for their pet causes. How dare they!

Breaking News: Ever interest group lobbies for handouts. Catholics. Farmers. Unions. Employers. Students. I am not sure if there is a horseshoe manufacturer association in the US, but if there is, they are likely lobbying for some federal money to help them compete against the Chinese or something.

Congress passes the budget, with some funds being further distributed by the administration according to the rules Congress passed for the funds. If you feel that the Biden administration is giving too much money to The Jews, take it up with your Congressperson. (It used to be that one could win elections on a platform of opposing the Evil Greedy International Finance Jews, but during the 40's, that became really unfashionable for some reason. So your Congressperson might not be very sympathetic to your concerns.)

I have not checked that FEMA really paid 300M$ for Jewish orgs, but even if they have, that would be about 1% of the yearly FEMA budget. Not very impressive, as narratives go. "Jewish space laser causes hurricanes" would be more impressive, but has certain epistemological disadvantages.

I am assuming that the remaining 99% of the budget was not spent on any other, gentile pet causes which have nothing to do with disaster preparedness, because otherwise, you would have mentioned them as well instead of singling out Jewish causes? If so, that would be a deal I would take any time: 99% on target spending is an unheard efficiency for government. We should totally give random Jewish organizations 1% of the federal medical budgets if that magically means that the remaining 99% will be spent efficiently on target.

Given that FEMA's major contributions at this point appear to be (1) preventing competent private citizens from actually achieving things, and (2) promising to distribute too-small-to-really-help checks at some point in the future (which, realistically, is going to get defrauded like crazy just like the CovidBux did), why are you assuming that dumping more money into the FEMA moneypit would have positive results?

If this hadn't happened, would FEMA have an extra $300 million to use on other things, or would they simply be appropriated $300 million less?

Same question for the illegal migrants program that everyone on Twitter seems to be talking about.

That's... even worse.

If money can be allocated whenever, it sends a clear signal that FEMA values illegal aliens and synogogues more than they value helping Americans in an actual disaster.

This is incredibly black pilling.

I think you reversed the order of money allocation...?

If the money is appropriated for a purpose, that means it can't be allocated whenever- it can only be spent for the purpose the legislature appropriated it for from the start, and thus does not come with the opportunity cost of a later allocation decision. The money would not have been there for FEMA for the first place if it wasn't for the purpose it was appropriated.

This is the difference between being given $20 to do what you want and spending it irresponsibly, and only getting $20 to use towards a thing you may / may not care about. Not using the $20 for the thing you do not care about does not convert it into $20 you can use how you want.

You can argue the wisdom of an annual budget for spending on things you don't care about, but the initial appropriate can't send signals that care more about a previously planned thing over a later shortage because the initial appropriation for a fiscal year is on the assumption that it would meet forecasted needs.

Which is why the normal thing for a national government is to later appropriate more money on a more ad hoc basis later in the fiscal year.

Jeroboam is referring to the ability of the Jews to manufacture a national panic in order to swindle $300 million from FEMA while North Carolinians are left with peanuts. The order of money allocation does not alleviate the sheer injustice of the dynamic that is at play.

$300m is peanuts. It costs tens of billions to recover from major hurricanes. This is as financially illiterate as when people think that taxing billionaires a bit more would ‘fix the deficit’ or whatever.

FEMA’s annual budget is like $20bn.

Jeroboam and you both seems unfamiliar with governmental budgetary practices. The order of money allocation does alleviate a falsely accused injustice because the order of money allocation renders the charge baseless.

FEMA cannot be swindled out of $300 million if FEMA never had $300 million that could be allocated for other purposes. If the money is only appropriated to FEMA for the purpose of migrant support, it'd be more accurate to say FEMA received $300 million more than it otherwise would have with the potential for ancillary benefits of dual-utilization investments that would be absent Congress had chosen another agency to help disperse the appropriated funds. Since American budgets work more along the lines of Purpose -> Funds -> Agency rather than Agency -> Funds -> Purpose, it is wrong to claim spending on one cause stole from another, even by the same agency, unless those are specifically the same funding line.

Since gaining $300 million you otherwise wouldn't have but for the action has considerably different moral and ethical implications than losing $300 million you could have used but for the action, this would if anything be the opposite of a swindle.

This is the distinction between an appropriation and an allocation.

While I don't agree with SS's strident anti-Jewish take, he is directionally correct.

Hiding being bureaucratic procedures is the last refuge of the scoundrel. If this was viewed as actually important by the administration, the money would be found.

Judge a system by what it does.

Hiding being bureaucratic procedures is the last refuge of the scoundrel. If this was viewed as actually important by the administration, the money would be found.

I'll accept your concession that the administration views this as actually important.

The claim that FEMA is out of money derives from the remarks of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had in a press conference on Wednesday, 2 October. Specifically-

“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting,” Mayorkas said.

Money is being found. Money was always being found. There was never a point where the money was not being found. Ergo, the issue was, is and always has been viewed as Actually Important by the Administraiton.

So where is the money shortage narrative deriving from?

Mayorkas was not specific about how much additional money the agency may need, but his remarks on Air Force One underscored concerns voiced by President Joe Biden and some lawmakers earlier this week that Congress may need to pass a supplemental spending bill this fall to help states with recovery efforts.

“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting,” Mayorkas said. “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”

This is not a claim that FEMA does not have money. This is a claim that FEMA does not have sufficient funding on-hand for the hurricane season, with another hurricane in sight, when you factor in the recovery efforts of the one that just hit.

Which is completely normal, as FEMA isn't funded on the front-end to cover the full cost of future disasters. The normal model for FEMA funding by Congress is enough money to handle immediate response- the point that Mayorkas is explicitly saying they have funding for- and to then re-top it off before adding in what is needed for tail-end costs.

Can Congress add in more if there's a need?

Both chambers of Congress are scheduled, however, to be in their home states and districts until after the election, as lawmakers focus on campaigning.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., gave no hint he was considering changing that schedule during a speech Tuesday. He said that Congress just provided FEMA with the funds it needs to respond and that lawmakers would make sure those resources are appropriately allocated.

A bipartisan group of Senators from affected states wrote their leadership this week saying it’s clear Congress must act to meet constituents’ needs. They said that may even require Congress to come back in October, ahead of the election.

This funding for response deriving from-

Congress recently replenished a key source of FEMA’s response efforts, providing $20 billion for the agency’s disaster relief fund as part of a short-term government spending bill to fund the government through Dec. 20. The bill also gave FEMA flexibility to draw on the money more quickly as needed.

So to recap-

-The head of the head of FEMA says there is money for the immediate crisis

-The Democratic administration is saying there is money on hand for the immediate response

-The Republican House Speaker agrees there is no issue on response funding for the immediate response

-Congress appropriated $20 billion as FEMA needs but to last the entire year as part of a short-term spending bill

And in future prospects

-The head of the head of FEMA says there is another hurricane on the way and they may need more money by the end of the hurricane season

-The Democratic administration is signaling that they may ask for additional FEMA funding later this fall

-The Republican House Speaker is non-committal on stopping election campaign fundraising to support an earlier refill

-Congress critters of both parties are considering coming back in October to pass more funding

And in this context, the $300 million grant, allocated in an entirely different funding context and thus not in contest with the $20 billion fund top up last month, is raised as directionally correct of there being a lack of funds to provide immediate help.

Now, while I am sure that some people find 300,000,000 a really impressive number, and all the more if written out, this itself is against a 20,000,000,000 pot of money that is the pre-Hurricane amount for a roughly 3-month period. Do some basic division structure, and you reach a staggering..

300,000,000/20,000,000,000 = 3/200 = 0.015 = 1.5%

1.5% of the short-term budget, allocated an entire fiscal year before, is truly all the difference in the handling of the current crisis.

Meanwhile, if we bother to look at FEMA's Monthly Disaster Relief Fund report which it provides to Congress monthly... let's take July 24 since that's before the current funding questions and would have helped feed the Congressional top-off decision...

Annex B identifies FY costs by event, by month, and with a cumulative by the year. On page 9 of document (12 of PDF), you will see that Hurricane Sandy- all the way back in 2012- has a current FY24 obligation of... 334 million dollars.

To reiterate- the entire number raised as Jewish swindling creating a current response shortage is insufficient to cover the ongoing DRF obligations of a single hurricane from a decade ago.

And sure, Hurricane Sandy is larger than some of these old ones... but it's nowhere near the top of the list either.

Hurricane Maria, from 2017, has a fullyear-obligation of 11,450... million. Which is to say, 11.45 billion.

COVID-19 is charging the DRF 20.45 billion in FY24. A single line item for a year is more than the entire budget for a quarter of a year.

Of course, those are full-year totals, and we're talking a 3-month coverage of 20 billion.

If we take the 3-month totals of July and then the estimated August/September obligations as a frame of reference, we'd see that for JUL-SEP FY24, FEMA thought it would need... a bit over 15 billion for 3 months.

And Congress allocated 20 billion for 3 months, before a historic hurricane hit a region ill-prepared for it.

So to bring this around-

In September 2024, Congress passed a $20 billion disaster relief fund budget for 3 months.

It did so with a reasonable expectation that about $15 billion would have been needed for all already existing expenses.

This would leave about 5 billion for all new disasters.

In the end of September 2024, a new disaster hit.

It is a historic hurricane in an area much less adapted to dealing with them or mitigating loss. Damage costs are likely to be very high.

On 2 October, the Administration warned that another hurricane could also hit.

1-2 hurricanes are warned to possibly go through enough of the $5 billion buffer to warrant additional appropriations for the unforeseen costs.

No one at any level of government alleges there is actually a lack of funding for the immediate response of Sep-Oct.

Directionally correct response:

The government doesn't care about spending money on people in America.

We know this because of $20 billion allocated for a 3 month period to help victims of natural disasters in America.

$15 billion is already allocated to American victims of past incidents.

The government is actively spending the $5 billion for new American victims of a historic disaster.

And the government is warning that reconstruction aid for American victims and a potential further disaster may warrant more money for American victims.

And that's bad.

Truly we should judge them by what they do.

Judge a system by what it does.

Sure. And the system is doing what it has been doing for years if not decades without being scandalous: having enough money on hand to deal with immediate issues, and Congress then appropriating more after new disasters come about to cover the recovery.

Similarly, we could judge people by what they do... or do not do, in the case of checking available information the nature of a problem.

How much money does the Federal Emergency Management Agency need to be allocated before it starts having some left over with which to manage federal emergencies?

It was specifically the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund that was down to only $1 billion dollars on hand until they asked Congress for more money and so Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. The FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that, and no amount of money provided to something that isn't to FEMA Disaster Relief is going to overflow and provide money to FEMA Disaster Relief. Both are under FEMA but there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA.

There's "FEMA disaster relief is about to run out of money!" headlines whenever there's a bad hurricane year, because Congress provides it additional funds as needed rather than providing that much funding every year. Here's an article from 2017:

Bloomberg: FEMA Is Almost Out of Money and Hurricane Irma Is Approaching

With Texas still reeling from Hurricane Harvey and another storm barreling toward Florida, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected to run out of money by Friday, according to a Senate aide, putting pressure on Congress to provide more funding this week.

As of 10 a.m. Tuesday morning, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, which pays for the agency’s disaster response and recovery activity, had just $1.01 billion on hand.

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How much water needs to be poured into a bowl before the bowl starts having some water left over to be in the bowl?

Unless you intend to claim that FEMA was not appropriated money with which to manage federal emergencies, the question doesn't parse. Governmental budgets tend to work on a 'pot of money' model, in which your annual appropriation is the starting amount you have to work with. Other pots (funding codes) don't get filled to overflowing for you to get the remainder- your pot is separate from others pots (funding codes) from the start.

Competition for resources at an Agency or Ministry level generally happens within a funding code, not between funding codes. Every disaster draws from the 'manage federal emergencies' pot of money. No emergency draws from the 'facility maintenance and improvement' pot of money. When cross-pot funding gets involved, so do lawyers, because if you start allocating funds for uses they weren't appropriate for by the government, you're defrauding your own government and the audits tend not to be pleasant.

When a funding code's allocation is proving insufficient for the year, this is a normal point for legislatures to pass additional appropriations. This is generally still on the per-pot basis, and from what I've read is more or less what was already underway with FEMA.

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Will anyone ever remember that every time the Fed prints more for handouts, it is simply stealing the value of anything else that's dollar denominated including your wallet and the rest of FEMA's budget?

I'm tired of everybody acknowledging US spending is not funded by taxes and the next day acting like nothing happened and that's still a good model for how it all works. Especially given the recent period of high inflation has redistributed wealth like nobody's business.

Inflation is only strongly redistributive if it either happens alongside or immediately after a large scale collapse in asset values. In this case the opposite happened, anyone who was rich in 2009 is much, much richer now. Anyone who was poor in 2009 is probably doing a little better, but still hasn’t had close to an opportunity to catch up. $1m in the S&P 500 in 2010 is $6m today. There’s a reason the only major new money in the ZIRP era was generated in private equity and tech.

Inflation is only strongly redistributive if it either happens alongside or immediately after a large scale collapse in asset values.

Inflation is only not distributive if it's spread equally among money-holders. IIRC it's how economists believe it should be done, and how they assume it is being done to make the models simpler (see "helicopter money"), but it's actually never done that way.

Inflation is classically redistributive because it erodes asset prices, increases borrowing costs and raises incomes. Older, wealthier people lose relative financial standing, while younger, asset-poor ‘not rich yet’ yuppies with high earning jobs experience a relative (and often substantial) boost in financial standing. That generational redistribution hasn’t happened at all over this period of inflation because asset prices have remained sky high throughout, and are still rising. No wealthy boomer need sell his home because his cost of living has gone up, because his investment portfolio has doubled since COVID, more than making up for the impact of inflation on his expenditure.

Inflation doesn't erode asset prices (going into assets is actually the way you're supposed to respond to inflation), it erodes cash balances.

Of course, the point is that historically periods of financial upheaval (and falling inequality, or larger financial redistribution) have very little to do with inflation at all, and are instead usually more to do with wars, famine or plague.

Inflation is classically redistributive because if you create $1000 and give it to someone, he'll be able to buy $1000 worth of stuff before the prices adjust to the new money supply. Even if the adjustment was instantaneous, the distribution of money would be skewed of in favor of the guy who got the money. The only way this doesn't happen is if you increase the supply of money without affecting it's distribution, i.e. "helicopter money".

The effects you describe are among the last to come about as result of inflation, and the redistribution doesn't even have to go the way you described. It can just as easily go the opposite way: fresh money being sunk into the stonk and real-estate markets, favoring the boomers at the expense of the young.

Especially given the recent period of high inflation has redistributed wealth like nobody's business.

Inflation is excellent for debtors, and a lot of Americans are debtors.

You clearly missed the memo, Milton Friedman is not running the show anymore.

www.politico.com/news/2020/04/25/joe-biden-green-stimulus-207848

I refuse to believe the whole of the American elite is truly so deluded as to think this has no consequence.

They just don't care because they're asset holders close to the printing press so it benefits them.

Doesn't need to be the whole of the American elite, just enough.

Well thanks for the reminder, pointed as it ever is lol.

Yeah the Jewish lobby is super powerful. Not surprised, seems like most well funded and well connected lobbying groups are able to just raid the budget indiscriminately at this point.

Well, in the media this has been thoroughly debunked, is the thing. I've seen several 'fact checks' about it in the last day or two. So SS up there is right to point it out.

Does this still move the truth needle for you? Because it doesn't for me at all.

I'm not claiming that SS is correct, or even that they are posting in good faith. But you seriously can't consider the media "debunking" something to matter at all in 2024.

The Nonprofit Security Grant Program is clearly a case of non-profits bellying up to the public trough (and thus a funding source for Left, Inc), but $300 million is the total, not what "the Jewish Lobby" is getting, the way our local Schutzstaffel implies. The FEMA site has awards broken down by geographical area but I cannot find the actual recipients.

H/T to @coffee_enjoyer he provided the numbers:

Between 75% and 97% of NSGP funding goes to Jewish groups. source 1 source 2 source 3

Maybe this ratio has changed slightly. I remember reading, hilariously enough, that Jewish NGOs pledged to host virtual trainings for representatives of other Faiths on how to apply for the grant. But that training is not necessary because the Goyim are too stupid to fill out forms, the training is necessary because they lack the Chutzpah to fathom that they are entitled to hundreds of thousands of dollars from FEMA for literally no reason. The Chutzpah-training is their attempt to make this less glaring than it actually is.

That's when it was a lot smaller than it is now -- Jewish groups were getting $9.7M of $10M or thereaabouts, but now the total budget is $300M. I would expect that most of the increase is new groups bellying up to the trough.

No, it’s mostly that Islamist attacks on churches are pretty much nonexistent in the US, limited as they are primarily to Islamic countries like Egypt and France. By contrast, violent extremist attacks on US synagogues from both them and your own ideological peers are more likely and in the latter case already more common.

Actually, violence at churches is far more likely owing to, erhm, the demographics of certain congregations. They can pay for their own security like every other organization in the country has to. Lobbying for hundreds of millions on the back of a propaganda hoax is despicable behavior.

You obviously knew I was referring to violence at churches caused by non-congregants or people not part of the demographic and cultural community of those in the congregation.

The money wasn’t off the back of a propaganda hoax, it was off the back of the very real Tree of Life terrorist attack and the fact that wignats and Islamists have attempted to murder congregants at many synagogues in Western countries over the last fifteen years. If no white nationalist attempts to murder American Jews at a place of worship over the next few years, I’ll concede I’m wrong. Sadly, I don’t think I will be.

Funnily enough, someone close to me is deeply involved in Church work and distressed dealing with a homeless person who is causing security concerns. Too bad she isn't Jewish, so she has to figure out how to finance security from the church budget, like everybody else in this country who pays for their own security.

The money wasn’t off the back of a propaganda hoax

The money was off the back of the propaganda hoax, the ADL literally coordinated with other Jewish groups to use the story to pressure Congress to increase funding for the program. They actually linked to their own lobbying efforts for funding in the midst of their reporting about the "National Day of Hate," which also directly caused the mobilization of police forces across the country to respond to this totally fabricated threat.

And why should that matter? Crime whether committed by congregants or non-congregants is a risk faced by all religious institutions. The evidence shows that Churches are more likely to experience violent crime than synagogues, the fact that crime tends to be more intra-community wouldn't undermine the greater need for security at those places.

The Nashville shooting at the Presbyterian church parochial school by the transgender shooter was only last year. There will likely be many more attempted murders at many Christian institutions across the country than any Synagogue. There's no empirical basis other than hysteria and political influence to warrant this funding which is almost entirely going to Jewish organizations.

Last time the motte managed to pull the actual numbers they were, perhaps unsurprisingly, disproportionately Jewish but had plenty of churches in the mix- and the percentage was increasing. Church security is a growth market while Jewish organizations are already at maximal paranoia, so this is unsurprising.

I haven't followed the FEMA stuff, but there has been a libertarian claim "the purpose of police is to prevent private citizens from enforcing the law." For a long time I scoffed at it, but I've slowly come around. When I watched the BLM protests there were a lot of police out on the street, but a lot of people were engaging in looting, disorderly conduct, street blocking, etc, with total impunity. But of course, if a group of concerned citizens had come out with clubs to beat up the vandals and looters, the police would have come down hard on them. In some cases there are videos of police arresting citizens who are trying to pull protestors away from blocking the street.

What it comes down to is that it is simply easier for the police to arrest Joe taxpayer-with-something-to-lose for vigilantism, than it is to stop a mob of BLM protestors. Furthermore, it may be more of an embarrassment, a challenge to their manhood, if a private citizen is enforcing the law. The elite don't like the private citizen enforcing the law either, a BLM protest they can contain, private citizens enforcing the law would be far more unpredictable. This model also predicts why despite blatant disorderly crime being so common and unpunished, and gangland violence being common, actual murdering of white children is very rare in a city. The police do take this seriously, because they know threat of arrest won't be enough to stop parents from engaging in vigilantism. So the police still have to do enough actual law enforcement to keep crime to a barely tolerable level.

There is probably some iron law of bureaucracy that states that the bureaucracies primary mission de facto will end up being preventing competition.

Getting back to FEMA, I don't think this is a case of FEMA consciously having orders to punish rural Trump voters. But, as a bureaucracy, they probably have some mandate that says, "our job is to establish chain of command and authority over the disaster area, so we don't have chaos and anarchy, and decision making comes through us." Sounds sensible to people in Washington sitting in the office coming up with the plans. But on the ground, in the middle of the disaster, it turns out it is far easier to stop people from helping, to stop people from flying helicopters in, than it is for FEMA itself to actually analyze and approve all incoming resources, or for FEMA itself to do the providing of resources. So the plan initially is:

  1. Establish authority over the disaster area. Prevent movement of resources without approval to ensure scarce resources are not misallocated, that there are no airspace collisions, etc.
  2. Approve allocation of resources, approve flights as requested based on our analysis
  3. Bring in resources from outside for people.

But then in the fog of war it becomes:

  1. Establish authority over the disaster area. Prevent movement of resources without approval.
  2. (too hard, falls through cracks)
  3. (too hard, falls through cracks)

So the actual result of the organization is that it is an anti-disaster relief bureaucracy. Conquest's third law strikes again.

I think a big part of it is that the BLM and related leftward groups tend to have people on their side skilled at lawfare and so if a protester gets arrested, they can post bail, and any good lawyer can go into court and paint the guy as a saint. Plus if the guy arrested gets so much as a bruise the same attorney can get their clients lots of money for “police brutality”. Ordinary non-protesters don’t often have that kind of attorney on retainer and therefore the police are much less likely to be sued for stopping them.

There is probably some iron law of bureaucracy that states that the bureaucracies primary mission de facto will end up being preventing competition.

Good guess since that's what the one actually called the iron law of bureaucracy states.

Though Michels describes the process at more length in Political Parties.

How credible is any of this?

At this point, with lawfare, several unclear assassination attempts, it's IMO pretty credible FEMA would deliberately be a bit slow. Politico thinks Helene could affect elections in the states hit.

Politico has an article.

Hurricane Helene hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of Georgia and North Carolina — a fact that could work to Donald Trump’s disadvantage in the two swing states.

...

Helene hit some predominantly Democratic communities hard too, adding to the uncertainty. In North Carolina, “Buncombe [County] was affected in really bad ways, and that is a liberal bastion,” said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. “And Watauga is in really bad shape, also a blue leaning county.”

Overall, Helene could “dramatically change who is in the electorate,” Cooper said.

“In a state like North Carolina where margins matter, then every little tweak to the electorate could be the tweak that makes the difference,” Cooper added. “It’s right on the razor’s edge between red and blue.”

County elections offices in North Carolina — five of which remained closed Thursday — will assess damage to early voting sites and polling stations to determine “which facilities won’t be available,” Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said this week.

"Every little tweak matters" - there you have it.

Perfect motivation for strong partisans to be inefficient with recovery so that voting is depressed in leaning red counties.

How do “several unclear assassination attempts” cause FEMA to sandbag their one job?

FEMA and SS are both under DHS and Mayorkas.

If you had a time machine and could go back in time and shoot Hitler in the head to save six million Holocaust victims, would you?

Would you travel back in time and detonate a bomb to kill Hitler, if it meant you also killed 1,000 civilians in the blast?

If you had a time machine and could kill Hitler by not repairing a bridge before he could evacuate before an allied strike, if it meant another 100,000 civilians died in the assault, and another 50,000 starved in the aftermath?

The media and the DNC has been saying Trump is Hitler for close to a decade now. I'm sure you can do the math.

There’s no time machine. This proposed negligence doesn’t kill or even personally affect Trump. And—most important—Democrats don’t actually equate Trump and Hitler!

The stochastic terrorism argument is a way to assign blame. It’s not, in and of itself, evidence.

I've played the Red Alert games, so the answer is no

This got a good chuckle. Well played.

I think the argument is that in a state of such rampant partisanship that the most unhinged will take matters into their own hands, it is realistic to expect normal bureaucrats to look at the political bottom line instead of their nominal duties.

Precisely.

It seems like the very visible screwup which Trump and his supporters are very visibly addressing would make the actual literal neighboring communities of the affected lean more towards Trump, though.

I dunno, maybe that's because I live in Texas, and Dallasites and Houstonians see each other as Texans, where other states don't have that consciousness. But Trump's coalition(I mean Elon has endorsed Trump and does anyone actually believe there's a single democrat in the Cajun Navy?) visibly rescuing people in your backyard seems like it should sway some votes.

It seems like the very visible screwup which Trump and his supporters are very visibly addressing would make the actual literal neighboring communities of the affected lean more towards Trump, though.

Except that the official story is that this is a lie by the vast right wing conspiracy, and the government is actually doing the rescuing. And people here are perfectly willing to steelman FEMAs actions so they can agree that's so.

What's weird to me is that people are asserting that FEMA is helping but providing exactly zero evidence - except maybe there is some action in Asheville.

Proving that FEMA isn't helping is hard. That's like proving a universal negative.

But proving that FEMA is helping should be easy. The evidence should be all over social media. And yet none of FEMA's defenders seems to be interested in doing that.

Ergo, FEMA probably isn't doing much of anything useful.

Did you even bother looking? Here's the governor of NC stating that FEMA has provided $27M and organized shelter for 1,400 people. Here's FEMA's own press release column, complete with photographic evidence.

You are in a bubble. As long as you're only looking for tweets that flatter your existing story, guess what you're going to find?

Those numbers are comically low. $27 million? I’m probably in a bubble but everything being posted in defense of FEMA here is such faint praise that I’m now almost certain the bubble is right on this one.

Oh, only now?

I am struggling to be charitable here. You asked for evidence that FEMA was doing anything useful. I was able to provide that with five minutes on Google. Now you want to complain about the numbers. Fine. But you have to actually contribute something.

What would it take to change your mind?

Replying since it's a direct question even though it's an old thread.

I recognize that perhaps I am not contributing to this conversation with data. My argument is that no one really is. And evidence of things being accomplished is easier to prove than the lack of things being accomplished.

You did find evidence of aid being delivered, however slight, so I will recognize that you have made greater contributions than I have.

If I contribute to the thread in the current week, I will spend some time researching before typing.

What would it take to change your mind?

That's a good question and I will think about it. Presumably, if the FEMA admins were working overtime that would be a good first step to changing my mind. But apparently they are keeping 9-5 hours and the head of FEMA was seen out shopping at a luxury store in DC. Senior management of FEMA should be, you know, actually in the disaster zone.

I'll try to remain open to the idea that maybe FEMA is not completely useless, but I'm also having a hard time being charitable I guess.

I pointed this out lower in the thread.

RW Person: Makes claim critical of government with some evidence (though often anecdotal)

Government official: That is untrue (doesn’t provide receipts).

Media: RW person debunked and spreading dangerous misinformation.

This is just how it works now. Semi-functional establishment institutions have squandered most of the bipartisan trust and goodwill they once enjoyed. When they screw up, often through a mix of mostly incompetence and some malice/political maneuvering, this is first ignored by a wholly partisan mainstream media and then picked up by a right-wing information ecosystem whose sole epistemological lodestar seems to be "does it make progressives look maximally bad?". This leads to the most unhinged takes bubbling up to the surface which allows the technically-not-lying-but-who-are-we-kidding mainstream media to enact their "right-wing conspiracy theorists pounce"-shtick. Which then leads to pundits on the dissident right to scramble for something, anything, that makes their inanity seem "directionally correct".

It's all so tiresome.

This leads to the most unhinged takes bubbling up to the surface

But lots of these takes are not unhinged.

FEMA distributes relief to migrants and illegals. That's not a conspiracy or furtive rumor. That's a basic function it performs with budget allocations and press releases and grants. Noticing that FEMA is now claiming to be out of money is not some weird partisan non-sequitur. It's a basic observation of cause-and-effect: they spent money on illegals and now are out of money for Americans.

Likewise, rumors about FEMA getting in the way. This is rumoring of the worst sort, but it's also correct to talk about it. You have first-hand accounts of people claiming that FEMA officers are confiscating relief and getting in the way. Imagine that that happened to you -- well, some guy on twitter concluded that this is just all part of a broken media incentive infrastructure, so it doesn't matter if it's true or false. Comforting!

It's a basic observation of cause-and-effect: they spent money on illegals and now are out of money for Americans.

But those are separate earmarked categories of funds. The FEMA Disaster Relief Fund was down to $1 billion dollars on hand and moved to "Immediate Needs Funding" until Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. But the FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that. Both are under FEMA but my understanding is that there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA. And obviously "FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund is about to run out of money" stories are generally overblown in the first place, since Congress is going to provide it additional funds as needed.

These rebuttals only move the problem one layer back. Why did Congress earmark these funds for non-citizen migrants instead of leave this funding open to American citizens who are displaced and need shelter and services?

instead of leave this funding open

Because most of the time the Disaster Relief Fund doesn't need that much money and Congress can just pass a bill giving them more funding if they actually need it, like they did in 2017 and last month. Would you prefer if they were deliberately given excess money and it was up to FEMA officials to decide how to save or spend it? Because that doesn't seem like a good idea to me. If the Disaster Relief Fund got an extra $20 billion every year they could probably find a way to spend it during mild hurricane seasons to increase preparedness or something, but that doesn't mean that would actually be better than spending the money on some other part of government or lower taxes.

Why did Congress earmark these funds for non-citizen migrants

If you're going to allow non-citizen migrants in the first place, such as allowing refugees under humanitarian justifications, the same humanitarian justification can be used to argue for helping them in other ways so they aren't left homeless on the street. More to the point, this is fundamentally a policy question that doesn't relate to the Disaster Relief Fund any more than any other government program. Regardless of whether it's a good idea to have the Shelter and Services program, that doesn't change whether it's a good idea to provide the Disaster Relief Fund with additional funds on an as-needed basis.

But lots of these takes are not unhinged.

Sure. And a functioning media ecosystem would be able to discuss these cases without partisan mud-slinging.

And I don't doubt that there are cases of FEMA dysfunction. But that's not under dispute here. The more interesting claims are that FEMA is deliberately, systemically, and strategically witholding help from those in need to help Harris win the election.

Imagine that that happened to you -- well, some guy on twitter concluded that this is just all part of a broken media incentive infrastructure, so it doesn't matter if it's true or false. Comforting!

Meditating on the potential emotional state of a potential truth-teller not being believed does not really tell us much about whether the person making such claims is actually telling the truth. Facts over feelings cuts both ways.

I find it equally tiresome, but I think anyone who's ever labored under the assumption that politics or say the media was ever at bottom about anything more than competing moral tribes with different visions of society's future, is deluding themselves.

For example, just the other day I was watching Piers Morgan's regretful debate with Mehdi Hassan over Israel/Palestine. Mehdi being a big player in the same space Piers is, clearly knows how the game is played, and spanked Piers pretty hard on his own show. It makes for great soundbites and entertainment, but is no way to conduct an honest debate.

I find it equally tiresome, but I think anyone who's ever labored under the assumption that politics or say the media was ever at bottom about anything more than competing moral tribes with different visions of society's future, is deluding themselves.

Maybe I have just grown much more cynical over the years, but I remember that the propaganda of, say, 20 years ago, was much more refined. Now it is just insultingly stupid, in a taunting "we know that you know we know you know we are lying, what are you going to do about it?" kind of way.

20 years ago the American media hadn't had it's back broken by social media and journalism was a profession rather than an advocacy platform.

Part of what makes professions different from trades is their willingness to punish their own for violating standards. Flaws did and do exist, but the economic downturns meant that there was a gradual shift towards the survivors being people willing to work for less (because they were more willing to work for ideology), and these people in turn- many of them more junior entries who had less experience and thus lower paychecks in the first place- were more inclined to punish on the basis of ideological deviation than on lack of adherence to style.

That explains the ideological conformity and the zeal of the survivors. It does not explain the total lack of subtlety.

I... generally don't associate conformist zeal with subtlety in the same person?

To clarify- the more subtle people were the professionals. The professionals were not the survivors.

I mean, you can both be zealous and competent at what you do, no? And if what you do is propaganda production...

You're conflating (and changing) the standard of comparison. Competent is not synonymous with subtle, particularly in a context where survival (a screening factor for what is / is not competent) is characterized by exceptionally enthusiastic support for a cause.

Being unsubtle is not a lack of competence in and of itself. Competence is the characteristic of what it takes to succeed. The metric of success in the selection effect to be a modern journalist is surviving as a modern journalist, not being a subtle propagandist.

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Well one problem has been that technological developments and social trends have made it easier by lowering the costs for people with cheap contributions to have a voice. I was one of the few skeptical and somewhat cynical naysayers among those I knew who took the opposite position and usually went around championing things like the democratization of the media or X or Y, and allowing people to have a voice, saying its going to raise the aggregate level news quality among people's media diet. Instead you got the reverse, more along the lines I more or less thought it would, where the signal to noise ratio became so out of hand that the bad drives out the good, and mediocrity rules the waves from one end to the other.

None of these things ever get pitched on the harm they'll do to society when the first appear and gain traction, but instead it's all about the great and wonderful and productive things it'll enable us to do. But the noble and moral uses of these things only ever end up being a footnote and an afterthought to their real uses. Mindless consumerism. Intellectual laziness. Style over substance. I really don't understand how it seems like nobody ever saw this coming. I saw it coming from a mile away. But maybe I'm just that pessimistic.

Idiots on Twitter is one thing. Midwits on the payroll of the NYT is quite another.

I’m reminded of Gay — a NYT editor. I can’t remember if she tweeted that when Bloomberg spent 500m on his political he instead could’ve given the 327m Americans over a million dollars each or merely saw the tweet and ran with it as a story for Brian Williams.

In either case, she had more than enough time to think “that sounds crazy — is the math right.” And either she can’t do basic basic math or she doesn’t care.

That was peak cable news comedy.

Williams showed a screen-grab of the tweet during the broadcast that read: “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The US population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over. I feel like a $1 million check would be life-changing for most people. Yet he wasted it all on ads and STILL LOST.”

Speaking in disbelief, Williams said: “When I read it tonight on social media it kind of all became clear.”

Even more embarrasingly, in the middle of reading out, the tweet remarked: “Don’t tell us if you’re ahead of us on the math.”

NYT Editorial Board Member Mara Gay then agreed: “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing. It does suggest what we’re talking about here which is there’s too much money in politics.”

In all seriousness these days, it can be hard to tell the difference. Bari Weiss could've passed as someone they hired off Twitter.

I saw someone post this leadership page on the fema website. Do these people look like the best our country has to offer? Just looking at these people I wouldn’t put it past them to be dragging their feet. I also wouldn’t be surprised if they’re incompetent. Either way, I don’t know how anyone can look at this and think the USA is anything other than an embarrassment.

https://www.fema.gov/about/organization/offices-leadership

They look fine to me.

Can you show me a leadership page that you wouldn’t say is incompetent? I’m not sure I understand your criteria.

They all seem pretty qualified. Just looking at the first one;

Ms. Criswell began her career in emergency management in Aurora, Colorado, where she led strategic change in the city's emergency and disaster planning. During her tenure, Ms. Criswell coordinated transitional housing and family reunification efforts in response to receiving evacuees during the response to Hurricane Katrina. She previously served at FEMA as the leader of one of the Agency's National Incident Management Assistance Teams (IMAT) and as a Federal Coordinating Officer. In this role, Ms. Criswell was the primary Federal representative responsible for leading the agency's response to and recovery from emergencies and major disasters, from severe flooding in North Dakota to hurricanes in South Carolina to fires in Colorado. She also spent two years as an executive in the private sector, providing exceptional technical expertise and the experience necessary to help her clients achieve their critical missions.

Ms. Criswell also proudly served 21 years in the Colorado Air National Guard. She is a veteran of two overseas tours to include as a fire officer in Kuwait immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and to Qatar in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2010 where she advised senior leadership on fire protection requirements for new and existing military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ms. Criswell holds a Bachelor of Science from Colorado State University, a Master of Public Administration from the University of Colorado – Denver, and a Master of Arts in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School, Center for Homeland Defense and Security.

Seems like the exact experience you would expect for someone in such a role? She was also Commissioner of the NY Emergency Management Dept.

Seems like the exact experience you would expect for someone in such a role?

'Strategic change' could be a code for shibboleths, but it is a good resume. The point about the fire officer in Kuwait might actually be relevant here- that's not 'fire' as in 'something is combusting,' but 'deconflicting airspace so shells and planes don't crash into eachother mid-air.'

That would be the precise sort of mentality to stress airspace deconfliction that's sparked some of the discussion here.

How exactly are you judging them as "an embarrassment"? Those look like ordinary professional photos and they look Iike normal people. Without knowing anything else about them, should I assume it's just the fact that many of them are black and/or women that's causing the curled upper lip?

They look like bureaucrats. They look like people that have spent their entire professional lives pushing paper around and playing office politics. I can only imagine what skillset it takes to advance to leadership in the federal government, but it seems unlikely that they’ve been selected for competence at responding to emergency situations.

I think it’s worthwhile for people to look at that page and assess for themselves what type of person is responsible for the hurricane response.

People should ask themselves, does this group look like the type of people that would prioritize Ukraine, “migrants”, or rural Americans. There is a well known trope that coastal elites seem to hold rural people in contempt. I’m willing to make the leap that the people on that leadership page are part of that group.

They look like bureaucrats. They look like people that have spent their entire professional lives pushing paper around and playing office politics.

They look like every person I see with a professional headshot on LinkedIn, from sales managers to software engineers.

I can only imagine what skillset it takes to advance to leadership in the federal government, but it seems unlikely that they’ve been selected for competence at responding to emergency situations.

Actually, being an adept bureaucrat is very important for people in charge of managing and funding a disaster response. These are not the people who will actually be wading through floodwaters to bring emergency supplies, which is of course an entirely different skillset.

People should ask themselves, does this group look like the type of people that would prioritize Ukraine, “migrants”, or rural Americans.

I would ask myself that about the politicians who determine policy, not try to divine someone's innermost loyalties based on a picture that reveals only sex and race.

There is a well known trope that coastal elites seem to hold rural people in contempt.

"Well known trope" = "Thing that lots of people are happy to believe because it fits their culture war priors." In fact most civil servants (and these people, while fairly high up in FEMA, are pretty low on the fed food chain) are no more or less diligent about their duties and responsibilities than the average corp wageslave, and I would argue generally moreso. You don't join FEMA because you have a seething hatred of "rural people" and think this is your best avenue to hurt them.

I’m willing to make the leap that the people on that leadership page are part of that group.

Again, I am asking why you think you can be so confident about this based solely on their photographs? If you just assume that anyone in a government agency leadership position is a "coastal elite" who holds rural people in contempt, then it wouldn't really matter what they look like. You could have just said "I'll bet FEMA hates rural people." I think you have a very unsophisticated inductive reasoning chain.

Given the antagonistic relationship between meritocracy and efforts to diversify institutions, a particularly "diverse" institution is in fact (weak) prima facie evidence of subpar competence among its members.

They look like every person I see with a professional headshot on LinkedIn, from sales managers to software engineers.

Tomayto, tomahto. It's not a pure demographics thing: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/prima-facie-leadership

I'm autistic enough to dislike this observation and to not be particularly acute at picking it up myself, but not autistic enough to pretend it isn't real.

I am very skeptical of this kind of phenotyping, which is often little better than phrenology. "You can just tell by looking at the strong-jawed white chad that he's a superior New Soviet Manalpha male." A lot of people claim they can detect "soy face" when it's just a guy making a goofy expression. Really, do you think you could pick Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower out of that West Point photo without being told who they are?

In this instance, it seems pretty clear to me that the judgment is purely based on the fact that the OP saw a lot of women and blacks.

Really, do you think you could pick Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower out of that West Point photo without being told who they are?

No, but I'm probably <1st percentile at facial recognition in general, and I'm reasonably willing to believe that normies would do better than chance (and that the entire West Point football team was already pretty strongly selected for Chadly leadership ability.).

phrenology. "You can just tell by looking at the strong-jawed white chad that he's a superior New Soviet Manalpha male

I mean, yeah, pretty much. I'm seeing a lot of pointing and sputtering at the idea that facial features and appearance are correlated with personality and aptitudes in unsurprising ways, without much actual convincing evidence to the contrary.

Skepticism isn't the same as "pointing and sputtering." Of course I am speaking for myself; I don't know if you mean me or if you have seen other people "pointing and sputtering." (I haven't, at least not here.)

The thing is, you can make inferences about someone's health and genetic gifts based on their appearance, sure. A tall, well-proportioned man with a strong jaw probably is a more fit physical specimen. So I, at least, am not claiming that you can determine nothing from appearance.

My skepticism encompasses the following points:

  1. Being a handsome strong-jawed chad may have some statistical correlation to also being smart and possessing natural leadership qualities, but the two don't automatically go hand in hand, so picking a "leader" because someone looks like Captain America in a headshot is probably at best a flawed heuristic. Yeah, given no other info, I'd pick Captain America over soy-face too. I would not agree that you can, as a general rule, pick people for their leadership qualities and competence based on their photos.

  2. A lot of what you see in photographs is superficial presentation. Any stylist, photographer, or couturier can tell you that you can make a strong man look weak or a weak man look strong with the right outfit and angle and lighting. (Same with women; turning a 4 into a 8 or a 8 into a 4 is not hard.)

  3. Going back to the OP, there wasn't even any discussion of specific characteristics of the people in question, just vague hinting that they aren't white men and therefore are inferior.

Which is why I am pushing back, because I'm totally interested in well-presented arguments about how you can correlate specific physical characteristics to positive traits (and anyone who's been around for a while knows I am not afraid of HBD arguments), but the OP's post was lazy. If all you have to say is "Look at all those women and blacks, obviously incompetent garbage!" what are you expecting, sober head nods and clapping at your well-reasoned argument?

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The steelman is that institutional DIE focus causes both uselessness and detectable changes in racial/sex ratios, which creates a correlation between those ratios and uselessness - valid Bayesian evidence - even in the absence of significant causation.

Except you can click on all these people and see that they are all amply qualified and experienced.

There are likely to be amply credentialed but that is different than qualified. This is a problem caused by the systemic discrimination that is now called DEI, but has existed since the 60s. I can be admitted to a very good school, say University of Michigan right next to a black woman, and there is a 90+% chance I was more qualified to get in. Then we can matriculate, and because no one fails anymore we will have similar GPAs. Then we will take the LSAT and again, this black women can get a mediocre score compare to me and we will both then be admitted to Michigan's law school. Again no one fails anymore, and now we graduate and my mildly better GPA (lets say 3.9 vs 3.8, that is generally the spread allowed at such schools now), means a law firm can justify hiring her over me. And they will.

She will wash out of biglaw, most people do, but the DEI hires do at extraordinary rates. But it will still say "Biglaw" on the resume forever, so now she can be picked for a make work government job paying 6 figures, and continue to do little to nothing for the rest of her "experience".

I am often reminded of Hillary Clinton when discussing this or similar topics. Recall how the media constantly called her the "most qualified" candidate ever? They love checking boxes. But checking boxes is not a qualification, its a credential, and they haven't been all that meaningfully linked for my entire lifetime.

People can be socially promoted through their entire education process and career now despite incompetency. Private companies are more likely to terminate these people. Therefore they are more likely to end up working for the government. Without a process to cull the useless, useless people will accumulate within an organization.

Recently, a woman sued Hartford Public Schools because she is unable to read or write. She was an honor roll student at the high school and currently is a part time student at University of Connecticut-Hartford.

https://readlion.com/a-connecticut-college-student-cant-read-or-write-she-blames-her-public-school/

Of course none of this is evidence that these FEMA people are necessarily incompetent. But believing that "qualifications = competency" is mere credentialism.

I think it's clear that this disaster has been mismanaged by FEMA. That, more than college degrees, is strong evidence of competency or lack thereof.

Is it representative of the population? Possibly. Is it representative of their workforce? Possibly. It's hard to tell

What really pisses me off is that the head of the DoT Pete Buttigieg is calling Elon Musk a conspiracy nut for claiming this, and dozens of other articles are calling it misinformation and 'blatant lies.'

And yet if you go to the Asheville regional website it literally says that no flights may land without prior permission.

I know at this point I shouldn't be shocked anymore by the blatant lies of the media, but it continues to baffle me how blatant and idiotic they are about it.

Asheville Regional's PPA is for the airport, I think Musk is more complaining about some NOTAM, which is far bigger a deal and covers a lot bigger area. There's nothing listed as a TFR right now, but there was this weirdness until earlier today. It's not marked as a TFR -- they start with some variant of no pilot may operate (unless), cfe this VIP one from Biden flying through a couple days ago -- but it requires everyone to communicate to and obey a specific emergency center channel that could tell people to fuck off or just be overwhelmed.

EDIT: I'll add that it's possible there was no management-level decisions for Buttigieg to be aware of, for the specific problems Musk was highlighting; radio calls and management are rough in the best of circumstances, and no one in this field is gonna be NY TRACON-tier.

... and that this is in many ways a much worse thing. Public officials dealing with an emergency can't treat complaints like they're political conspiracy theories, not because such foul play is unimaginable -- I can give examples! -- but because the alternative is imaginable. Disasters are by definition the breakdown of normal systems, with lives on the line dependent on our ability to respond to those gaps.

... and that this is in many ways a much worse thing. Public officials dealing with an emergency can't treat complaints like they're political conspiracy theories, not because such foul play is unimaginable -- I can give examples! -- but because the alternative is imaginable. Disasters are by definition the breakdown of normal systems, with lives on the line dependent on our ability to respond to those gaps.

Yeah I think this is my main issue. When the default response becomes "the other side is trying to smear us with insane conspiracies" then the government becomes basically immune to any criticism.

Extremely worrying development.

What is more annoying is that the media will say “government official debunks Musk’s wild claim.”

The evidence they will point to is the government official. The same government official Musk is criticizing.

It would be like if our judicial system asked the defendant “did you do it” and if they said “no” accepted their word as final. Just crazy.

I know!! Exactly it's just... comically thin.

But then again political and news discourse has been degrading at a dramatic rate.

My guess is that fema is fucking up because it literally does not occur to them that requiring permits slows things down.

Look, I’m not a fan of the federal government or the cathedral. But they don’t actually hate us and want us dead. They’re shitty and incompetent and don’t share values, but they’re not cartoon villains. I think this is typical federal bureaucracy which doesn’t stop to think that checking every can of donated food for botulism before letting it through will stop aid from reaching the people who need it, causing more harm than the botulism would.

they don’t actually hate us and want us dead

Why are you so sure?

I mean hate us might be accurate but the cathedral does have astroturfed messages aimed at the red tribe, and they're consistent with wanting a peasant population that has kids who join the army and do actual work(as peasants are expected to do).

Sure, the cathedral might want red tribers/rural people/whatever your category is to be second class citizens. But they very clearly want us around.

and they're consistent with wanting a peasant population that has kids who join the army and do actual work

if the chattering in X is anything to go by regarding the recruiting ads displayed on TV, it looks like your sentiment only applies in times of war or near the beginning of them. In which case it would be assisted suicide by enemy action at best.

And it makes sense, why would they need red tribers any other time when they have illegals willing to do the job for much less.

So you suggest we invoke Hanlon's Razor?

Yes

I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.

Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.

At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.

I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.

Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.

Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.

This is underselling the culpability of the democratic city and state leadership. There wasn't merely a 'not taking the imminent storm threat seriously', but actively delaying and hindering federal support responses including by not actually asking for various types of assistance from the federal and other states until days later, instigating a posse comitatus policy freeze disrupting federal military assistance, and of course the police not merely abandoning duty roles but partaking in the looting.

When the local police are joined in on the looting and a state senator is diverting national guard assets to get material from his personal home, there's not terribly much an organization like FEMA can do.

At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.

The steelman is that airspace is dangerous if uncontrolled, and so in a disaster a government doesn't want to be competing with airspace. This is especially true when rescue agencies would be further diverted if they had to rerout resources to help someone who got themselves into a mess- like, say, by crashing aircraft into a town.

On the other hand, this administration is the heir to the one that repeatedly targeted religious medical charities if they didn't support abortion-enabling policies. There is an established vein of 'our way or not at all' in some parts of the US government.

I have no insight into this specific circumstance, but 'stop getting in our way as you try to help' is a real, and sometimes even valid, thing.

When the local police are joined in on the looting and a state senator is diverting national guard assets to get material from his personal home, there's not terribly much an organization like FEMA can do.

Wait do you have examples or sources of this? Would be crazy if it turned out to be true.

“Military sources tells ABC News that Jefferson, an eight-term Democratic congressman, asked the National Guard that night to take him on a tour of the flooded portions of his congressional district. A five-ton military truck and a half dozen military police were dispatched. Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News that during the tour, Jefferson asked that the truck take him to his home on Marengo Street, in the affluent uptown neighborhood in his congressional district. According to Schneider, this was not part of Jefferson's initial request.”

“Four New Orleans police officers have been cleared of allegations that they looted a Wal-Mart store after Hurricane Katrina, but each was suspended 10 days for not stopping civilians from ransacking the store, the Police Department said. The probe stemmed from an MSNBC report that showed the officers filling a shopping cart with shoes, clothes and other items. When a reporter asked the officers what they were doing, one responded, “Looking for looters” and turned her back. Assistant Police Chief Marlon Defillo, commander of the Public Integrity Bureau, said the officers seen on the video were recently cleared of looting because they had received permission from superiors to take necessities for themselves and other officers. The Police Department later informed Wal-Mart management, after the store had been secured, that its officers had taken some needed items, he said.”

I’m going to classify both of these stories as “technically true”.

I’m going to classify both of these stories as “technically true”.

The best kind of true, truly.

There is/was more- one of the reasons that Bush invoked the insurrection act in Katrina was because the Governor was refusing to invite federal troops in unless she could get control of them, there was significant desertion of police at the time (in some cases actual people just not coming in, but allegations I can no longer find reports of that various police numbers were never-show corruption), and even reports that reached NPR of shootings of unarmed civilians- but the general point is that the foundations were generally cracked, and that FEMA as an empowering rather than an overriding agency is always going to do worse the worse the local leadership is..

and even reports that reached NPR of shootings of unarmed civilians-

I'm pretty sure InRangeTV did a dive on one of those incidents.

Ahh I thought you were talking about Helene, not Katrina.

Still though, what a mess. Every time I think I can't hate the government more...

Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.

On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media. Sure, sometimes it’s trolls, but by this point, enough ultimately true stories were officially dismissed as misinformation until they were shown to actually have happened that I no longer find the “Russian Trolls” story to be a sensible hypothesis. In fact, I’m trying to think of a story told in the past 2-3 years where it’s actually traced back to a real Russian whether working for the government or not.

I’m mostly with the steelman here. People who don’t know what they’re doing wandering about a disaster area are more likely to create situations where they need rescue than to do substantial good — unless they have enough knowledge to know what they’re doing. A bunch of rednecks coming in and sawing through things or chopping down trees or whatever might well injure people or need rescue themselves. Disaster areas tend to be dangerous and the dangers aren’t always obvious. Taking your John boat over downed power lines is pretty dangerous. So the government probably is turning people away because they don’t want to rescue the redneck brigades who have no experience rescuing people.

It's always extremely easy to be intellectually lazy and unconsciously fall victim to propaganda. Britain and the US invented the modern public relations and propaganda industry and have been very successful at convincing the average person who had never even heard of places like Donetsk and Luhansk up until a few years ago, that they're on the right side of an issue they know nothing about.

I remember awhile ago getting into a debate with someone in the /r/geopolitics subreddit, who literally said to me that if Russia only spent more money on it's domestic social programs to take care of its people, NATO wouldn't expand into Ukraine. And that is not hyperbole. This is the quality and caliber of the average person who takes great pride in having very strong opinions about something they know absolutely nothing about. Americans in general are not very good when it comes to putting themselves in the shoes of other people, and when you combine that with someone who mistakes the philosophy subreddit for the geopolitics one when it comes to understanding international affairs, riding a bike on the highway isn't your only problem when you're also going the wrong direction.

If you don't understand what's really going on, then you can't even represent the other accurately enough to have a sensible disagreement with it.

On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media. Sure, sometimes it’s trolls, but by this point, enough ultimately true stories were officially dismissed as misinformation until they were shown to actually have happened that I no longer find the “Russian Trolls” story to be a sensible hypothesis.

Are you even dismissing the right hypothesis?

No, seriously. I think you mis-read what was claimed, and projected previous / other experiences onto it. The hypothesis is not that 'the coverage is the result of Russian trolls.' The hypothesis is 'no matter what happens, there will be Russian trolls trying to make it worse.' Whether the Russian trolls succeed in significantly shaping the conversation, or originated the talking points, or are fallaciously conflated with legitimate grievance is irrelevant to a characterization of their (a) existence and (b) attempts.

If you want to dismiss that, sure, but you haven't actually provided a grounds of disputing either supporting point. Which do you find non-sensible- that Russian troll farms like the Internet Research Agency exist?

Very directly- what do you think the Russians use the Internet Research Agency for? Not how influential it is, not whether it's fair to tar Americans with guilt by association. What do you think the Russian IRA does, and why?

In fact, I’m trying to think of a story told in the past 2-3 years where it’s actually traced back to a real Russian whether working for the government or not.

What does 'traced back' even mean in this context? If you mean 'originated with,' one of the more famous was the Colombian Chemicals Plant Hoax in 2014, and more recently the 2021 the pre-Ukraine War propaganda justification/narrative blitz, which included claims of genocide of Russian-speakers to justify Russian intervention.

But if 'traced back' means 'shaped / signal boosted,' which is the claimed level involvement here, then by definition any Russian social media coverage of any topic counts, especially since you said 'for the government or not.' Unless you intend to argue that the Russians don't use social media...?

No, seriously. I think you mis-read what was claimed, and projected previous / other experiences onto it. The hypothesis is not that 'the coverage is the result of Russian trolls.' The hypothesis is 'no matter what happens, there will be Russian trolls trying to make it worse.' Whether the Russian trolls succeed in significantly shaping the conversation, or originated the talking points, or are fallaciously conflated with legitimate grievance is irrelevant to a characterization of their (a) existence and (b) attempts.

Except that every time I’ve seen the claim made, it’s not really backed up by any evidence of trolling. It’s just a go-to excuse for the reports in question and circulated on social media. This isn’t remotely a good faith attempt at explaining what’s going on, but an easy off the cuff statement of “yeah don’t pay attention to this.” And I think at this point, the propaganda claims that Russia is causing or amplifying these stories by far outstrips what Russia itself is actually doing.

If you want to dismiss that, sure, but you haven't actually provided a grounds of disputing either supporting point. Which do you find non-sensible- that Russian troll farms like the Internet Research Agency exist?

Yes, troll farms exist, I’m not disputing that Russia, China, and pretty much every other country with internet access has some sort of troll farm. But if they aren’t capable of getting results and getting good results, then it kinda doesn’t matter. And given that it’s possible for us to track them, we know where the trolling is coming from, stuff like this is probably fairly trivial to block.

And to be clear my grounds for dismissal are pretty simple. First, this is the go-to story every single time a social media story contradicts or embarrasses the cathedral. It never happens that Russian Trolls are pushing the narrative of Project 2025, or calling Trump a danger to democracy, or calling Republicans fascists. That is never considered trolling. But when the story is something embarrassing to the establishment, that’s the trolls. Kinda interesting how one set of stories is always pushed by, started by, faked by, or amplified by Russia, and the other side absolutely never is.

Secondly, we never seem to find out which Russian troll account starts or amplifies these stories. Can you name any troll accounts outed by the regime? Have they given any evidence beyond “trust us bro” for any such claims that a story has been deliberately seeded or amplified by a known Russian troll account? And this seems fairly telling. There’s almost never evidence presented to show these trolls did all the things they’re accused of. They are invisible and leave no evidence behind every time.

Very directly- what do you think the Russians use the Internet Research Agency for? Not how influential it is, not whether it's fair to tar Americans with guilt by association. What do you think the Russian IRA does, and why?

The Russian IRA does cyberwarfare, that much is obvious. To the degree it exists, it’s there to do various forms of cyber warfare in support of Russian military operations. And it’s not like I don’t think they’re occasionally effective. Honestly they might be as good as the ones in the CIA group we have. But again, if you’re going to issue a blanket statement that every anti-cathedral story on social media is based on something Russians are pushing, it’s simply not credible unless and until it’s shown to actually have been done by Russia.

To blame Russian trolls for every negative viral story is a conspiracy theory.

To blame Russian trolls for every negative viral story is a conspiracy theory.

Cool, but who here that you're replying to is doing that?

You lead off with this,

Except that every time I’ve seen the claim made, it’s not really backed up by any evidence of trolling.

And if you're looking for examples of Russian efforts because you literally have never head any, sure these can be provided. Here is a 140 page academic review of Russian propaganda in the context of the start of the Ukraine war. Here is a 2014 (and thus pre-2016 craziness) on the Internet Research Agency, one of the original notable troll farms. Here is coverage of an IRA-linked accounts conducting an Ebola and cop-shooting hoax in Atlanta, GA. Here is a study of when IRA accounts were engaging in pre-COVID vaccine debates. Here is IRA posters involved in inflamatory British rhetoric. Here are times they helped organize protests by Americans on differing parts of the spectrum, including BLM.

Heck- and you'd probably agree with the thesis of this one- here is a Foreign Affairs article including a recount of the Doppelganger project which cloned entire news sites to introduce fake news in what people believed would be real webistes.

One of the benefits of the IRA when it was around was that it didn't constantly change all of its accounts regularly, allowing for pattern-matching. This has gotten rarer with evolutions in bot-technologies and such, but you can still find examples if you look.

But then you go to this

And to be clear my grounds for dismissal are pretty simple. First, this is the go-to story every single time a social media story contradicts or embarrasses the cathedral.

Which is assigning a motive to me I do not have, and a mischaracterization of many opinions I do have.

It never happens that Russian Trolls are pushing the narrative of Project 2025, or calling Trump a danger to democracy, or calling Republicans fascists. That is never considered trolling.

To which I and others would say... yes! If / when Russian troll accounts are linked to these such things, they can absolutely be called supported by Russian trolls! It's Russian trolls if they're involved in trying to arrange Black Lives Matter protests. If Russia trolls are linked to supporting a cause it is considered Russian trolling. There is no claim to the Russsian troll style that there is any allegiance to a specific cause.

But when the story is something embarrassing to the establishment, that’s the trolls. Kinda interesting how one set of stories is always pushed by, started by, faked by, or amplified by Russia, and the other side absolutely never is.

....but this is where I feel bad for you, because this is the opposite of positions already provided to you in this overall thread. The people claiming Russian trolls only support one side are not the people you are actually arguing against, shoving other peoples arguments into theirs is dishonest.

As such, I'm going to skip to this-

Secondly, we never seem to find out which Russian troll account starts or amplifies these stories.

And be frank: it doesn't matter to the argument you responded to if Russian stroll accounts start or amplify these stories.

There are cases of Russian trolls starting stories. There are cases of Russian trolls amplifying stories. Neither is meaningfully different when it comes to whether it is a bit of an effort to manufacture a narrative. Signal boosting and initiation are both ways to try and manipulate narratives.

And to be clear my grounds for dismissal are pretty simple. First, this is the go-to story every single time a social media story contradicts or embarrasses the cathedral. It never happens that Russian Trolls are pushing the narrative of Project 2025, or calling Trump a danger to democracy, or calling Republicans fascists. That is never considered trolling. But when the story is something embarrassing to the establishment, that’s the trolls. Kinda interesting how one set of stories is always pushed by, started by, faked by, or amplified by Russia, and the other side absolutely never is.

Based on the "cathedral" and "establishment" phrasing, it looks like you believe the Democrats are basically in control of the country. If so, then why would Russia, should they aim to destabilize, push narratives against the underdog Republicans? They are already losing, if Russia starts helping Democrats they'll just lose harder and then there'll be no destabilization, just securing the Democrat regime.

Would boosting PunchANazi, BLM, MeToo, Trans Women Are Women and whatnot count as helping or hurting Republicans?

No, seriously. I think you mis-read what was claimed, and projected previous / other experiences onto it. The hypothesis is not that 'the coverage is the result of Russian trolls.' The hypothesis is 'no matter what happens, there will be Russian trolls trying to make it worse.'

I have two questions:

  • Does the hypothesis carry any meaningful content then? If $controversy is spreading, what's the point of bringing Russians into it, if you're not going to make a claim on the spread being a result of their interference?
  • Why the particular focus on Russia? It's not like the US doesn't have a whole bunch of "Cyberspace Wings" and "Test Groups" that spend a suspicious amount of time on social media.

I have two questions:

Does the hypothesis carry any meaningful content then? If $controversy is spreading, what's the point of bringing Russians into it, if you're not going to make a claim on the spread being a result of their interference?

Yes. The point is raising an uncontroversial example demonstrating the claim that there are motivated actors who will try and shift a public discourse regardless of context, and whether or not that involves lying or truth.

Notably, the controversy here isn't whether the Russians do it, which was the claimed example, but how responsible they are for the effect of discord, which was not argued and irrelevant to the position.

Why the particular focus on Russia? It's not like the US doesn't have a whole bunch of "Cyberspace Wings" and "Test Groups" that spend a suspicious amount of time on social media.

Russia was raised as single example because a single example was all that was needed to demonstrate the premise, a single example from US politics could have been interpreted as an insinuation of relative responsible to the party invoked and insulting to the tribes associated with it, and two or more examples would have been twice or more the work without changing the generally uncontested point that the example was raised to demonstrate.

Writing about a whole bunch of groups seemed unnecessary. Is it?

Yes. The point is raising an uncontroversial example demonstrating the claim that there are motivated actors who will try and shift a public discourse regardless of context, and whether or not that involves lying or truth.

It's still not clear to me what is the meaningful content here. What information is it bringing that wasn't already being taken into account?

Writing about a whole bunch of groups seemed unnecessary. Is it?

- Jews steal!

- Everybody steals!

- Well yeah, but we were talking about Jews.

What can I say, I disagree. If you wanted to make the point that we are all being psy-opped by cyber-warfare divisions of every major world power, the point would have been better made as a general statement. If you single out one particular power, it will look like you think there's something different about them in particular.

It's a bit like that thing about cat-eating Haitians. The claim is not particularly interesting if it was a freak occurrence, and raising it only makes sense if Haitians are disproportionately more likely to do it.

It's still not clear to me what is the meaningful content here. What information is it bringing that wasn't already being taken into account?

To the person who originally felt that there may be actors trying to manipulate public discourse, affirmation that there are actors trying to manipulate public discourse.

Someone is learning something for the first time every day. The information is always meaningful for those who weren't already taking it into account.

What can I say, I disagree. If you wanted to make the point that we are all being psy-opped by cyber-warfare divisions of every major world power, the point would have been better made as a general statement. If you single out one particular power, it will look like you think there's something different about them in particular.

Except that not all psy-opps run in the Russian style, which was the specific style identified for the example, so claiming that every major world power is psy-opping in the same way would not only be wrong, but a deliberate falsehood.

And if I didn't single out an example, I could be accused of not supporting a claim and doing low-effort posting.

Shrugs

It's a bit like that thing about cat-eating Haitians. The claim is not particularly interesting if it was a freak occurrence, and raising it only makes sense if Haitians are disproportionately more likely to do it.

Is there a credible reason to believe a disproportionately refugee population from a state with endemic contemporary food insecurity is not disproportionately more likely to partake in non-traditional dining?

More comments

I personally find the "Russian trolls" narratives to be really frustrating because, whether or not the subject actually originated, or even was just amplified by them, the discussion tends to devolve into Westerners (Americans) accusing each other of being Russian trolls. Which is itself a loss in social trust "making it worse" in ways far beyond what the Russians would have been able to do themselves. Bickering about Russian trolls is, in itself, a victory for those trolls! The long-running inquisition into the Russian activities in the 2016 election seems to me to have been far more damaging to American institutions than anything the Russians themselves directly did.

Which isn't to say that they don't exist -- they do -- but most coverage I see of the issue seems, at best, counterproductive.

I'd fully agree on grounds of counter-productive and social trust loss, and I've had similar thoughts for some time. Even here, the point of the original raising of it was an example of an actor that would be present rather than a claim that the actor was responsible, but not being clear enough about that clearly triggered the (justified!) argument-immune system response for some.

Which I think has been more than interesting enough to leave the original lack of clarity in, but I truly do sympathize for those who thought I was implying something I didn't intend to.

In the spirit of an apology- and to maybe remind myself to write on effort post on it later- here's a pretty interesting article from Foreign Affairs last week on how Russian influencer-networks like the Social Design Agency are inflating their roles.

This has some interesting (and effort-post worthy) implications for what it means for western discourse on Russian troll farms, as it can mean that Western leaders are truthfully conveying key points from actual intelligence reporting that accurately characterizes the intent of legitimate Russian influence efforts. It is both a potential example of the limits of deductive reasoning (where all premise must be true, but here the chain of links can be compromised by self-aggrandization), but also in characterizing the head-space of leaders who see these reports of 'we're going to mess with the Americans with lies', try to tell the public of these things, and are... discounted and dismissed by people who then also repeat themese these actors say they're going to boost.

There's more steps than that- the conflation of false and true signal boosting, the role of lack of social credibility, the motivated reasoning to believe the negative effects are the result of a malefactor taking credit for achieving them- but just as intellectual empathy requires understanding why some people can doubt elites for reasonable reasons, the same standard can understand that elites can have their own reasonable reasons to believe things others may dismiss as mere partisan motivation.

I look forward to reading your effortpost! It sounds interesting.

EDIT: that Foreign Affairs article seems pretty reasonable. Thanks for the link!

Just for your understanding, this is exactly the danger of the Russian style of disinformation. It is decentralized and not tied to any particular narrative or to truth in general. The agents will amplify both true and false stories with impunity. This is because the stated goal of the Russian propaganda machine in the West is not, for example, 'make Russia look good' or 'show hypocrisy in Western countries'. The essential goal is to create division in Western societies over the long term by degrading trust in institutions, information sources, and each other.

So yes, in this case Russian disinformation may be amplifying actual government failures. In other cases it may be making things up wholesale. The point is to be aware that there are malign agents (and not just Russians) whose purpose is to turn this into a political or cultural battle rather than giving a clear picture of reality, and then factor that in to our assessment of the situation.

This is an unfalsifiable theory. If there is Russian interference, hey, wow, I was right. If there's not, well, whatever, I was just being careful, and it's always good to be careful.

Russian social media campaigns being in any way influential is extremely implausible. Whatever they might be spending would be a drop in the bucket relative to what Americans spend on social media all the time. That has been the case every time a number is attached to whatever Russia is supposedly spending.

Did he claim they were influential, or was he claiming a style?

If he's claiming a style, then that would actually be falsifiable, by establishing a different style is what is actually pursued.

When the style claimed is "increases discord", it's indistinguishable from internal partisans who are unhappy with the current state of affairs, and post their (discordant) opinions on social media.

I guess this is falsifiable if you found some russian operatives posting so as to... increase harmony, but this seems unlikely, and I can't really visualize what "increase discord" looks like on the other end. "Here's some rubles, go stir the shit on twitter"? Government propaganda campaigns always have some sort of goal in mind IME -- it used to be "promote global communism", but what is it now?

When the style claimed is "increases discord", it's indistinguishable from internal partisans who are unhappy with the current state of affairs, and post their (discordant) opinions on social media.

Absolutely. Or at least, almost indistinguishable. There are occasionally tells- for example, intermixing the awkward fixing of things an internal partisan wouldn't care about that happens to align with a foreign propaganda interest (plenty of Americans don't like the idea of fighting China over Taiwan, but only a minute number do so on grounds of appeals to the Century of Humiliation narrative)- but often it is indistiguishable.

This is why I'm fully sympathetic to people whose ideological immune system is flaring in suspicion.

I guess this is falsifiable if you found some russian operatives posting so as to... increase harmony, but this seems unlikely, and I can't really visualize what "increase discord" looks like on the other end. "Here's some rubles, go stir the shit on twitter"?

Unironically pretty close to that.

One of the origins of the modern Russian troll factory is that one of the more notorious- the Information Research Agency- was founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin. Yes, the Wagner Mercenary guy. Prigozhin was basically somewhere between a front, a fence, and a semi-autonomous vassal of Putin's security establishment. The distinction is that not only did he do what he was told, but he had a degree of freedom to try initiatives on his own. This was/is part of Putin's power structure, where inner-circle elites compete for power and influence and attention... and one of the ways is to do something impressive. Or, in Prigozhin's case, something that appeals to Putin's spy-mentality, while also serving as an excuse to charge the Russian government for services rendered. Other elites began copycatting later, and the American reaction probably justified the investment in Russian views, but IRA was the first (until it's dismantling / repurposing after the Wagner Coup and Prigozhin's assassination).

The IRA began in 2013, and by 2015 it had a reported ~1000 people working in a single building. One of its earlier claims to notice, before the 2016 election and compromise of American political discourse on that front, was back in 2014 when Russia was trying to recalibrate international opinion on its post-Euromaidan invasion of Ukraine. Buzzfeed published some leaked/stolen IRA documents, including a description of daily duties.

To quote-

"Foreign media are currently actively forming a negative image of the Russian Federation in the eyes of the global community," one of the project's team members, Svetlana Boiko, wrote in a strategy document. "Additionally, the discussions formed by comments to those articles are also negative in tone.

"Like any brand formed by popular opinion, Russia has its supporters ('brand advocates') and its opponents. The main problem is that in the foreign internet community, the ratio of supporters and opponents of Russia is about 20/80 respectively."

So how does one counter that narrative mismatch?

The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.

...

The trolls appear to have taken pains to learn the sites' different commenting systems. A report on initial efforts to post comments discusses the types of profanity and abuse that are allowed on some sites, but not others. "Direct offense of Americans as a race are not published ('Your nation is a nation of complete idiots')," the author wrote of fringe conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, "nor are vulgar reactions to the political work of Barack Obama ('Obama did shit his pants while talking about foreign affairs, how you can feel yourself psychologically comfortable with pants full of shit?')." Another suggested creating "up to 100" fake accounts on the Huffington Post to master the site's complicated commenting system.

And how does one fund that?

The trolling project's finances are appropriately lavish for its considerable scale. A budget for April 2014, its first month, lists costs for 25 employees and expenses that together total over $75,000. The Internet Research Agency itself, founded last summer, now employs over 600 people and, if spending levels from December 2013 to April continue, is set to budget for over $10 million in 2014, according to the documents. Half of its budget is earmarked to be paid in cash.

So, yes. "Here's some rubles, go stir the shit on twitter" is unironically close to what happened. Reportedly.

And this was back in 2014, when it was still very new and immature as an institution. As internet social media technologies evolved, so did the Russian technical infrastructure and incorporation into information warfare theory, which itself evolved. Note that IRA in the early days functioned as a more message-focused concept (a russian position). However, other parts of the Russian information-proxy sphere were decentralized and took other, even contradictory stances- most notable to western observors in the pro-wagner vs pro-MOD narrative wars before the Wagner Coup.

If you'll forgive an unrepentantly NATO-based analysis, the Irregular Warfare Center has a pretty comprehensive analysis of how the Russian information efforts has evolved over time.

Government propaganda campaigns always have some sort of goal in mind IME -- it used to be "promote global communism", but what is it now?

Other models of propaganda include making you want to buy something (advertisement), go to a specific church (missionary work), think favorably of a specific cause or subject (advocacy), think worse of a specific cause (defamation),undercut a subject's moral authority (deligitmization), spread a cultural viewpoint (normalization), and so on.

For a more typical model, China's propaganda apparatus is much more focused on specific topics where it wants you have a specific position, such as a good view on Xi, the CPC, multipolarism, etc, while having no particular stance and spending no particular effort on others. Arguing both sides of an argument is rarely done, because point of propaganda is seen as to persuade / push to a certain perspective, and playing both sides at the same time is generally seen as information fratricde countering your own efforts. When confusion is the point, it can be pursued, but these are shorter-term and generally the exception rather than the norm. To a degree this is itself a measure of centralization- the Chinese government has a stronger message control over its directly employed propagandists than the Russians imposed on their associated blogosphere and elite-owned influencer networks.

A general 'increase discord by truth and fiction on any topic any time' motive is relatively rare as a result. Not only does that lead to contradictory themes, but doing so is a success on its own standing. Note how Russian sources fed both a source of anti-Trump narratives (the Steelle Dossier), and in anti-anti-trump narratives (social media boosting), or how in the Ukraine context Ukraine was simultaneously a NATO puppet controlled from abroad (attempting to generate nationalist resistance to foreign meddling against European liberalism) and a Nazi regime suppressing locals (a justification for foreign intervention to prevent an antithesis of European liberalism) . If the goal of propaganda was to actually enable a favored manchurian candidate or promote a foreign (Russian) intervention, this would be self-defeating, since you'd still be having primary state-propaganda persuasion of the classical model, but be actively undercutting it with more contradictory messaging.

An implication of this sort of model is not only is it cause-agnostic, but it can take both sides of the same argument at the same time- support Tribe A with social media via venue C, and Tribe B on the other stance with different media via venue D. (In a non-single-nation context, if you ever get the chance, look up the global conspiracy variations of 'who is to blame for COVID.' The US and China are not the only candidates claimed.) I've long since lost the articles, but a personal pet peeve back in the early Trump administration when the disinformation craze was at it's peak was how much of the coverage of 'Russian interference' in US politics didn't actually identify relative partisan themes being boosted.... because it was both Republican and Democratic themes.

Which, as you say, can be indistinguishable from partisan propaganda, even though it has a different intent.

and I can't really visualize what "increase discord" looks like on the other end. "Here's some rubles, go stir the shit on twitter"?

If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.

That would be even emptier. Be careful about what you see on social media, because it could have the same effect as Russian disinformation. That parses to something like: Look both ways before you cross the street, because a plane could fall on you.

Counter-point, "Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer."

Which has the merit and utility of being actually useful advice. Overconfidence is a risk factor, and it can take a long time to take detrimental effect. You could dismiss the warning on the same grounds of falsifiability- if overconfidence does get you killed here then you were right and if it doesn't you're just being careful and careful is good- but this ignores that sustaining carefulness is an enduring good in and of itself.

This is a relatively common form of warning for harms that can come with unclear immediate impacts. Don't just eat mushrooms you find in a forest, they may be poisonous. Walk slower on just-mopped floors, they may be slippery. Don't trust strangers on the internet, they might be bad. The fact that these warnings don't have to come in a context where the element of danger is immediate or guaranteed doesn't make them non-falsifiable, and their value can come because the warned against function is rare. When an element of danger is rare, it's easy to ignore the possibility of something that could be prevented with diligence.

By contrast, 'look both ways because a plane could fall on you' has no link between cause of warning and effect of warning. Looking both ways does nothing to warn you of the danger that comes with 'up,' so there's no merit of dilligent reminder. It also an argument of a specific instance (planes crashing into crosswalks is so singular that it can't really be claimed as a trend) as opposed to a trend-consequence of mounting risks (overconfidence may not get you killed this time, but the reoccuring and persistent nature can lead the threat to grow over time).

Which simile is better for "the danger of the Russian style of disinformation" is up for debate, but I'd wager (and right) on the comparison to overconfidence than to airplanes-on-crosswalks.

How are you defining "disinformation" in this context? That Russia has a project to subvert the liberal international order that the US has ran since the post-war period? They openly admit that all the time and have made formal declarations admitting as much. So presumably anybody who advances a different narrative through their own perception of events isn't pushing disinformation, unless you're setting the bar extremely low.

If Russia is this nebulous disinformation fountainhead that some people seem think it is, then their actions prove that they're incredibly bad at it. What Russia 'has' been successful in doing is a form of national rebranding and international marketing to try and attract disaffected people in their own nations to join them. And why would such a measure be aimed at such an end? Because most of the fractious disunity in western nations has come by their own hand. The progressive left in this country has done more harm and inflicted more damage upon itself than Vladimir Putin or Osama bin Laden ever have.

How are you defining "disinformation" in this context? That Russia has a project to subvert the liberal international order that the US has ran since the post-war period? They openly admit that all the time and have made formal declarations admitting as much. So presumably anybody who advances a different narrative through their own perception of events isn't pushing disinformation, unless you're setting the bar extremely low.

Why shouldn't the bar be that low for the way flailingace is using it?

Even selectively signal-boosting true-but-non-representative things can have an effect of misleading an audience. This very thread is based on someone taking something that has happened (an accusation of pushback against people wanting to help) in a way that generates outrage (FEMA is deliberately witholding help, partisan motivation?) that plausibly wouldn't exist with other potentially relevant context (the government has an interest in managing airspace, which appears to be the form of pushback being alluded to).

Nothing in it is false, but it's not information structured for building objective understanding either. It is an oppositional / antagonist information presentation, and one that- if done deliberately- can be information to promote discord rather than discourse.

flailingace's position, as I understand it, isn't that it's disinformation on the basis of truth / not truth, or 'their own' narrative, but the intended result of why the information is being presented.

If Russia is this nebulous disinformation fountainhead that some people seem think it is, then their actions prove that they're incredibly bad at it. What Russia 'has' been successful in doing is a form of national rebranding and international marketing to try and attract disaffected people in their own nations to join them. And why would such a measure be aimed at such an end? Because most of the fractious disunity in western nations has come by their own hand. The progressive left in this country has done more harm and inflicted more damage upon itself than Vladimir Putin or Osama bin Laden ever have.

Okay, I don't even disagree with you, but how does this relate to flailaingace's position?

This is a counter-argument of relative effectiveness, of relative harm done, but flailingace wasn't making an argument of relative harm / culpability / etc. Flailingace is making a point that russia will attempt to promote discord, to a person who has dismissed russian trolls as a reasonable hypothesis, to another post that also does not rest on relative effectiveness.

Remember that this branch of the conversation itself started over someone saying they felt there was a bit of an effort to manufacture an issue. Not that the issue was entirely manufactured, or that the dominant cause or concerns were manufactured.

Why shouldn't the bar be that low for the way flailingace is using it?

You can personally set the bar wherever you want. But in that case, I'm struggling to understand why people say this like it's some kind of surprise. What am I supposed to be made to think or feel upon hearing that?

Even selectively signal-boosting true-but-non-representative things can have an effect of misleading an audience. This very thread is based on someone taking something that has happened (an accusation of pushback against people wanting to help) in a way that generates outrage (FEMA is deliberately witholding help, partisan motivation?) that plausibly wouldn't exist with other potentially relevant context (the government has an interest in managing airspace, which appears to be the form of pushback being alluded to).

Well put it this way then. Anyone who would want to hold Russia or anyone else for that matter guilty of disinformation and not the media complex in the west which IMO is far worse by comparison, has a very hard sell to convince me of some kind of moral indictment, because anyone who wouldn't also hang the whole of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS and everyone else from lampposts outside their headquarters for also being guilty of disinformation, is just being a partisan hack.

Nothing in it is false, but it's not information structured for building objective understanding either. It is an oppositional / antagonist information presentation, and one that- if done deliberately- can be information to promote discord rather than discourse.

And RussiaToday can also make similar claims in some of their reports as well as far as exposing disinformation. So what? Are people calling for them to be restored to YouTube now on grounds of their occasional fairness?

flailingace's position, as I understand it, isn't that it's disinformation on the basis of truth / not truth, or 'their own' narrative, but the intended result of why the information is being presented.

Meaning what? If they're doing it for a good cause or something they agree with then its okay then?

You can personally set the bar wherever you want. But in that case, I'm struggling to understand why people say this like it's some kind of surprise. What am I supposed to be made to think or feel upon hearing that?

That yourself and others should think on what you are feeling, and why, before you act upon what you are feeling, in case someone is trying to deceptively manipulate your feelings to cause you to act in their interests rather than yours.

That the lesson may be unnecessary to you personally does not mean the lesson is not needed for other people. Some people may not recognize that they are being targetted for manipulation. Others may dismiss the existence of relevant actors to focus on other grievances.

Well put it this way then. Anyone who would want to hold Russia or anyone else for that matter guilty of disinformation and not the media complex in the west which IMO is far worse by comparison, has a very hard sell to convince me of some kind of moral indictment, because anyone who wouldn't also hang the whole of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS and everyone else from lampposts outside their headquarters for also being guilty of disinformation, is just being a partisan hack.

Noted, but where do you get the belief that flailingace or myself wouldn't agree that those aren't also disinformation actors?

Granted, I don't believe in hanging disinformation actors in general, so I suppose I fail that purity test if that's the standard you want to make.

And RussiaToday can also make similar claims in some of their reports as well as far as exposing disinformation. So what?

So you should consider what, how, and why RT chooses to cover what it covering in the way it does before taking what it says as substantially true, the same as you should have bounded skepticism of any source...

...but also that you should recognize that RT, and countless actors like it, will continue to try and execute their motives in any given case, regardless of how much traction they have in general...

...so that if you start getting a suspicion that your intake of social media on something feels like it's being manipulated to try and encourage an impression, you're not being crazy, you are having a reasonable grounds of wanting to think more critically before you decide how to feel.

And, by extension, so are other people.

Are people calling for them to be restored to YouTube now on grounds of their occasional fairness?

Yes, and why would you think there aren't any? The topic has died away from public awareness with time and distance, but there were and still are people who would agree that banning RT from youtube was bad on various grounds.

One of the general reasons for maximal free speech stances is that even malefactors can bring up good points and challenge/compel better actors to clean themselves up in ways they wouldn't if the 'better' people could exclude them from the public stage, and that it's easier to hone the counter-arguments / strengthen your own when you can openly engage them.

Even completely unfair media actors have their defenders on why they should be allowed to have a public position. For example, North Korea is one of the extreme examples of 'bad media actor,' but it's youtube presence was (and, to a lesser degree, still is) a resource for researchers trying to understand.

And this doesn't even touch on grounds of national interest, ideology, or various forms of strategy. Russia took a decent black eye in the early Ukraine War when several hosts who had previously been taking the party line that the warnings of invasion were an American russophobic hoax publicly quit / were fired in objection. It was a self-harm / 'even their own propagandists couldn't support it' that could not have discredited the pro-Russian factions in various western governments had RT been restricted from that sort of public awareness earlier.

Meaning what? If they're doing it for a good cause or something they agree with then its okay then?

Less 'okay' and more of 'categorical difference in actor intent.'

Let's stick to 'just' true things, as in someone who never tells a direct falsehood.

If someone says true things because they value truth as an abstract concept in and of itself, we call them a truth-seeker and can recognize their errors may be out of ignorance but not deliberate distortion of context.

If someone says true things because they dislike deception even when it would benefit them, we call them honest, and can take them at their word. Their word may be limited, and unllike the truth seeker they may not be interested in actively establishing context and understanding, but they can be trusted within the bounds of that.

If someone would say true things but only selectively and with the intent to ruin others relationships, we would call them a manipulator, and recognize that they deserve extra scrutiny. Because their intent is what determines what they say and why, it behooves an audience to consider if there is additional context, missing information, or other truths that simply aren't being provided before believing what the manipulator tries to lead us to feel.

And this is before outright lies and other forms of dishonesty are included. A truth-seeker may have a motivated interest in what they focus on and find, an honest person may selectively try to avoid being questioned in certain ways to let a misunderstanding continue, but a manipulator who doesn't limit themselves to just truths can do even more to meet their interest.

Intent matters, and as such recognizing who's intent for what is a relevant piece of meta-context. 'Disinformation' may be an abused term, but 'Russian disinformation' is as good enough term as any other for characterizing a system intent by a coherent actor for information that is ambivalent about truth/accuracy but which is systemically proferred to try and shape public discourse in ways hoped to be systemically detrimental to the national target. This is a categorically different intent of, say, 'Partisan disinformation'- which wants what is bad for the opposition but good for the party- or 'ideological disinformation'- which wants what is good for cause and willing to tear down the obstacles.

You may feel the impact is grossly overestimated- and not only would I agree, but there was a very recent article last week pointing out a Russian incentive to overestimate their own impact which has interesting implications for if western leaders are accurately reflecting western intelligence accurately reporting on Russian self-assessments that are themselves incorrect for reasons of self-interested motivated reasoning- but again, what you are responding to isn't about 'relative' impact.

Show me a person of influence who made this case when the George Floyd video dropped.

I do not believe anything the Russians could ever say or do could hold even a flickering candle to the gigaton flare generated by the actual words and deeds of genuine Americans.

I think I may have encountered a Russian troll. Specifically, this guy. He went into a bunch of WP articles about US surveillance, ruining them, and when I noticed the pattern and alerted WP he made a few ominous-but-vague threats and then vanished.

At the time I thought he was simply an NSA/CIA agent, but in retrospect I think that's unlikely. He was very sloppy, copypasting entire sections of NSA propaganda into Wikipedia without even changing the "we"s to "they"s, and my read on the Five Eyes is that they're usually slicker than that; a real NSA/CIA agent would also have no motivation to make vague public threats and then disappear, rather than simply ghosting straight away or picking up the phone to threaten someone for real. And if he wasn't a Five Eyes spook, he was somebody pretending to be one, presumably someone intending to get caught in order to frame them for vandalising Wikipedia. Could be a random lunatic, I suppose, but the people with a logical motive to do that are strategic adversaries of the USA, and my read based on PRC external propaganda and the Sam Dastyari fiasco is that 4D-chess shenanigans like this aren't their style. I suppose I'll never know, particularly since I've left Wikipedia.

a flickering candle to the gigaton flare generated by the actual words and deeds of genuine Americans.

Sure, I think this is a healthy perspective. But Russia, and China, trying to sow discord is an argument some make:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/01/russia-and-china-target-us-protests-on-social-media-294315

While these official social media accounts have not posted doctored images or false information, they have sowed divisive content — a strategy that Russia previously used during the 2017 Catalan referendum in Spain and the 2019 European Parliament election, according to previous analyses of social media activity by POLITICO. The goal, according to disinformation experts, is to foment distrust on both sides of the political spectrum rather than publishing easily identifiable fake social media posts.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/19401612221082052

RT and Sputnik primarily produced negative coverage of the BLM movement, painting protestors as violent, or discussed the hypocrisy of racial justice in America. In contrast, newer media properties like In The NOW, Soapbox, and Redfish supported the BLM movement with clickbait-style videos highlighting racism in America.

Computer, enhance:

Over the last three days, Chinese ambassadors, Russian-backed news outlets and others with ties to Russia and China have tweeted more than 1,200 times about the United States,

Wow, foreign infiltrators tweeted a thousand times! That's a lot of tweets.

Come on, there is no evidence that these campaigns are barely statistically significant. I know guys who put out that many tweets in a week.

At least in 2016 they also had bots/provocateurs masquerading as legitimate users. And Russia just wanted to fan the flames, they played both sides from “gay rights to gun rights”.

WSJ 2017: Facebook Users Were Unwitting Targets of Russia-Backed Scheme
https://archive.ph/rZJBo

“Blacktivist,” an account that supported causes in the black community and used hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, frequently posted videos of police allegedly shooting unarmed black men.

The issues they targeted spanned the U.S. political and social spectrum, including religion, race, immigration, gun rights and gay rights. Facebook said the accounts were created by Russian entities to exploit tensions among Americans and interfere with U.S. elections.

NYT 2017: Purged Facebook Page Tied to the Kremlin Spread Anti-Immigrant Bile
https://archive.ph/kuS2E

More comments

The government or at least substantial parts of it wanted the BLM protests. They aren’t going to call it trolling.

But again, very little of the stuff named Russian Trolls can actually be traced to Russia in any way whatsoever. They can’t find Russians behind the Laptop, election fraud, UAPs, or Q. They can’t because it’s not Russia.

The person you responded to is filtered.

On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media.

I don't see any particular reason both can't be true.

The problem with FEMA stopping other people from helping is that FEMA cannot help everyone. They are only able to help those reachable by road. FEMA sets up in major hubs in areas their trucks can reach and expects people to reach them. https://x.com/glennbeck/status/1842293685834416174

National guard can do search and rescue, but they don't have many helicopters. Civilian helicopters outnumber them by an order of magnitude and are flying a lot of the aid. https://instagram.com/reel/DArJyuevDTK/

https://www.facebook.com/p/Hurricane-Helene-Airlift-Relief-61566554308647/?wtsid=rdr_0LYxi1KBGzv4lEjYR

The federal government might be employing a strategy that saves the most lives in a major costal city. It might not do so well here.

If they are confiscating resources from private charities that are air dropping resources to those who need them, this is a death sentence for those who cannot be reached by road for weeks.

National guard can do search and rescue, but they don't have many helicopters.

Airborne corps of the US army is based just a few hundred km away, at Ft.Bragg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVIII_Airborne_Corps#Structure

Might be something of a paper formation but they should still have a serious amount of helicopters and trained people.

You're probably thinking of the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB), which has one battalion of Blackhawks (1-rotor lift) and one aviation battalion of Chinooks (2-rotor).

(Disclaimer: This is not a counter-argument, but raising some factors you or others may not be aware of.)

There's some policy issues at hand. 18th Airborne Corps is Federal Army, not National Guard. Part of the implications there is not only different authorities to provide support (the US Federal Army has significant limitations on domestic activities following Cold War issues / concerns). This isn't insurmountable, but other policies that matter include aircraft protection. The same storm to cause damage would also have justified flying aircraft out of the storm's path, and thus creating a return-delay, a sufficiently bad storm may have compromised local airfields (such as by flooding fuel reserves), the best airfields and the place where the best supplies may be significantly distant), etc. Even if you were to use those aircraft, that'd probably also contribute to the 'no one else fly where we are' issue that could contribute to a blockage, since military aviators are far more concerned about airspace deconfliction in general (since a lack of it is how friendly anti-air starts shooting down more aircraft than enemy).

A separate issue would be if they were uncommitted and thus available for use in the first place.

82nd CAB is supporting the 82nd Airborne Corps, which is less of a paper formation and one of the Americans' global first-responder units. For example, the 82nd was the American unit sent to secure the inside of Kabul Airport during the final month in Kabul. This doesn't include the regular deployment cycles. Where the forces go or are staged to go, the helicopters are meant to follow.

The so-what there is that since the 82nd's job is to basically be on a plane anywhere to the world on a phone call, if you take the ready forces away from that for natural disaster relief you're taking away a national response force for a period of days to weeks (because after doing the operations the aircraft will need to be returned, inspected/maintained after unusual utilization in more limited contexts, etc.). And given the real-world crisis hotspots like what's going on in the middle east, even if helicopters are around the area it may take an exceptionally important phone call to permit their use.

None of that says that they shouldn't be used, or couldn't be used, or aren't being used, but there may be far fewer of them both literally and practically available than you'd think.

No, I wasn't thinking of a CAB, I was thinking a 'airborne corps' is likely to have a serious amount of helicopters in its organisational structure, as it's 2020s and not 1940s.

The so-what there is that since the 82nd's job is to basically be on a plane anywhere to the world on a phone call,

Helicopters based in the US can't be 'on a plane' to anywhere to the world on a phone call. Helicopters go over the sea by ship.

No, I wasn't thinking of a CAB, I was thinking a 'airborne corps' is likely to have a serious amount of helicopters in its organisational structure, as it's 2020s and not 1940s.

Tell me you didn't look at the 2021 organization chart of the wiki page you linked to without telling me you didn't look at the 2021 organization chart of the wiki page you linked to.

The Corps is composed multiple divisions, each at various installations. Each Division in turn has its own Brigades, including a Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB). You can recognize the helicopter units by the triangles shaped like |><| that represent the rotary blades.

Per the org chart, the division at Fort Bragg, NC, the same installation as the Corps HQ, is the 82nd Airborne Division. Underneath the 82nd Airborne Division is the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade, with its 4 Aviation Battalions. Of those battalions, 2 are attack/recon (Apache gunships), 1 is Assault (Blackhawks), and 1 is General Support (Chinook).

Helicopters based in the US can't be 'on a plane' to anywhere to the world on a phone call.

You would be mistaken, and unfamiliar with the C-5 Galaxy.

A C-5 Galaxy strategic lift aircraft can carry up to six UH-60s.

A Blackhawk aviation battalion, in turn, is usually 30 or fewer blackhawks, or 5 or fewer strategic lift flights.

A C-5 galaxy can alternatively carry up to 2 CH-47s, such as this flight of 10k miles to Australia.

Helicopters go over the sea by ship.

Only when it makes sense to, same with any other decision between shipping or airlift.

Countries send equipment by sea when cost matters more than speed, i.e. for a major deliberate deployment cycle for sustained operations. However, a global reaction force prioritizes speed over cost.

Since the point of a global reaction force is to be able to react, they tend to bring their own equipment they can be reasonably sure is reliably maintained, ready for use, and that their personnel are certified on, as opposed to assuming the crisis will occur in a region with extra equipment to fall in on.

I mean, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that Biden should make that phone call because rescuing Americans in America is more important that bailing out Israel for the millionth time.

I should restate, National Guard isn't sending lots of helicopters. Outside states are sending 1-3, North Carolina has 7 deployed: https://abc11.com/post/national-guard-appreciative-helene-recovery-help-fort-liberty/15390130/. Is it enough?

In North Carolina, Hollenack said, the National Guard has over 1,100 soldiers and airmen on active duty, and is making use of nearly 400 vehicles, including 26 aircraft.

"We have support from 10 different states," he said. "[There is] a lot of appreciation to our other state partners who have provided equipment and people to help us."

So 26 helicopters, compared to the hundreds being provided by charities like Operation Air Drop, Aerial Recovery, and other private citizens.

Meanwhile, rescues performed by individuals acting on their own are being attributed to the National Guard. https://instagram.com/reel/DAl8mr-PPsH/

Totally incredible? Like, what is the actual evidence people are giving? Here's an article quoting multiple NC state, FEMA, and federal government officials about the effort. Here is a post by an actual Asheville resident describing the scale of the federal response. The contrast is with, what, anonymous sources "on the ground"?

I find it interesting, reading the first article, that it decries "right-wing influencers" saying that FEMA is denying other rescue teams access, but the article does not actually say that this isn't true.

I got an email from my (not at all right wing) employer noting that when some employees in the area needed rescue, we had to hire a FEMA-certified contractor to get them out. I think not only is FEMA (with local officials doing the actual enforcement, usually) denying other rescue teams access, but this is their standard operating procedure. They're the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not the Federal Emergency Relief Agency.

And as @Goodguy and @MaiqTheTrue noted, there are understandable and possibly-valid reasons for that.

But I felt that @Gillitrut might have needed the pointer on the "is this actually happening Y/N" question.

It would be very Seeing Like a State for government agencies to dump a shitload of assets and supplies in the major regional cities with no real plan to get aid to the isolated residents in the mountains whose roads have been washed out.

FEMA in Asheville doesn't nessesarily mean FEMA in wherever the hell this is.

I expect that Ashville, which has a working road into it, would see the most support from FEMA and will be the happiest with how aid goes. This does not mean that everyone who lives in a town with less than 10,000 people is receiving adequate aid.

The people who would have the most to complain about are the ones without power, gas, internet, water, or a road to anywhere.

What’s annoying is the concept that FEMA saying “we are doing great” is also taken is settling the matter. They are a motivated party. Similarly you wouldn’t expect state officials to criticize the people whose help they need.

What we really need is an honest independent media but we don’t have that.

Yes, the normal stupidity of bureaucracy.

But Secretary Buttigieg reacted to Elon Musk!

https://x.com/SecretaryPete/status/1842271678274928964

No one is shutting down the airspace and FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights. If you’re encountering a problem give me a call.

Musk reacted first aggressively, but after the call conciliatory:

Thanks for the call. Hopefully, we can resolve this soon

Maybe he overreacted? Let’s see what he posts tomorrow.

But I think “legitimate” could be a key word here. It is an emergency, business as usual shouldn’t apply, and they shouldn’t restrict the airspace in any way. It is not like aircraft/helicopters pilots are blind, they are not crashing into each other easily.

Edit:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1842352252922843403

Problem has been resolved. Kudos to @SecretaryPete

I think we need subject-mater expertise here. How is airspace usually regulated? What would happen if all restrictions were lifted? How hard is it to operate in the mountains (especially takeoff and landing)?

I'm sure FEMA considers Starlink to be low-priority compared to food, water, gas, etc. It's plausible that SpaceX flying wildcat deliveries of Starlink is net-negative to the relief efforts, but I would like to know why specifically they think that.

EDIT: Per CNN's Pete Muntean, "an unprecedented number of airplanes, helicopters, and drones swooping in to help with Hurricane Helene recovery efforts are now posing a safety hazard. There were 30 near-mid-air collisions last Saturday, a federal source tells me." I guess that's the official line. No idea if it's accurate or not.

How is airspace usually regulated?

I am not a pilot, but a rough overview...

Normal operations fall under various types of airspace classifications: Class A (18000-60000 foot above sea level), Class B - D (funnels of airspace near various sizes of towered airports), Class E (between 1200 foot above ground level and 18000 foot above sea level, with some exceptions not relevant here, and above 60,000 foot above sea level), and Class G or unclassed airspace (generally under 1200 foot above ground level, with some exceptions).

Class A-D, you are under the direct control of a towered airport or other air traffic controller, rarely more than one. Class E means you can be under air traffic control for instrument flight rules, or you can operate in visual flight rules and you're allowed to fly whatever without radio traffic (though insurance companies will frown on this). Class E airspace over 10000 foot above sea level requires ADS-B out, and in practice it's pretty hard to operate without it, but people do still run below without ADS-B out.

Rules for drones are complicated, and a lot of the whole mess about Class G is the FAA trying to control where they can go and when.

Then you have various special airspaces, geographically (and sometimes temporally) specific stuff, with various constraints on entry. Restricted areas (and warning areas) have dangerous exercises going on at some times: you're pretty much never allowed in them when active unless you're working with the US military, and going in can get you in trouble with the feds in a way that results in pulling your pilot's license. Prohibited areas are like that, but they're always active, and you'll probably go to jail if you break one. MOAs are in the same realm, but it's not technically illegal to enter while flying visual flight rules, just a really bad idea.

Then you have Special Air Traffic Rules and Special Flight Rules Areas. These are all unique one-offs with their own special constraints, which can be as minor as having to call someone ahead of time before flying certain altitudes or locations, or as serious as needing a police officer with a loaded gun pointed at your pilot while you fly (the DC SFRA is a mess). Busting these can and does result in a military response: I know a pilot who's gotten the nickname 'takedown' because the SATR contact actually lost his tail number, and he ended up pulled over by a Blackhack and sprawled onto the tarmac.

Lastly, you have Temporary Flight Restrictions. These are issued rules for temporary limits in an area. They're fairly common and can happen for ground events (every Presidential visit, and even major sports games will have its own NOTAM), or they can happen because of high disaster response. Some TFRs are blanket prohibitions (you are not flying at low altitude near the President), but others will simply require calling ahead, and others still will restrict flights to certain groups.

In this case, there are very clearly TFRs specific to several disaster areas,

What would happen if all restrictions were lifted?

All restrictions being lifted wouldn't happen. The FAA would spontaneously explode if you even considered touching most MOAs, Class A-C airspace is genuinely like that for a reason, and the SATRs are statutory. But most air space in the mountains are Class E and Class G. They're not outside of FAA control, but you can normally wildcat all you want in them.

There might be a slightly increased risk of midair collision, and those do happen, both drone-aircraft and aircraft-aircraft. Crowded areas with unprofessional pilots are especially dangerous, and there was a recent Oshkosh incident that's made it more prevalent in a lot of minds. On the gripping hand, a lot of the FAA's concern on drones, the FAA vastly overstates a lot of the risk for unintentional incidents. You just shouldn't be that low in a fixed-wing aircraft unless you're about to land, and helicopters aren't doing the sort of movement that makes a drone-on-fixed-wing aircraft collision so dangerous.

((And also shouldn't be flying that low, although many helicopter pilots are daredevils.))

Fixed-wing on fixed-wing, near misses are more common than I'd like. ADS-B gives more warning if it's equipped, but especially near busy airports you also get a ton of false positives (from aircraft on ground), and outside of ADS-B you're dependent on the human eyeball to spot a thirty-foot object that might be closing distance at >200 knots combined speed, while you're in a vehicle with giant blind spots (like 'everything above you' or 'everything below you', cfe Aeromexico 498). The claimed thirty near misses isn't as serious as it sounds -- Oshkosh doesn't even count them at this point -- but a mid-sized flight school would be very upset to see that many in a month and not happy to see that many in six months, and not ever near-miss is gonna be reported.

How hard is it to operate in the mountains (especially takeoff and landing)?

Fixed wing, pretty rough. The Appalachias aren't that high, so you don't have the oxygen problems that the west coast mountains do, but they're messy areas to fly in from an updraft and thermal perspective, and there's a lot of space where you don't really have any way to handle an in-flight emergency. That's not helped by the lack of serious airports around and the roughness of terrain -- if you're not at 10k ASL, for a lot of western North Carolina your emergency response is gonna be to kiss your ass goodbye.

Helicopters have it a little better, but they tradeoff easier landing against much lower sustain.

Quick follow up to this (I'm a licensed pilot though I don't fly that frequently).

Class B is the really important one in the usual course of business (but all bets are off when TFRs come into play). Class C and D are pretty small and used for regional airports. If you accidentally fly through one, tower won't be happy but you won't get in serious trouble for it. And they're so small that accidentally flying through them is pretty hard anyway (the only real reason to enter them is to land at the airport in the center). And if you do want to fly through them, you just need tower to acknowledge your presence somehow. Easy.

Class B is special. It's used for the major international airports. The upper section measures sixty miles across (i.e. typically the entire city the airport is a part of). It has huge amounts of jumbo jets with hundreds of passengers each. And the government has absolutely no tolerance at all for any shenanigans in there. Students are mostly not allowed in without explicit permission from their instructor. Any plane entering needs explicit permission from ATC before entering and always has an assigned altitude and vector while there that they are not allowed to deviate from (barring genuine emergencies). And violating any of these rules has severe penalties.

Thank you for taking the time to describe all that!

There was probably some thing that happened that one time and there was an accident and then a rule for made.

Mid-air collisions happen more often than you might expect given the size of, well, the atmosphere even in spots that aren't busy disaster zones. There was one just a few weeks ago in Nevada in clear weather, and there have been several over the years in tourist flight hotspots like Alaska. The automated systems (TCAS) are getting better, but still aren't going to prevent everything.

Although in this case, I think we should, as a society, consider that reducing safety standards (in a limited capacity) is an acceptable risk in response to the much more imminent risk to life and limb. I'm not sure exactly what my judgement would be in this case.

I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.

Dead Republicans don't vote... at best. Most of the counties effected went 60% for Trump. In North Carolina, about 1 million voters out of the 6 million in the state have been impacted.

All the same, what we are seeing here is just the same passive aggressive indifference to the lives of people who vote wrong that the secret service showed towards Trump in Butler PA. It's the same attitude you Longshorman's Union Head mentioned if they force the Longshoremen to work. "We were moving 60 an hour, now we're moving 8." You can't force these organizations to save people they hate and want dead.

Dead Republicans don't vote

I don't think the numbers work out. One dead republican is very unlikely to move the result of a state election, you would probably require a few thousands at least.

However, having a few thousand citizens die due to your negligence will have political ramifications (unless you are the FDA and its red tape) orders of magnitude more significant than the missing votes of the dead people.

The US is politically divided, but neither the median Trump nor Harris voter would say that it would be a good thing if all the voters for the other party dropped dead. There are plenty of centrist Americans who would not think "they let all the rednecks starve to secure the election, that is clever" but "they let uncle Billy die, how could they!"

Big disasters are great opportunities for state capability to be seen as an unambiguous force of good. People normally don't like their governments much, but a competent disaster response can turn this around for a while.

But isn’t there a case to be made that displacing tens of thousands will make it hard for them to vote in a month?

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