Hizzonor Adams and Hochul are constantly using the c word to describe it, and are bemoaning the lack of Fedbux for them to deal with it.
And since randomly bussing migrants places is a cruel, inhumane political stunt, they naturally are dealing with it by bussing migrants to random upstate communities where they are being welcomed with open arms sometimes disguised as lawsuits and protests.
Huh. For some reason I just don't see much reporting about it. Nor about the pro-Palestinian protests in NY, saying things like "cancel Christmas". (I mean, I **know** why I don't see these stories.)
I know someone who is 18 and has no clue what to do in life. Is going to university and just taking whatever prereqs with no idea, not even the first clue, despite all kinds of probing questions, what she wants to do.
I recommended maybe volunteering for charity. As a first pass, I went to Givewell's site to see if they had some recommendation where to volunteer and, surprisingly, I could find nothing.
So what are the best charities to volunteer for right now? How do you find out?
How do people even do that? Does this include, like, having no hobby? This sounds to me like a horrible way of existing, regardless of the university problems.
My recommendation would be to get as much experience as possible, as quickly as possible. Like, call all the people you know, ask them to give you a list of things they enjoy doing or find meaningful, and then spend one afternoon trying each one of them, with the help of the person who already does that. (Read a book. Play a board game. Play a computer game. Take a hike. Go dance. Cook something. Feed the homeless. Teach kids math. Just talk. Meditate. Clean the beach.) At the end of each week write a diary entry about what you tried and how much you enjoyed it.
I was the same way, up until age 21, when I randomly took a CS-for-majors course and discovered that not only did I like programming, I was also good at it. Up until then, there was a lot of stuff I was decent at, and enjoyed a bit, but nothing that could come close to being described as a "calling". I'd have been just another bright, aimless kid, puttering around in the professional-managerial class, trying desperately to find meaning in a world of bullshit jobs. And if I didn't happen to be dating someone who was taking that CS course, I'd never have found out.
I agree with your recommendation of trying lots of stuff. That's part of why I mentioned the social work jobs - rather than jump in to something EA right away, why not try a lot of other things first and see how they fit? If you're already thinking in EA terms, and vaguely planning to end up there, this would provide a chance to test out your theorizing in the real world. It's like one of those chains of literature or science or engineering, where to understand why we do things the way we do them today, it's helpful to understand the other things we've tried first, and the evolution of the state of the art in the field.
Yeah, some people grew up during Covid and had a harder time of it than others, I guess. I struggle to imagine that state of being myself, to the point where I wonder if she's lying... but it is what it is!
As a counterpoint, find the closest organization that provides free food for homeless people, and volunteer there for a while. It's hands-on experience with ground truth in the place she lives, and gives a context for human suffering that might be otherwise missing. Alternatively, if she's in a moderately left-wing city, the local government should be contracting with agencies to manage housing homeless people, so she could probably find a (messy, disgusting, but paying) job there doing clean-up work. Apparently, a lot of people burn out of that type of job after a few months, so if she goes into it with that expectation, she'll spare herself some angst.
Like, even from a cold tactical view, if she's pretty sure she wants to go into EA later, it will give her a perspective that many people around her will be lacking, and allow her to address questions from first-hand experience rather than from regurgitating someone else's reporting.
If you feed the pigeons, you get more pigeons. If you feed the homeless you get more homeless.
If you want to do some good for the world, go out and pick up litter off the beach, on yor own. There's no social aspect to it, so you won't be pulled into some kind of stupid groupthink, it's just you and your litter bag and a strip of clean beach behind you.
>If you want to do some good for the world, go out and pick up litter off the beach, on yor (sic) own
If you assert without evidence that feeding the homeless creates more homeless people, maybe we should also worry about the possibility that picking up litter will incentivize more litter.
[Incidentally, even were it true that feeding the homeless would "create more homeless" that wouldn't be equivalent to feeding homeless people being a net negative. If e.g. there are a total of 1 million homeless people and feeding them all would create a small relative incentive to be homeless and the total number of better fed homeless people would rise to 1 million and 1, that would almost certainly be a large net positive.
If you are very worried, though, about the effects of various charitable efforts, you can check out GiveWell's recommended charities, as GiveWell conducts extensive analyses on optimal charities.]
Sorry about that. I had just stumbled off a red-eye after getting about 2 hours of sleep. But in my defense:
It's Christmas Eve, and you sounded exactly like Ebeneezer Scrooge. :-)
To address your point, I've done that sort of volunteering, there was no groupthink, and it doesn't work like that. I'm quite confident that the number of people who are incentivized at the margin to become homeless because of free food, is approximately zero. The descent into the visible, "problematic" sort of homelessness is overdetermined.
As an example, take the woman who was sitting in front of a grocery store, panhandling and asking people to buy her a sandwich, when **literally** half a block away there was a place serving free hot all-you-can-eat meals. When I told her about this place, she thought for a moment and then said that she preferred to stay where she was because otherwise she would "lose her place". Of all the things going wrong there, free food was not the problem.
What does happen is space-shifting (but not the sort caused by Dr. Frankenfurter's castle). Providing better services to homeless people draws in existing ones from the surrounding areas, making it seem like there are more. There's a potentially valid criticism about encouraging people to uproot from their original communities where they might have received personalized support. But the homeless aren't a homogenous population, and my impression is that this sort of migration is mostly of the sort who're far enough gone that they've already burned whatever bridges they had left (or had the bridges burned for them). (These would be the visible, "problematic" ones I mentioned, who usually have some combination of mental illness, drug addiction, and chronic antisocial behavior.)
I'm not surprised that GW doesn't have recommended volunteering options, as volunteering probably isn't generally particularly impactful. Following GW's sort of reasoning, the most impactful charities will help the poorest people in the world, very few of whom are in the West. The most impactful help to those people, like distributing mosquito nets, vitamin supplements, or vaccines, is probably not particularly amenable to volunteering - particularly from Westerners.
How efficient would it be for a Westerner to fly to sub-Saharan Africa and back to perform essentially unskilled labor in mosquito net warehouse, or something, rather than sitting back and sending some money to GW. The savings to them through such volunteering over local labor may be worth less than the plane tickets to get there and back, to speak nothing of the expenses of staying there.
Going to uni and taking random prereqs without knowing what exactly you're going to do, actually sounds like a course of action with a fairly high expected value.
College graduates generally significantly out earn non-college graduates, even with soft degrees. And higher paying jobs generally require hard degrees, which generally require various prerequisites.
Earning a lot of money in and of itself would probably tremendously impactful, as income could be seen as a proxy for productivity. And certainly, earning a lot of money would be allow someone to be very impactful through donations - probably much more so than they could be through charitable volunteering.
This doesn't preclude, of course volunteering in free time. And if someone is going to volunteer, they could try do do so as effectively as possible. But even outside of the primary path towards impact of career (probably facilitated by college degree), depending on one's goal, one could still consider alternative routes towards impact. E.g. instead of contributing $10 per hour of labor in a soup kitchen, a college student could tutor students for $60 an hour, and donate the proceeds to that soup kitchen (or GW, for even more impact).
If someone *does* want to contribute to charity through labor, rather than money, it seems reasonable to try to help the poorest people you can find. If the people will be local, perhaps soup kitchens could be a good option.
I guess one question I would have (reading that reply) would be, is your primary concern (a) the future “impact” of the 18-year-old, as denominated in dollars or some fungible equivalent, or (b) her actual future as a flourishing individual that you personally care about? Hope I don’t come across as dunking on Mallard here, but the two are not the interchangeable imo.
Does anyone here have any (personal or second-hand) experience in successfully treating height-related body image issues in men through therapy, and could recommend a good therapist (possibly from the ACX list) in the Bay Area or remote?
I’m 5’5 and past therapy attempts have been pretty unsuccessful, with some of my past therapists basically having taken the position of this just being a minor cosmetic issue with few real-life implications (I also got the feeling that it used to be way less of an issue before online dating, but alas I live in those changed times).
I’m looking for medical blog recommendations with a similar style to Scott’s but focused almost entirely on doctoring and medicine. Ideally one with thoughtful takes on both the day-to-day of medicine and interesting topics in medicine as a whole. As medical student, I’ve searched around for one but never found one anywhere near the quality of Scott’s.
Not just that, but he also pretty much seems to have given up on moderating the comments section. People used to get permabans for 1% of the crap NS has been spamming here.
Edit: Turns out, Scott has recently become a father of twins, which kinda explains it.
I don't have a problem with NS sharing their opinion – even though I almost completely disagree with it – but with how they present it: by spamming links to random Twitter accounts, with maybe a one-liner about how Israelis are pure evil. Even people that agree with NS have called them out on it.
For what it's worth, I've also asked another person whom I agree with, to stop with this style of posting.
Very very peculiar that you (apparently) haven't been doing the same thing to the pro-israelis flippantly dismissing the suffering of gazans or basically calling for gaza to be ethnically cleansed, which represents a lower quality of posting than NS.
Perhaps you need to be less sensitive towards being exposed to opinions from outside of your ideological echo chamber. At least Adrian is objecting to the style of the posts as opposed to the opinion expressed, while you seem to be objecting entirely to the opinion.
There's a thing I'm annoyed about, and it isn't worthy of a full post, so ... here we go.
If you’re baffled/confused/upset about why the American public is still up in arms about inflation, even though it’s down - here’s a question for you.
Were you equally baffled/confused/upset when the public didn’t react at all to inflation until it had been going on for a little while?
Let's say for the sake of argument that 10% inflation is bad. We had 10% inflation -before- the public really got upset about it. Were you looking around wondering why nobody was getting upset about it at the time? Or did you not notice, for the same reason none of them noticed - it hadn't had time to actually have a substantive impact on your wallet?
Demanding everybody calm down about inflation after prices have inflated by some amount, because they're no longer rising as quickly, only means something if you were also demanding something be done about inflation when prices were rising more quickly but hadn't yet inflated to the point where it was causing problems.
People aren't upset about inflation because, a year from now, they'll be paying more for their food and rent. They're upset about inflation because they're paying more for their food and rent than they were paying a year ago. Necessarily, public opinion on inflation is a trailing indicator for inflation itself - and demanding people calm down about it, because it's in the past, is in effect demanding that nobody ever get upset about inflation, because they thing they're upset about is, necessarily, always in the past.
In the metamodern memespace, there's sort of a low-key debate about which religion is the most insightful or helpful. A lot of people single out Buddhism as displaying a lot of sophistication and insight, and being relatively less harmful than many other traditions. However, since I have appreciated what Buddhism has to offer, it has changed the way I look at Christianity and other religions.
Now that I relate to concepts and doctrines as more like meditation prompts that can potentially alter my perception or state of consciousness for the better, I see how Christian doctrines that seem arbitrary are actually potentially helpful for achieving altered or mystic states consciousness. I've seen rankings that suggest that the Christian mystics can achieve states of consciousness almost as enlightened as Buddhist adepts, and I think I'm beginning to see why.
In particular, I've been relating to the Christian doctrine of grace as a tool for helping me to generate the ideal complement to my state of consciousness. I think of it metaphorically as similar to equalizing waves, whether sound or light waves. You can reduce any sound wave to silence by producing its perfect complement. You can change any light wave to pure white light if you create the perfect complement to it so that the sum of the two adds up to white light, balanced activation of all light frequencies.
Likewise, during meditation or prayer, the idea of grace is not just to look for something outside of yourself, but, in some sense, to look for the thing which is MOST outside of yourself, the thing which is least like your current shape. Except, of course, that actually makes it easier to locate computationally. It may not be a simple as multiplying your current shape by -1, but the exact complement to your shape is actually implicit in your shape. In this way, the Christian approach also seems to preserve individuality. Instead of achieving smooth states of consciousness by reducing everything to nothing, it tries to provide a means by which you can access the perfect complement to each moment of experience, allowing each individual thing to enjoy its own idiosyncratic nature while also participating in a complementary dynamic that sums up to perfect, unified totality.
This is all very unlike the Christianity I grew up with, which suggested that the only important thing was making sure you performed the right ritual so that you would go to the right afterlife when you died. But I've now looked back on some of the C.S. Lewis stuff I read growing up, and Buddhism has helped me see it in a new light. I've heard some stuff from Tolkien and from famous Christian mystics like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and from poets, that seems to be making reference to similar concepts.
I wish there was a modern community of Christian mystics I could ask about their practices, like a Christian Sangha. The closest I've found is the community of Jonathan Pageau's fans. Does this conceptualization of Christianity sound familiar to you, or are you familiar with a memespace that discusses such things (inside or outside of metamodern circles)?
i think those mystics would tell you to become a Christian first, and do the first things; their mysticism is done to better know a God they love who saved them, and grace is not what you think it is. You are using them as a means to your own ends of altered consciousness.
id also think they'd warn you it is dangerous to break the self down via technique, and that it can lead to being naked and starving in a desert in the pursuit of a holiness that is monstrous. Chasing ecstasy is not really a good thing; i was raised charismatic, and saw plenty of ecstatic experiences that only lasted so long as the revivalist was in town.
Any religious mysticism is designed to experience the reality stated in their own dogma, not yours. Even then personally the focus on mysticism is silly imo; the original state of man in Christianity was Adam in a beautiful garden talking with God, and Jesus pointed at children as closer to accepting the kingdom. Sometimes people get a little too disembodied for their own good.
I can't comment on a lot of this, but my appreciation for Christian theology increased significantly a few years ago. I got interested in certain aspects of Orthodox mysticism, and read up on some of their theology, and wanted to see how that compared with Catholic theology, and it turns out they're explicitly describing the same things, just in very different ways. At that point, a number of things that I thought were silly in Catholic/Anglican theology just turned out to be me trying to play word games with something I didn't understand, obsessing over the pores of the finger pointing at the moon.
What an interesting direction to go in. I have no info for you at all, though I've listened to Pageau's podcast with interest, and wish you Godspeed on your journey, and hope you share what you discover.
I think YouTube is not even trying to remove all the scam ads with "Elon Musk" promising to send you lots of money if you give him access to your bank account. I see them every day.
But if your video contains something that resembles copyrighted music, it gets taken down automatically. Yes, it is important to have priorities.
A friend-of-a-friend, beloved of many in my circle, just passed away, leaving behind a family. He was suffering from several things, but chief among them was kidney failure, and complications from dialysis were a direct contributor to his sudden decline.
As someone who has considered kidney donation from time to time - but never that seriously - it has me asking questions. Including the obvious one, which is "would he still be alive if I had given him a kidney?"
And I realized I have some thoughts, and in reading the previous discussions (both Scott's, and the followup from the comments, and the comments on _that_ one) I'm still fuzzy on some parts of this.
I would not - I think - hesitate to give a kidney to a family member or close friend. Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Which makes me wonder - in a case where someone is in dire need of a kidney, and has friends and family, what is generally going on? Is it that none of them are a match? Or that none of them offered? Are match rates that low? Or is it just that so many people are so typically biased against it that they would never offer even for someone dear to them?
I think a relatively big part is that kidney failure is often just one failure out of several; in one study, only 4% of people with CKD stage 3 had no comorbidities. Most had two or more.
The most common comorbidities are age-related, which isn't a surprise, given the median age is >70 years old.
Your picture of the median person with severe kidney issues should probably be an elderly person on multiple medications for multiple conditions (and some of those medications are likely to be contributing factors to the kidney failure). The death, in a sense, is expected, and friends and family, while they may regret the death, are entirely reasonable in being unlikely to undertake a heroic effort to prevent it.
The relatively low rate of kidney donation, relative to the number of people with kidney failure, thus probably shouldn't be taken to reflect upon the friends and family of thus with kidney failure generally; many of those dying of kidney failure aren't going to be helped a lot by a kidney donation.
This is not to argue against kidney donation, because even if 80% of people with kidney failure who have a long life ahead of them otherwise have somebody willing to donate, that implies that 20% do not, and kidney donations are prioritized by the medical system for that 20%.
> Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Donating a kidney allows you to designate loved ones as getting highest priority for donation if they ever need one, so that's not the best reason.
---
I haven't donated a kidney because i'm terrified of pain... I know it's about as bad as pregnancy and I have been pregnant, but being pregnant sucks... And you don't even get to have contact with an adorable recipient afterwards... Sure there's the warm glow of having done something nice but I'm a very selfish person and altruism doesn't really make me feel noticeably more warm and fuzzy for a long time vs like huffing baby fumes.
Are you sure you're not thinking about passing a kidney stone? That's something that people compare to pregnancy a lot. Couldn't find that sort of comparison w.r.t. kidney donation.
>Donating a kidney allows you to designate loved ones as getting highest priority for donation
Wait, really? I know that donors get priority for themselves but I didn't realize it was transferable. I wonder how much of the problem is just making that fact public?
Anyway, this still raises questions about the system in general. Thinking about it more generally - we have X people who need kidneys. I would hope that many of these people have at least one person in their lives willing to give them a kidney. As long as the average is >1 willing donor per recipient, we should have enough kidneys for everyone who needs one.
So why don't we? Is it that matching rates are so low?
Or is it that even people with close friends & family don't have many willing donors due to fear of the process?
Or is it that people with close friends & family _are_ getting kidneys, and the remaining people (who have to hope for strangers) are either genetically unlucky, or loners with no potential donors in their circle?
I think what I'm struggling with is how we jump all the way to needing random strangers to make the system work. I understand it with something like bone marrow, where the matching rate is extremely low. I'm trying to understand if that's also going on here, or if something else is.
(None of this would invalidate the EA conclusion that it makes sense for you to donate your kidney to a stranger right now, but I'm curious how we came to this pass).
From what I understand, matching rates are low enough between some subsection of donors and recipients, that you need to set up a donation chain, where incompatible but willing pairs are in a pool, and as new compatible pairs come in, they get added to a chain, the hope is that eventually a pair comes in that completes the circle.
Undirected donations in this sense are very powerful since you just need the "head" of the chain to be compatible with the incoming kidney instead of a pair of people, a recipient at the end of the chain AND a donor for the head.
I think there are quite a few caveats to exactly how useful an undirected donation is, and also I don't know exactly how long these donor chains get, but hopefully this provides a good intuition for what's going on.
Even if people are willing, they may not be able. If ten people are drinking buddies, and one of them needs a kidney, the other nine may be unable to donate due to having similar damage. Or if they're a two income household, and are already losing one to kidney disease, they may not be able to afford to suspend the other for surgery recovery.
As a fellow Pro-Palestinian and an Arabic-loving Arab, as well as a vaguely left-ist-ish person who generally prefers Mercy over Justice and have a cosmpolitan interest in every Lost People's plea, I couldn't be more empathetic to the general direction and intent behind your post, but you couldn't have possibly picked a more hostile and alienating posting policy if you have planned it for 20 years.
Here's a bunch of unsolicited frank advice that you can heed, feel free to throw it in the trash and continue on course as usual, but feel free to also examine it and see if it, some of it at any rate, might help you.
1- Please Stop Posting Twitter Links.
2- Please recognize, don't minimize, the pain and fear of Israelis. In the vast majority of the Animal kingdom, Aggression almost always traces back to fear.
3- Please write, write anything. Express what you have in mind, in your own words. There is a place for quotation and link aggregation, but this place can't be "everywhere" at a time that is "everywhen". At some point you have to write in your own words.
4- When you write, people will counter-write, meaning they will pick things in your writing to poke holes through. At this point you can (1) Retract them, this will be relatively rare and only the case if you really fucked up and - say - quoted a factually incorrect source very confidentally or said something really cruel in anger. (2) Defend them, and you must do that while resisting the temptation to call the one(s) talking with you stupid and cruel, even though in fact they might very well be stupid and/or cruel (or running a functionally-indistinguishable simulation thereof) (3) Not Respond, which is always an option and is preferable than responding with twitter links, ad-hominems, whataboutery, or just plain meanness.
5- Changing minds is not a sequential, linear process. It's not a process with immediately visible effects. Beliefs form a network, they depend on other beliefs, which in turn depend on other beliefs, which depend ..... and so on. To make matters even more complicated, in a Broadcast setting like a public forum, different people (who you're not even aware of) have their beliefs (which might appear the same on the surface) rooted at different roots. So someone might believe Israel is fully justified in what it does because Muslims are the Earth's trash and God chose Jews as the Master Race, I'm not sure someone like that is worth changing their minds, but assuming that you wanted to, surely you will go about it very differently than from someone else who holds the legalistic view and believes Israel is fully justified because it's a state while its adversary is a non-state militant actor with extremist rhetoric. People are complex, people are not honest with each other and themselves about their own web of beliefs (they will claim to themselves that belief A traces back to beliefs B and C, while in fact it actually traces back to beliefs D and E but they just don't want to admit it), sometimes they don't even know what the roots of their belief networks are, and so on. He who wants to change minds must have patience, he must have respect and empathy, he must have a necessary dose of relativism ("I, too, would think like that if I lived their life") along with the conviction that he is right.
6- This is a bit depressing, but it's a perspective that you have to have in the back of your mind somewhere : the battle of words is just a metaphor. Even the trashiest hahah-I'm-glad-Palestinians-are-dying commenter is still not killing actual Palestinians. Even a complete and utter "win" in the field of words and signals and any quantity or quality of media will still not liberate Palestinians or guarantee starving Gazans a meal. The pen is mightier than the sword only because it **sometimes** has the ability to move several swords, but the pen that can't move swords (i.e. most of us most of the time) is actually quite useless, materially speaking. I say this only to lower the stakes somewhat and open your eyes to the fact that arguments need not always proceed by the terrible rules of war, with its terrible fight-or-flight logic and total disrespect for the opposing party. Argument-as-Fighting is just a Metaphor We Live By, you can and should try others.
7- Those rules are not a holy book, they're ill-defined and not all-encompassing (so maybe just like a holy book after all). Sometimes your instincts will get the better of you and you will violate them, repeatedly, it's okay, I don't follow a lot of them a lot of the time, that's not hypocrisy since I'm openly admitting it, that's what it means to have a (vaguely-defined) ideal to strive to.
Palestine deserves better advocates. Palestine deserves selfless ambassadors who are not looking to "win" arguments vis-a-vis Ben Shapiro or Andrew Tate or any of the countless Merchants of Rage that are a dime a dozen at every level in the media ecosystem, but are simply looking to be beacons : Humble, omni-directional SOS beacons transmitting at full power and at all wavelengths such that those who don't know there is a place called Palestine where people starve and suffer and experience humiliation through no fault of their own, know. It's not about you, it should never be.
Ten times yes to this. One of the most depressIng aspects of NS’s shitposting is that it makes a tiny but nonzero impact in the wrong direction by making an average observer dislike Palestinians slightly more.
Yeah I agree with much of what you say here, I suppose there is a part of me that wants to piss off some of these genocidal freaks to get even a little payback in the face of their powerful onslaught on kids but the goal should be to help Palestinians and bite down on the pain we feel over the child slaughter, that they gleefully cheer on.
I'd say there's one thing I don't agree with you and maybe another thing I'd say things are a bit mixed (and perhaps I'm unfairly addressing your point)
So for
1) I don't think these people are are genuinely motivated by fear. Jews are a wealthy, talented, highly politically and culturally influential group today. The modern world is distinct from the pre modern world and people aren't out to lynch them for killing their god as they did in the past. The fact that they are so committed in spite of their numerous options to live thriving, wealthy, powerful and influential lives here in America, committed to stealing land and slaughtering children indicates they prefer the feeling of dominating so much that they will commit these demonic crimes, inspite of the stellar alternative, even RISKING a new rise in world antisemitism. This is sadism and the urge to dominate, not fear. Or at least if it is fear it is fear over losing that privilege. This makes them far more evil for it in my eyes. Most Muslims condemn muslim extremism but slaughter of infants isn't Jewish extremism it's something 95% of Israelis SUPPORT! I remember you asking for a link for that which i shared.
2) you've seen I'm sure how that brinkley guy responded to me. I showcase just a droplet of links on Israeli evil he dismisses it, literally 3 fully documented articles on Israeli atrocities none written by an Arab or Muslim in case he is racist or Islamophobic respectively and he dismisses that too. We are up against people who are very committed to being unjust, often breaking even their own values they would otherwise claim to uphold our of sheer bloodthirsty animosity towards Muslims. A tweet, a line of argument a full article they will just dismiss, deny, downplay on reflex while repeating zionist bullshit. It's the world's most extreme version of selective demands for rigor.
However relatively speaking it seems better to share links that are comprehensive whose authors can't so easily be dismissed because there probably are a number of lurkers silently reading this back and forth and I give brinkley credit for displaying the nasty unfairness pro Palestinian advocates are typically subject to.
The other thing I've personally found is if you are engaging in a dialogue with a Jewish zionist (yes I recognize most jews are, overwhelmingly so) you are typically arguing with a bad faith individual who jumps from scattershot point to scattershot point, often spreading lies or half truths in an effort to stall and distract anyone listening in while his tribe makes life more and more unlivable for Palestinians, kills more of their children and steals more of their land. They are nearly NEVER arguing from anything more than bloodthirsty chimp-level tribalism. He/she wants more land for his tribe, knows he is getting that and wishes to stall you.
So it is challenging that way to even decide to have dialogue with some of these people.
You make a really good point about the process not being linear, another spectacular point about the pen being mightier than the sword working only when it is, and the analogy of debate to war having its limitations. And also the need to place Palestinian welfare over our own emotions. I will try to consider and factor these in to see how I can be more effective. We will probably always disagree to a degree on approach and there will always probably be limitations to various approaches and settings in the end.
To add, another good point of yours I missed was not responding often being better than responding badly. I agree with this though I've often (LOL ALWAYS) failed to apply it.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that NS is clickfarming. (It's consistent with that behavior, but also consistent with NS genuinely upset over Israelis and not being particularly well-read, which to me begs correction, but not banning.)
Do you mean, post links so that people will click on them so that the links will show more traffic?
I don't really understand the BS that makes the internet run the terrible way that it does.
It's not really important for me to understand it being as I have a pretty good idea of how it could run a lot better based upon being a part of the internet for the entirety of its duration and experience and get from many different angles and in many different countries.
But once you mentioned this specific bit of bullshit and the response by this individual seems to back it up, I'm wondering what this bullshit is and why people would do it?
In case anyone reading this missed it. None of these articles was written by a Muslim or Palestinian and the first and last are written by jews the last of whom is literally an Israeli professor who studies the holocaust.
There is a great deal more documented savagery from Palestinians toward Israelis, to the point that any time you see a tweet like this, you should be looking into whether it's faked in some way long before you just conclude "Israeli savagery is just unmatched".
(The video appears to be an Israeli soldier performing some sort of detonation operation. It's not clear to me what. AFAICT, his tone isn't that of a fanatic. The tweeter claims some yelling in the background is "the echoes of their voices", presumably to imply innocent Palestinians just got hit by that blast. She provides no proof, and I've seen evidence of multiple fakes in the past. She leaves out the well-documented attacks by Palestinians on Israelis, barely two months ago, and routinely further back, for decades.)
> There is a great deal more documented savagery from Palestinians toward Israelis
I actually call bullshit.
How can one even quantify "documented savagery" let alone actually measure the numbers ? Whatever the metric is, I can guarantee that Israeli savagery towards Palestinians in the West Bank will "win" as long as it's remotely fair and unbiased.
No it's true, there's literally no shortage of evidence of Israelis savages targeting and slaughtering civilians. I am inclined to think the same of you.
The funny thing is that you would be absolutely livid if someone so much as thought about justifying Oct Shava using the actions of the Israeli government for the last 30/50/70 years.
"If"? A lot of people, both from the Western as well as the Muslim world, have been doing exactly that non-stop since the morning of 2023-10-07.
It's also an invalid justification, because Israel withdrew from Gaza 18 years ago, and yet various groups in Gaza have been attacking Israel ever since.
Presumably you think those justifying October 7th to be reprehensible individuals, presumably you have something colorful to say about their character or how their mother raised them. So it's again baffling how you emulate them so faithfully just with a 180 direction reversal.
Does it make you feel better ? Do you see a starving Gazan child with 3 killed siblings and think "Ahhhh, nothing like the smell of JUSTICE in the morning, that's the natural and desirable outcome for children born on HAMAS land, those future terrorists" ?
Moreover, Palestinians everywhere feel kinship with their brethrens in the West Bank, who are under a nonstop occupation and attack for north of 50 years now, to say nothing of their (both Gazans and West Bank Palestinians) ancestors who used to live in what is today Israel, all 800K of them, and were expelled in massacres and atrocities by the pre-IDF Zionist militias.
So if the actions of governments justify violence against their populations, you have one hell of an uphill fight to argue that Israelis don't deserve October 7th in light of what their government has been doing for the last 3/4 of a century. The other alternative, of course, is to recognize that governments and their populations are 2 very intertwined but nonetheless conceptually separate things, and that collective punishment is a type of savagery that humans have long ago agreed to abandon.
> Do you see a starving Gazan child with 3 killed siblings and think [...]
No, the suffering of innocent men, women, and children in Gaza deeply saddens me, and I don't feel the least bit of satisfaction or even joy about their plight. Most of them are not directly responsible for the violence committed by Hamas, just like most citizens of Dresden weren't directly responsible for the violence committed by the Nazi regime.
I wish this war would end soon, with Hamas being eradicated for good. And I hope that certain members of Israel's government will be put on trial for their complicity in the current situation, and locked away for a very long time. I'm being sincere, although I wouldn't blame you if you don't believe me.
> Moreover, Palestinians everywhere feel kinship with their brethrens in the West Bank [...]
Strangely, their leaders don't seem to feel much compassion towards the Palestinians in Gaza, or else they wouldn't have launched such an unprecedented attack as on Oct 7. Hamas' leadership aren't stupid enough to not have predicted that Israel would be forced to retaliate on an equally unprecedented scale, inflicting more suffering and misery than in the last decades combined.
So no, your "they only did it to support their brothers in the West Bank" thesis doesn't hold up, unless you believe that Hamas willfully sacrificed themselves and the lives of many, many Gazans to maybe perhaps create a small chance that Israel might stop their illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Hamas has the right to fight Israel because Israel is occupying the west Bank, Israel had the right to end its occupation. Palestinians are one people.
Israelis are merely committing crimes to protect their occupation. They are the nazis here.
>>Hamas has the right to fight Israel because Israel is occupying the west Bank, Israel had the right to end its occupation.
Even assuming this to be true, there are constraints as to how one may lawfully fight, even when one has the right to do so. Shooting up civilians at a bus stop or machinegunning a concert are not included.
You seem quite capable of recognizing those limitations when Israel is doing the fighting - can you see your way to a world where they apply to Hamas as well?
It's true some hamas members committed transgressions as the allies did. But Israelis are fundamentally the aggressor here, they're defending their oppression not themselves. Hamas and the rest of the world recognize 67 borders. Isrselis just want to steal the land.
There are no shortage of examples of Israelis targeting and sadistically murdering civilians
That's a TikTok dancing video. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised if there are people who want to invade China over this, but I'm inclined to count dancing as non-violent. (And again, if you want to submit this as Israelis being mean, you're submitting against a great deal more evidence in the other direction.)
Are you unaware that the laptop also contained evidence of felonies? By The Big Guy I mean. Obviously Hunter's felonies are NBD 'cause he's a white guy and the sonof soemone important.
You're the one pretending that the significance of the laptop was it had naked pics of Hunter. Your declaration that other people are not being straight is laughable.
Hunter is currently indicted on a bunch of charges, actually, and after the court cases finish will likely be sentenced like anyone else who did what he did.
Also, what specific felonies? Because there have been two separate senate Republican investigative committees and a single congress Republican one that looked at the contents of the laptop and found nothing that incriminates the POTUS, so I find your claim very surprising.
> Safely after the election and years after the laptop was made public.
That is entirely normal. Trump is currently on trial for things that happened before he was ever president. The justice system is generally much slower than people expect it to be, even when you expect it to be slow. Currently the greatest threat to Trump facing justice is not that the prosecutors cannot make a good case, it's that prosecuting him for the worst stuff might literally take longer than his expected remaining lifespan.
Please give me specifics on what on the laptop incriminated the POTUS. Not vague "it's totally there" statements, but statements of specific facts. Because I have yet to find anything even resembling that.
Because the closest thing to that I have seen anywhere is the claim that a certain ledger represented funneling money to the POTUS from foreign entities. This claim was simply not true; the ledger tallied the rent payments for a property not owned by the POTUS.
Are you deliberately ignoring the context of "would have surely swung the election?" I'd like to know before I do any work for someone that may be completely uninterested in learning anything.
>Please give me specifics on what on the laptop incriminated the POTUS. Not vague "it's totally there" statements, but statements of specific facts.
You were asked a specific question in the interest of converging on truth, and you keep ignoring it. Any further responses without putting for a concrete answer should be taken as evidence that such information does not credibly exist, and that you are, therefore, trolling.
Swedish researcher who investigated the influence of the muslim brotherhood in swedish politics now facing the prospect of being charged of a crime for his research
OK, I'm going to post a guess here, before I look up the story.
I'm going to guess (with extremely high confidence) that what he's being charged for is not researching the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood per se but some specific thing he did while doing so, and (with lower but still moderately high confidence) that that thing constitutes an at least reasonably solid justification for charging him, and that the insinuation that this is about trying to punish him for his conclusions is unfounded.
Having now looked up the story: he's accused of mishandling private/personal data; my Swedish google-fu is too weak to have an informed opinion of how justified that charge is.
If he mishandled the personal data of the far right, such as by doxxing, libeling, and cancelling them, would he have been charged with a crime? Or would he have been lauded as a hero fighting the good fight?
Thank you for taking the time to look into the additional background. Can't say it's surprising (who put this hyperbole into a culture-war post? You *never* see those 2 things together), but good to have clear in the thread.
I only see the ethics committee charging his dissertation, presumably an academic disciplinary action, alleging publication of private data (I might be misunderstanding, as my Swedish is weak). Is a lawsuit coming with it?
Why do spell checkers suck now? I'm a terrible speller, and also I tend to hit keys out of order sometimes. And yet when I spell something wrong the list of words I get never has the word I want.
It wasn't like this in the past. What went wrong? (Do I need to compile a list?)
Rule 7: If a common word can be made by switching the position of two adjacent letters, then that word should appear on the list.
I am a good speller, and from my perspective the spell checkers are improving, because in the past they didn't know many existing words and happily "corrected" them to something random... and now they mostly leave me alone.
"thousands of Tesla documents....chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, dat[ing] back at least seven years...across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe...nine former Tesla managers or service technicians...."
"the documents, which have not been previously reported, offer the most comprehensive view to date into the scope of the problems and how Tesla handled what its engineers have internally called part “flaws” and “failures.” The records and interviews reveal for the first time that the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators. The documents, dated between 2016 and 2022, include repair reports from Tesla service centers globally; analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high failure rates; and memos sent to technicians globally, instructing them to tell consumers that broken parts on their cars were not faulty...."
The lede anecdote is of a new-Tesla owner whose family was endangered when the steering failed, and Tesla declared that the incident was due to "prior" suspension damage. Um with 115 miles on the odometer? "prior" to what exactly?
European regulators are no doubt reading that article with great interest. Meanwhile the fresh class-action lawsuits to be soon launched by Tesla car owners in the US could be epic -- looks like they could propose that the courts skip the discovery stage and proceed straight to verdict/damages.
Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter, file a histrionic lawsuit against them, declare that whoever leaked the Tesla records is to be found and flayed alive or whatever, etc. The professional managers at Tesla though will surely try to respond in some more-organized ways.
>Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter,
I REALLY hope you were incensed that twitter helped bury the hunter biden laptop scandal, which was tantamount to them conspiring with a political party to help them win the election, rather than the owner of a website hypothetically restricting what he wants to restrict.
It's not big news because it's tiny news. "At least 11 drivers told Tesla a crash was caused by a failure in the suspension, steering or wheel assembly, company records show. Those accident claims, which have not been previously reported by the media, were recorded by Tesla staff between 2018 and 2021 and assigned to engineers or technicians for review."
11 drivers out of millions.
The tone of the hitpiece makes it sound like it's a persistent issue affecting teslas in general instead of a relatively minor problem. Even the bigger numbers elsewhere in the piece are small scale compared to the company as a whole.
The bigger numbers don't look very good. Depending on what tens of thousands means, the failure rate might be on the order of 1-4% of all cars delivered during the period under scrutiny. Memos directing technicians to lie don't look good, either.
The Takata airbag recall is a comparable case study, but theyre not blaming the customer.
It's unclear if the automakers knew about the issue (I mean, probably not? It's more likely a failure to do due diligence, but this was pretty much every major car manufacturer for years!). They also didn't make the part themselves so there is at least some plausible deniability.
I don't think emissions diddling is quite in the same league.
The nearest comparison would be the Toyota accelerator fiasco about a decade ago, which started with a single crash, though quite an awful one. And it did make big news.
I was curious about buying an empty lot and building a house there to rent out, until I talked to my real estate agent about the idea. He says building a house from scratch is always longer and more expensive than owners realize.
It made me think: If you want to build your dream house and don't have a multimillionaire budget, isn't it best to buy a small house and then transform it into what you want through renovations and additions?
My building knowledge is mostly secondhand, but the big delays to building a new house are going to be stuff like weather, and unforeseen problems like one of your boards being slightly too short, or a builder's truck breaking down. Plus I know one guy who had an engineer friend that convinced him to build a very complicated roof with some supposed engineering advantage (like, a dome, or something); not being an engineer himself, the guy was struggling to build that roof for months.
Renovations include those problems and then add problems of prior construction; the existing walls have load-bearing posts, and water pipes and electrical wires running through them. You can't just knock an existing wall down; it's a whole operation to make sure the rest of the house stays up.
Of the two, as long as you already have a place to stay, you'd want to build from scratch.
Not true for production builders, they can build a house in 3-4 months for a normal price. But they don't usually build on your land, not sure if they would do that because they like to build a lot of houses at the same time in the same area.
Custom home builders are different. They are small companies so it all depends on who you hire.
But buying a small house and renovating is always going to be worse than building a new house. No one does that for good reasons.
>But buying a small house and renovating is always going to be worse than building a new house. No one does that for good reasons.
Depends on whether or not there's available land in a convenient location that's zoned for single-family residential construction, and on how many hoops the local government makes you jump through to get permits and planning approval to build a new house vs renovating an existing house. For these reasons, major renovations of existing houses (most common pattern was to strip the existing house down to its frame, expand the foundation, and build essentially a new house on the site; another pattern was to do a large addition and doing a superficial remodel on the existing house) were incredibly common in Bay Area suburbs c 2010 through at least when I move away from Sunnyvale in 2018.
IME, the same factors that make building a new house expensive and unpredictable also cause major renovations and additions to be expensive and unpredictable. (although if you could find a house that was say 90% of the way towards being your dream house, then at least you are minimizing the expensive/unpredictable part!)
I don't know so much about American housebuilding, but over here - if you know what you're doing and have family members/friends who are both able to do construction work (including plumbing and electrical) and willing to assist, it's not so bad.
Of course, it often helps that it's young married couples building their own houses on a plot of land donated by parents/family. If you have to buy a site, yes that is more expensive. And yeah, it will take longer because you're building in your spare time rather than having a crew work on it for you full-time.
We have the saying: "Wer zu viel Geld hat und ist dumm, kauft ein altes Haus und baut es um" = "Whoever has too much money and is stupid, buys an old house and rebuilds it". Not sure how much truth is in there, though...
Yug Gnirob here. Substack banned me without any notification.
Their appeal process is a joke. They don't tell you what the supposed violation is and instead demand you defend yourself in a void. They then send an email which just says
>Upon additional review we've determined that your account is in violation of Substack's Content Guidelines and will not be reactivated.
They have said nothing about which part of the Guidelines I supposedly violated, but I know accounts who have repeatedly linked pictures of dead babies in these threads are still unbanned, so I highly doubt this list is actually what they're using in their determinations. (This is the only place I post, so any violation would have had to be from here; everyone feel free to guess what rule exactly they're saying I violated. If you do it quickly enough then this post will remain on the page with "Removed" as the name and contents, instead of being deleted completely.)
Well, it appears they've repealed the ban today. Whether that was because of this post or just the natural process I don't know, but I'm still going to hold it against them that "upon additional review" apparently did not include an actual additional review.
So. Exciting journeys into the Substack appeal process.
I had similar experiences twice with KDP, Amazon's self-publishing subsidiary. At one point I sent them two emails making different arguments. After I received back two identical form letters, signed with the same name, sent three minutes apart, I concluded that I was dealing with software not humans.
I sent one reply to the original email (the post-appeal one), asking what exactly they were saying the problem was, then made this post assuming I wouldn't get a response. One of those things presumably got past the software.
So are your removed posts, even the ones that didn't get any comments, now back up, or is your psst self still canceled? If they're back up, maybe having a look at them would provide a clue. Though I still think you should tell Scott about this. It's not like he reads every one of these open threads, so your posting here isn't all that likely to come to his notice.
They're all back up. The thing is, I say a lot of stupid jokey stuff and could think of half a dozen posts that might have caused someone to object, from this thread alone (which you can now read again by doing a search for Yug). The unban message from Substack just says "I've corrected the issue", which reads to me like it was caused by none of them. Getting banned wouldn't bother me too badly as long as someone justified it; it was very much the lack of it that got my back up.
Strangely, the notifications under the bell are still gone for the last eight months, I'd have to go through my email to find those again.
What!? I haven’t read enough of your comments to have a mental picture of what you’re like, and can’t call to mind a single one of them offhand. But I do have a general sense that you’re a reasonable commenter. If somebody says something cruel, unusually rude or wacko I tend to remember that. And if somebody is quite funny or blows me away with their smarts, I remember that. I think you said said one thing a couple weeks ago that I found quite funny. Except for that you are untagged in my mind.
It’s weird that something you said triggered the Substack police. Somebody a couple of open threads ago wrote that Jews lusted for the blood of children. I have used every single one of George Carlin'f forbidden words on here, except for 'cocksucker,' which seems to depend for its impact on contempt for gay men -- and as of this post I am somebody who even wrote 'cocksucker' in a post. And I've never heard a peep out of Scott or Substack about it. What the hell could you have written that tops those? And how do they even find remarks that break their rules? There's a sea of comments on ACX, and of course there are other blogs with big comment sections too. They *can't* be reading it all. Seems like it must be that somebody writing or lurking in the comments section must have complained to Substack about something you said.
How about you search your name on the last few comments sections and get a list of your recent comments. Maybe also read reactions to them, see if there was anyone who seemed to think one of them was awful and unacceptable. And I think you should let Scott know about this. He cares about this issue, and I think would hate the idea that people who comment here can be canceled by Substack. His email address is scott@slatestarcodex.com. Put "NOT SPAM" in both the subject line and within the body of the email itself.
If you look down to the comment about military code names, you'll see that searching for the name of someone who got banned by Substack rather than the blog owner won't work because the username will be replaced by 'Removed'. In this case I don't know what the problem was with military code names either, but I'm assuming that it was something similar in Yug's case, nothing morally offensive, just legally risky for Substack itself.
Oh, you're right. But that's better, in a way, because he can just search for 'Removed.' That way he'll know which of his comments was the one. But what will remain unexplained still are why he was banned by Substack (do they do that to all who post something legally risky to Substack?) and what led them to notice the comment. Do you have any theory about the latter?
It only shows "Removed" for comments that had replies; all the unreplied ones are simply gone. But I shouldn't have to search for anything, they should tell me what they think the problem is, which they haven't done. Presumably their silence means they know their reasoning is gross.
I think Eremolalos is right, and some nubbins reported a comment of yours which triggered the banbot to automatically remove it (I highly doubt Substack has Real People sorting these cases out anymore, since bots are Cheap even if they're not accurate or reliable).
If it was automatically done and they have nobody flesh and blood reading these complaints, then I think you're probably out of luck. It's stupid but this is how AI is going to be used, rather than solving world problems: just automate the hell out of everything because it's cheaper than even dirt-cheap Third World labour, and who cares if it's shitty customer service? Look our share price do gooder!
I thought comment reports all went to Scott. If Substack is going to ban commenters based on criteria they enforce site-wide, then I hardly expect them to rely on individual reports when any two blogs could have completely opposite moderation policies and readerships.
This doesn't really apply here, since freedom of speech doesn't mean entitlement to every platform. Unless you're talking about legally formalizing internet moderation, in which case I'm curious how could this be done without causing a huge mess.
You're right, people posting here can't claim a right to freedom of speech. But one of the things people with blogs on Substack like is that it does very little censorship, and I'm sure Substack is aware of that. If they are now doing more censorship, what's up with that, and how much worse is it going to get?
"Freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is a dumb and dangerous slogan - that's most of what it does mean.
Total freedom from consequences is meaningless - the reductio ad absurdam is "freedom to say 'pass the salt' without receiving condiments".
So when you talk about "speaking freely" like this, I take you to mean "it should be forbidden to impose certain sorts of consequence for certain sorts of speech on the internet".
And that obviously covers a multitude of sins - what forms of reaction to what forms of speech do you think should and shouldn't be legal?
> "Freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is a dumb and dangerous slogan
Yeah, by that logic, you had a lot of free speech in Soviet Union, you just later got a bullet for what you said, but... you know, things have consequences, and that's okay.
I guess, technically, internet is more analogical to press than to speech. Freedom of press only applies to those who have printers, and you are not one of them.
The most extreme case I can think of would be a blog promoting child abuse. Motto "after 8 is too late." (That's the real motto of some underground group of pedophiles.)
I don't know who you are but I was just disallowed to share a link on my own youtube channel unless I uploaded a video for them to run against their database to ensure that I was never suspended from their platform.
I never was and I assume this is just another tightening of the reigns against everybody by the Faceless Unaccountables who have a chokehold on all of human communication.
Which kind of makes it worse than if they had some particular reason to suspect me personally.
I don't understand how ANYBODY can allow this continue.
There is SO MUCH WRONG with how society is managed. And yet, rather than be activists against the tyrannical elite we leave such activism to crazy conspiracists and are proud to laugh at them when they accurately describe the present tyranny as tyranny.
THERE IS NO "hope in the proles".
Let history not say that there was no hope in us either.
here's the thing; the only reason you can post a video at all is because of Google bearing the costs. If you tried to self-host it, it probably would be far too expensive to do so unless you were a business. Hobbyist video might be impossible. Video hosting is hard and costly, which is why YouTube exists.
people dont get that they are begging from others; they are vastly underpaying for a service but are vulnerable because of it.
The internet was once free and equal (please don't nitpick). If you were around during google's genesis you know what I am saying, and Net Neutrality aimed to keep it that way.
And if it cost us the ability to upload more than one video a week that would be an okay cost for the benefit of a more equal internet (and I'm not even sure we would consider it a cost.)
If the problem we have is that land grabs have left large swathes of the internet a patchwork of privately-owned enclaves run by a class of gentry accountable to none but themselves, then Urbit, a project started by an unironic monarchist that encodes feudalism into its very fabric, is the opposite of a solution.
Yes, he would of course like to own the internet and everything in it. But, as history has shown us, so does everyone.
The fact that he says it up front at least means that he will have to engage with the matter as things move along.
I know nothing about Urbit and only use android currently, but trustbusting can be good. It won't solve everything forever, but, it takes a while for companies and people to build up enough credibility before they become any kind of real threat.
Besides, maybe along the way we'll find him to be the king we never knew we wanted?
Anyway, all I'm saying is that while the old free internet would be better (and with what we've learned since then we can make it even a whole lot better than that, as well solve many of the problems which that internet itself had) taking a few big chunks out of the handful of people who currently own all of the portals of worldwide conversation would be an improvement.
I'm sure most of you good people live in large cities on one coast or the other. I, on the other hand, live in the middle of the country on a small peninsula that runs out into northern Lake Michigan. But even here in our little village, politics can get a little crazy: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/brouhaha-at-the-council
eh you come across badly in the council meeting, which undermines the point. You disrespected the leader and showed an "i'm too good for this" attitude. Keep in mind people have long memories and in a village you will rely on them because you have less of the resources suburbs and cities have that let you ignore your neighbors.
a little grace goes a long way, and they've seen more rich people play at chicken raising than you have councils.
"The language of the letter was official, very official. There were no charges, per se, just several concerns about the housing, feeding, watering, psychological welfare and eventual fate of the birds on our farm property."
And *this* is why I am very non-gruntled about Scott's grant to the Legal Impact for Chickens bunch, because *this* is precisely the kind of lawfare I expect them, or the people who want to take cases which they will then assist to do so, to engage in.
'But we're only going after factory farms!' Yeah, my eye they are.
And also yeah, townies who visit the country and have no idea about how animals are raised or how animals live in the wild, but they just love the poor little animals and are so concerned about their welfare, they learned it all from the Disney anthropomorphised animal movies so they know what animals are like better than you do!
Hey, Not All Townies (tm). I'm a townie and while I fed the chickens one week in summer back when I was five years old, I have no idea how they're raised. I saw a chicken running around in the forest once and was confused. But still, the only thing I am concerned about re: chickens is 1). the taste, and 2). whether they contain any chemicals that are hazardous to my health. That's it. Chickens aren't animals to me, they're protein.
No I meant the social/legal repercussions. Was there any further impact from the town council? What were they actually investigating? Were they accusing you of animal cruelty? Is everyone mad at you now? What's the deal?
Joshua Moon runs a Kiwi Farms, a forum that has many supporters and even more enemies. Regardless of what you may have heard or think about his forum (please don't rail off to comment about it here), his essays are better journalism than most WSJ long forms. They tend to not to defend his site as a specific case but small websites in general (i.e are not heavily biased). Moon has experience very few have, and at least this new essay on the DDoS mitigation industry makes very good use of it: https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/a-handful-of-companies-rule-the-internet
KF is extremely mean-spirited and as such I don't know how much its troubles generalize, but there's a real problem with the internet that I think this article speaks to. Nothing but boring, safe, corporate websites these days.
Regarding the reactions to this post: I do not know who the hell Joshua Moon is, but judging by the comments here and the people who are making them, I think it's likely that I, too, would despise him if I knew more about him. Still, it seems unreasonable to reject the blog poster, and the person posting the link to the post here, rather than the content of the blog post itself. Why not just shred the views in Moon's post? If he is both evil and a mediocre thinker and writer that should be easy to do.
Here's an instance of that ad hominem and ad ad hominem rejection.
<For what it's worth, if you can't find anyone who isn't a B-grade monster expressing an opinion, that should tell you something (if you still think the opinion is worth spreading, rewrite it in your own words); if you can, don't source it to someone who is
Ok, I clicked, so that others don't have to. My attempt at summary...
There are only 16 Tier 1 internet providers in the world, half of them are American. They "effectively dictate what is allowed to be on the Internet in the United States" and "are complicit in allowing a form of network abuse" called DDoS.
DDoS attacks are cheap, defense is expensive. Cloudflare provides security against DDoS for half of the internet. "If they decide you don’t get to be on their network, you will quickly realize there’s no real alternatives." There are two subtypes of DDoS attacks -- application attacks and network attacks -- a good programmer could write something analogical to Cloudflare to protect against the former, but the latter would just directly increase his bills. There are companies providing solutions to that, too, but most of them accept only big corporate customers; the remaining ones "get to be choosy about their customers" and are very expensive. They have rejected Kiwi Farms, and tomorrow, they might reject you!
Also, Joshua Moon suspects that the DDoS protection companies may be organizing DDoS attacks themselves, to increase their profits.
As I was reading your comment, I thought I had once read a WIRED or some other article about Cloudflare continuing to provide service to the Daily Stormer (and then something else about the founder having a brain tumor, not related). So I looked it up and found this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
I don't know what else to say.
Re your last paragraph: this piece https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/6/23339889/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-content-moderation-ddos mentions that "Cloudflare provides security services to… makers of cyberattack software! That’s the claim made in this blog post from Sergiy P. Usatyuk, who was convicted of running a large DDoS-for-hire scheme". I haven't looked into this. That seems like a good reason for refusing a client service, though. Does Cloudflare routinely reject clients on the basis of refusing to support illegal /other activity, or are the high-profile cases the main instances?
Maybe instead of rejecting vigilanteism in the realm of content moderation, we should embrace it in a principled way, because legislation is slow to do so? I suppose that's what most platforms are starting to do already.
I can't comment on the technical part, of if it's possible for ISPs to make it harder for people to send DDOSes. I imagine that the "distributed" part makes it fairly difficult, though - there's not an individual source of the attacks that you can ban, all you can do is look for patterns that make you think "these connections are probably from a botnet."
As for the fact that ISPs and infrastructure companies can be choosy about their customers, I think I value freedom of association more than I value keeping KiwiFarms on the air. It's pretty normal for a business to be able to fire a client who's too much trouble to work with, or who's costing them reputation and money.
And like, if he was *just* an annoying right-winger you could maybe have a "spirit of the first amendment" argument, arguing that even if "right-wing asshole" isn't *legally* protected, the *spirit* of the law demands that we let KF exist online like everyone else. But KF in particular is famous for organized doxxing and harassment, and trying to protect that on "spirit of the law" grounds strikes me as incoherent. "Everyone has the right to be in the public square no matter how much you hate them" can't coexist with "You have the right to bully people you hate into withdrawing from the public square."
>> As for the fact that ISPs and infrastructure companies can be choosy about their customers, I think I value freedom of association more than I value keeping KiwiFarms on the air. It's pretty normal for a business to be able to fire a client who's too much trouble to work with, or who's costing them reputation and money.
+1
Forcing a business to serve anyone, regardless of who they are or how reprehensible their conduct, is a significant infringement on individual rights for a government to impose on a private company. I wouldn't say that such a requirement should never be imposed (electricity and hospital services come to mind), but given the conflict it presents trading against freedom of association, I think it's a high bar for very special cases. And while I would be a strong advocate that a hospital or water utility not be permitted to refuse Mr. Moon service, the DDoS Defense Industry does not strike me as critical enough to life and livelihood to rise to that level.
And I certainly wouldn't advocate for the government to enforce some kind of tailored privilege specific to Mr. Moon and people like him, along the lines of a Civil Rights Act. I mean, what's the protected class? "People dedicated to pissing on other people's shoes online?"
Refusing to provide internet service or infrastructure to someone is *also* not harassment or bullying.
You can either take a legalistic approach and say "Well, bullying is okay, and so is refusing to associate with bullies, they're both legal." Or you can take a spirit-of-the-law approach and say "Denying people internet access is not okay, and neither is harassing them off of it, they both are harmful to the marketplace of ideas." But I don't see a coherent set of norms in which it's okay to bully people but not okay to refuse to associate with bullies.
EDIT: I should also point out that while DDOSing is a crime, so is harassment. So even the legalistic approach doesn't get you very far.
"But I don't see a coherent set of norms in which it's okay to bully people but not okay to refuse to associate with bullies."
The same set of norms that says a Jewish baker has to bake a Hitler's Birthday cake, or a Christian wedding chapel host a gay poly pagan pre-orgy ceremony.
"I was informed, on accident, that their motivation for this decision was that my website’s Wikipedia page was unfavorable." - translation: once ISPs become aware of what is on his website, they cancel him because of that.
Moon does not mention once what his website is about because he knows that decent men everywhere will oppose it. He feels his sophistry can make the situation someone else's fault and not his own.
The enemies of Kiwi Farms aren't just good men, decent men, but true men's men. Some of the most square-jawed, testosterone-soaked men I've ever seen! Like Atlas, they carry the weight of the world on their exceedingly broad shoulders! Like Zeus, a furrow of their manly brow will change destinies!
Well I must be an indecent man, or maybe not even a man at all. I don't know this guy, I don't know his website, I have no idea if all this is true or it's a few disgruntled special snowflakes causing trouble (this does happen on the Internet, you know), so how about you explain to me why Decent Men Oppose?
It looks like Kiwi Farms was created in 2013 as a forum where people who didn't like some fancomic author named Christine Weston Chandler, as a place to coordinate plans to harass her. Specific details in the article, but it includes highlights like convincing a 13-year-old boy into masquerading as a 19-year-old girl in order to have phone sex with Chandler and record it, sending prostitutes to visit Chandler’s house then calling the family to taunt them about it, etc.
From there KF seems to have evolved into a preferred platform for people who want to coordinate harassment, trolling, stalking, doxing, etc of online figures and communities. Wikipedia says they've been tied to 3 suicides by targeted figures.
So yeah, pretty dirtbag stuff.
Also kind of entertaining that the "guy who runs the site where people can coordinate to harass other people" is apparently asking for more government intervention in the DDOS marketplace so that "people can't coordinate to harass me with DDOS attacks."
In reality it's just a gossip forum full of women. Certain demographics with outsized influence in the tech industry don't like it because the nastiness of their social circles gets regularly exposed there and laughed at.
Things like "sending prostitutes to somebody's house" and "convincing a 13-year-old to impersonate a 19-year-old, have phone sex with somebody, and record it" seem to me to go significantly beyond "gossip."
On the other hand, looking up "Christine Weston Chandler", I get the information that this was a guy before they came out as trans, and have admitted committing incest with their mother.
So there's a lot of "what the hell" on both sides, and it seems to be the worst of the Internet with people finding a target who responded with equal vigour and it all took off from there:
On the one hand, yeah, that site appears to be full of dirtbags. On the other hand, as long as they're not doing anything actually illegal, they deserve to have their dirtbag website. ISPs should not get to dictate who does and who doesn't get to speak, because no one died and elected them Commissar.
Wait, who has been prevented from speaking here? I mean, Chandler is probably having a harder time reaching her audience on account of being in jail, but she's in jail for a crime she apparently committed in meatspace. And "freedom of speech" has never meant "if you publicly admit to committing crimes, you can't be prosecuted because that would be punishing you for your speech".
If other participants in this drama are being harassed or DDOSed into silence, then they're being effectively prevented from speaking, but it's not the ISP that's doing that, it's the harassers and DDOSers.
Which perhaps the ISP, or Cloudflare or whomever, could help with. But if I'm a bodyguard with time on my schedule and the head of Hamas's US chapter asks me to protect him from a bunch of pissed-off Jews, my decision to sit this one out doesn't mean I'm the one denying his right to life.
Nobody’s stopping the dirtbags from starting their own DDoS defense service and taking all comers.
There’s a very limited number of services (water, hospitals, electricity) where I’d support a utility model that denies a private company agency over who its customers are. DDoS protection isn’t one of them.
My refusal to give you a ride does not mean I’m acting as “Commissar of Transit” preventing you from getting to work.
You'll find that KF's targets are themselves horrific people, almost always shielded by being a person of protected identity status. As such they'll be one of the only places online you'll find true information about their targets.
Unfortunately, you can also find a lot of untrue information there.
...so, vigilanteism is good and should be permitted, and therefore KF is a valid target for vigilante takedowns just like anyone else? ...or vigilanteism is bad and shouldn't be permitted, and therefore it's valid to refuse to work with KF?
Yeesh. So its dirtbags bagging on dirtbags bagging on dirtbags all the way down. Can't say I'm surprised.
Still, to the extent that Moon wants to lean on the "the target of my dirtbag behavior is, himself, a dirtbag who totally deserves it" defense, I don't see any reason we should be sympathetic when he finds that shoe fitted for his own foot as well.
I will stop commenting here, and in ACX in general, and probably never go to an ACX meeting. You are hopelessly far away from old LW rationalism.
He plainly advocates for more transparency from payment network, a better Section 230, and regulation to have Tier 1 ISPs prevent DDoS by informative and well-argued essays about these topics. There essays are kind of content that could have been published in a high quality magazine. There's almost no mention of Kiwi Farms. The only case Moon defends in them is the general case.
Arguing about the specific instead of the general case is absurd. I said please don't rail off, and get four replies that do exactly that!
It has always been Lesswrong tradition to go on tangents. If you were making this comment on lesswrong I would downvote you for being dramatic and whiny about it.
What's the end game for the migration crisis in NY?
I wasn't aware that it was still a "crisis". Maybe that attitude will spread to NYC? Do you still have local politics there?
Alternatively, declare that America isn't safe because it's "the most racist country in the world", and send them on to Canada?
Hizzonor Adams and Hochul are constantly using the c word to describe it, and are bemoaning the lack of Fedbux for them to deal with it.
And since randomly bussing migrants places is a cruel, inhumane political stunt, they naturally are dealing with it by bussing migrants to random upstate communities where they are being welcomed with open arms sometimes disguised as lawsuits and protests.
Huh. For some reason I just don't see much reporting about it. Nor about the pro-Palestinian protests in NY, saying things like "cancel Christmas". (I mean, I **know** why I don't see these stories.)
The media stops covering it once election year ramps up and everybody forgets about it.
They managed to studiously avoid the (genuine) crisis in Texas so I'm sure they can figure out how to avoid the (tiny) crisis in New York.
I know someone who is 18 and has no clue what to do in life. Is going to university and just taking whatever prereqs with no idea, not even the first clue, despite all kinds of probing questions, what she wants to do.
I recommended maybe volunteering for charity. As a first pass, I went to Givewell's site to see if they had some recommendation where to volunteer and, surprisingly, I could find nothing.
So what are the best charities to volunteer for right now? How do you find out?
> 18 and has no clue what to do in life
How do people even do that? Does this include, like, having no hobby? This sounds to me like a horrible way of existing, regardless of the university problems.
My recommendation would be to get as much experience as possible, as quickly as possible. Like, call all the people you know, ask them to give you a list of things they enjoy doing or find meaningful, and then spend one afternoon trying each one of them, with the help of the person who already does that. (Read a book. Play a board game. Play a computer game. Take a hike. Go dance. Cook something. Feed the homeless. Teach kids math. Just talk. Meditate. Clean the beach.) At the end of each week write a diary entry about what you tried and how much you enjoyed it.
> How do people even do that?
I was the same way, up until age 21, when I randomly took a CS-for-majors course and discovered that not only did I like programming, I was also good at it. Up until then, there was a lot of stuff I was decent at, and enjoyed a bit, but nothing that could come close to being described as a "calling". I'd have been just another bright, aimless kid, puttering around in the professional-managerial class, trying desperately to find meaning in a world of bullshit jobs. And if I didn't happen to be dating someone who was taking that CS course, I'd never have found out.
I agree with your recommendation of trying lots of stuff. That's part of why I mentioned the social work jobs - rather than jump in to something EA right away, why not try a lot of other things first and see how they fit? If you're already thinking in EA terms, and vaguely planning to end up there, this would provide a chance to test out your theorizing in the real world. It's like one of those chains of literature or science or engineering, where to understand why we do things the way we do them today, it's helpful to understand the other things we've tried first, and the evolution of the state of the art in the field.
Yeah, some people grew up during Covid and had a harder time of it than others, I guess. I struggle to imagine that state of being myself, to the point where I wonder if she's lying... but it is what it is!
As a counterpoint, find the closest organization that provides free food for homeless people, and volunteer there for a while. It's hands-on experience with ground truth in the place she lives, and gives a context for human suffering that might be otherwise missing. Alternatively, if she's in a moderately left-wing city, the local government should be contracting with agencies to manage housing homeless people, so she could probably find a (messy, disgusting, but paying) job there doing clean-up work. Apparently, a lot of people burn out of that type of job after a few months, so if she goes into it with that expectation, she'll spare herself some angst.
Like, even from a cold tactical view, if she's pretty sure she wants to go into EA later, it will give her a perspective that many people around her will be lacking, and allow her to address questions from first-hand experience rather than from regurgitating someone else's reporting.
If you feed the pigeons, you get more pigeons. If you feed the homeless you get more homeless.
If you want to do some good for the world, go out and pick up litter off the beach, on yor own. There's no social aspect to it, so you won't be pulled into some kind of stupid groupthink, it's just you and your litter bag and a strip of clean beach behind you.
> If you feed the homeless you get more homeless.
>If you want to do some good for the world, go out and pick up litter off the beach, on yor (sic) own
If you assert without evidence that feeding the homeless creates more homeless people, maybe we should also worry about the possibility that picking up litter will incentivize more litter.
[Incidentally, even were it true that feeding the homeless would "create more homeless" that wouldn't be equivalent to feeding homeless people being a net negative. If e.g. there are a total of 1 million homeless people and feeding them all would create a small relative incentive to be homeless and the total number of better fed homeless people would rise to 1 million and 1, that would almost certainly be a large net positive.
If you are very worried, though, about the effects of various charitable efforts, you can check out GiveWell's recommended charities, as GiveWell conducts extensive analyses on optimal charities.]
Sorry about that. I had just stumbled off a red-eye after getting about 2 hours of sleep. But in my defense:
It's Christmas Eve, and you sounded exactly like Ebeneezer Scrooge. :-)
To address your point, I've done that sort of volunteering, there was no groupthink, and it doesn't work like that. I'm quite confident that the number of people who are incentivized at the margin to become homeless because of free food, is approximately zero. The descent into the visible, "problematic" sort of homelessness is overdetermined.
As an example, take the woman who was sitting in front of a grocery store, panhandling and asking people to buy her a sandwich, when **literally** half a block away there was a place serving free hot all-you-can-eat meals. When I told her about this place, she thought for a moment and then said that she preferred to stay where she was because otherwise she would "lose her place". Of all the things going wrong there, free food was not the problem.
What does happen is space-shifting (but not the sort caused by Dr. Frankenfurter's castle). Providing better services to homeless people draws in existing ones from the surrounding areas, making it seem like there are more. There's a potentially valid criticism about encouraging people to uproot from their original communities where they might have received personalized support. But the homeless aren't a homogenous population, and my impression is that this sort of migration is mostly of the sort who're far enough gone that they've already burned whatever bridges they had left (or had the bridges burned for them). (These would be the visible, "problematic" ones I mentioned, who usually have some combination of mental illness, drug addiction, and chronic antisocial behavior.)
> I'm quite confident that the number of people who are incentivized at the margin to become homeless because of free food, is approximately zero.
I am trying to imagine a food so delicious it would motivate me to become homeless just so I could get it for free every day...
Nope, I think I would rather buy it.
> a food so delicious it would motivate me to become homeless
Aha, this is how the AIs will destroy civilization!
Do you believe in ghosts?
I'm not surprised that GW doesn't have recommended volunteering options, as volunteering probably isn't generally particularly impactful. Following GW's sort of reasoning, the most impactful charities will help the poorest people in the world, very few of whom are in the West. The most impactful help to those people, like distributing mosquito nets, vitamin supplements, or vaccines, is probably not particularly amenable to volunteering - particularly from Westerners.
How efficient would it be for a Westerner to fly to sub-Saharan Africa and back to perform essentially unskilled labor in mosquito net warehouse, or something, rather than sitting back and sending some money to GW. The savings to them through such volunteering over local labor may be worth less than the plane tickets to get there and back, to speak nothing of the expenses of staying there.
Going to uni and taking random prereqs without knowing what exactly you're going to do, actually sounds like a course of action with a fairly high expected value.
College graduates generally significantly out earn non-college graduates, even with soft degrees. And higher paying jobs generally require hard degrees, which generally require various prerequisites.
Earning a lot of money in and of itself would probably tremendously impactful, as income could be seen as a proxy for productivity. And certainly, earning a lot of money would be allow someone to be very impactful through donations - probably much more so than they could be through charitable volunteering.
This doesn't preclude, of course volunteering in free time. And if someone is going to volunteer, they could try do do so as effectively as possible. But even outside of the primary path towards impact of career (probably facilitated by college degree), depending on one's goal, one could still consider alternative routes towards impact. E.g. instead of contributing $10 per hour of labor in a soup kitchen, a college student could tutor students for $60 an hour, and donate the proceeds to that soup kitchen (or GW, for even more impact).
If someone *does* want to contribute to charity through labor, rather than money, it seems reasonable to try to help the poorest people you can find. If the people will be local, perhaps soup kitchens could be a good option.
A website that can help find volunteering options by location and category is: https://www.volunteermatch.org/.
If they want to volunteer for one of the most impactful charities, they can try to sign up for Against Malaria Foundation: https://www.againstmalaria.com/Volunteers.aspx.
Thank you for this very thorough reply! I shall ponder it.
I guess one question I would have (reading that reply) would be, is your primary concern (a) the future “impact” of the 18-year-old, as denominated in dollars or some fungible equivalent, or (b) her actual future as a flourishing individual that you personally care about? Hope I don’t come across as dunking on Mallard here, but the two are not the interchangeable imo.
My pleasure!
Does anyone here have any (personal or second-hand) experience in successfully treating height-related body image issues in men through therapy, and could recommend a good therapist (possibly from the ACX list) in the Bay Area or remote?
I’m 5’5 and past therapy attempts have been pretty unsuccessful, with some of my past therapists basically having taken the position of this just being a minor cosmetic issue with few real-life implications (I also got the feeling that it used to be way less of an issue before online dating, but alas I live in those changed times).
Find a way to meet a lot of asian women so you can date one with your height being less important
I’m looking for medical blog recommendations with a similar style to Scott’s but focused almost entirely on doctoring and medicine. Ideally one with thoughtful takes on both the day-to-day of medicine and interesting topics in medicine as a whole. As medical student, I’ve searched around for one but never found one anywhere near the quality of Scott’s.
Is it just me or has Scott's posting frequency dropped substantially?
Not just that, but he also pretty much seems to have given up on moderating the comments section. People used to get permabans for 1% of the crap NS has been spamming here.
Edit: Turns out, Scott has recently become a father of twins, which kinda explains it.
I'm glad it was a happy thing keeping him from posting!
Perhaps you need to be less sensitive towards being exposed to opinions from outside of your ideological echo chamber.
I don't have a problem with NS sharing their opinion – even though I almost completely disagree with it – but with how they present it: by spamming links to random Twitter accounts, with maybe a one-liner about how Israelis are pure evil. Even people that agree with NS have called them out on it.
For what it's worth, I've also asked another person whom I agree with, to stop with this style of posting.
Very very peculiar that you (apparently) haven't been doing the same thing to the pro-israelis flippantly dismissing the suffering of gazans or basically calling for gaza to be ethnically cleansed, which represents a lower quality of posting than NS.
Perhaps you need to be less sensitive towards being exposed to opinions from outside of your ideological echo chamber. At least Adrian is objecting to the style of the posts as opposed to the opinion expressed, while you seem to be objecting entirely to the opinion.
Looking forward to the anecdotal twin study posts that are coming a decade from now
There's a thing I'm annoyed about, and it isn't worthy of a full post, so ... here we go.
If you’re baffled/confused/upset about why the American public is still up in arms about inflation, even though it’s down - here’s a question for you.
Were you equally baffled/confused/upset when the public didn’t react at all to inflation until it had been going on for a little while?
Let's say for the sake of argument that 10% inflation is bad. We had 10% inflation -before- the public really got upset about it. Were you looking around wondering why nobody was getting upset about it at the time? Or did you not notice, for the same reason none of them noticed - it hadn't had time to actually have a substantive impact on your wallet?
Demanding everybody calm down about inflation after prices have inflated by some amount, because they're no longer rising as quickly, only means something if you were also demanding something be done about inflation when prices were rising more quickly but hadn't yet inflated to the point where it was causing problems.
People aren't upset about inflation because, a year from now, they'll be paying more for their food and rent. They're upset about inflation because they're paying more for their food and rent than they were paying a year ago. Necessarily, public opinion on inflation is a trailing indicator for inflation itself - and demanding people calm down about it, because it's in the past, is in effect demanding that nobody ever get upset about inflation, because they thing they're upset about is, necessarily, always in the past.
That's why the focus on the term 'inflation' is a mistake - it should have always been 'cost of living'
In the metamodern memespace, there's sort of a low-key debate about which religion is the most insightful or helpful. A lot of people single out Buddhism as displaying a lot of sophistication and insight, and being relatively less harmful than many other traditions. However, since I have appreciated what Buddhism has to offer, it has changed the way I look at Christianity and other religions.
Now that I relate to concepts and doctrines as more like meditation prompts that can potentially alter my perception or state of consciousness for the better, I see how Christian doctrines that seem arbitrary are actually potentially helpful for achieving altered or mystic states consciousness. I've seen rankings that suggest that the Christian mystics can achieve states of consciousness almost as enlightened as Buddhist adepts, and I think I'm beginning to see why.
In particular, I've been relating to the Christian doctrine of grace as a tool for helping me to generate the ideal complement to my state of consciousness. I think of it metaphorically as similar to equalizing waves, whether sound or light waves. You can reduce any sound wave to silence by producing its perfect complement. You can change any light wave to pure white light if you create the perfect complement to it so that the sum of the two adds up to white light, balanced activation of all light frequencies.
Likewise, during meditation or prayer, the idea of grace is not just to look for something outside of yourself, but, in some sense, to look for the thing which is MOST outside of yourself, the thing which is least like your current shape. Except, of course, that actually makes it easier to locate computationally. It may not be a simple as multiplying your current shape by -1, but the exact complement to your shape is actually implicit in your shape. In this way, the Christian approach also seems to preserve individuality. Instead of achieving smooth states of consciousness by reducing everything to nothing, it tries to provide a means by which you can access the perfect complement to each moment of experience, allowing each individual thing to enjoy its own idiosyncratic nature while also participating in a complementary dynamic that sums up to perfect, unified totality.
This is all very unlike the Christianity I grew up with, which suggested that the only important thing was making sure you performed the right ritual so that you would go to the right afterlife when you died. But I've now looked back on some of the C.S. Lewis stuff I read growing up, and Buddhism has helped me see it in a new light. I've heard some stuff from Tolkien and from famous Christian mystics like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and from poets, that seems to be making reference to similar concepts.
I wish there was a modern community of Christian mystics I could ask about their practices, like a Christian Sangha. The closest I've found is the community of Jonathan Pageau's fans. Does this conceptualization of Christianity sound familiar to you, or are you familiar with a memespace that discusses such things (inside or outside of metamodern circles)?
Thomas Merton is certainly to be recommended for anyone interested in both Christian mysticism and buddhism
i think those mystics would tell you to become a Christian first, and do the first things; their mysticism is done to better know a God they love who saved them, and grace is not what you think it is. You are using them as a means to your own ends of altered consciousness.
id also think they'd warn you it is dangerous to break the self down via technique, and that it can lead to being naked and starving in a desert in the pursuit of a holiness that is monstrous. Chasing ecstasy is not really a good thing; i was raised charismatic, and saw plenty of ecstatic experiences that only lasted so long as the revivalist was in town.
Any religious mysticism is designed to experience the reality stated in their own dogma, not yours. Even then personally the focus on mysticism is silly imo; the original state of man in Christianity was Adam in a beautiful garden talking with God, and Jesus pointed at children as closer to accepting the kingdom. Sometimes people get a little too disembodied for their own good.
sorry, this is the frustrated preacher in me.
I can't comment on a lot of this, but my appreciation for Christian theology increased significantly a few years ago. I got interested in certain aspects of Orthodox mysticism, and read up on some of their theology, and wanted to see how that compared with Catholic theology, and it turns out they're explicitly describing the same things, just in very different ways. At that point, a number of things that I thought were silly in Catholic/Anglican theology just turned out to be me trying to play word games with something I didn't understand, obsessing over the pores of the finger pointing at the moon.
What an interesting direction to go in. I have no info for you at all, though I've listened to Pageau's podcast with interest, and wish you Godspeed on your journey, and hope you share what you discover.
I think YouTube is not even trying to remove all the scam ads with "Elon Musk" promising to send you lots of money if you give him access to your bank account. I see them every day.
But if your video contains something that resembles copyrighted music, it gets taken down automatically. Yes, it is important to have priorities.
I suppose people who have all their money stolen by Fake Elon Musk are less likely to sue than the RIAA.
Yeah, one group has a dozen senators on speed-dial, the other group is invisible and poor and obscure.
A friend-of-a-friend, beloved of many in my circle, just passed away, leaving behind a family. He was suffering from several things, but chief among them was kidney failure, and complications from dialysis were a direct contributor to his sudden decline.
As someone who has considered kidney donation from time to time - but never that seriously - it has me asking questions. Including the obvious one, which is "would he still be alive if I had given him a kidney?"
And I realized I have some thoughts, and in reading the previous discussions (both Scott's, and the followup from the comments, and the comments on _that_ one) I'm still fuzzy on some parts of this.
I would not - I think - hesitate to give a kidney to a family member or close friend. Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Which makes me wonder - in a case where someone is in dire need of a kidney, and has friends and family, what is generally going on? Is it that none of them are a match? Or that none of them offered? Are match rates that low? Or is it just that so many people are so typically biased against it that they would never offer even for someone dear to them?
I think a relatively big part is that kidney failure is often just one failure out of several; in one study, only 4% of people with CKD stage 3 had no comorbidities. Most had two or more.
The most common comorbidities are age-related, which isn't a surprise, given the median age is >70 years old.
Your picture of the median person with severe kidney issues should probably be an elderly person on multiple medications for multiple conditions (and some of those medications are likely to be contributing factors to the kidney failure). The death, in a sense, is expected, and friends and family, while they may regret the death, are entirely reasonable in being unlikely to undertake a heroic effort to prevent it.
The relatively low rate of kidney donation, relative to the number of people with kidney failure, thus probably shouldn't be taken to reflect upon the friends and family of thus with kidney failure generally; many of those dying of kidney failure aren't going to be helped a lot by a kidney donation.
This is not to argue against kidney donation, because even if 80% of people with kidney failure who have a long life ahead of them otherwise have somebody willing to donate, that implies that 20% do not, and kidney donations are prioritized by the medical system for that 20%.
> Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Donating a kidney allows you to designate loved ones as getting highest priority for donation if they ever need one, so that's not the best reason.
---
I haven't donated a kidney because i'm terrified of pain... I know it's about as bad as pregnancy and I have been pregnant, but being pregnant sucks... And you don't even get to have contact with an adorable recipient afterwards... Sure there's the warm glow of having done something nice but I'm a very selfish person and altruism doesn't really make me feel noticeably more warm and fuzzy for a long time vs like huffing baby fumes.
Are you sure you're not thinking about passing a kidney stone? That's something that people compare to pregnancy a lot. Couldn't find that sort of comparison w.r.t. kidney donation.
>Donating a kidney allows you to designate loved ones as getting highest priority for donation
Wait, really? I know that donors get priority for themselves but I didn't realize it was transferable. I wonder how much of the problem is just making that fact public?
Anyway, this still raises questions about the system in general. Thinking about it more generally - we have X people who need kidneys. I would hope that many of these people have at least one person in their lives willing to give them a kidney. As long as the average is >1 willing donor per recipient, we should have enough kidneys for everyone who needs one.
So why don't we? Is it that matching rates are so low?
Or is it that even people with close friends & family don't have many willing donors due to fear of the process?
Or is it that people with close friends & family _are_ getting kidneys, and the remaining people (who have to hope for strangers) are either genetically unlucky, or loners with no potential donors in their circle?
I think what I'm struggling with is how we jump all the way to needing random strangers to make the system work. I understand it with something like bone marrow, where the matching rate is extremely low. I'm trying to understand if that's also going on here, or if something else is.
(None of this would invalidate the EA conclusion that it makes sense for you to donate your kidney to a stranger right now, but I'm curious how we came to this pass).
From what I understand, matching rates are low enough between some subsection of donors and recipients, that you need to set up a donation chain, where incompatible but willing pairs are in a pool, and as new compatible pairs come in, they get added to a chain, the hope is that eventually a pair comes in that completes the circle.
Undirected donations in this sense are very powerful since you just need the "head" of the chain to be compatible with the incoming kidney instead of a pair of people, a recipient at the end of the chain AND a donor for the head.
I think there are quite a few caveats to exactly how useful an undirected donation is, and also I don't know exactly how long these donor chains get, but hopefully this provides a good intuition for what's going on.
I did this from memory, but apparently https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-treatments/k/kidney-transplant-surgery/types/paired-kidney-donation.html the cycles are very short when there's no undirected donation. Huh.
Even if people are willing, they may not be able. If ten people are drinking buddies, and one of them needs a kidney, the other nine may be unable to donate due to having similar damage. Or if they're a two income household, and are already losing one to kidney disease, they may not be able to afford to suspend the other for surgery recovery.
Happy Winter Solstice to you all! And those who celebrate it, a blessed Advent waiting for Christmas Day which is fast approaching.
Israeli savagery is just unmatched. What a disgusting people. Pure evil.
https://twitter.com/NourNaim88/status/1737584585372836035
As a fellow Pro-Palestinian and an Arabic-loving Arab, as well as a vaguely left-ist-ish person who generally prefers Mercy over Justice and have a cosmpolitan interest in every Lost People's plea, I couldn't be more empathetic to the general direction and intent behind your post, but you couldn't have possibly picked a more hostile and alienating posting policy if you have planned it for 20 years.
Here's a bunch of unsolicited frank advice that you can heed, feel free to throw it in the trash and continue on course as usual, but feel free to also examine it and see if it, some of it at any rate, might help you.
1- Please Stop Posting Twitter Links.
2- Please recognize, don't minimize, the pain and fear of Israelis. In the vast majority of the Animal kingdom, Aggression almost always traces back to fear.
3- Please write, write anything. Express what you have in mind, in your own words. There is a place for quotation and link aggregation, but this place can't be "everywhere" at a time that is "everywhen". At some point you have to write in your own words.
4- When you write, people will counter-write, meaning they will pick things in your writing to poke holes through. At this point you can (1) Retract them, this will be relatively rare and only the case if you really fucked up and - say - quoted a factually incorrect source very confidentally or said something really cruel in anger. (2) Defend them, and you must do that while resisting the temptation to call the one(s) talking with you stupid and cruel, even though in fact they might very well be stupid and/or cruel (or running a functionally-indistinguishable simulation thereof) (3) Not Respond, which is always an option and is preferable than responding with twitter links, ad-hominems, whataboutery, or just plain meanness.
5- Changing minds is not a sequential, linear process. It's not a process with immediately visible effects. Beliefs form a network, they depend on other beliefs, which in turn depend on other beliefs, which depend ..... and so on. To make matters even more complicated, in a Broadcast setting like a public forum, different people (who you're not even aware of) have their beliefs (which might appear the same on the surface) rooted at different roots. So someone might believe Israel is fully justified in what it does because Muslims are the Earth's trash and God chose Jews as the Master Race, I'm not sure someone like that is worth changing their minds, but assuming that you wanted to, surely you will go about it very differently than from someone else who holds the legalistic view and believes Israel is fully justified because it's a state while its adversary is a non-state militant actor with extremist rhetoric. People are complex, people are not honest with each other and themselves about their own web of beliefs (they will claim to themselves that belief A traces back to beliefs B and C, while in fact it actually traces back to beliefs D and E but they just don't want to admit it), sometimes they don't even know what the roots of their belief networks are, and so on. He who wants to change minds must have patience, he must have respect and empathy, he must have a necessary dose of relativism ("I, too, would think like that if I lived their life") along with the conviction that he is right.
6- This is a bit depressing, but it's a perspective that you have to have in the back of your mind somewhere : the battle of words is just a metaphor. Even the trashiest hahah-I'm-glad-Palestinians-are-dying commenter is still not killing actual Palestinians. Even a complete and utter "win" in the field of words and signals and any quantity or quality of media will still not liberate Palestinians or guarantee starving Gazans a meal. The pen is mightier than the sword only because it **sometimes** has the ability to move several swords, but the pen that can't move swords (i.e. most of us most of the time) is actually quite useless, materially speaking. I say this only to lower the stakes somewhat and open your eyes to the fact that arguments need not always proceed by the terrible rules of war, with its terrible fight-or-flight logic and total disrespect for the opposing party. Argument-as-Fighting is just a Metaphor We Live By, you can and should try others.
7- Those rules are not a holy book, they're ill-defined and not all-encompassing (so maybe just like a holy book after all). Sometimes your instincts will get the better of you and you will violate them, repeatedly, it's okay, I don't follow a lot of them a lot of the time, that's not hypocrisy since I'm openly admitting it, that's what it means to have a (vaguely-defined) ideal to strive to.
Palestine deserves better advocates. Palestine deserves selfless ambassadors who are not looking to "win" arguments vis-a-vis Ben Shapiro or Andrew Tate or any of the countless Merchants of Rage that are a dime a dozen at every level in the media ecosystem, but are simply looking to be beacons : Humble, omni-directional SOS beacons transmitting at full power and at all wavelengths such that those who don't know there is a place called Palestine where people starve and suffer and experience humiliation through no fault of their own, know. It's not about you, it should never be.
Many Thanks! Your advice is very wise. Peace and blessings to you.
“ Palestine deserves better advocates.”
Ten times yes to this. One of the most depressIng aspects of NS’s shitposting is that it makes a tiny but nonzero impact in the wrong direction by making an average observer dislike Palestinians slightly more.
Here’s a better example (and even more poignant because it comes from an otherwise vapid word-thrower): https://samkriss.substack.com/p/but-not-like-this
Yeah I agree with much of what you say here, I suppose there is a part of me that wants to piss off some of these genocidal freaks to get even a little payback in the face of their powerful onslaught on kids but the goal should be to help Palestinians and bite down on the pain we feel over the child slaughter, that they gleefully cheer on.
I'd say there's one thing I don't agree with you and maybe another thing I'd say things are a bit mixed (and perhaps I'm unfairly addressing your point)
So for
1) I don't think these people are are genuinely motivated by fear. Jews are a wealthy, talented, highly politically and culturally influential group today. The modern world is distinct from the pre modern world and people aren't out to lynch them for killing their god as they did in the past. The fact that they are so committed in spite of their numerous options to live thriving, wealthy, powerful and influential lives here in America, committed to stealing land and slaughtering children indicates they prefer the feeling of dominating so much that they will commit these demonic crimes, inspite of the stellar alternative, even RISKING a new rise in world antisemitism. This is sadism and the urge to dominate, not fear. Or at least if it is fear it is fear over losing that privilege. This makes them far more evil for it in my eyes. Most Muslims condemn muslim extremism but slaughter of infants isn't Jewish extremism it's something 95% of Israelis SUPPORT! I remember you asking for a link for that which i shared.
2) you've seen I'm sure how that brinkley guy responded to me. I showcase just a droplet of links on Israeli evil he dismisses it, literally 3 fully documented articles on Israeli atrocities none written by an Arab or Muslim in case he is racist or Islamophobic respectively and he dismisses that too. We are up against people who are very committed to being unjust, often breaking even their own values they would otherwise claim to uphold our of sheer bloodthirsty animosity towards Muslims. A tweet, a line of argument a full article they will just dismiss, deny, downplay on reflex while repeating zionist bullshit. It's the world's most extreme version of selective demands for rigor.
However relatively speaking it seems better to share links that are comprehensive whose authors can't so easily be dismissed because there probably are a number of lurkers silently reading this back and forth and I give brinkley credit for displaying the nasty unfairness pro Palestinian advocates are typically subject to.
The other thing I've personally found is if you are engaging in a dialogue with a Jewish zionist (yes I recognize most jews are, overwhelmingly so) you are typically arguing with a bad faith individual who jumps from scattershot point to scattershot point, often spreading lies or half truths in an effort to stall and distract anyone listening in while his tribe makes life more and more unlivable for Palestinians, kills more of their children and steals more of their land. They are nearly NEVER arguing from anything more than bloodthirsty chimp-level tribalism. He/she wants more land for his tribe, knows he is getting that and wishes to stall you.
So it is challenging that way to even decide to have dialogue with some of these people.
You make a really good point about the process not being linear, another spectacular point about the pen being mightier than the sword working only when it is, and the analogy of debate to war having its limitations. And also the need to place Palestinian welfare over our own emotions. I will try to consider and factor these in to see how I can be more effective. We will probably always disagree to a degree on approach and there will always probably be limitations to various approaches and settings in the end.
To add, another good point of yours I missed was not responding often being better than responding badly. I agree with this though I've often (LOL ALWAYS) failed to apply it.
Was that necessary/true/kind thing deprecated?
3 articles on Israelis committing atrocities past and present
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
https://colterlouwerse.substack.com/p/does-israel-target-civilians
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
I suspect, but cannot prove, that NS is clickfarming. (It's consistent with that behavior, but also consistent with NS genuinely upset over Israelis and not being particularly well-read, which to me begs correction, but not banning.)
Do you mean, post links so that people will click on them so that the links will show more traffic?
I don't really understand the BS that makes the internet run the terrible way that it does.
It's not really important for me to understand it being as I have a pretty good idea of how it could run a lot better based upon being a part of the internet for the entirety of its duration and experience and get from many different angles and in many different countries.
But once you mentioned this specific bit of bullshit and the response by this individual seems to back it up, I'm wondering what this bullshit is and why people would do it?
Here is an article that goes into some Jewish atrocities
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
I am testing your resoluteness to respond solely with further links right now!
3 articles on Israelis committing atrocities past and present
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
https://colterlouwerse.substack.com/p/does-israel-target-civilians
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
In case anyone reading this missed it. None of these articles was written by a Muslim or Palestinian and the first and last are written by jews the last of whom is literally an Israeli professor who studies the holocaust.
https://x.com/rafaelshimunov/status/1737219725187305890?s=20
There is a great deal more documented savagery from Palestinians toward Israelis, to the point that any time you see a tweet like this, you should be looking into whether it's faked in some way long before you just conclude "Israeli savagery is just unmatched".
(The video appears to be an Israeli soldier performing some sort of detonation operation. It's not clear to me what. AFAICT, his tone isn't that of a fanatic. The tweeter claims some yelling in the background is "the echoes of their voices", presumably to imply innocent Palestinians just got hit by that blast. She provides no proof, and I've seen evidence of multiple fakes in the past. She leaves out the well-documented attacks by Palestinians on Israelis, barely two months ago, and routinely further back, for decades.)
> There is a great deal more documented savagery from Palestinians toward Israelis
I actually call bullshit.
How can one even quantify "documented savagery" let alone actually measure the numbers ? Whatever the metric is, I can guarantee that Israeli savagery towards Palestinians in the West Bank will "win" as long as it's remotely fair and unbiased.
The disgusting slaughter of kids Israelis commits go back two decades and beyond all the way to 75 years ago
False, and you should have little problem looking up why.
At this point, I suspect you are simply trolling.
No it's true, there's literally no shortage of evidence of Israelis savages targeting and slaughtering civilians. I am inclined to think the same of you.
I am inclined to think this is an AI-assisted troll account. If so, why would I care what a small program thinks of me?
Or can you prove otherwise? Did you do the research? It's not hard - certainly no harder than pulling up the links you did.
3 articles on Israelis committing atrocities past and present
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
https://colterlouwerse.substack.com/p/does-israel-target-civilians
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
Here is an article written by a jew on just some of zionist Jewish atrocities
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
Maybe next time the Palestinians shouldn't allow a dictatorial, terrorist regime to take power. The German people learned that same lesson towards the end of WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fotothek_df_ps_0000010_Blick_vom_Rathausturm.jpg
The funny thing is that you would be absolutely livid if someone so much as thought about justifying Oct Shava using the actions of the Israeli government for the last 30/50/70 years.
"If"? A lot of people, both from the Western as well as the Muslim world, have been doing exactly that non-stop since the morning of 2023-10-07.
It's also an invalid justification, because Israel withdrew from Gaza 18 years ago, and yet various groups in Gaza have been attacking Israel ever since.
Presumably you think those justifying October 7th to be reprehensible individuals, presumably you have something colorful to say about their character or how their mother raised them. So it's again baffling how you emulate them so faithfully just with a 180 direction reversal.
Does it make you feel better ? Do you see a starving Gazan child with 3 killed siblings and think "Ahhhh, nothing like the smell of JUSTICE in the morning, that's the natural and desirable outcome for children born on HAMAS land, those future terrorists" ?
> because Israel withdrew from Gaza 18 years ago
This point is often parrotted again and again and again without context behind it. Israel withdrew precisely so that this happens, so that the peace process breaks and Palestinians are pushed to the brink further and further, they are literally on record saying it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza#Rationale_and_development_of_the_policy.
Moreover, Palestinians everywhere feel kinship with their brethrens in the West Bank, who are under a nonstop occupation and attack for north of 50 years now, to say nothing of their (both Gazans and West Bank Palestinians) ancestors who used to live in what is today Israel, all 800K of them, and were expelled in massacres and atrocities by the pre-IDF Zionist militias.
So if the actions of governments justify violence against their populations, you have one hell of an uphill fight to argue that Israelis don't deserve October 7th in light of what their government has been doing for the last 3/4 of a century. The other alternative, of course, is to recognize that governments and their populations are 2 very intertwined but nonetheless conceptually separate things, and that collective punishment is a type of savagery that humans have long ago agreed to abandon.
> Do you see a starving Gazan child with 3 killed siblings and think [...]
No, the suffering of innocent men, women, and children in Gaza deeply saddens me, and I don't feel the least bit of satisfaction or even joy about their plight. Most of them are not directly responsible for the violence committed by Hamas, just like most citizens of Dresden weren't directly responsible for the violence committed by the Nazi regime.
I wish this war would end soon, with Hamas being eradicated for good. And I hope that certain members of Israel's government will be put on trial for their complicity in the current situation, and locked away for a very long time. I'm being sincere, although I wouldn't blame you if you don't believe me.
> Moreover, Palestinians everywhere feel kinship with their brethrens in the West Bank [...]
Strangely, their leaders don't seem to feel much compassion towards the Palestinians in Gaza, or else they wouldn't have launched such an unprecedented attack as on Oct 7. Hamas' leadership aren't stupid enough to not have predicted that Israel would be forced to retaliate on an equally unprecedented scale, inflicting more suffering and misery than in the last decades combined.
So no, your "they only did it to support their brothers in the West Bank" thesis doesn't hold up, unless you believe that Hamas willfully sacrificed themselves and the lives of many, many Gazans to maybe perhaps create a small chance that Israel might stop their illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Hamas has the right to fight Israel because Israel is occupying the west Bank, Israel had the right to end its occupation. Palestinians are one people.
Israelis are merely committing crimes to protect their occupation. They are the nazis here.
>>Hamas has the right to fight Israel because Israel is occupying the west Bank, Israel had the right to end its occupation.
Even assuming this to be true, there are constraints as to how one may lawfully fight, even when one has the right to do so. Shooting up civilians at a bus stop or machinegunning a concert are not included.
You seem quite capable of recognizing those limitations when Israel is doing the fighting - can you see your way to a world where they apply to Hamas as well?
Israel does not behave lawfully though
3 articles on Israelis committing atrocities past and present
https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return
https://colterlouwerse.substack.com/p/does-israel-target-civilians
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
It's true some hamas members committed transgressions as the allies did. But Israelis are fundamentally the aggressor here, they're defending their oppression not themselves. Hamas and the rest of the world recognize 67 borders. Isrselis just want to steal the land.
There are no shortage of examples of Israelis targeting and sadistically murdering civilians
These are the kinds of demonic people Hamas is fighting
https://x.com/dimitrilascaris/status/1737619716657558008?s=20
https://twitter.com/DrLoupis/status/1737298086911734023
That's a TikTok dancing video. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised if there are people who want to invade China over this, but I'm inclined to count dancing as non-violent. (And again, if you want to submit this as Israelis being mean, you're submitting against a great deal more evidence in the other direction.)
There js no shortage of instances of Israelis murderingkids in occupied territory from before the 7th
Truly the power of Hunter's nudes would have surely swung the election.
Are you unaware that the laptop also contained evidence of felonies? By The Big Guy I mean. Obviously Hunter's felonies are NBD 'cause he's a white guy and the sonof soemone important.
What evidence of what felonies? I expect no straight answer to this question.
You're the one pretending that the significance of the laptop was it had naked pics of Hunter. Your declaration that other people are not being straight is laughable.
Sorry, what evidence of what felonies?
Hunter is currently indicted on a bunch of charges, actually, and after the court cases finish will likely be sentenced like anyone else who did what he did.
Also, what specific felonies? Because there have been two separate senate Republican investigative committees and a single congress Republican one that looked at the contents of the laptop and found nothing that incriminates the POTUS, so I find your claim very surprising.
"Hunter is currently indicted on a bunch of charges."
Safely after the election and years after the laptop was made public.
"and found nothing that incriminates the POTUS"
That is simply untrue. Motte/Bailey that with "not conclusive proof when excluding other evidence not contained on the laptop."
> Safely after the election and years after the laptop was made public.
That is entirely normal. Trump is currently on trial for things that happened before he was ever president. The justice system is generally much slower than people expect it to be, even when you expect it to be slow. Currently the greatest threat to Trump facing justice is not that the prosecutors cannot make a good case, it's that prosecuting him for the worst stuff might literally take longer than his expected remaining lifespan.
Please give me specifics on what on the laptop incriminated the POTUS. Not vague "it's totally there" statements, but statements of specific facts. Because I have yet to find anything even resembling that.
Because the closest thing to that I have seen anywhere is the claim that a certain ledger represented funneling money to the POTUS from foreign entities. This claim was simply not true; the ledger tallied the rent payments for a property not owned by the POTUS.
Are you deliberately ignoring the context of "would have surely swung the election?" I'd like to know before I do any work for someone that may be completely uninterested in learning anything.
>Please give me specifics on what on the laptop incriminated the POTUS. Not vague "it's totally there" statements, but statements of specific facts.
You were asked a specific question in the interest of converging on truth, and you keep ignoring it. Any further responses without putting for a concrete answer should be taken as evidence that such information does not credibly exist, and that you are, therefore, trolling.
Swedish researcher who investigated the influence of the muslim brotherhood in swedish politics now facing the prospect of being charged of a crime for his research
https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1737502854162645254
LIberal democratic propaganda org Freedom House of course rates a society capable of such authoritarian madness 100 out of 100 for freedom: https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=fiw&year=2023&country=SWE
OK, I'm going to post a guess here, before I look up the story.
I'm going to guess (with extremely high confidence) that what he's being charged for is not researching the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood per se but some specific thing he did while doing so, and (with lower but still moderately high confidence) that that thing constitutes an at least reasonably solid justification for charging him, and that the insinuation that this is about trying to punish him for his conclusions is unfounded.
Having now looked up the story: he's accused of mishandling private/personal data; my Swedish google-fu is too weak to have an informed opinion of how justified that charge is.
If he mishandled the personal data of the far right, such as by doxxing, libeling, and cancelling them, would he have been charged with a crime? Or would he have been lauded as a hero fighting the good fight?
Thank you for taking the time to look into the additional background. Can't say it's surprising (who put this hyperbole into a culture-war post? You *never* see those 2 things together), but good to have clear in the thread.
I only see the ethics committee charging his dissertation, presumably an academic disciplinary action, alleging publication of private data (I might be misunderstanding, as my Swedish is weak). Is a lawsuit coming with it?
It's a criminal matter, currently being handled by the prosecutor. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/sameh-egyptsons-avhandling-om-politisk-islam-anmals-for-brott
Ah, that's a lot more informative. Thank you!
Why do spell checkers suck now? I'm a terrible speller, and also I tend to hit keys out of order sometimes. And yet when I spell something wrong the list of words I get never has the word I want.
It wasn't like this in the past. What went wrong? (Do I need to compile a list?)
Rule 7: If a common word can be made by switching the position of two adjacent letters, then that word should appear on the list.
I am a good speller, and from my perspective the spell checkers are improving, because in the past they didn't know many existing words and happily "corrected" them to something random... and now they mostly leave me alone.
Huh, even realizing that our news cycles nowadays are crowded with batshittery I'm a bit surprised that this isn't generating broader headlines:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/
"thousands of Tesla documents....chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, dat[ing] back at least seven years...across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe...nine former Tesla managers or service technicians...."
"the documents, which have not been previously reported, offer the most comprehensive view to date into the scope of the problems and how Tesla handled what its engineers have internally called part “flaws” and “failures.” The records and interviews reveal for the first time that the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators. The documents, dated between 2016 and 2022, include repair reports from Tesla service centers globally; analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high failure rates; and memos sent to technicians globally, instructing them to tell consumers that broken parts on their cars were not faulty...."
The lede anecdote is of a new-Tesla owner whose family was endangered when the steering failed, and Tesla declared that the incident was due to "prior" suspension damage. Um with 115 miles on the odometer? "prior" to what exactly?
European regulators are no doubt reading that article with great interest. Meanwhile the fresh class-action lawsuits to be soon launched by Tesla car owners in the US could be epic -- looks like they could propose that the courts skip the discovery stage and proceed straight to verdict/damages.
Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter, file a histrionic lawsuit against them, declare that whoever leaked the Tesla records is to be found and flayed alive or whatever, etc. The professional managers at Tesla though will surely try to respond in some more-organized ways.
>Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter,
I REALLY hope you were incensed that twitter helped bury the hunter biden laptop scandal, which was tantamount to them conspiring with a political party to help them win the election, rather than the owner of a website hypothetically restricting what he wants to restrict.
It's not big news because it's tiny news. "At least 11 drivers told Tesla a crash was caused by a failure in the suspension, steering or wheel assembly, company records show. Those accident claims, which have not been previously reported by the media, were recorded by Tesla staff between 2018 and 2021 and assigned to engineers or technicians for review."
11 drivers out of millions.
The tone of the hitpiece makes it sound like it's a persistent issue affecting teslas in general instead of a relatively minor problem. Even the bigger numbers elsewhere in the piece are small scale compared to the company as a whole.
The bigger numbers don't look very good. Depending on what tens of thousands means, the failure rate might be on the order of 1-4% of all cars delivered during the period under scrutiny. Memos directing technicians to lie don't look good, either.
sure it doesn't look good but if you're not focused on attacking Elon Musk it doesn't look notably bad https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/8/22568356/volkswagen-bmw-daimler-emissions-cartel-fine-audi-porsche-eu
The Takata airbag recall is a comparable case study, but theyre not blaming the customer.
It's unclear if the automakers knew about the issue (I mean, probably not? It's more likely a failure to do due diligence, but this was pretty much every major car manufacturer for years!). They also didn't make the part themselves so there is at least some plausible deniability.
Tesla famously makes all their own parts!
I don't think emissions diddling is quite in the same league.
The nearest comparison would be the Toyota accelerator fiasco about a decade ago, which started with a single crash, though quite an awful one. And it did make big news.
Ha! We're on the leelanau, south of Northport. Manton is a nice area
I was curious about buying an empty lot and building a house there to rent out, until I talked to my real estate agent about the idea. He says building a house from scratch is always longer and more expensive than owners realize.
It made me think: If you want to build your dream house and don't have a multimillionaire budget, isn't it best to buy a small house and then transform it into what you want through renovations and additions?
My building knowledge is mostly secondhand, but the big delays to building a new house are going to be stuff like weather, and unforeseen problems like one of your boards being slightly too short, or a builder's truck breaking down. Plus I know one guy who had an engineer friend that convinced him to build a very complicated roof with some supposed engineering advantage (like, a dome, or something); not being an engineer himself, the guy was struggling to build that roof for months.
Renovations include those problems and then add problems of prior construction; the existing walls have load-bearing posts, and water pipes and electrical wires running through them. You can't just knock an existing wall down; it's a whole operation to make sure the rest of the house stays up.
Of the two, as long as you already have a place to stay, you'd want to build from scratch.
Not true for production builders, they can build a house in 3-4 months for a normal price. But they don't usually build on your land, not sure if they would do that because they like to build a lot of houses at the same time in the same area.
Custom home builders are different. They are small companies so it all depends on who you hire.
But buying a small house and renovating is always going to be worse than building a new house. No one does that for good reasons.
>But buying a small house and renovating is always going to be worse than building a new house. No one does that for good reasons.
Depends on whether or not there's available land in a convenient location that's zoned for single-family residential construction, and on how many hoops the local government makes you jump through to get permits and planning approval to build a new house vs renovating an existing house. For these reasons, major renovations of existing houses (most common pattern was to strip the existing house down to its frame, expand the foundation, and build essentially a new house on the site; another pattern was to do a large addition and doing a superficial remodel on the existing house) were incredibly common in Bay Area suburbs c 2010 through at least when I move away from Sunnyvale in 2018.
IME, the same factors that make building a new house expensive and unpredictable also cause major renovations and additions to be expensive and unpredictable. (although if you could find a house that was say 90% of the way towards being your dream house, then at least you are minimizing the expensive/unpredictable part!)
I built my (non-dream, but adequate) house for considerably less than a single megabuck.
Modern construction is vastly better than the existing stock in this part of NY.
I don't know so much about American housebuilding, but over here - if you know what you're doing and have family members/friends who are both able to do construction work (including plumbing and electrical) and willing to assist, it's not so bad.
Of course, it often helps that it's young married couples building their own houses on a plot of land donated by parents/family. If you have to buy a site, yes that is more expensive. And yeah, it will take longer because you're building in your spare time rather than having a crew work on it for you full-time.
We have the saying: "Wer zu viel Geld hat und ist dumm, kauft ein altes Haus und baut es um" = "Whoever has too much money and is stupid, buys an old house and rebuilds it". Not sure how much truth is in there, though...
Any reading recommendations on status? I have read the book review
Yug Gnirob here. Substack banned me without any notification.
Their appeal process is a joke. They don't tell you what the supposed violation is and instead demand you defend yourself in a void. They then send an email which just says
>Upon additional review we've determined that your account is in violation of Substack's Content Guidelines and will not be reactivated.
Which links to the Content Guidelines. https://substack.com/content
They have said nothing about which part of the Guidelines I supposedly violated, but I know accounts who have repeatedly linked pictures of dead babies in these threads are still unbanned, so I highly doubt this list is actually what they're using in their determinations. (This is the only place I post, so any violation would have had to be from here; everyone feel free to guess what rule exactly they're saying I violated. If you do it quickly enough then this post will remain on the page with "Removed" as the name and contents, instead of being deleted completely.)
Substack's breaking your comment section, Scott.
Well, it appears they've repealed the ban today. Whether that was because of this post or just the natural process I don't know, but I'm still going to hold it against them that "upon additional review" apparently did not include an actual additional review.
So. Exciting journeys into the Substack appeal process.
I'm glad you're back, too.
Glad to have you back!
I had similar experiences twice with KDP, Amazon's self-publishing subsidiary. At one point I sent them two emails making different arguments. After I received back two identical form letters, signed with the same name, sent three minutes apart, I concluded that I was dealing with software not humans.
I sent one reply to the original email (the post-appeal one), asking what exactly they were saying the problem was, then made this post assuming I wouldn't get a response. One of those things presumably got past the software.
So are your removed posts, even the ones that didn't get any comments, now back up, or is your psst self still canceled? If they're back up, maybe having a look at them would provide a clue. Though I still think you should tell Scott about this. It's not like he reads every one of these open threads, so your posting here isn't all that likely to come to his notice.
They're all back up. The thing is, I say a lot of stupid jokey stuff and could think of half a dozen posts that might have caused someone to object, from this thread alone (which you can now read again by doing a search for Yug). The unban message from Substack just says "I've corrected the issue", which reads to me like it was caused by none of them. Getting banned wouldn't bother me too badly as long as someone justified it; it was very much the lack of it that got my back up.
Strangely, the notifications under the bell are still gone for the last eight months, I'd have to go through my email to find those again.
Congratulations on being on another list!
The part that sucks about being a suspected spy is your computer performance degrades once the NSA installs their monitoring software.
What!? I haven’t read enough of your comments to have a mental picture of what you’re like, and can’t call to mind a single one of them offhand. But I do have a general sense that you’re a reasonable commenter. If somebody says something cruel, unusually rude or wacko I tend to remember that. And if somebody is quite funny or blows me away with their smarts, I remember that. I think you said said one thing a couple weeks ago that I found quite funny. Except for that you are untagged in my mind.
It’s weird that something you said triggered the Substack police. Somebody a couple of open threads ago wrote that Jews lusted for the blood of children. I have used every single one of George Carlin'f forbidden words on here, except for 'cocksucker,' which seems to depend for its impact on contempt for gay men -- and as of this post I am somebody who even wrote 'cocksucker' in a post. And I've never heard a peep out of Scott or Substack about it. What the hell could you have written that tops those? And how do they even find remarks that break their rules? There's a sea of comments on ACX, and of course there are other blogs with big comment sections too. They *can't* be reading it all. Seems like it must be that somebody writing or lurking in the comments section must have complained to Substack about something you said.
How about you search your name on the last few comments sections and get a list of your recent comments. Maybe also read reactions to them, see if there was anyone who seemed to think one of them was awful and unacceptable. And I think you should let Scott know about this. He cares about this issue, and I think would hate the idea that people who comment here can be canceled by Substack. His email address is scott@slatestarcodex.com. Put "NOT SPAM" in both the subject line and within the body of the email itself.
If you look down to the comment about military code names, you'll see that searching for the name of someone who got banned by Substack rather than the blog owner won't work because the username will be replaced by 'Removed'. In this case I don't know what the problem was with military code names either, but I'm assuming that it was something similar in Yug's case, nothing morally offensive, just legally risky for Substack itself.
Oh, you're right. But that's better, in a way, because he can just search for 'Removed.' That way he'll know which of his comments was the one. But what will remain unexplained still are why he was banned by Substack (do they do that to all who post something legally risky to Substack?) and what led them to notice the comment. Do you have any theory about the latter?
It only shows "Removed" for comments that had replies; all the unreplied ones are simply gone. But I shouldn't have to search for anything, they should tell me what they think the problem is, which they haven't done. Presumably their silence means they know their reasoning is gross.
I think Eremolalos is right, and some nubbins reported a comment of yours which triggered the banbot to automatically remove it (I highly doubt Substack has Real People sorting these cases out anymore, since bots are Cheap even if they're not accurate or reliable).
If it was automatically done and they have nobody flesh and blood reading these complaints, then I think you're probably out of luck. It's stupid but this is how AI is going to be used, rather than solving world problems: just automate the hell out of everything because it's cheaper than even dirt-cheap Third World labour, and who cares if it's shitty customer service? Look our share price do gooder!
I thought comment reports all went to Scott. If Substack is going to ban commenters based on criteria they enforce site-wide, then I hardly expect them to rely on individual reports when any two blogs could have completely opposite moderation policies and readerships.
Yes, of course they should tell you. I hope you contact Scott. Besides being unfair to you, what's happening threatens ACX itself.
The right to speak freely on the internet (perhaps so long as no other person is named or shown) must be added to the bill of rights.
And while we're at it, we should reinstate the other ones too.
No one speaks up for the fourth amendment. I feel like it's been swept aside. (for various reasons.)
This doesn't really apply here, since freedom of speech doesn't mean entitlement to every platform. Unless you're talking about legally formalizing internet moderation, in which case I'm curious how could this be done without causing a huge mess.
You're right, people posting here can't claim a right to freedom of speech. But one of the things people with blogs on Substack like is that it does very little censorship, and I'm sure Substack is aware of that. If they are now doing more censorship, what's up with that, and how much worse is it going to get?
What really applies better would be this one:
Article 3
Artificial Intelligence
Everyone has the right to know that the algorithms imposed on them are transparent, verifiable and fair. Key decisions must be taken by a human being.
https://jeder-mensch.eu/en
Free from what?
"Freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is a dumb and dangerous slogan - that's most of what it does mean.
Total freedom from consequences is meaningless - the reductio ad absurdam is "freedom to say 'pass the salt' without receiving condiments".
So when you talk about "speaking freely" like this, I take you to mean "it should be forbidden to impose certain sorts of consequence for certain sorts of speech on the internet".
And that obviously covers a multitude of sins - what forms of reaction to what forms of speech do you think should and shouldn't be legal?
> "Freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is a dumb and dangerous slogan
Yeah, by that logic, you had a lot of free speech in Soviet Union, you just later got a bullet for what you said, but... you know, things have consequences, and that's okay.
I guess, technically, internet is more analogical to press than to speech. Freedom of press only applies to those who have printers, and you are not one of them.
The bill of rights doesn't give you a right to someone else's press.
The most extreme case I can think of would be a blog promoting child abuse. Motto "after 8 is too late." (That's the real motto of some underground group of pedophiles.)
I don't know who you are but I was just disallowed to share a link on my own youtube channel unless I uploaded a video for them to run against their database to ensure that I was never suspended from their platform.
I never was and I assume this is just another tightening of the reigns against everybody by the Faceless Unaccountables who have a chokehold on all of human communication.
Which kind of makes it worse than if they had some particular reason to suspect me personally.
I don't understand how ANYBODY can allow this continue.
There is SO MUCH WRONG with how society is managed. And yet, rather than be activists against the tyrannical elite we leave such activism to crazy conspiracists and are proud to laugh at them when they accurately describe the present tyranny as tyranny.
THERE IS NO "hope in the proles".
Let history not say that there was no hope in us either.
Oh dear, I think I knida agree with you. And yet it's such a soft and comfy prison. Back the Dave the Diver. (fun game.)
here's the thing; the only reason you can post a video at all is because of Google bearing the costs. If you tried to self-host it, it probably would be far too expensive to do so unless you were a business. Hobbyist video might be impossible. Video hosting is hard and costly, which is why YouTube exists.
people dont get that they are begging from others; they are vastly underpaying for a service but are vulnerable because of it.
The internet was once free and equal (please don't nitpick). If you were around during google's genesis you know what I am saying, and Net Neutrality aimed to keep it that way.
And if it cost us the ability to upload more than one video a week that would be an okay cost for the benefit of a more equal internet (and I'm not even sure we would consider it a cost.)
Urbit
If the problem we have is that land grabs have left large swathes of the internet a patchwork of privately-owned enclaves run by a class of gentry accountable to none but themselves, then Urbit, a project started by an unironic monarchist that encodes feudalism into its very fabric, is the opposite of a solution.
Yes, he would of course like to own the internet and everything in it. But, as history has shown us, so does everyone.
The fact that he says it up front at least means that he will have to engage with the matter as things move along.
I know nothing about Urbit and only use android currently, but trustbusting can be good. It won't solve everything forever, but, it takes a while for companies and people to build up enough credibility before they become any kind of real threat.
Besides, maybe along the way we'll find him to be the king we never knew we wanted?
Anyway, all I'm saying is that while the old free internet would be better (and with what we've learned since then we can make it even a whole lot better than that, as well solve many of the problems which that internet itself had) taking a few big chunks out of the handful of people who currently own all of the portals of worldwide conversation would be an improvement.
I don't know about your other comments, but I appreciate, and learned from, both the comments you had made in response to me.
I'm sure most of you good people live in large cities on one coast or the other. I, on the other hand, live in the middle of the country on a small peninsula that runs out into northern Lake Michigan. But even here in our little village, politics can get a little crazy: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/brouhaha-at-the-council
When was this? It looks like all the council meetings are on YouTube and I’d love to watch it.
Java Center, NY. my piece of woods.
eh you come across badly in the council meeting, which undermines the point. You disrespected the leader and showed an "i'm too good for this" attitude. Keep in mind people have long memories and in a village you will rely on them because you have less of the resources suburbs and cities have that let you ignore your neighbors.
a little grace goes a long way, and they've seen more rich people play at chicken raising than you have councils.
"The language of the letter was official, very official. There were no charges, per se, just several concerns about the housing, feeding, watering, psychological welfare and eventual fate of the birds on our farm property."
And *this* is why I am very non-gruntled about Scott's grant to the Legal Impact for Chickens bunch, because *this* is precisely the kind of lawfare I expect them, or the people who want to take cases which they will then assist to do so, to engage in.
'But we're only going after factory farms!' Yeah, my eye they are.
And also yeah, townies who visit the country and have no idea about how animals are raised or how animals live in the wild, but they just love the poor little animals and are so concerned about their welfare, they learned it all from the Disney anthropomorphised animal movies so they know what animals are like better than you do!
Hey, Not All Townies (tm). I'm a townie and while I fed the chickens one week in summer back when I was five years old, I have no idea how they're raised. I saw a chicken running around in the forest once and was confused. But still, the only thing I am concerned about re: chickens is 1). the taste, and 2). whether they contain any chemicals that are hazardous to my health. That's it. Chickens aren't animals to me, they're protein.
Another Northern Michigander? Where is the small peninsula you live on?
Your picture almost made me think of Old Mission peninsula in Traverse City.
We recently moved south from TC to Manton to get away from the bustle, and we could afford a couple of acres here.
Leelanau, south of Northport. Manton is a nice area, lots of Amish right?
I think so. I grew up in East Jordan south of Charlevoix and Petoskey. They have an Amish store there now
Cute story! You're an excellent writer. Please tell me that didn't actually happen. If it did ... ugh. What was the epilogue?
It's strange how many people have asked the same question! Epilogue, chickens are in the freezer, minus a few, Thanks for reading, best, Tom
No I meant the social/legal repercussions. Was there any further impact from the town council? What were they actually investigating? Were they accusing you of animal cruelty? Is everyone mad at you now? What's the deal?
Does anyone know of a smart and conscientious online marketing person? Ideally someone who will accept a cut of incremental revenue as payment.
So many online marketing people seem scammy!
Joshua Moon runs a Kiwi Farms, a forum that has many supporters and even more enemies. Regardless of what you may have heard or think about his forum (please don't rail off to comment about it here), his essays are better journalism than most WSJ long forms. They tend to not to defend his site as a specific case but small websites in general (i.e are not heavily biased). Moon has experience very few have, and at least this new essay on the DDoS mitigation industry makes very good use of it: https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/a-handful-of-companies-rule-the-internet
Kiwifarms is a stalker terrorist network. The people involved in running it and many contributors should be arrested, charged with crimes, and jailed.
KF is extremely mean-spirited and as such I don't know how much its troubles generalize, but there's a real problem with the internet that I think this article speaks to. Nothing but boring, safe, corporate websites these days.
...and, y'know, here. Not boring, safe or corporate; QED
Regarding the reactions to this post: I do not know who the hell Joshua Moon is, but judging by the comments here and the people who are making them, I think it's likely that I, too, would despise him if I knew more about him. Still, it seems unreasonable to reject the blog poster, and the person posting the link to the post here, rather than the content of the blog post itself. Why not just shred the views in Moon's post? If he is both evil and a mediocre thinker and writer that should be easy to do.
Here's an instance of that ad hominem and ad ad hominem rejection.
<For what it's worth, if you can't find anyone who isn't a B-grade monster expressing an opinion, that should tell you something (if you still think the opinion is worth spreading, rewrite it in your own words); if you can, don't source it to someone who is
Ok, I clicked, so that others don't have to. My attempt at summary...
There are only 16 Tier 1 internet providers in the world, half of them are American. They "effectively dictate what is allowed to be on the Internet in the United States" and "are complicit in allowing a form of network abuse" called DDoS.
DDoS attacks are cheap, defense is expensive. Cloudflare provides security against DDoS for half of the internet. "If they decide you don’t get to be on their network, you will quickly realize there’s no real alternatives." There are two subtypes of DDoS attacks -- application attacks and network attacks -- a good programmer could write something analogical to Cloudflare to protect against the former, but the latter would just directly increase his bills. There are companies providing solutions to that, too, but most of them accept only big corporate customers; the remaining ones "get to be choosy about their customers" and are very expensive. They have rejected Kiwi Farms, and tomorrow, they might reject you!
Also, Joshua Moon suspects that the DDoS protection companies may be organizing DDoS attacks themselves, to increase their profits.
Thanks for the summary!
As I was reading your comment, I thought I had once read a WIRED or some other article about Cloudflare continuing to provide service to the Daily Stormer (and then something else about the founder having a brain tumor, not related). So I looked it up and found this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
I don't know what else to say.
Re your last paragraph: this piece https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/6/23339889/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-content-moderation-ddos mentions that "Cloudflare provides security services to… makers of cyberattack software! That’s the claim made in this blog post from Sergiy P. Usatyuk, who was convicted of running a large DDoS-for-hire scheme". I haven't looked into this. That seems like a good reason for refusing a client service, though. Does Cloudflare routinely reject clients on the basis of refusing to support illegal /other activity, or are the high-profile cases the main instances?
Maybe instead of rejecting vigilanteism in the realm of content moderation, we should embrace it in a principled way, because legislation is slow to do so? I suppose that's what most platforms are starting to do already.
I can't comment on the technical part, of if it's possible for ISPs to make it harder for people to send DDOSes. I imagine that the "distributed" part makes it fairly difficult, though - there's not an individual source of the attacks that you can ban, all you can do is look for patterns that make you think "these connections are probably from a botnet."
As for the fact that ISPs and infrastructure companies can be choosy about their customers, I think I value freedom of association more than I value keeping KiwiFarms on the air. It's pretty normal for a business to be able to fire a client who's too much trouble to work with, or who's costing them reputation and money.
And like, if he was *just* an annoying right-winger you could maybe have a "spirit of the first amendment" argument, arguing that even if "right-wing asshole" isn't *legally* protected, the *spirit* of the law demands that we let KF exist online like everyone else. But KF in particular is famous for organized doxxing and harassment, and trying to protect that on "spirit of the law" grounds strikes me as incoherent. "Everyone has the right to be in the public square no matter how much you hate them" can't coexist with "You have the right to bully people you hate into withdrawing from the public square."
>> As for the fact that ISPs and infrastructure companies can be choosy about their customers, I think I value freedom of association more than I value keeping KiwiFarms on the air. It's pretty normal for a business to be able to fire a client who's too much trouble to work with, or who's costing them reputation and money.
+1
Forcing a business to serve anyone, regardless of who they are or how reprehensible their conduct, is a significant infringement on individual rights for a government to impose on a private company. I wouldn't say that such a requirement should never be imposed (electricity and hospital services come to mind), but given the conflict it presents trading against freedom of association, I think it's a high bar for very special cases. And while I would be a strong advocate that a hospital or water utility not be permitted to refuse Mr. Moon service, the DDoS Defense Industry does not strike me as critical enough to life and livelihood to rise to that level.
And I certainly wouldn't advocate for the government to enforce some kind of tailored privilege specific to Mr. Moon and people like him, along the lines of a Civil Rights Act. I mean, what's the protected class? "People dedicated to pissing on other people's shoes online?"
Good thing DDOSing is neither harassment nor bullying someone into withdrawing from the public square.
I mean technically, you're not giving them a chance to withdraw, you're forcing it.
Refusing to provide internet service or infrastructure to someone is *also* not harassment or bullying.
You can either take a legalistic approach and say "Well, bullying is okay, and so is refusing to associate with bullies, they're both legal." Or you can take a spirit-of-the-law approach and say "Denying people internet access is not okay, and neither is harassing them off of it, they both are harmful to the marketplace of ideas." But I don't see a coherent set of norms in which it's okay to bully people but not okay to refuse to associate with bullies.
EDIT: I should also point out that while DDOSing is a crime, so is harassment. So even the legalistic approach doesn't get you very far.
"But I don't see a coherent set of norms in which it's okay to bully people but not okay to refuse to associate with bullies."
The same set of norms that says a Jewish baker has to bake a Hitler's Birthday cake, or a Christian wedding chapel host a gay poly pagan pre-orgy ceremony.
Bog-standard Colorado.
> a Jewish baker has to bake a Hitler's Birthday cake
...wait, are we arguing for or against letting ISPs decide not to work with Kiwi Farms, again? It's hard to keep track.
"I was informed, on accident, that their motivation for this decision was that my website’s Wikipedia page was unfavorable." - translation: once ISPs become aware of what is on his website, they cancel him because of that.
Moon does not mention once what his website is about because he knows that decent men everywhere will oppose it. He feels his sophistry can make the situation someone else's fault and not his own.
> decent men everywhere will oppose it
The enemies of Kiwi Farms aren't just good men, decent men, but true men's men. Some of the most square-jawed, testosterone-soaked men I've ever seen! Like Atlas, they carry the weight of the world on their exceedingly broad shoulders! Like Zeus, a furrow of their manly brow will change destinies!
"decent men everywhere will oppose it"
Well I must be an indecent man, or maybe not even a man at all. I don't know this guy, I don't know his website, I have no idea if all this is true or it's a few disgruntled special snowflakes causing trouble (this does happen on the Internet, you know), so how about you explain to me why Decent Men Oppose?
Coming to this with zero knowledge myself, I found the wiki and this article helpful:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/kiwi-farms-the-webs-biggest-community-of-stalkers.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
It looks like Kiwi Farms was created in 2013 as a forum where people who didn't like some fancomic author named Christine Weston Chandler, as a place to coordinate plans to harass her. Specific details in the article, but it includes highlights like convincing a 13-year-old boy into masquerading as a 19-year-old girl in order to have phone sex with Chandler and record it, sending prostitutes to visit Chandler’s house then calling the family to taunt them about it, etc.
From there KF seems to have evolved into a preferred platform for people who want to coordinate harassment, trolling, stalking, doxing, etc of online figures and communities. Wikipedia says they've been tied to 3 suicides by targeted figures.
So yeah, pretty dirtbag stuff.
Also kind of entertaining that the "guy who runs the site where people can coordinate to harass other people" is apparently asking for more government intervention in the DDOS marketplace so that "people can't coordinate to harass me with DDOS attacks."
People's issue with KF isn't what it's used for, it's whom it's used against.
Taylor Lorenz's career is living proof of that.
Speak for yourself, my issue is very much with what it is used for
I don't wish to interact with you. You're Bad People and I don't want to promote you.
In reality it's just a gossip forum full of women. Certain demographics with outsized influence in the tech industry don't like it because the nastiness of their social circles gets regularly exposed there and laughed at.
Things like "sending prostitutes to somebody's house" and "convincing a 13-year-old to impersonate a 19-year-old, have phone sex with somebody, and record it" seem to me to go significantly beyond "gossip."
On the other hand, looking up "Christine Weston Chandler", I get the information that this was a guy before they came out as trans, and have admitted committing incest with their mother.
So there's a lot of "what the hell" on both sides, and it seems to be the worst of the Internet with people finding a target who responded with equal vigour and it all took off from there:
https://www.insider.com/chris-chan-saga-timeline-incest-charges-arrest-2021-8#christine-chandler-was-arrested-on-august-1-2021-1
On the one hand, yeah, that site appears to be full of dirtbags. On the other hand, as long as they're not doing anything actually illegal, they deserve to have their dirtbag website. ISPs should not get to dictate who does and who doesn't get to speak, because no one died and elected them Commissar.
Wait, who has been prevented from speaking here? I mean, Chandler is probably having a harder time reaching her audience on account of being in jail, but she's in jail for a crime she apparently committed in meatspace. And "freedom of speech" has never meant "if you publicly admit to committing crimes, you can't be prosecuted because that would be punishing you for your speech".
If other participants in this drama are being harassed or DDOSed into silence, then they're being effectively prevented from speaking, but it's not the ISP that's doing that, it's the harassers and DDOSers.
Which perhaps the ISP, or Cloudflare or whomever, could help with. But if I'm a bodyguard with time on my schedule and the head of Hamas's US chapter asks me to protect him from a bunch of pissed-off Jews, my decision to sit this one out doesn't mean I'm the one denying his right to life.
Nobody’s stopping the dirtbags from starting their own DDoS defense service and taking all comers.
There’s a very limited number of services (water, hospitals, electricity) where I’d support a utility model that denies a private company agency over who its customers are. DDoS protection isn’t one of them.
My refusal to give you a ride does not mean I’m acting as “Commissar of Transit” preventing you from getting to work.
You'll find that KF's targets are themselves horrific people, almost always shielded by being a person of protected identity status. As such they'll be one of the only places online you'll find true information about their targets.
Unfortunately, you can also find a lot of untrue information there.
...so, vigilanteism is good and should be permitted, and therefore KF is a valid target for vigilante takedowns just like anyone else? ...or vigilanteism is bad and shouldn't be permitted, and therefore it's valid to refuse to work with KF?
Yeesh. So its dirtbags bagging on dirtbags bagging on dirtbags all the way down. Can't say I'm surprised.
Still, to the extent that Moon wants to lean on the "the target of my dirtbag behavior is, himself, a dirtbag who totally deserves it" defense, I don't see any reason we should be sympathetic when he finds that shoe fitted for his own foot as well.
I will stop commenting here, and in ACX in general, and probably never go to an ACX meeting. You are hopelessly far away from old LW rationalism.
He plainly advocates for more transparency from payment network, a better Section 230, and regulation to have Tier 1 ISPs prevent DDoS by informative and well-argued essays about these topics. There essays are kind of content that could have been published in a high quality magazine. There's almost no mention of Kiwi Farms. The only case Moon defends in them is the general case.
Arguing about the specific instead of the general case is absurd. I said please don't rail off, and get four replies that do exactly that!
It has always been Lesswrong tradition to go on tangents. If you were making this comment on lesswrong I would downvote you for being dramatic and whiny about it.