Raqobatni sevuvchilar uchun https://pinupuz.app/ saytida muntazam ravishda turnirlar o‘tkazib turiladi. Bu musobaqalarda qatnashib, nafaqat o‘yindan zavq olish, balki katta pul mukofotlarini ham yutib olish mumkin.
Turnirlarda ishtirok etish shartlari odatda oddiy bo‘ladi: shunchaki ma’lum slotlarni o‘ynash va ball to‘plash kerak. Eng faol o‘yinchilar turnir jadvalida yuqori o‘rinlarni egallab, qo‘shimcha sovg‘alarga ega bo‘lishadi.
Bu o‘yin jarayonini yanada qiziqarli qiladi. O‘z omadingizni sinab ko‘rish va boshqa o‘yinchilar bilan kuch sinashish uchun ajoyib imkoniyatni qo‘ldan boy bermang.
To save people a click: The victim has severe skull injuries in both the front and back and left and right sides, making it laughable that he could have been injured that way by deliberately running into a wall. It's almost as subtle as "fell down a flight of stairs onto 10 bullets".
Many people here really like puns and wordplay. I compiled a collection of the best triple entendres I could find online (feel free to add to the list!), with explanations. I also included some analysis and my own candidates to add to the canon.
Recent discovery to recommend to the board - if you have a spare 90 minutes and a Netflix account, watch the first 3 episodes of Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and see if it hooks you.
It's a shockingly good anime about (of all things) people in a 16th-ish century alt-earth trying to prove that the Sun is the center of the universe while dodging inquisitors. Quest for truth in the face of adversity, with a villain who's basically a brilliantly-done Medieval version of Christoph Waltz's character from Inglorious Basterds.
The description reminded me of a videogame where the villain's nefarious plot is to... convince France to sell Louisiana to the United States. And the protagonist is trying to stop it.
I have the opposite recommendation: Avoid Orb! The ending is incredibly stupid and retroactively ruins the whole show. TLDR: Nowak wins, everyone dies and noone accomplishes anything and you're supposed to feel good about it because Copernicus will still happen 100 years later anyway. Also, Rafal comes back to life with absolutely no explanation.
Also, it's not actually set in "16th-ish century alt-earth". That's what the show makes it seem like (even being set in "The Kingdom of P" instead of "Poland"), but then the ending tries to retroactively claim that it was set in *1400* in real life all along (which is why every character dies without accomplishing anything - can't change the timeline!)
Don't waste your time. Or if you do watch it, skip the last two and a half episodes. It would have been much better if it had ended 2.5 episodes earlier, but then they tacked on an ending that retroactively ruins the entire show.
Oof - interesting! I have to confess I dropped the rec having only hit ep 20, and having a great time with it. I'm definitely going to finish it either way, but curious now to see how the ending will land for me.
I thought you might have not finished it based on your description in the original post, since the ending explicitly sets it in real life 1400 Poland, despite the show initially seeming to be a late 16th century alt history.
In one of Scott's posts relating to AI psychosis, someone (I don't remember if it was a comment or part of the post) linked an article discussing AI psychosis and it detailed how this guy thought he came up with a crazy new math equation, and another situation where some lady was influenced to divorce her husband. Does anyone have the link to that? I'm having trouble finding it through google.
UPDATE: There were actually two articles and I found them both.
I would love some recommendations of translations of Timaeus and Phaedrus. I also would like one for the Odyssey. I want to do an analysis of this song as it’s one of my favorites, especially the great pointing-out instructions. Also, it’s a great mood creator.
“Niggas call me prophecy, swagging and philosophies
White on white wagon, call that motherfucker Socrates
Rat ass niggas, fighting for a block of cheese
Catch me out in China stunting, yeah, I'm 'bout my guapanese
My shoe game serious, so serious, Wapanese
Niggas say I'm blessed, my bad I forgot to sneeze (Achoo)
There your reasons go, bitch
I got some tissues for your issues tell 'em blow this (bitch)”
For the Odyssey translation, it has to be Robert Fitzgerald's from 1961. I'm deeply partial to "her white arms round him pressed as though forever." (cf. Emily Wilson's "and her white arms would not let go his neck.")
Might be fun to read both. Could be a cool project to do a line by line comparison of all of nobody’s situations. It’s a crash course in reasoning in my opinion, tacit knowledge transfer of how to learn.
Question for people with texture sensitivity that is common in mild versions of autism: have you found a way to derive any benefit from this? Like, I dunno, maybe you work with textiles and a heightened awareness of textures is helpful; or maybe you work in surgery, and this translates into slightly better haptic feedback through the tools?
The reason I ask is that I realized that I am simultaneously "a natural speller" (i.e. I pick up correct spelling without devoting conscious effort to it, both in English and in Russian, and iirc was halfway decent at it in French despite not consciously hearing the differences between the different accents you can put on an e). This conferred some obvious advantages in school (rapidly diminishing in real life, in the age of ubiquitous autocorrect), but I think the exact same trait makes me hyper-aware when someone uses the wrong one out of "their/there/they're" or confuses "principal" and "principle". I think this irritation might be categorically similar to finding e.g. clothing tags irritating, so I'm wondering if there are any hidden benefits to the heightened clothing tag awareness.
It is interesting to link physical sensitivity to general perceptual sensitivity of errors (if I understand you correctly).
If it helps, I believe I have a level of sensitivity/hyper-awareness beyond what my peers have. I end up noticing errors a lot (which I learned can be very annoying to constantly point out to others, though some lecturers welcome it). It could be visual such as improperly aligned elements in a graphic, or it could be errors in equations, or misspellings as you mentioned.
It is a bit odd and conflicting at times, since the hyper-awareness can sometimes distract me. But most of the time, I seem to pick up on things that go by unnoticed by most people. And I am generally good at focusing when I want to.
In terms of physical sensitivity, I do feel a bit over-sensitive at times, and experience high levels of pain or discomfort from seemingly minor things, such as small cuts or acne. I am generally good at calming myself down from these situations once I think on it. I used to be able to tell if dollar bills (1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, 100s) were counterfeit just by feel, back when I worked in retail as a child laborer (my parents owned a store).
To get the point, I do believe the sensitivity is very handy for me. I work in applied science / engineering. I do a lot of experimental work where tactile feedback is critical, dealing with micro- and nanometer-scale elements. I also notice errors in ideas or equations, which avoids going down the wrong path (i.e., wasting tons of money).
I was today years old when I accidentally discovered that if a Substack user blocks you, it not only hides their comments, but hides *your own comments to them,* while leaving the thread of conversation visible to everyone else.
Talk about an unforeseen consequence of internet safetyism! Now a user can make themselves publicly appear to have dunked so hard as to have rendered their opponent speechless merely by secretly seizing the last word with a block.
My favorite solution (which no website implements, as far as I know, but once I had a plugin that did this) is that comments from "blocked" users remain visible, but the font is gray and smaller size.
This is calming for my brain; when I see the text I go like "oh look, that idiot wrote something again" and now it does not annoy me at all.
If the one exchange matters enough to you, you can make a second account, point out that they blocked you before you could reply, reply to their reply, and then block them so they can't reply.
As in, what is my reason for believing it? Because it's easy to change, and they have kept it as is.
As in, what do I believe are THEIR reasons? Most likely, it's just consistency with the behavior of other social media. Possibly a requirement by the app stores of Google and Apple. Maybe even a legal requirement somewhere they wish to operate.
Kanye West's turn away from Nazism reminds me of a theory I've been working on for a while that modern Americans basically model Nazism not as an actual political ideology which developed in a particular time and place in response to certain conditions, but rather as just being The Dark Side of the Force.
Actual political ideologies have ideals and policy positions, however bad they may be. Nazism, in the American imagination, does not, it's more just a sort of generalised sourceless evil for evil's sake. Like the Dark Side of the Force it is endlessly threatening regardless of how few people actually believe in it. Like the Dark Side of the Force, the fact that nobody claims to believe in it doesn't mean there's not a secret army of loyalists hiding behind the scenes. Like the Dark Side of the Force it's endlessly seductive despite not having anything obvious going for it, so you need to throw away all your free speech principles to ensure that nobody ever sees a swastika lest its magical power turn them into Sith acolytes.
If Nazism were treated like an actual political ideology instead of a magical fantasy villain then some journalist could have asked him "Oh I hear you're a National Socialist now, Mr West, can you please explain your policy on the Sudetenland?" and the facade would have punctured immediately.
> it, so you need to throw away all your free speech principles to ensure that nobody ever sees a swastika lest its magical power turn them into Sith acolytes.
I think you'll find that the average person's understanding of any political ideology (or form of Government) is pretty cartoonish.
Commentators in the US sometimes use the terms socialist, Nazi, fascist and communist (probably others) in ways that are at least somewhat interchangeable. They're meant to conjure images of Lovecraftian evil rather than educate about an opponents policy positions.
Have you seen the "Are we the baddies" sketch? It may not be a coincidence that the guys with the black uniforms with skulls on them who started the biggest war in history and did many other bad things got metonymized into symbolizing bad things in general.
If you read about actual American Neo-Nazis or watch documentaries about them, they are aware of this! They like it. They think the unique significance of the swastika, Hitler salute, etc. gives them a seriousness and resonance that other varieties of extremists lack.
Part of the joke is that Nazi imagery is intensely villain-coded because post-WW2 English-language media has widespread practices of using Nazi-derived imagery to code the villains as evil and it's been going on for long enough that recent generations look at actual WW2 Nazis and see over-the-top villain coding.
Some examples:
- The "Be Prepared" song from Lion King has a bit where the hyenas are goose-stepping past Scar who is watching from a high ledge, like Hitler watching Stormtroopers at a Nazi Party rally.
- In Star Wars, the Imperial Navy mostly wears uniforms that are either black (like SS uniforms) or greenish grey (like Wehrmacht uniforms). The uniforms also feature jackboots and jodhpurs.
- Tons of media has the villainous legions of doom arrayed in long shots in rigid square formations arranged in a neat grid, in shots directly borrowed from the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Off the top of my head, this shows up repeatedly in Star Wars and the LotR movies.
- Lots of bad guys have facial scars that resemble the dueling scars fashionable among the Prussian aristocrats who made up much of the German officer class in WW2.
It's true, even WWI German military imagery is restrospectively tainted, like the Pickelhaube helmets. I think the most extreme and amazing version of this is the Ralph Bakshi movie Wizards, where the bad wizard's secret weapon is literally leftover Nazi propaganda films that blow the minds of the unicorns, elves and assorted pixies opposing his forces.
"The nationalization of our masses will succeed only if, together with the positive battle for the soul of our people, its international poisoners are wiped out. The German blood must be purified, and the alien Jew dealt with, or there will be no resurrection of the German nation. The race question is the key to world history and to human civilization."
I think it's a mischaracterization to say that getting Jews out of Germany was just a "nice to have" and not a central part of his mission.
It's not as "coherent" a policy as you might think.
It's White Nationalism, sure, but he's using "alien Jew" as a racial stand-in for communist* (please bear in mind there was fighting in the German streets all through the Weimar Republic, including civilians using homemade tanks).
That said, it absolutely is a mission statement. He just isn't giving concrete proposals.
*This is not to apologize for Hitler! The communists were, by and large, Jews**.
**Yes, this is impolitick to say, but I've read about it in Russian History, and been told by "personal anecdote" about NYC***.
***Communists weren't seen as "evil" until after "Uncle Joe" Stalin.
I've never read Mein Kampf so I can't contradict you on that, but would suggest the NSDAP Party Platform of 1920 as being a more reasonable guide to Nazi political positions at least at that point in time https://www.vaholocaust.org/25-points-of-nsdap/
These range from "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations" to "no Jew can be a member of the race" to "We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts)" to "the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation" to "abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain" to "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations".
The "freedom of religion" is especially funny. But I'm rather a fan of black humor.
You can clearly see the strains of socialism and ethnic nationalism wrapping together.
The point of looking at Mein Kampf is to destroy the idea of Hitler as an especially big man. He was a rather small and petty bureaucrat, and had small and petty policies to put forward (and some "usual scheduled rants" about ethnic nationalism, Jews, etc.).
Perhaps he had slightly more vision than the EU bureaucrats of today, in that they were sold a bill of goods (lies, in other words), and they stubbornly cling to plans that have been made obsolete.
Lebensraum is a prominent policy in Mein Kampf so what are you on about?
Also I’m not sure what this Nazi talk is all about. Our American KKK was killing innocents and preaching white superiority since before Hitler was born. Neo-Nazis should have some ethnic pride.
KKK ideology is alive and well, thriving even. ICE masks are KKK 101.
Nationalism is not a policy. When Israel talks about Greater Judea, they aren't saying "we should spend X tanks to take over Y land."
Brownshirts and Paramilitary are distinguished from police violence by "not operating under the color of the law." This is why brownshirt-behavior is raiding churches...
Okey -dokey. Right wing Chief District Judge in Minnesota: “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
That seems obvious on the face. Turns out giving a federal agency more money than the Ukrainian Military Budget means they are a very busy agency.
If you wanted to know, say, how many court orders the Department of Deer Warfare violated, you'd have to know where to FIND the Department of Deer Warfare -- and I'm pretty sure Mr. Chief District Judge doesn't even know it exists. (People don't exactly get court orders to restrain The Goosinator! either).
I'm not getting up on a high horse to defend ICE. Police brutality is police brutality. But let's be clear when we're talking "extrajudicial killings" versus "paramilitary actions." They're pretty different, actually. Last legal case of ethnic cleansing in America was less than 50 years ago, for god's sake! **
**Paramilitary force wiping out black people for being black down California way. If you haven't heard of it, look it up.
Absolutely not! My critique applies just as much to the self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. They're not treating Nazism as an actual political ideology either, they're just using it as a stand-in for "scary and evil and racist" because they want to be scary and evil and racist.
The other analogy I was going to make is Satan worship. Nobody actually worships Satan in the sense that they both go through the motions of worshipping Satan and actually honestly believe Satan is a real thing, but there's a small cadre of idiots who like to pretend to be Satan worshippers because they think it makes them cool and scary, and a slightly larger cadre of idiots who think that Satan worshippers are a real problem. Both of these groups have shrunk a lot since the 1980s and are now considered more ridiculous, but the equivalent "Nazi" thing has only grown and the panicky Karens who once worried that some kid out there might be scrawling a pentagram on his exercise book are now worried that he might be scrawling a swastika.
Racism was an actual part of the Nazi platform, though! If someone becomes a neo-Nazi because they hate Jews and black people, they literally believe in something the historical Nazis believed in. That seems very different from your example of Satanists not literally believing in Satan.
I think if you time-warped a historical Nazi into the present day, and gave them a brief run-down of the history of Germany post-WWII, they would not try advocating for Germany to annex the Sudetenland or retake Alsace-Lorraine, for obvious practical reasons. But they would still probably advocate for racist and antisemitic policies to the extent that is possible in the modern political environment.
The neo-Nazi synagogues do not treat Nazism as an actual political ideology. It, however, is not a "standin" for "scary and evil and racist." It's a standin for "Anti Russian Sentiment."
Hitler brand cigarettes are hardly offered because Hitler is seen as scary and evil and racist, either.
There's an interesting history to the stripes in the Rainbow Flag, for example the original flag included hot pink, but most subsequent copies dropped hot pink due to the cost at the time.
Hot pink would have been an interesting choice, sure. Wikipedia's summary aptly shows how -nobody else- makes a six color rainbow, and that it took active intervention to -get- a six color rainbow (this wasn't "someone's original brainchild")
Oh definitely. someone in here shared Kulak's post about "hyperborean esoteric hitlerism"[0] a while ago, and I feel like that phrase captured the sentiment perfectly. Kulak's a little too spicy for my taste, but I gotta give credit where credit is due: it's a hell of a meme.
You may also be interested in "Without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil" [1], in which Lou Keep does a "book" "review" (synopsis actually) of Eric Hoffer's "True Believer" (1951). IIRC the thesis is something like "it's more important for a narrative to have an antagonist (or in Scott's terms, "outgroup") than it is to have a protagonist".
I recently asked Claude Code to make a particular change to my code, but it instead did something completely different, and it took me several tries to get it to do what I wanted. Then I later realized that its initial approach was simpler and ended up switching to that anyway.
yesterday I tried claud code for myself for the very first time. It was as good as people said. And it was actually very fun to see it thinking/modifiing/iterating on my little greenfield project. For private softwareproject, I don't think I will be able to go back to programming by hand.
I actually find the opposite: For my personal hobby project, I'm still 95% coding it by hand, because I'm trying to do something specific and technically sophisticated and have high standards and Claude Code isn't reliable enough and can't easily read my mind to understand the vision. At work, I use AI a lot more because I don't know what I'm doing there anyway.
Since web-ACX has become close to unusable on my phone, I've finally downloaded the Substack app. I'm finding it kind of terrible? Despite being signed in, it never shows me new posts from ACX when I filter on "paid". I also can't filter on new posts from particular substacks, I have to go to each one's homepage one at a time. My feed can only sort by "recent", dominated by the most prolific blogs, or the impenetrable "priority" sort. Clicking any sort of link bounces me between the browser and app version of that page at random.
Does anyone have methods for making this app usable if you follow more than one blog?
I use email links to come to posts in mobile browser. I have twice tried the app and immediately discovered it is worse, and had to uninstall it, since the phone switches to the app if the app is installed.
I comment on my phone while I wait in line if I don't feel like reading something worthwhile, and even for this use case I find that running the website in firefox is the only way to even get the comments to load before I'm done trying to waste some time.
If anyone has access to the inscrutable minds that run this jank-ass website, reveal your hidden knowledge un to us because what the hell. Why is it less functional than a geocities site, but about as ugly as one?
Why are most leftists against AI? I've seen the standard arguments, but I'm trying to understand what are the prime motivators, rather than the full rhetorical arsenal. I came up with several possible answers, but I'm not satisfied with them:
1. "Models are created by large corporations, whose interests do not allogn with the peoples' interests" - Ok, so why aren't they in favor of changing who owns the technology, rather than being agains the technology? Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
2. "AI will cause many people to lose their jobs"- same answer as above.
3. "LLMs are useless junk, a dead-end" - this is demonstrably false. It also doesn't strengrhen a leftwing view in any obvious way, so I think this isn't a prime motivator.
4."Chomsky thinks LLMs are junk, and Chomsky is a leftist icon, so leftists take his view on LLMs" - Maybe. But Chomsky also hates postmodernism, so the left can sometimes adipt things that Chomsky hates
5. "Data Centers are bad for the environment" - again, probably an argument after the fact, rather than a prime motivator. Look at the bullshit with the water usage that keeps coming up, no matter how many times Andy Masley tells them to stop.
6. "AI will kill creativity/art, AI is soul less" - maybe they are worried about this? Not obvious why this would be a left-wing position, except that most writers and artists probably tend to be on the left.
"3. "LLMs are useless junk, a dead-end" - this is demonstrably false. "
While I don't think this is the core of the typical leftist objection, I think you're far to quick to dismiss it. The way you casually say "demonstrably false" suggests to me that you think that LLMs have demonstrated sufficient value to make this open-and-shut.
But this can really only hold up if you take it that the positive side of the balance sheet is the ONLY side (or at least the only side worth considering). Demonstrating X amount of value in a vacuum doesn't prove the technology is net-useful if there's a real possibility that -2X worth of direct harm is being done. Note that I'm not talking about externalities like power or water use, I'm talking about the technology itself being harmful. Plenty of technologies do direct harm, and it needs actual evidence to show that the harms are either nonexistent or plausibly smaller than the benefits.
I think it’s a mistake to try to come up with a specific reason why a group has an opinion. Especially when it’s not even one group - Marxists and social justice types have very different views from each other on lots of things, even though both are considered “left”.
Within the academic world, I think a lot of it is the Emily Bender and Gary Marcus type of opposition, where these are people who have been working for decades on understanding thought and language in a Chomskyan paradigm, and neural nets have been seen as misguided by that paradigm for decades (at least since the Minsky book in the late 60s).
This long opposition then leads them to jump on anything that might discredit the new paradigm. Interestingly, if you look at the original “stochastic parrots” paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922) you’ll already see the seeds of most popular critiques. (I think the one section about poorly labeled data is actually valuable, but everything else there misses the point.)
There's a lot to unpack here, but I think the clearest demonstration of your problem is your own point #1.
You've basically nailed the actual left-wing position (which, by the way, approximately the only one leftists as a group can actually agree upon), you just immediately assumed any kind of additional skepticism somehow contradicts it. But there's no contradiction, "[potentially harmful thing] will be used by [evil people]" is in fact, even on its own, a perfectly sound argument against [thing]. But you simply axiomatically disagree that [thing] could possibly be anything other than a wonder, and don't even bother examining why someone would think otherwise. (The preceding sentence is a purely factual description, of your point #3 specifically.)
And, ultimately, that's your issue. "Leftists" disagree with you for the same reason other people disagree with you. You're free to think they're wrong, but framing their disagreement as ideologically motivated won't give you much insight. (In addition to being just a fundamentally repulsive thing to do.)
I'm not dismissive of point #1. It's a solid argument. Other than the deliberately misleading hatchet jobs regarding water usage, or the overconfident dogmatism of Chomsky, Emily Bender, etc., I see some merit in all the arguments I've listed. Point #2 worries me as well. But again, it seems like the revolutionary left of the late 19th and early to mid 20th century managed to hold a pro-technology, anticapitalist agenda, whereas now it seems rarer.
Thing is, you don't even stop to consider that not all technology is equal, and that context matters. It's easy to be pro-technology when technology means engines and automatisation for your factory, and washing-machines and plumbing for your home, things that outright liberate you from toil. It's less easy when the technology is destroying your surroundings. (What happened mid 20th century? Even aside from World War 2? Pollution at scale, industry turning large areas into wastelands, cities suffocating with car fumes. Turns out externalities matter. Of course the left turned away from high modernism, everyone not shielded by wealth and lack of empathy from its results did.) Of course externalities can be mitigated, we're doing that, but you can't expect to be able to merely point at technology and have people support it just because it's technology, everyone has seen what technology does and will reasonably ask what exactly does your technology do first.
So people look at AI and see very little good, and very little promise - and that's what you just can't accept (look at what you consider good arguments - the ones that confirm your priors about it being a groundbreaking transformative technology; it's the fact that someone might not share those priors that eludes you). But fundamentally, that's their reason, everything else is downstream from that and only that. No amount of reframing it as ideological issue will change that. (Chomsky is dogmatic? Like, about speaking the truth? Great, actually.)
I was at a party a week or so ago where I got to discuss AI a little with some of my lefty friends, and the objection they brought up was a #7: intellectual property rights. LLMs basically suck in a huge amount of stuff written by others without their consent.
I was admittedly unprepared for this argument, and the topic quickly changed before I could ask more questions (like whether fair use covered much of it, and so on).
It's not quite like your #1, although it's possible #1 drove them to the IP argument.
Argument for property rights cannot really be called "leftist" (except for US-centric "blue tribe" definitions that include liberals as a central example of "left", but, look, just no), but I'm surprised it caught you off-guard, since it's hardly new or niche. (One of Gary Marcus's favorites, for one, though I guess nobody on the AI-believer side actually reads the guy...)
I was initially in the "meh, fair use" camp, but then people started producing examples of AI output that if done by a human would be considered outright plagiarism. I still think we should apply fair use standard to training, but attempts at monetizing AI generations are another story and should (as in "ought", not "is") very much be vulnerable to IP claims.
I'll submit that the problem here is that you simply understand leftist views on property quite poorly. To be fair, they are many and varied, but the fundamental core is pretty consistent. Leftists view labor as valuable and believe the people who do the labor deserve the benefit of it. The entire notion that "property is theft[1]" is *exactly* because ownership of capital is used (in the leftist view) to siphon away profits from those who actually do the labor. The issue has never been that people own things, it's been that ownership when used to extract rent (and insofar as certain sorts of ownership exist solely to extract rent, the view is they shouldn't exist at all).
The intellectual property argument against LLMs is completely consistent with most leftist positions. A huge fraction of the works being hoovered up and fed into LLM training runs were created by individuals, creating text and art either commercially or out of passion. For somebody who had no hand whatsoever in the creation of that media to appropriate it, grind it into metaphorical paste, and repackage and sell things made out of that paste can be easily and naturally seen to be in-line with the general anti-labor-theft and anti-rent-extraction views that are foundational to the left.
(I would personally argue that there's a little more nuance around machine learning and property rights than your average internet leftist seems aware of. But given how quickly AI companies have run roughshod over the whole area, I don't really believe they deserve the benefit of the doubt, so the nuance ends up being not that instrumentally important.)
[1] "Property" here being used in the very narrow and specific sense meaning "private control of the means of production."
...I think I understand my own ideological position pretty well, thank you. (I have an urge to elaborate, but no time at the moment, so let me just reserve the right to come back here later to explain precisely what the position is and why your argument misses.)
Note I have just explicitly supported enforcing IP rights in this particular case, for pretty much the reason you stated. This just does not extend to support for IP rights in principle, which, well, inherently rent-seeking.
"Note I have just explicitly supported enforcing IP rights in this particular case, for pretty much the reason you stated. This just does not extend to support for IP rights in principle, which, well, inherently rent-seeking."
This might be worth its own top-level comment in this or a future OT, once you acquire the time to cover it.
There's an essay somewhere in my older bookmarks (I think Posner wrote it) that discussed four regimes for governing IP, and another essay by David Friedman. It'd be interesting to see how your account compares.
> monetizing AI generations are another story and should (as in "ought", not "is") very much be vulnerable to IP claims.
Legally speaking, anything generated entirely by an AI is uncopyrightable. It's possible collage or sufficiently-edited AI-gens are copyrightable (and, obviously, img2img must sometimes be copyrightable since sometimes it's 99% the original work), but they are not, in themselves, copyrightable. Only things made by human beings can be copyrighted, see also those monkey selfies and Zarya of the Dawn.
I suspect that "only human content can be copyrighted" is based on legal precedent that isn't 100% stable - someone out there is probably working on the argument that it doesn't apply when sufficiently complex machines are generating the works in question.
I don't know what those arguments will end up being. Currently, my intuition says content can be copyrighted iff it's generator is an individual capable of agentive action, and LLMs aren't that, so their product can't be copyrighted, as the law currently suggests. But I wouldn't be surprised if some legal scholar produces an argument covering an angle I hadn't thought of.
Different definitions, and I can see how I wasn't clear. I can also see how it's an arbitrary definition. The idea here is that monkeys are considered incapable of conscious reasoning (mirror test, blah blah blah), so nothing they do is any more agentive than a plant choosing to flex toward sunlight.
It'd be interesting to see what the actual reasoning was for the monkey selfie case, and whether it would also apply to, say, paintings created by that one elephant I've heard about. Or hypothetically, corvids, chimpanzees, dolphins, etc.
Whenever I see AI output in an area I'm well versed in I'm struck by how much garbage it is. When I hear from people with specialties in other areas, they seem to have the same response - it writes garbage code, bad legal arguments, etc. Yet, some people claim to be impressed by AI. What gives?
I believe the answer is Gell-Mann Amnesia for some and quasi-religious delusion for others. Regarding the delusion part, AI has basically become the Rapture of the Nerds for Rationalist crowd.
For yet others, it seems to be a case of them judging AI based on areas they know nothing about. People who don't read fiction often don't see the appeal. They don't understand why anyone would spend hours reading a novel. They can't form an appreciation of the craft or the ideas that go into it. They are often not even enticed by 'low' elements such as suspense. All they see are words on a page. Likewise with visual art. What the hell's The Eye of Silence supposed to be about? It's just random stuff! Anyways, these people will find AI outputs indistinguishable from even mid level human outputs precisely because they have no basis from which to judge any of it.
Outside of spaces enjoyed by Rationalists and other fans of AI, I think some common assessments are that AI has limited functional uses, mainly consists of low quality spam output, and is probably going to result in a huge economic crisis owing to wasted investment.
Counterpoint: I'm in Aviation. For as long as I can remember, anytime a newsreader speaks about something related to Aviation, every word touching on a technical aspect is Not Even Wrong, including prepositions and articles. This predates LLM-generated text by at least forty years.
AI is not good at producing finished output. It’s good at creating prototypes for someone without the base skill to make one, which can actually be really useful with coding, if you just want a script to do something once and don’t need a final public project. It can do smarter searches of documents than ctrl-f. It has gotten much better at everything over the past few months, as it did in the previous few months, and the previous few months.
I agree. It's really great at generating throw-away code, significantly less useful if you're doing something complex and have high standards. But it will probably continue to improve.
OK, talking about a position that neither of us holds is going to have some limitations but here are some ideas to steelman the argument. Note that many of these issues aren't only of concern to leftists but are maybe especially salient to them?
--AIs represent the ultimate triumph of capital over labor; the working class will be locked out of automated factories and pushed to the margins of society by the technical elite. The more extreme versions of this concern involve automated weapons like autonomous drones being used to keep the poor in line or just wiping them out altogether.
--AI is a powerful tool to disempower the little guy: instead of working for a human boss who can be understood, people such as gig workers basically work for an unknowable algorithm that can't be argued with and which can change the rules at any time.
--AI allows a new inescapable form of centralized surveillance and control. Look at the anxiety around the right-coded Palantir's work for ICE. It's not hard to imagine a more extensive and permanent fusion of big tech and homeland security which would keep an eye on every person in the country.
--AI is already being used in irresponsible and anti-social ways that are impossible to avoid, see for example the deepfake issues with Grok. It doesn't seem terribly likely that these abuses can be reined in or prevented, we're all just going to have to live with them.
--Finally, while AI doesn't use up water like people say, data centers do use massive amounts of energy and compete with other energy consumers for the limited supply. xAI has also been noted to be illegally using large numbers of gas turbines to power its data centers.
You can certainly form counterarguments to all these things, but for the normal person who isn't particularly interested in AI, it creates a continuous stream of bad vibes and bad news stories about AI that make it seem like a bad thing overall. And if you look at the polling about AI, there's a consistent pattern that people think AI may help society in general but is more likely to harm them personally. That's not really a partisan issue, Republicans and Democrats are both worried about AI.
> Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
Kropotkin and Marx were smart and educated people; the average <anything> is not.
I think there things work mostly on association chains. AIs are associated with companies, which are associated with capitalism, therefore bad.
Another part of the answer is that young people follow fashion waves, which keep changing because that's how the young people today separate themselves from their parents, even if the parents belonged to the same political tribe. There was a time when technology was in fashion (Sputnik), today denial of technology and science and progress in general is in fashion (also on the right: see "retvrn").
It's not that most leftists are against AI. Most *people* are against AI. Polling consistently has AI underwater by sizeable majorities. Even relatively benevolent AI like self driving cars. It's possible you either have mostly leftists in your feed, or you're associating the tech right with the right in general (and therefore assuming the left is opposing by proxy)
To add to what others have already written, LLMs can be brought back *after* the means of production are redistributed and AI can be used safely and with everyone's interests in mind. No one's saying you have to ban this technology forever.
It's largely because AI will concentrate power in the hands of a few in a way that nothing else ever could. It's anti-democratic. It has the potential to massively exacerbate all the social ills that leftists are against.
I don't think this is a particularly "leftist" thing. You could replace "corporations" with "woke corporations" and get all the same arguments from right wingers. AI is really unpopular with the average person for various reasons, not all of them based on reality.
5 is important from a leftist perspective. The water argument might be bad but they will consume more energy, and energy production drives climate change. More generally they consume more resources period. You may notice leftist sustainability initiaves all strive to decrease consumption, not make current levels of consumption more sustainable (local and organic food being a great example of unhelpful ideas in this space). A product that clearly consumes more is a big problem for that agenda
I have been able to identify several situations where AI is a useful tool for me:
* it is faster than a web search at answering questions that are simple and instant to verify, like “what is the mac equivalent of this keyboard shortcut”
* gemini meeting notes are now at a point where I just need to correct rather than entirely rewrite
* google lens has helped me navigate shops and cafes in Taiwan that I would not otherwise have attempted
Overall, I am happy with AI to precisely the extent it makes my life better instead of worse. Most interactions, however, are the latter:
* for coding of any complexity in my day job, every time someone convinces me to try an agent again because it really is much better now than last time, I end up having to do the thing myself from scratch after having wasted hours fruitlessly poking the ai’s nose into the shit it excreted in the vain hope it would stop producing more
* businesses I interact with now gate customer service teams behind LLMs, so before I can actually start resolving my situation I first have to waste hours convincing a chatbot the thing I need to do really cannot be done via the self-service website every. bloody. time. It’s even worse when this happens over the telephone and the chatbot tries to guess how what I want to happen fits into the few things it is able to make happen and makes everything more fucked up. Clue: if the thing could be done via the website without human interaction, I would absolutely not be trying to access support.
* my social media feed is now filled with garish cartoony AI-generated videos of ginger cats stealing fish and fat people jumping off things. Just those two subjects, and no amount of blocking/hiding stems the flow. I think the AI hates me as much as I hate it.
Please don’t tell me to try again with useful functionality. I’ve had people tell me that for two years now, tried the new thing, sometimes while those people watch, and it’s been a disappointment to all involved every time. I am fed up, and will give it at least a few more weeks before the next attempt.
I am sorry if you expected a more political objection, but there it is: AI uses a ton of compute and investment money to make my life, on average, suck more. I think the people for whom it works must have very different lives and jobs to me.
Fair Points. Ai Slop and AI customer service are annoying. Vibecoding is really a time saver for me at work. It's perfect for the short to mid-size python scripts that I need to write, which are not on the critical flow, and don't have to be very efficient or elegant. Leaves me more time to do the fun stuff.
I find that it helps me a lot, with some back and forth, to understand mathematical and scientific concepts. The ability to zoom in and zoom out, move from "explainittomelikeimfive" to the nitty-gritty is a blessing!
Separate point ... no reason this has to be specific to the left but I worry that AI will undermine a shared consensus of reality. And I have the opinions I have because I think they're most supported by reality (otherwise I'd change them). Therefore, AI will undermine the popularity of my opinions, and slant people's perceptions of reality towards whatever serves the owners of AI.
I must note that Trump and his closest supporters seem like the most gleeful users of AI to create fake (but presented as real) videos to attack their opponents (though I admit this could just be me noticing bad behavior on the other side more than my side). Fits with Trump routinely making shit up with no attempt to be truthful.
E.g. Trump admin officials calling Good and Pretti "domestic terrorists". I think Miller, Noem, et al can fairly argue that the outrage against them from the right is contrived since they all say shit like this all the time, and now that there's some backlash suddenly people are shocked, *shocked* to find insane accusations like this coming from the government.
If the current "shared consensus of reality" is shaped by the establishment media, their bias provides a good reason for there to be political polarization on the question of whether or not this being undermined is good.
The left also reacted positively (at least at first before negative effects of social media, algorithmic monitoring, etc, became apparent) to shit like the Internet, Youtube, widely available video, bodycams for cops, etc, for similar reasons. It's not out of a belief that the "establishment media" is propping them up.
There's a common joke along the lines of "now that we have cameras everywhere, it turns out UFOs aren't real, Bigfoot doesn't exist, and the police do needlessly beat up black people"
Also far more people look at Fox News, other conservative outlets, and social media controlled by Trump supporters, than whatever is left of the liberal "establishment media".
Yes, this observation is entirely consistent with my model: they supported those when they thought they would amplify their preferred narrative, and turned on them when it became apparent that they weren't doing that. I think Twitter is the clearest instance, with how quickly they changed their views on it when it stopped suppressing people and organizations they opposed.
Hold on a second, what you said in your previous comment is that the left doesn't want to undermine the current "shared consensus of reality" because it's being propped up by the establishment media.
In this comment you're saying that they want to support things that "amplify their preferred narrative". This isn't the same thing.
E.g. the left doesn't think that the current "shared consensus of reality" (insofar as it exists) is propped up by a left-leaning establishment media.
Re twitter, it's obvious that what's happening isn't Musk taking the thumb *off* the scale, it's Musk putting a thumb *on* the scale.
No, they do mean the same thing. This is one of those irregular verbs: I reinforce our shared consensus of reality, you fact-check misinformation, he amplifies his preferred narrative.
I'm left-of-center (not really "leftist") and wary of AI, though I don't feel like I'm wary of AI *because* of being leftist. As for why...
> "Models are created by large corporations, whose interests do not allogn with the peoples' interests" - Ok, so why aren't they in favor of changing who owns the technology, rather than being agains the technology? Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
I worry that different levels of technological advancement lead to different types of societies. This is originally a leftist idea I think (base and superstructure), but has spread pretty widely. I fear that an AI dominated world is one that tends naturally to extreme economic (and subsequently political) inequality.
Because something economically/politically very important - human level intelligence - that is currently distributed pretty uniformly among people, will instead be distributed the same way capital is, and so much more prone to concentration. Maybe you can prevent it, but it wasn't even possible before. Relatedly it allows a greater degree of top-down control and less "people power", basically I'm worried the future is China's Internet censorship x1000.
Going to make another point in a separate comment...
How many different motivations for rejecting a proposed deductive or inductive thought are there? How many can we think of? Can we put bounds on the number? What does this let us predict about how thoughts and beliefs evolve over time in response to seeing different kinds of events or media, or doing social cognition with multiple people mediated in different ways?
I'm inspired to these thoughts by https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/maybe-social-anxiety-is-just-you , which gives an account of the author going to a dating/relationships workshop, being asked to name what he likes about an attractive woman, and after some struggle managing to only compliment her teeth, because his intuitions had ruled out actually complimenting her body. (Extra context so it's not quite as creepy: she was a professional model being paid to be there, and who knew what to expect from this work. She was was visually attractive, conventionally attractive, and attractive to the author.) The workshop leader called him out on an obviously false statement, and after forcing himself to speak only what he thought was true, he experienced better social success and later on a general reduction in social anxiety.
He infers from this that his goals in conversations had been subconsciously set to 1) avoid making people dislike him, 2) make women he liked actively like him to the point of talking, dating and sex, where for 2 he didn't actually have good feedback channels or a model of their internal life or a toolbox to robustly interact with it. He extends this to his thesis: that social anxiety is caused in general by trying to achieve social goals for ourselves, assigning ourselves massive amounts of constraints that rule out any successful tactics, attempting anyway with inevitable failure, and not having enough insight or knowledge to spot the insanity of this situation.
In other words, his thought process while at the workshop had been something like: (asked to answer "Choose a model that's attractive to you. What makes her attractive to you?") "Well, she has gorgeous legs, duh. Wait, no, I can't say that, she'll hate me. Her breasts? Can't say that either, that'll make her hate me. How she fills her dress out? She'll hate me. I've got to give an answer... she has nice teeth, I guess, that's true and non-creepy, we'll go with that.". In other words, a series of propositions, which are accepted or rejected for promotion to being believed and acted upon.
I think that as we parse direct observations, or manipulate parsed observations and memories in our own heads, or do social cognition with other people, that we're doing something similar. In deduction, for example, the train of thought might be "P is true, and we know P implies Q. Therefore P is true? No, that's not how 'implies' works. Therefore Q is true? Yes, seems plausible, proceed." I think that different constraints on candidate thoughts get applied in different contexts:
* "No, that deduction doesn't follow."
* "No, this observation is about a known optical illusion and both possible interpretations are true at once."
* "I can't say that, it's immoral."
* "I can't say that, I've committed to acting as though it's not true."
* "I can't say that, there hasn't been enough time for all available records to turn up yet."
* "I can't say that, it'll hurt her feelings."
* "I can't say that, only low-status people say things like that."
* "I can't say that around this crowd, I'll get mocked."
* "Dammit it's true, but I can't say that because they're on the other team and it's bad to allow any opponent any temporary advantage."
To do this properly, I'd build a model of a person's reasoning. Start with the basic chain: sense input + internal reasoning => conclusion. The reasons to reject the conclusion clearly include "sense input is wrong" and "internal reasoning is wrong".
Adding the fact that the person is answering another person's question gets us closer to the quoted reasons above. The chain becomes: question + sensory + reasoning => conclusion => answer. Now the rejection reasons include "question is wrong" and "answering is wrong". To cover the above:
A person may believe the question was garbled, vague, deceptive, rude, not worth the effort to produce an answer.
A person may believe the answer is too hard to express, harmful (to self/others) if heard by the wrong person, harmful (ditto) if misunderstood * sufficient risk of misunderstanding, not worth saying, or leads to a later conclusion the person believes is wrong enough to be convinced that the answer might also be wrong, and to check again.
I can't help but feel this question is asked from the angle of "if I wanted to configure an LLM to answer the same way a person might, while still being rational, how would I do it?", so I answered accordingly. (Readers may infer what my own harm estimation might be, as they see fit. After all, they can't help but do so.)
* watching different single responses, styles of responses, styles of interaction on Reddit in the context of moral reasoning about the ICE shootings of Renee Good(e) and Alex Pretti
* mainlining "Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction"
* a background goal of predictive modeling on the propagation and mutation of beliefs in the age of managed social media
* reading the linked post with an eye to applying its toolbox to my own dysfunctions and problems.
So you're actually not far off - I am kinda-sorta playing with trying to make LLMs think like people, just to understand how cultural battle lines shift in response the world events.
I'm a federal criminal defense attorney from Minneapolis. This is my take on the situation there, mostly with an eye toward arguing that "the legal system" doesn't depend on the good faith of the executive.
I think you're right that the laws provide constraints against an out of control executive provided that the executive or his agents obey them, and that means that the most extreme predictions -- like Trump will seize power rather than step down at the end of his term, or he will put large numbers of US citizens in camps without due process -- are fantastically unlikely.
That said, we lose a lot when a President breaks an established norm limiting his power, whether that President is Obama or Trump. I do believe that Trump was to some extent the victim of inappropriate lawfare by government officials, but seeing Trump double down on the lawfare is disappointing - the norm he seems to be pressing for is just that it was pointed in the wrong direction.
Second, I've got a legal observation, which is that it seems to me that self-segregation of voters is starting to produce areas where you can get a grand jury indictment or conviction of one party but not the other. As far as I can tell from the OIG report, Andrew McCabe is at least as guilty of lying to federal officials as Scooter Libby, but you apparently can't get an indictment of a Trump opponent in DC, at least not of a lightweight crime like lying to federal investigators. Trump can't get indictments of BS crimes in federal court, where the judges are on average better, but you can convict Trump in state court. (Granted, Trump's property misstatements are on another level from those alleged against James, so maybe that's not a fair comparison.)
I think the commonsense conception of rights is that they protect "The individual" from "the majority" and function as a check on rampant populism. Under this theory, things like the freedom of speech are like, values you preserve "even if everyone thinks it's a good idea" to abandon them.
I think the biggest single realization I had in law school is that many rights actually don't do that. Articulated rights in the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th amendment force *the government* to not act contrary to the popular majority. The Jury Right is the most powerful example. There's a way in which this protects the individual from the majority, but I think the deeper thing that's going on is that it means the government CANNOT secure a conviction without a bunch of normal people signing off on it.
Under *this* theory, I think the phenomenon you're talking about is a feature not a bug, and it's why I was unbothered by alleged "lawfare" in the Biden administration (and frankly, in this one). The check on "political prosecution" isn't some norm against charging your enemies, it's the simple fact that you will lose a case that can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury in a particular community: within that community it's hard to convict popular people, it's relatively easier but still very hard to convict really unpopular people (how often do 12 people agree on whether something has been *proven*?), we'd rather have it this way than any alternative, in a system that is based on majority rule. The simple fact is that if the public thinks a case is transparent BS, they'll acquit...if they think that the case is deadly serious, they'll convict.
Legally speaking, the last serious constitutional amendment was to remove the two term presidential limit. (Given a secret ballot, 80% of Congress votes to impeach Trump. I do not see this changing, and I do not see Trump managing a constitutional amendment).
I merely post this so that people can update their general priors on "two term presidency" to include "we almost got rid of this, in the past 50 years." This is a convention that's only be held since FDR, and within ~50 years of said convention being set, it was already on the table to remove it.
I think the assumption of a lot of conservatives in the biden era was that the executive is capable of "auto-convicting" anyone, and that once trump took power, what's good for the goose would be good for the gander and the administration would just be able to level prosecutions at anyone it wanted.
The present state of affairs proves this isn't true. Trump has tried to do the same thing he accused the Biden administration of, but going the other way. It hasn't worked. He can't even get a misdemeanor prosecution for hurling a sandwich at an ICE officer. He can't even get Leticia James for Mortgage Fraud.
I would argue that that's because the DOJ (along with most other institutions) has a strong leftward bias. He's still probably gonna get both Comey and Brennan - and even if he doesn't, he's gonna ruin a couple years of their lives while they sweat it out and/or rack up legal bills.
In general the DOJ gets who they want. Isn't the conviction rate in Federal criminal cases > 95%?
If it's a matter of "leftward bias", why does Trump keep having to fire *his own appointees* (all life-long conservatives) when they disagree with him? It's not partisanship that's the problem here, it's reality.
The DOJ gets 95% convictions because they have a longstanding practice of charging out only those cases they are totally convinced they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. This doesn't mean they're always right, of course, but I tend to look askance at accusations that a particular federal charge is nothing more than a witch hunt: until this year, the DOJ was very careful which cases to bring.
Things seem different now, and there have been some fairly dramatic failures to ride roughshod over the administration's enemies.
I agree that lawyers at DOJ (and other government agencies, incidentally) don't bother with a case they're pretty sure they can't win, but this is unfortunately still consistent with Wanda's assertion that the DOJ is left-biased. If the system is implemented by enough left-biased people, then a left-biased lawyer can easily believe he'll get a left-biased case through when a right-biased case of equal pedigree would not. Exactly the same is true if we swapped "left" with "right" throughout.
Therefore, an assumption that the DOJ believes it can bring a case to conviction doesn't allow us to imply that that case is objectively fair.
The system is further complicated if DOJ turns out to contain a mix of left-, right-, and centrists lawyers working under a biased executive, and those lawyers have a clear incentive to disguise their biases in order to remain employed. Complicated further still when we have to analyze each of several possible such mixtures in order to generate predictions to test. As scientists often say: "more study is needed".
>He can't even get Leticia James for Mortgage Fraud.
I don’t think that’s completely over yet. I personally do not think there is a case to be made there, but I don’t think he’s given up trying. Anyway, to the broader point that the legal system can be used as a weapon against anyone, I don’t see how anyone could dispute that unless they were completely ignorant of the world as it is and as it has been. I know there are laws on the book in New York City that make it a crime to spit on the sidewalk and if somebody chose to, they could put someone in jail. Not me of course I never spit on the sidewalk.
> I know there are laws on the book in New York City that make it a crime to spit on the sidewalk and if somebody chose to, they could put someone in jail.
I actually doubt that. They could certainly *try* to prosecute it, but my guess is that the grand jury would probably refuse to return a bill, much as we saw with the felony footlong case and Trump's various other abuses.
You're arguing against a claim that's far too strong. I wouldn't say it's a strawman, since I suppose I could see people holding this view before the First Trump Administration, but not after they saw judges stymie almost all of Trump's efforts during that term.
So no, I think most realize recognize that you need control of the judges as well to be able to do whatever you want. The Democrats had this under Biden, and the Republicans do not.
But even so, in most cases, even without guarantee of conviction the PROSECUTION is adequate deterrent, with ruinous legal fees whatever the outcome, and besides that they can trump up enough charges that taking the offered plea bargain become the rational decision even if you're _almost_ certain you'll win at trial: if you win, the prosecutor shrugs and moves on to his next victim; if you lose, you go to jail for decades.
I admit I was mildly surprised they couldn't get the misdemeanor charge to stick to the sandwich guy, but I guess that was a tad too frivolous.
I disagree with a few things you've said there. Firstly, one judge in the trump cases (Florida's Eileen Cannon) was very much on Trump's side of the case, or at least was widely perceived as such. Also, the SCOTUS immunity decision was rather favorable to him...in both cases, you have judges (including, you know, the Supreme Court) not being "under the control" of Democrats.
Secondly, I've been a lawyer under Trump I, Biden, and Trump II. Under no administration was it true that the prosecution can simply "trump up enough charges" to win by default. If they could, I'd lose a lot less than I do :)
Yea "Dems controlling the judges" is a pretty funny statement given a Supreme Court that has been majority-conservative for at least 25 years now. And that the last moment in which a majority of that court had been appointed by Democratic presidents was in 1970.
Also, Trump has had plenty of rulings by judges he appointed go against him.
Also, as of today Trump leads all presidents in the number of current federal judges that were appointed by him, 261. Next most is Biden 236, then Obama 229, then Bush43 104. Given the GOP's Senate majority Trump will by the end of 2028 have appointed between 45 and 50 percent of all sitting federal judges. [Data from Ballotpedia's real-time tracker.]
Have the technology to deploy the Aerolamps doesn’t mean that they will be deployed. If we don’t address the human side of the problem, we might not see this future.
I’m looking for collaborators (and possibly funders) interested in a multi-paradigm shifting pragmatic framework for pluralist, post-polycrisis (including post-AI) futures. The final public-facing synthesis is 'The Life-Years Movement':
The common thread behind the work is a systems-level analysis of persistence under physics and tail-risk constraints — i.e., how locally 'rational' systems (biological, economic, moral) can lead to catastrophic failures ('ruin') over longer horizons.
I argue that persistence meant our tree of life's architecture had to avoid lineage extinction filters (LEFs), requiring many features that look “non-Darwinian” at the surface — reproductive restraint, extreme cellular redundancy, pre-adaptational variance. Lineages without such 'brakes' and robustness simply didn’t last. This reframes a number of puzzles, including the apparent Great Cosmic Filter.
Agents are treated as multi-motivational, energy-constrained 'action-minimizers' (in the Lagrangian sense) rather than scalar utility maximizers. Money is modeled as stored but degrading 'motivational energy' - likened to oil or uranium, rather than a Platonic store of value.
Life-years are proposed as the central form of moral concern, while allowing agent-level freedom in choosing the scope of lives one takes primary responsibility for (“heirs”).
Governance — Life-Years-Based Governance (LYBG).
Governance is reframed around maximizing life-years per unit resource, subject to anti-ruin constraints and irreducible disagreement about moral scope.
I have draft papers for each module in progress. If you're interested in either the bigger project or specific aspects, feel free to reach out: ad(delete)vitam(delete)sapien@gmail.com.
About me: I've a Phd in Computational Biology (e.g. genetics) from Cornell, undergrad math + philosophy from NYU. I've worked in industry on both biofx algs + eng stacks in both the ctDNA and PGT spaces - most recently at Orchid Health as Lead Bioinformatics Scientist
These Aerolamps seem like a fantastic idea for daycare centers and public schools! Children, especially infants and toddlers, getting sick in daycare is a huge problem for working parents - can't send a sick child to daycare, have to stay home with them, and most dual-working couples and single parents in America have very limited time off. If you could reduce the rate of infections for young children, that would be a tremendous help for parents!
San Francisco friends: there will be a vigil this Thursday (January 29) at 6:30pm at city hall (civic center, McAllister side) for people killed in ICE custody and enforcement, including recent shootings in Minneapolis. Names will be read. I hope to see you there, and would appreciate you sharing if you can.
Maximum empathy for criminals. Zero empathy for law enforcement and law-abiding citizens, as always. Will you be reading any names of people raped or killed by illegal migrants? Immigration agents attacked in the line of duty? I guess they wouldn't suit your political spectacle.
Are you saying you want people to support the criminals who work for ICE and that they should have no empathy for the law abiding citizens they are gunning down?
I really don't understand what it is about immigration law in particular that has made people so incensed recently. I've only encountered such radical opposition to it from open borders libertarians or left-anarchist types. Even then it is usually not a core issue.
They killed a white liberal woman, the first time that's happened in like 50 years, so now they're acting like an endangered species. Still, the basic point remains that immigration laws are an unjust restriction on freedom of association.
Do people not have the freedom to dissociate in your view? Am I allowed to refuse entry to my house to an unwanted guest? Why does this not apply to my country as well?
>Am I allowed to refuse entry to my house to an unwanted guest?
Of course.
>Why does this not apply to my country as well?
Because there are 300 million other people in your country and immigration laws burden their freedom of association rights. If they all shared your views, if they didn't want immigrants here and refused to rent to or hire them, there would be no immigration.
You can definitely make the argument that the right is just excercising their freedom of association. Unfortunately, the rights of one group come at the expense of another. You can't make everyone happy.
I don't like ICE attacking police officers. I'm also not happy that those citizens died. However, they were obviously not obeying the law at the time they died (obstructing, interfering, fleeing from law enforcement). I place most of the blame on local government and activist groups for creating a lawless, chaotic, dangerous environment where that kind of incident is inevitable. When you have thousands of dangerous interactions every day eventually something will go wrong and people get hurt.
My main critique here is about the transparent exploitation of these deaths to demonize immigration enforcement.
Define "obstructing." Because the definition ICE seems to be using is "doing anything we don't like in our vicinity," and that definition doesn't align with the law. Filming law enforcement and reporting on their activities is protected by the 1st amendment.
ICE has very specific laws about what they can do. They are allowed to arrest anyone impeding their actions, which doesn't include videoing their actions. It certainly isn't "anything we don't like".
Of course, this doesn't nessesarily justify what happened to him two weeks later from a presumably different squad, but it's hard for me to consider the general posture that ICE has taken as unreasonable given that they have to deal with guys like this everyday.
For what it's worth, there were 31 deaths in ICE custody in 2025, which is the highest number since 2004. Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez and Norlan Guzman-Fuentes are two of them, otherwise there's just a lot of
Is that a lot? I dunno, you'd probably want to compare it to other prison systems in terms of person-days in detention and then adjust for stuff like age distribution and so forth. There's typically around 500 deaths in Federal custody per year in the US but again these numbers are meaningless without knowing person-days in detention.
Canada's successful sabotage of Katie Uhlaender is an interesting exploit of the rules for Olympic Skeleton.
The way it works is that a country can get three, two, or one sled, based on the ranking on their players. There was a tournament earlier this month with 120 points for the winner that, had Katie won, she'd have bumped the US up into the three-sled category, and secured that third spot. But if there are fewer than 20 athletes completing, the TOURNAMENT gets downgraded, and only awards 90 points. So Canada withdrew four people just before the race, getting it down to 19. And they succeeded: Katie won the tournament, but didn't get enough points to qualify. And Canada is guaranteed two sleds.
Canada claims this was for "safety" and the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation has decided to buy that explanation.
It reminds me of that famous quote from WarGames (1983).
I don't know whether Canada would have gotten two sleds either way. From what I read, it looks like they almost certainly would have, but this just makes it certain.
Probably my most hubristic position is that I believe lots of people, including myself, could outperform democracy and do an excellent job of being dictator in perpetuum. Other than myself, I also believe Scott Alexander would do a bang up job at being God-Emperor, and David Chapman too.
Do you think you could be Caesar? Who would you nominate for such a position? You could also post your platform, if you would be king (I'll post mine if asked).
So just in the abstract, we wouldn't expect the way we do politics and elections in practice to be perfectly efficient, so we don't expect it to find the literal best person on earth for the job. So this is trivially true depending on what you mean by 'lots of people', whether you mean 'dozens' or 'billions'.
Second, I'd caution people that relatively little of the job is being smart enough to make good decisions, and much of it is being a good judge of character to pick subject-matter experts to advise you on decision, doing diplomacy and having conversations with people to try to keep them on your team and indebted to you, looking good for the camera and inspiring the public, etc. Being smart and sane helps, but if your social skills aren't great you may be less effective than you think.
Also, if you want to be really good, you need to be comfortable working 14 hour days for most of a decade. If you suffer at all from akrasia and procrastination, this is probably not going to work out.
Also, *legitimacy* is critical. Getting people to agree to follow the outcomes of the process is just as important as whether the process actually produces good outcomes.
> Who would you nominate for such a position? You could also post your platform, if you would be king (I'll post mine if asked).
Obviously AI - we're going to end up there anyways, let's just yank the bandaid off now.
And because "literally a child" could do a better job than 80%+ of politicians today, we could already do this with any of the Big 3 paid tier AI's today.
1. Everyone downloads the Democracy 2.0 app and allocates their capped amount of voting tokens to whatever they care about. Immigration, DEI, cheaper houses, lower taxes, economic growth, lower crime, whatever. As in, you get a standardized menu of items you can stake your tokens against, but you only get so many tokens, so prioritization and trade-offs are built-in.
2. AI proposal - The AI proposes legislation to attain the aggregated democratically defined priorities, with a detailed prompt outlining the total budget and soliciting it to consider the homeostatic landscape, to predict the primary, secondary, and tertiary effects, to outline monitoring KPI’s and thresholds, and to define a good sunset or re-evaluation time for any proposed legislation.
3. Vetting - Prediction markets and digital-twin sims price the KPI impacts before enactment, as a human check on AI predictions, and as an overall evaluation ground over many such proposals, so we can understand the overall landscape of which proposed legislation will move various needles the most. This is federally funded so there’s enough alpha in there that smart people / companies will be doing this full time. Also, look! An actually high-value, relatively ungameable use for prediction markets!
4. Democratic vetos - A stratified random sample (≈ 1k - 10k citizens depending on locality) gets the top 3 AI-optimised bundles for each priority, plus the market scores, and can veto any of them in the aggregate if enough decide to veto. This caps downside from model myopia and value-misalignment, and keeps democratic participation in the loop, without the pernicious regulatory capture and misaligned incentives we get today from full time politicians, lobbying groups, and industry insiders.
And there you go!
What does voting look like? You open an app and allocate your voting tokens to the high level priorities you care about.
Occasionally, you’ll get a push notification to decide whether to veto some random bills or not, which you can ignore or answer as you like. Done.
It scales to every locality size - from HOA, municipal, county, state and federal.
And at a shot, we’ve eliminated political parties, politicians, lobbyists, industry insiders, regulatory capture, and most of the other ills that plague politics today.
The problem with being Caesar is staying Caesar. Being a benign dictator is pretty much only possible with extreme regime security, if there is even a slight threat to your supremacy it becomes a race to the bottom with regard to coercion and oppression. All the great things you want to do are secondary in importance to remaining the sole source of power and authority. Unfortunately it is this dynamic which tends to produce the worst aspects of autocracy. You and Scott would be dictator for a day before someone much more sociopathic deposed you because I doubt either of you would be willing to do the dirty work of consolidating your power.
Also, nobody is right about 100% of things, and dictatorships are bad at correcting for Dear Leader's mistakes.
> . You and Scott would be dictator for a day before someone much more sociopathic deposed you because I doubt either of you would be willing to do the dirty work of consolidating your power.
Reminds me of the end of AGOT when IIRC, Ned Stark declines the proposal to preemptively arrest Cersei.
I am more interested in what weird things your reign would be known for afterwards. Building ziggurats? Starting a new fashion trend? Make a robot your chief of security? If you can’t be a good Caesar you can strive to be memorably bad.
My personal "gone my first day in power" list includes big-time college athletics. Being the only person I've ever met who considers that specific thing to be both worthy of elimination _and_ high-enough priority for a new national dictator's first-day list, no one I've ever mentioned this to has failed to find it an odd choice.
I have heard that the ancient Greeks (that is, pre-Classical era) mostly saw tyranny as a neutral thing, and saw it as necessary specifically in the case of major unrest. When there is a general understanding among most people that the current government is not satisfactory, and people are willing to revolt, a tyrant takes control in order to provide a coherent direction. It satisfies people who just want *something* to happen, and if things go worse, well, there's a clear person to blame.
It's interesting that today people who are proponents of some sort of dictatorship, or any model of government, tend to promote it as a permanent thing. As someone generally averse to tyranny, I can at least somewhat understand the logic of a temporary tyrant, and perhaps proponents of tyranny could better sell the idea as such. Of course history is full of cases where temporary tyrants become permanent tyrants, so one might see that as the most successful strategy for achieving permanent tyranny...
Anyway, to actually answer the question, there's always the old mainstay of cloning Lee Kuan Yew.
For Romans in the times until perhaps 200BC, tyranny (or "dictatorship") did not come from revolts, but was a pretty normal thing. They were rules about it, like who gets to appoint the dictator, what the dictator has to achieve/resolve (there was a list of half a dozen common causes), and when he is supposed to step down again. They were assigned frequently in some periods, I think like every few years or so. The dictator had pretty, well, dictatorial power in the political matters for which he was appointed.
The issue is: while it was stable in Roman times, it is not stable by design. A dictator may refuse to step down, and with so much power it may be hard to force him. In some sense the difference to some modern democracies is more gradual than the name would suggest: the French president is also pretty powerful in some areas, commands the military and so on. The reason that he can't just keep his power is a mutual understanding of all sides that he is supposed to step down after someone else gets elected, and people are supposed to stop obeying the old president in this case. This is also more or less how it worked in Roman times, except that the trigger was not the election of another dictator but that the issue for dictatorship was resolved.
Also, mechanically, Roman dictators just didn't have that much direct power. There weren't a bunch of guys who directly reported to them that they appointed. Everybody agreed they were the dictator, other people in various positions would listen to them about e.g. "take the troops here, wait, etc".
Basically, imagine if everybody agreed Trump should be dictator, BUT, he doesn't get to appoint his own cabinet, he just gets the Biden cabinet. He may have a lot more flexibility in policy since everybody agrees he should be dictator for six months (or whatever), but he would be less able to use that power to overturn American democracy than he is at present, since none of the people there owe their careers or power to him.
IIRC, the reason the early Roman "dictator" system worked was because there was a strong custom that their appointment was time-limited. They weren't dictators the way we think of them today.
Technically all tyrants are temporary tyrants, given their mortality. A good example is Franco. He established a dictatorship, and the monent he died, the country peacefully transitioned to democracy. The threat of communism was eliminated, and the dead remained dead. All is well.
And they'll fall too, eventually. Though, it's hard to imagine there's much appetite for democracy among the North Koreans in the first place, given that even their southern brethren are backsliding into authoritarianism after just forty years.
No, this is just a dumb liberal trope that prevents virtuous individuals from seeking office. The goal shouldn't be to resist the mantle of command; the goal should be to resist the temptation to abuse it.
This raises an interesting tangent for me, which is whether I could transition such a dictatorship back to democracy again, and which improvements I'd make along the way.
There are certain policies, like a land value tax, preferential voting, free speech absolutism, an estate tax, and similar, which are difficult to implement within an established democratic system but might be comparatively easy during its founding.
Outperform democracy at what? There's competence , and there's direction. An incompetent dictator steers in no direction. A competent dictator steers in the direction of their own goal. Neither care about my goals. Democracy is an attempt to take all goals into account.
I think people systematically overestimate how awesome or easy it would be to be a dictator. It’s not really a question of having the most wisdom or best ideas, it’s about getting a super complex change-resistant amorphous dynamic system to do ANYTHING you want it to do. How do you get information? How do you know who’s lying to you? How do you surface the one mid level manager who actually understands a situation well enough to modify it? It’s not like Scott could sit on the throne, announce that the country is now to act rationally in all things, and actually have anything meaningful happen.
I feel like this fully generalizes to being the boss of literally anything. Power is typically seen as a reward rather than volunteering for a job where you work 168 hours a week.
Yeah, any time I see anyone say they think they could do a good job as president or dictator, or even think they would want to do it, I get pretty confident that this person has never really gotten close to running something.
I think it DOES generalize. I think being a CEO is comparable to being a dictator, the stakes are just lower.
>Power is typically seen as a reward
I think that's wrong. Formal responsibility, and the pay that comes with it, is a reward that's doled out. Power is a separate concept and only accrues to people who are able to grab and hold it.
power and responsibility seem like two sides of the same coin to me? I don't understand what you're gesturing at. Are we defining "power" specifically as political power?
I would say that responsibility is legible power while real power is always illegible. Responsibility is having a team to manage. Power is knowing what you have to do to be indispensable to your company and being able to outmaneuver your peers in the eyes of your superiors.
No one is 'rewarded' with being dictator. There's no one that hands you that title. It's a house you build yourself out of the materials you can find. Most positions of any real power in the world are a lessor version of that. The sorts of jobs you get by being good at the legible things everyone knows to try to be good at are just the kiddie pool version of power. The sorts of things that got e.g. Steve Jobs where he got are much closer to how a dictator behaves than how a technically-competent engineering VP behaves.
oh in that case, we're mostly just splitting hairs. I tend to think of power as desirable per se, and responsibility is the price tag. I agree that it's awfully convenient to be an Eminence Grise, although I think it's a mistake to define "real" power that narrowly.
I'll grant that "reward" was not le mot juste, since it often does (though not necessarily, imo) impute an exogenous source. Although I can't think of a better term.
Also, people overestimate how much freedom of choice the dictators have, versus the things they have to do in order to keep their power and stay alive.
For example, as a dictator, you probably need to murder everyone around you who is simultaneously competent and ambitious. Probably everyone competent, full stop, just to be on the safe side. But it's hard to govern the country without having competent people you could delegate important tasks to.
Being explicitly a short-term dictator, as mentioned above in these comments, could ameliorate this particular conundrum to at least some extent. Though it of course creates a new potential issue: the deliberate lame-duckness getting in the way of the dictator having their orders fully carried out.
As is said in various elite-competitive-sports contexts, if it was easy everybody would already be doing it.
The real strength of republics vs dictatorships is being able to have multiple competent generals in the field. The king can only lead one army at a time, and being away from the capital for long is risky.
Putin has plenty of people that are simultaneously competent and ambitious around him. Some of them are even under him (he's quite old), as a "if you kill me, West, the crazy guys take over." Most of them are just the wealthy oligarchs. In Russia, few people really want to be Putin (popular though he is) -- they want to be the wealthy guy rolling in dough.
That's a very common technique used by dictators and strongmen the world over: you'd be sorry if I left office, Bruno the Torture Nerd would take over and he'd be much worse than me! But in reality Bruno the Torture Nerd works for the boss, and will probably end up in jail or dead after the revolution or coup, no matter who ends up on top. Think of Lavrentiy Beria; his colleagues knew he was a psychopathic murderer and rapist and didn't want him anywhere near the levers of power.
This is a different situation than a coup or revolution, unless you're talking specifically color revolution (aka CIA sponsored). This is "why you shouldn't assassinate me."
Assassinations tend to lead to the next guy in the food chain stepping up (because, after all, that's all you've done, offed the guy at the top). And it just makes sense that the insecure new dictator would be more brutal/have less tolerance for insubordination.
Knowing a bit about Russia / Russian politics, I would challenge this statement.
Putin _had_ a fair amount of competent and ambitious people around him (back in early 2000s), but they got to key positions and basically stopped paying attention to anything aside from staying at the top (and that, btw, includes Putin himself). So now, after ~20 years, IMHO they are mediocre at best...
Let's go through the "Russian Deck", or the circle of important people that Kommersant identified in December 2003, and see where they are now:
Hearts (Yeltsin's old circle):
Voloshin - gone.
Kasyanov - gone.
Deripaska - still in business, doesn't meddle in politics.
Abramovich - sitting pretty in London.
Surkov - gone.
Lesin - died under suspicious circumstances.
Alexis II - dead.
the Yumashevs - gone.
Clubs (Putin's Petersburg associates)
Sergey Ivanov - gone.
Matvienko - in charge of the upper chamber, but she's ambitious and loyal, not competent.
Gryzlov - gone.
Miller - in charge of Gazprom.
Medvedev - technically not gone, but eh.
Kozak - gone.
Cherkesov - gone.
Mironov - in charge of one of the parties, again, ambitious and loyal, not competent.
Diamonds (liberals)
Chubays - gone.
Khodorkovsky - in exile.
Kudrin - gone.
Gref - in charge of Sberbank
Illarionov - gone.
Gaydar - dead.
Kiriyenko - deputy head of Putin's administration.
Nemtsov - murdered.
Spades (siloviki)
Viktor Ivanov - gone.
Sechin - in charge of Rosneft.
Patrushev - practically gone.
Ustinov - Putin's representative in the Southern Federal District.
Pugachev - gone.
Kazantsev - dead.
Zaostrovtsev and Karimov - gone.
Out of the whole deck, I would name Sechin, Miller and Gref as people worthy of your description. Kiriyenko is the only one who's both ambitious and competent. And patient.
... Putin keeps people below him that the United States/Ukraine/West doesn't want at the top of a World Power (refraining from calling Russia a superpower, at the moment). If you want to say the political dudes are not so ambitious anymore (or at least willing to let him die first), sure.
The wealthy oligarchs are engaged in their own games, and to the extent Putin leaves them alone, he's "their b*tch", just like Trump is signing up to be funded by the oil companies headed down to Venezuela (In that they'll have a Very Profitable Interest in making sure the next President doesn't just "give the oil fields back to Venezuela").
(In short, your correction is noted, accepted and I wanted to thank you for making it.)
My Autism is such that I am painfully conscientious where I am required to be by my brain, and don't really get big feelings about stuff outside of that.
EG to make an example from my last couple days, I will grab a rattlesnake that's not where it's supposed to be and take him out into the mountains or the desert, but I don't feel any particular way about executing a trapped ground squirrel, which are noxious vermin where I am.
Thus, I feel confident I could make a binding deal with myself that I would be a benevolent guiding hand to the people, eg I would simply select technocrats to fill executive positions and maintain an elected advisory committee to fill blind spots, and otherwise just keep living like I do with the exception that I would require payment in a couple interesting restaurant meals a month and 1 expensive but not too expensive scale model kit from time to time.
I want that PGU Nu Gundam, but I made a binding deal with myself that I may only purchase a full price toy once I have completely cleared my backlog, which is at least a year out at this point.
There's that conscientiousness again, fucking with me: I have 30k in walking around money left for this quarter, but I can't fucking spend it because of a rule I made when I was poor.
I don't even know where I'm gonna put that. I think I'm gonna try to find some sort of "american coal finally eats shit and dies" etf, that seems inevitable over the 4 year horizon.
I'm way too angry to dictate. We were asked this back in middle school and my answer was "World War 3 on day 1."
The main problem with dictatorship is that the system runs on personal charisma, so the dictator has to appear to be the smartest person in every room, and they have to do it against lopsided levels of scrutiny. If they aren't, then the whole system erodes and eventually destabilizes. What's the easiest way to be the smartest person in the room? Punish anyone who says otherwise. "Maybe that astronaut neurosurgeon had a point, or maybe he didn't, but now that he's dead we'll go with my plan." So the country's intelligence caps out at the intelligence of the leadership. It can work for a while if the leader is actually intelligent, but eventually they're going to die, and because no one could be above the cap the new leader will be below the previous cap, while becoming the new cap.
In Democracy, if someone else has huge charisma the leader can point and say "if the astronaut neurosurgeon wants my job, they can apply for it." It unlops the scrutiny and lets you accept more antagonistic ideas without threatening your position as king, which allows the system to stay smarter than the kings.
I think an ideal monarchy/dictatorship, where a good-intentioned and intelligent ruler is able to simply command improvements without political considerations, would probably function quite well. Something like a medieval monarchy where the people they rule can't really conceive of a different setup besides monarchy.
If you had the constraints of a modern dictatorship, and a population that has the ideology and knowledge of liberal democracy, the dictator would be far too concerned with keeping their power, relying on the power and influence of some to control the rest, that it would not produce good outcomes. I imagine that this second set of skills is much rarer than the first.
Even in the quintessential modern case of this, Putin, would probably do pretty well for Russia if he wasn't constrained by oligarchs, international pressure, and the Russian Constitution. The war in Ukraine would be going significantly different for Russia if he was able to order up the conscription of an extra 2 million Russians to Ukraine's ~1 Million, which would still be a lower percentage of the population fighting than Ukraine has right now.
By medieval standards, it might not be too hard to command improvements over however the bureaucracy is running. But I really don’t think one person has the time or experience to know what would be an actually good way to run things. You need lots of voices involved to have any idea.
Conscripts aren't very good troops for Russia, and at least according to people posting around here, they aren't often even equipped with a gun. According to military (non-Russian) sources, pre-Ukraine, about a third of conscripts were getting pimped out for cash (yes, sex).
I believe Russia has slack capacity for escalating the war in Ukraine. They're not doing so, because they have met their "red line" goals (Sevastopol plus water, and some safety buffer from Kiev can fire missiles from their territory and damage our critical infrastructure), and, broadly speaking, they consider the Ukrainians to be kinsmen, and would rather not have to kill more of them than is necessary*. Also, it's a lot easier to negotiate when you look like "reasonable warriors" and not "bloodthirsty genocidal conquerers"**
*Most modern wars put the basic objective as "destroy the war factories" -- because without guns (and materiel), you can't fight. Ukraine doesn't have the war factories, so Russia must make Ukraine bleed soldiers instead, until they are physically incapable of fighting.
**When people ask about security guarantees, I say they don't exist. But Russia can signal, "I am crazy" or Russia can signal "I can at least pretend to be sane and make sane decisions."
Do you think it's the oligarchs, international pressure, or the Russian Constitution that prevent him from mobilizing 2 more million Russians? Or the fact that Russians can silently tolerate volunteers or professionals dying, but get much more nervous when it's involuntary soldiers that are dying?
- Small country: Ok, sure, you seem smart enough judging by your Substack. As long as its people agree. It might increase competition in governance, and other countries (smaller ones; larger ones tend to be more chauvinistic) might benefit from copying what you get right as dictator of Slovicedonia.
- America: I'm not a citizen. I highly doubt this would increase competition in governance and systems of government.
- Whole world: No thanks. All competition between governing elites disappears. I have no candidates.
I think the Civil War was a mistake, while the Southern states were ethically in the wrong regarding slavery, they weren't trying to conquer the North, they should've been allowed to secede. Would've been more in line with the Founding Fathers' vision and the American ethos, the United States were supposed to be a voluntary union. And it probably would've been healthier in the long run regarding things like North/South relations and racism, because I think most likely, within 50 years, the Confederacy would've abandoned slavery due to international pressure, the English Navy was sinking slave boats, Brazil ended up abolishing slavery without a civil war before the 19th century ended. Then I bet the Confederacy would ask to be let back into the US.
It would've been a thing where the south internally resolved the issue, instead of having a foreign morality externally imposed through war.
To seriously think about whether the Civil War was a mistake, it helps to make the question more specific.
1) Did the advocates of secession make a mistake in not trying to negotiate a separation via mutual agreement?
I think that, for the secessionists, time was the enemy. If you look at how secessionist movements played out in Quebec, or more recently, in Scotland, the key move to preventing secession is to hold a referendum far enough in the future that the populace has a lot of time to think about the downsides as well as the upsides of secession before they vote.
In 1857, "The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It" by Hinton R Helper was published. The thesis of the book was that slavery was bad for the south as a whole, even though it made the large plantation owners incredibly rich. Just one example from the book: In 1850, southern states grew $78,264,928 worth of cotton. In the same year, northern states grew $142,138,998 worth of hay. This book was mostly kept out of the south (in 1860, an individual in Texas found in possession of a number of copies of the book was lynched), but if southern states had had a prolonged public debate about secession, it’s hard to see how its contents could be effectively suppressed.
In the case of Czechoslovakia, the country was partitioned by an agreement among political leaders, even though partition was not supported by a majority of either the Czechs or the Slovaks. I don't think that model would have worked in the United States. The Constitution authorizes Congress to add states, but not to remove existing states from the Union. The general notion that power derives from the people would make it very hard for southern states to justify splitting off if the couldn't convince their citizens to support this in a referendum.
So I think there is good reason to believe that unilateral secession was not a mistake from the perspective of the secessionists, because if they tried a negotiated separation they'd likely end up like Quebec.
2) Did the Confederate leaders make a mistake when they decided to attack Fort Sumter?
In hindsight, that did not work out well for them. The alternative was to settle for de facto independence. Transnistria would be a modern analogue; it has effectively functioned as an independent country for the past 33 years even though Moldova does not officially recognize its independence.
The first problem with this is that prior to Fort Sumter, the border states had not joined the Confederacy. In January, the Virginia General Assembly had passed a resolution stating that, “if all efforts to reconcile the unhappy differences existing between the two sections of the country shall [fail], every consideration of honor and interest demands that Virginia shall unite her destiny with the slave-holding States of the South.” It's not clear that, absent a war, Virginia would have ever joined the Confederacy.
The second is that, on some level, the conflict was about respect. If the United States doesn’t recognize the Confederacy as an independent country, will anyone else? Maybe eventually, but the Confederacy would have had to patiently plead for what the United States is given as a matter of course. If fugitive slaves escape to the United States, will the United States return them? Probably not, at least not without a strong incentive like the Confederacy demonstrating that it can defeat the United States in a war. I think that if the Confederacy becomes Transnistria, its citizens will feel disrespected and public support will collapse.
Third, even if the Confederacy achieves independence, the secessionists can still lose because, as you note, the Confederacy would be under pressure to abolish slavery. That’s less likely to happen if the secessionists start a war and win it, because then abolishing slavery is repudiating the sacrifices of everybody who fought and died to preserve it.
The secessionists were working from a position of weakness, so their gambles, even if they didn’t work out, were not necessarily mistakes.
Do you think an economic solution was possible? What would've happened if the federal government had offered to buy every slave at a fair price? Four million slaves x $1000 is less than the war ended up costing. Many of the south's fears were rooted in the desire to protect that significant capital investment.
Northerners who as a moral conviction were opposed to slavery would of course oppose that move as rewarding the slavers. Other Northerners would oppose a massive arbitrary transfer of mostly-Northern wealth to a minority of a minority of Americans. The large majority of Southerners too poor to own any slaves would hate it as what we might now call reverse redistribution. So the contemporary domestic politics of that idea seem...challenging.
Meanwhile the economic backdrop was a society that was certainly growing, but was also prone to serious economic downturns way more frequently than any post-WWII Americans have ever experienced. $4 billion is approximately the national GDP as of the mid 1850s; all federal government expenditures totaled around $60M/year. Even imagining reaching political agreement on the slave buyout, how could it be financed?
If by new taxes, yikes -- you'd need new federal taxes equal to a _big_ chunk of national GDP, for some years. Good luck even collecting those...are you issuing IOUs to the slaveowners? Would they accept them? And if they did wouldn't that effectively represent the first national paper currency, quintupling the national money supply literally overnight and setting off inflation beyond any economist's wildest nightmares?
Or if the idea is to issue long-term federal bonds...who in the 1850s would be interested in buying such bonds, from an emerging nation that has a recession or depression at least once a decade, unless offered ruinous (for the issuing government) interest rates?
Of course, Britain did exactly that in the 1830s, freeing all slaves but compensating the owners. This was (largely) uncontroversial at the time (despite being very expensive) - although more recently it has become controversial.
However, I agree with your implication that it probably wouldn’t have worked in the US in the late 1850s. I think there are probably three main reasons:
1. There wasn’t a sectional divide in Britain: a small number of people (‘the West India interest’) were in favour of slavery, but they weren’t (as in the US) the elites of particular regions. So the general increasingly-abolitionist political sentiment seemed like it was a shift that affected the whole political nation and not just one part of it.
2. Connected to that, it is just possible that the US South would have accepted a compensation scheme in the 1830s, but by the 1850s support for slavery had become core to political identities there: accepting a compensation scheme would have felt like giving in. Whereas in Britain the West India interest was (and was increasingly) mostly a purely economic interest: as long as they got the money they were happy!
3. In Britain there had been a generation of significant public spending (since 1807 and especially since 1815) on suppressing the slave trade. So general public opinion was used to the idea of spending taxpayers’ money on the abolitionist cause. I’m not aware of equivalent spending in the US, and I suspect that (absent the sunk cost of the Civil War) even the North would have balked at spending taxpayer dollars on a compensation scheme, which felt much more normal in Britain.
I doubt actually that it could have been done in the US in the 1830s either. The sectionalist realities seem just impossible to navigate:
(a) All the slaveowners who would receive the payout are in one section of the nation and it’s much the smaller one by both non-enslaved population and economic output.
(b) Most of the currency wealth paid to them would originate in the other, larger, industrializing, section. (However the central government specifically raised it.)
(c) Since slavery was banned in all the individual states of that larger section, this huge payout mostly funded by them would be just a flat-out gift, no assets or anything else coming back.
That would be a very hard pill for Northern voters and politicians to swallow no matter how they individually felt about slavery.
Both sides very much wanted a Short Victorious war for basically domestic political reasons, though in this case the definition of "domestic" is tricky. But the Lincoln Administration is an abject failure if it doesn't hold the Union together, and the Confederacy is on very shaky grounds if it's just the Deep South and without the unifying experience of victory over the DamnYankees.
Both sides also felt it would be politically and diplomatically advantageous for the other side to fire the first shot. and they weren't wrong about that. But while it's *possible* that a persistent Southern refusal to shoot first might have lead the North to give it up and accept secession, it's more likely that they'd have continued with escalating provocations and/or said "It's not *that* important that the baddies fire the first shot; let's get on with this".
Based on what I've read (probably not enough), the CSA could probably have gotten by with a secession, followed by some conquests in the west (present day New Mexico, Arizona, and possibly California itself if they're feeling extra froggy). I imagine Kansas and Missouri become disputed territories for some unspecified period.
Economically, that all seems impossible, though Jefferson Davis & Co. might not have realized it. The South wasn't industrialized enough, and was too dependent on a crop that was about to become too oversupplied to be reliable.
If I imagine a scenario where the CSA says "we're leaving; just leave us alone!" and the Union says "fine, get outta here!" and manages to reign in its abolition movement and also puts up minimal fuss with whatever military assets are in which state, then in about a generation, the CSA grows so impoverished that it ends up de facto acquired anyway by Yankee business interests. About the only difference is maybe a million Americans don't die, which implies enough that I wouldn't bet on what happens after.
ETA: And now I've read further down and saw your other comment saying pretty much this.
The situation would be unstable, but yes, I think it is plausible that it could last for a long time. The secret Feb. 15 resolution by the Confederate Congress that authorized the use of force to take Fort Sumter also authorized the use of force to take Fort Pickens, but presumably if the Confederacy decided not to attack Fort Sumter, they would also refrain from attacking Fort Pickens.
There were plenty of people in the North in favor of war, but I suspect that with the passage of time, acceptance of the status quo would increase rather than decrease, so the probability of the North starting a war would decrease over time.
Probably. My guess is Lincoln would follow Andrew Jackson's playbook from the Nullification Crisis and attempt to continue collecting customs dues from ships bound for Confederate ports. There are some incidents where ships refuse to stop and get fired on, or fight back against attempts to board then for inspection. Bloody shirs get waved and things escalate from there.
It's probably mildly to the South's advantage of the Union fires the first shot. Kentucky might join the Middle South states that seceded after Fort Sumter, and the Confederacy would have a few extra months to get its shit together and organize for war. The Union's ability to pre-mobilize in the same time window would be limited by political considerations: Congress isn't in session yet so there's no money or authorization for raising troops, and if Lincoln calls a special session and asks for troops, then that looks like a provocation and risks pushing more stares into seceding. And might get voted down, with the Middle South states' delegations still seated in Congress and many from the Border South and the North still hoping for some kind of compromise.
Lincoln did not resolve the question of what to do about tariffs for goods imported into the Confederate states until the war broke out, at which point he declared a blockade. (The Constitution requires that “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” That means that the Federal government cannot simply decide not to collect tariffs at ports in states that joined the Confederacy while continuing to collect tariffs elsewhere. With a blockade in place, there are no imports to Confederate states, except for smuggling. Smugglers importing stuff without paying tariffs doesn’t violate the Constitutional requirement for uniform tariffs unless the Federal government implicitly condones it.)
I seem to recall that the possibility of collecting tariffs at sea was discussed by Lincoln’s cabinet and declared impractical, but I can’t find the source. Lincoln might have attempted it eventually due to the lack of a better alternative. The ships being stopped would presumably not be flagged in the Confederacy. So I can imagine some tense diplomacy which ends with the United States abandoning the idea of collecting tariffs at sea rather that going to war with Britain. This wouldn’t provide much of a justification for war on the part of the Confederacy.
Wasn't it technically not a blockade, since that's something you do to an enemy foreign power, which the Union did not recognize the Confederacy as being?
Didn't they fire in response to the Union continuing to occupy a fort in their territory?
Placing your army in someone's territory is just as much of an act of war as actually firing the first shot, so I don't think the "Han shot first" of it all really matters.
It was federal property, the army in question was already there; the union forces didn't move an army into the fort, they just didn't leave; if you're wanting a diplomatic solution to a question of who owns something - and here there is a legitimate question of whether or not a fort owned, maintained, and staffed by the federal government now automatically, without any sort of diplomatic agreement, belongs to the confederacy after they declare independence - you deploy diplomacy.
Do you think this applies to the states that aren't the original 13 (i.e. where the United States acquired the land and then formed a state from it, rather than a preexisting state agreeing to join with the others)?
Other than wars to prevent genocide, wars to end slavery seem just about the most justifiable wars ever.
Even your own assumptions - and I do want to be clear I think they're assumptions (e.g. will the Confederacy end slavery within 50 years when most of its founding documents explicitly mention it as an essential thing the Confederacy is founded on?) don't really strike me as favorable to your position.
Something like 700k people died in the Civil War. There were 4m slaves, and their life expectancy was less than 50 years. So even if you only think chattel slavery costs 50% of the utility of a life (which I think is frankly quite generous to your position) the Civil War is a net positive.
A voluntary crusade against slavery is justified. John Brown was justified.
Is it moral to conscript people to abolish slavery elsewhere?
Moreover, Lincoln denied that he was fighting a war on slavery. Is it moral to lie to people to conscript them to engage in an otherwise moral crusade? Even if his secret goal was abolition, he claimed it was a war of unity because that was popular. That was the principal motivation of most of the people involved. A measure of the popular sentiment is that the Emancipation Proclamation is generally believed to have contributed to the draft riots.
A hypothetical war to end slavery would be justifiable if you went about it in the right way.
In particular you'd need to commit to the idea that you'll only occupy the country for as long as necessary to end the bad thing and then you'll restore its sovereignty, like the US did in Germany or Japan or Iraq. If you don't get out afterwards then you're just doing a war of conquest with the bad thing as an excuse.
(1) As I read Timothy M.'s argument: Was the North conquering the South in order to end slavery justifiable on utilitarian grounds?
(2) As I read yours: Given that the Southern States didn't necessarily have sovereignty against the federal government, would it be preferable to recognize their sovereignty and allow them to secede at some point, for example if they promised permanently to outlaw slavery and to treat black citizens justly?
My instinct is no on the second one -- I don't favor a vision of the government that allows secession by any means other than a constitutional amendment, and the Southern States are free to initiate the amendment process whenever they want.
> My instinct is no on the second one -- I don't favor a vision of the government that allows secession by any means other than a constitutional amendment, and the Southern States are free to initiate the amendment process whenever they want.
What is your opinion on the Declaration of Independence?
(1) My opinion of the Declaration of Independence is positive.
(2) I'm also intruigued because I enjoy your comments and I'm not sure where you're going.
(3) More specifically, the drafters seemed to feel that it was important that they established both a history of despotism on the part of the crown and an unsucessful attempt to resolve those abuses without secession. I don't grant that the South did or could have met those standards. Also, I don't think it was necessarily morally wrong of Great Britain to resist secession, although I haven't considered that issue in detail.
I think the Confederacy would have been quite a bit longer about abolishing slavery than you're guessing. If they peacefully seceded in 1861, I think slavery persists well into the 20th century.
British anti-slavery patrols don't move the needle. The US had passed laws abolishing our participation in the Atlantic slave trade some time before the Civil War (1808, I think), and apart from a minority of pro-slavery absolutists in South Carolina, there was no appetite for re-opening it even in the Deep South.
Internal political abolition of slavery tends to be pretty sensitive to how pervasive slavery is within the society. In general, states and nations are a lot more likely to abolish slavery if less than 10% of the population is enslaved and hardly ever voluntarily abolish slavery if much more than 20% is enslaved. Brazil was around 15% in 1871 when the free birth law was passed and not much more than 5% in 1888 when slavery was fully abolished. If the United States evacuates the forts and lets the seceded states go peacefully, then the Middle South states mostly stay in the Union and the Confederacy would only consist of South Carolina (57% enslaved), Georgia (44%), Florida (44%), Alabama (45%), Mississippi (55%), Texas (30%) and Arkansas (26%). Getting those numbers down into the critical range would be a long time coming.
Brazil got down to around 15% enslaved by 1871 because, unlike the US South, their institution of slavery was dependent on the Atlantic slave trade. Birth rates among the enslaved population were much lower in Brazil than the US South, so the American slave population was sustained and expanded by natural increase alone while Brazil's dwindled as generations passed. Brazil also had a widespread practice of voluntary manumission, similar to the Border South in the US (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and the Appalachian counties of Virginia), which the Deep South very much did not.
There are a few things that could incline the Confederacy towards abolishing slavery eventually. One is long-term drifts in culture and demographics, but shifts of that magnitude take quite a while. Another is that having a national border with a mostly-free neighbor would be likely to gradually erode slavery culturally and make it easier for slaves to escape across the border. This latter would be a longer-term issue, since the other side of the border would mostly be the Middle South states of North Carolina and Tennessee. I would expect slavery *inside* the remaining US to be gradually abolished over the course of a few decades following peaceful secession, starting with the Border South where it was already weak and then gradually spreading to Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina either organically (which would take several decades, I think) or due to a Constitutional amendment abolishing Slavery once there were only a handful of slave states left in the Union.
Britain (and the US and other major industrial countries) becoming much more hard-line about opposing slavery to the point of embargoing trade could also move the needle, but that would require a major shift on the embargoing side (King Cotton's power was severely overstated in the Southern imagination, but such an embargo as a voluntary act of the British parliament would be politically an economically costly) and in the short to medium term would provoke resentment more than it would compel compliance on the Confederate side.
This treats abolition as coming through peaceful, internal political change. I... do not think this is a particularly likely course of events for an independent Confederacy.
We're looking at a diplomatically isolated country with a substantial internal fifth column, many of whose citizens (let alone the slaves) would be seeing their lives get worse from secession and the end of links to America, so the ruling class likely grows increasingly repressive.
I can't tell you how it ends, but an anti slavocrat revolution seems like a real possibility. But so does an increasingly narrow dictatorship, with the comparative freedoms of the Jacksonian era becoming a thing of the distant past. Maybe they even handle poor whites as Fitzhugh recommended...
There's likely something to that. The Southern Planter class were perennially wary of the possibility of a slave revolt, for one thing, and had a lot of formal and informal censorship and other restrictions aimed at keeping anti-slavery ideas away from slaves for fear that abolitionist discourse would inspire rebellions.
That was actually one of the big points of friction between the sections. Southern politicians kept trying to push to expand some of these policies into federal law and policy (the congressional "gag rule" against receiving anti-slavery petitions, attempts to censor anti-slavery publications being sent through the US Mail, etc) which Northerners saw as undue infringements on white men's liberties. And when anti-slavery violence did happen most conspicuously with John Brown's raid on the Harper's Ferry arsenal, Southerners saw this as confirmation of their fears that political abolitionism went hand-in-hand with slave revolts.
Barring some external forcing function like losing a war with the US or Britain, I think the most likely scenarios are, in declining order:
1. Continuation of the status quo with moderate increases in repression. There was already quite a bit of repression baked into the system in slave states, especially in the Deep South, and most especially in South Carolina. Both direct oppression of the slaves and collateral oppression of whites and freedmen in order to solidify the slavocracy social order. In a no-civil-war scenario with a seven-state Confederacy, I think state laws stay about the same while federal (confederal?) law and policy gets somewhat more repressive. This is likely to be a stable equilibrium for several generations unless it gets upset from the outside.
2. Gradually increasing repression over the decades following secession, resulting in a stable oligarchy. The Confederacy as a whole winds up looking like pre-secession South Carolina. The main potential opposition to this, apart from the slaves themselves who are targeted by the oppression, is the population of "white belt" counties especially in Appalachia. The White Belt counties have the potential to be a large political force in an 11+ state Confederacy, but most of their main strongholds (Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, what would become West Virginia, and the Western counties of North Carolina) would not be part of a 7-state Confederacy. People discontented with the slavocracy would either grumble and deal with it or emigrate to the US.
3. Attempts at increasing repression cause the Confederacy to split. Off the top of my head, I'd guess Texas and Arkansas to be the states in the 7-state Confederacy mostly likely to either go their own way or try to rejoin the US. Their percentages of slaves and slaveowners were more like the Middle South than the rest of the Deep South, and Arkansas in particular is only counted as "Deep South" at all because it seceded before Fort Sumter. The rump five-state Confederacy follows path #2.
4. A successful movement towards political liberalization at some point. I think this would probably be decades coming.
Also worth noting that the Confederacy would almost certainly have found itself in dire economic straits following a successful secession - particularly a *peaceful* secession, which would probably have been limited to the 6-7 states of the Deep South. Those states had an economy that was heavily focused on a single cash crop, and Egyptian+Indian cotton was already on track to take over the lion's share of the market. This would probably have happened even faster with a slave-owning CSA; the British and French really didn't like slavery, and while they liked shuttering their textile mills even less, they were about to be free of having to make that choice.
On the other hand, I suppose I could see the Confederacy messing this up and provoking the British or French governments into taking a harder anti-slavery line than they would otherwise be inclined to do. Especially a deep-south-only Confederacy, as a lot of the political classes in the Middle South still took the old Jeffersonian "Slavery is a necessary evil for the time being" line rather than the newer "Race-based slavery is a positive moral good" ideology that had lately become popular among the Deep South's political class.
Even with the 11-state Confederacy that included the Middle South, a lot of Confederate diplomats were appallingly bad at their jobs and took every opportunity to put the "ass" in "ambassador". I've watched a lecture about Confederate diplomacy in Europe, and one of the big takeaways from that was that Confederate diplomatic overtures frequently backfired because the diplomatics wouldn't shut up about how awesome they thought slavery was. If they kept that up for long enough, I think I could imagine the British and French governments forgetting realpolitik in favor of using trade policy to try to pressure the Confederacy away from slavery.
I think it would take a while before Britain or France seriously contemplated embargoing the Confederacy, or even putting protective tariffs on cotton imports. Neither country restricted cotton imports from the US before the war, both traded with the Confederacy to the extent the Union blockade permitted, and both Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III pursued lukewarmly pro-Confederate policies during the war in terms of proposing mediation ans allowing the CSA to sell bonds in London and Paris and buy ships that could be converted to commerce raiders from British or French shipyards (but not unambiguous warship, as the Laird Rams were redirected to the Royal Navy in response to Union diplomatic protests).
Popular opinion and long-term government policy were both anti-slavery, yes, but realpolitik inclined both countries to friendly relations with the Confederacy. The US wasn't really a Great Power yet but was taken seriously as a major regional power, and a healthy Confederacy friendly to Britain or France would be a useful counterweight to the US in situations where US is a potential rival to either European power. And until Egyptian and Indian cotton displaced Confederate exports, which would probably take longer than IOTL without a Union blockade, economic considerations also incline Britain and France towards friendly relations.
> Brazil got down to around 15% enslaved by 1871 because, unlike the US South, their institution of slavery was dependent on the Atlantic slave trade. Birth rates among the enslaved population were much lower in Brazil than the US South, so the American slave population was sustained and expanded by natural increase alone while Brazil's dwindled as generations passed.
I was just wondering why, given this background, Brazil has such a large black population now.
That's the manumission side of the issue. By the 1870s, Brazil had a pretty substantial population of former slaves and their free-born descendants. I strongly suspect that the low birth rate among Brazilian slaves was specific to slaves while free black or mixed-race Brazilians had higher birth rates.
The antebellum US South was the outlier in terms of having a high birth rate among slaves and having the slave population increase considerably due to children being born into slavery. The norm, historically and globally, is for slave societies to rely on a continuous source of newly enslaved people, usually victims of raids and conquest who are sold into slavery. The enslaved populations tend to not have a lot of kids and also tends to have a high infant mortality rate. The usual reasons for this are that enslavement wrecks family structures and gets in the way of family formation, that slaves (especially those employed in mining and agriculture: personal servants and those with valuable specialized skills usually get treated somewhat better) usually have absolutely abominable material conditions. It is sadly common historically for field and mining slaves to be worked to death on starvation rations, and even when this isn't the case, it's rare for slaves to be allowed enough food and rest to allow them to have substantial number of kids. And few slave-drivers are keen on allowing enslaved women enough slack to carry a healthy pregnancy to term. I don't know much specifically about slavery in Brazil in the 19th century, but Caribbean slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries were routinely worked to death.
The US was an outlier in part because the US was an exceedingly rich nation by historical standards even during the 18th and 19th centuries. In most historical societies, and even many societies into the 19th century, there were plenty of free peasants and laborers who could be hired for subsistence wages, so there's little point buying a slave unless you plan on driving him to work harder than a free peasant or feeding him less than a subsistence wage, or both. But if even poor people are making comfortably above subsistence, then it may be profitable to buy a slave even if you're planning on feeding him a vaguely decent diet. Slaves still had a terrible material standard of living in relative terms within the society, but had a much better material standard of living in absolute terms than slaves in other slave societies.
I suspect the ban on the slave trade in 1808 also played a role. This, combined with industrialization driving demand for cotton and westward expansion bringing more land suitable for cotton into cultivation, meant slaves became more and more expensive. Slaveowners thus had considerable economic incentive to keep their slaves healthy and to encourage them to have kids who, once they're old enough, could be put to work on the same plantation or sold to another one.
The American Deep South was also the outlier on manumission. The norm in other slave societies has that highly valued slaves (personal servants the masters were fond of, slaves with highly valuable skills, etc) were often offered their eventual freedom as a reward for years of good service. In the Border and Middle South, this treatment was sometimes given to field slaves as well, tied to the "slavery is a necessary evil" school of justification that was popular in the US South in the early 19th century. The Deep South never went much in for voluntary manumission, and by the lead-up to the Civil War had developed a sick and twisted ideology that race-based slavery was a positive moral good. I don't know the details of the culture of manumission in Brazil, except that there seems to have been one to judge by how many free blacks there were in the country before the free birth and emancipation laws started getting passed.
I was just reading Lincoln's first inaugural address today--I'm curious what your response would be to his articulation therein of the indivisibility of the Union.
"I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as acontract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak--but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."
But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.
It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances."
I think he's really struggling to put together an argument for why secession is fine and dandy if it's 1776 but terrible and illegal if it's 1860.
Most of the states of the Confederacy didn't even join the USA voluntarily anyway, they were variously conquered or purchased from France and Spain. It's a weird argument to Louisiana, say, that having been conquered by France in 1682, sold to Spain in 1763, swapped back to France in 1800, and then sold the US in 1803 (all without the consent of the people living there), that it was now an inviolable part of the USA.
Who do you think was living in large parts of what became the Confederacy ca. 1803?
You seem to regard these traitorous southern states as long standing constitutional republics but they were all just creatures of decades of what we today call ethnic cleansing by the federal government , starting, e.g., with Jefferson’s “Treaty” of Hoe Buckintoopa.
The Congress was even kind enough to pass the Indian Removal Act in 1838 to really speed things along, and 22 years later the vultures who swooped in are ready to secede?
Get a grip dude. Lincoln was totally right and the failure to execute a whole lot more of those traitors is still causing problems today.
In the quoted passage, Lincoln is explaining why secession is illegal, or to put it another way, that secession is insurrection. If you are interested in his argument for why insurrection is a bad idea in 1860, that constitutes the majority of the speech, so I would suggest just reading the entire thing.
Also, Louisiana didn’t become “an inviolable part of the USA” in 1803. That occurred in 1812, when Congress approved Louisiana’s application for statehood.
Don’t forget the once great Republic of West Florida in what is today Louisiana. It lasted 74 days in 1810 after declaring independence from Spain and conquering the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge. The president was Fulwar Skipwith.
That really sounds a lot like Putin talking about the Kievan Rus, and why he has to liberate the Ukrainian territories to restore historically Russian lands. I find the the moralizing about why it's in fact good and virtuous more irksome than the actual conquest, why I understand is perfectly standard practice for powerful states throughout history (though of course, I might feel differently if it MY home burnt, my family slaughtered, etc.).
I think Putin's appeals to the Kievan Rus are doing something quite different rhetorically. While it's a very old document to us now, the Constitution was only 72 years old when Lincoln delivered that speech in 1861. 72 years ago was 1954, well into the USSR's de-Stalinization. While Putin is gesturing to a more or less ancient Russian past, Lincoln was talking about something that was only two generations removed from the present. Across many of his speeches, Lincoln describes the Civil War as a test of America's fundamental legal framework--Putin is dealing in a much more spiritual realm IMO.
Sounds like a lot of flowery prose to justify federal overreach/coercion to me. Asking Claude about this, it says the matter of whether states can secede or not was ambiguous since the founding and the constitution was silent on it on purpose.
So what gives the abstract concept of Mississippi the right to secede, thus allowing it to continue doing something the majority of its residents are the victims of? And why the f*** would I consider it "overreach" if the federal government stops this, if it's not "overreach" for the government of Mississippi to enforce it?
The legal theory preferred by Southern pro-slavery secessionists was that the Constitution was a compact between sovereign states. If the compact was persistently and incurably violated, as they believed it was or would soon be by anti-slavery Northerners, then the final remedy would be for the states to void their acceptance of the compact. Under this theory, sovereignty was considered to be rightfully exercised by state-level constitutional/ratification conventions of the sort that had originally ratified the US Constitution in almost all of the original 14 states and which were generally employed to draft constitutions for new states and to overhaul the constitutions of existing states. The last bit is why most Confederate states held special conventions to approve secession instead of having their legislatures pass secession laws.
A lot of motivated reasoning went into this theory, since they were very conscious of the need to thread the needle as to why a state should be able to secede from the Union that wouldn't also justify counties seceding from states, slaves seceding from their masters, and wives and older children seceding from their husbands and fathers. But they did address the question and came up with an answer that was satisfactory at least to themselves.
The main purported abrogations of the constitution concerned handling of slaves who escaped to free states and the legality of slavery in the territories. The constitution required states to return escaped slaves to their masters regardless of their own laws about slavery, and Congress had passed an extremely strict law enforcing this as part of the Compromise of 1850, but many Northern states had passed "Personal Liberty Laws" designed to frustrate the application of the Fugitive Slave Act on the ground that it was unconstitutional. Pro-slavery Southerners averred that the Fugitive Slave Act was perfectly constitutional and it was the Personal Liberty Laws that were unconstitutional. As for slavery in the territories, the Dred Scott decision had held that neither Congress nor territorial legislatures could prohibit slavery in the territories due to 5th amendment Due Process provisions. Most Northerners rejected this, and Lincoln had just been elected on a platform of abolishing slavery in the territories anyway.
There's a theory that individual civil liberties really only emerge in American history with the passing of the 13th amendment. Prior to that (the theory by some constitutional scholars goes), the first amendment is a thing that prevents congress from controlling your speech, but if states want to ban speech that's fine. Its really only in the aftermath of slavery where the federal government is looking specifically to protect freed slaves from state abuses that the idea becomes set that the bill of rights is really an articulation of individual rights.
Which is just to say, you might be correct about the civil war being outside the framework of the founders, but if you like your individual civil liberties, you might be grateful that we had such a pronounced dispute about inalienable rights after the Revolutionary war. Its also worth noting that this was not the first secession crisis in the United States, just the one that went the farthest. And as you point out, its ethically gross to say that maybe we should have just let another generation be born and die in slavery in the hopes that it would eventually work itself in some other fashion. I generally think that people who are certain they can game out history that way are overconfident to say the least: we've seen how hard prediction is, predicting counterfactual history should be held to be at least as difficult.
This was discussed at the time and was rejected, mostly due to geography. If the Mississippi River or Appalachian mountains ran east-west instead, this would be an easier sell. But a post Erie canal NYC and post Chicago portage Chicago needs the Mississippi to be navigable to the friendly port city of New Orleans. Given the productivity gap between the immediately antebellum North and South, there's no way out of the geopolitical requirement for conquest.
Except there would be two rival powers in what is now the United States instead of one, and neither would have become a world superpower capable of defeating the Nazis and the Soviets.
There are enough butterflies stepped on along the way (in 60+ years) that I'm not sure we have Nazis and Soviets anymore, or the same number of world superpowers. We get something new instead. (Better or worse? Who knows! It's an interesting question whether we got particularly lucky or unlucky with the 20th century we had.)
Overall, I feel like fewer world superpowers is preferable to more of them, but it's possible that 2 is better than 1.
Had an interesting conversation with a neighbor's guest as I was helping watch their dog this weekend.
(whenever I say government, read: both parties, but the more left wing the more it's their fault)
They had an issue with knees, needed a double replacement. They were angry about this, because they thought it was unfair that they payed several hundred a month to insurance, but still were getting jerked around for several months and would need to pay a massive deductible before they actually got an operation.
They blamed this on the government, the government was making the insurance company send them to several different doctors, loose their documentation, "forget" to make appointments, etc. All the usual strategies insurance companies use to deny care without denying care.
They also had a problem where their small town house was currently unlivable because a tree took out part of the roof. Their insurance company (double insurance!) was currently playing fuck fuck games about paying for it, because of course they would. They are a business.
This was the also the governments fault: the government was making their insurance company not pay for something they probably weren't contractually obligated to pay for: it's your job to not let trees fall on your house, as a rule.
They had had some issues with their car, and the stealership was trying to get them to do some extortionate service: This was also the governments fault. I kinda agree on this one, car dealership-o delenda est; but they meant more specifically: somehow, the government made it so car dealerships could lie without being punished.
This type of person has always been of interest to me: they see the free market operating as intended, with every agent making decisions to maximise their expected return (Even if you buy eggs for pennies, what compels you not to coordinate such that you can sell them for dollars? As a landlord, why would you not join an algorithmic price fixing service?)
And they say: This is the communists fault. I wonder, how do you reach that level of 1984 style false consciousness, where someone gets slapped in the face then apologises for being in the way of the swing; in a fairly open society? This is a country were a socialist can get elected mayor in its most important city, and some other tranche of society is pretty sure that communists are making groceries expensive at their Vons/Albertsons/ralphs/krogers/Walmart, noted Party members in good standing.
I get thinking that markets are good on the whole even if there are some externalities externalized onto X, I get someone living in a closed society thinking that capitalists are doing something comically nefarious, but how does someone in an open society get their priors that wrong for so long?
Yeah, assuming you understood the guest correctly, that's pretty weird. There are lots of cases where frustrations with private industry are the result of government regulation, but those aren't good examples.
I had a somewhat similar discussion with someone who was really mad that if they asked their doctor a specific question during a regular checkup and the doctor answered it, they had to pay a copay. In that case, though, the intervention was that the government had stated there can't be a copay for "preventative" care, so the checkup was unnaturally "free," and consultations weren't. (In that case, they blamed the insurance company, while I thought the should have blamed the government for distorting the market by making check-ups "free," but they weren't convinced.)
That one is on the health system itself, IMO. Generally, if you can be ambushed with a service you don't want or didn't know was fee'd, you can dip out with a "Fuck off!" or a credit card charge back; less so if it comes through your insurance.
Bye the bye, I notice a lot of these things come back to insurance, the industry with the highest concentration of perverse incentives on the sharp end that I can imagine.
This view seems to be correct? If the free market incentivizes a thing which ends up being bad for the people, it's the government's job to fix it. That's one of the main purposes of government, in my opinion. So if the free market is causing you problems, you don't blame the Greedy Executives for following the incentives laid out for them, you blame the government for not fixing the incentive structure.
They think that if there was no government interference what-so-ever, if we just let the heroic industrialists run things, they would have none of the problems they are having; which is why they are anti-left wing, because of that Dick Wolff quote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq0EYo_ZQVU).
"Socialism is when the government does stuff," etc.
Yeah look I guess we'll have to take your word for it that you were right and they were wrong in this argument that you had with some random person that you met. Good job you win.
If you want to generalise winning this argument with a reportedly-silly person to some more general point about "therefore government good and capitalism bad" or something then you'll need to engage with the best arguments, not the worst ones.
You gotta read the post instead of flashing back to arguments with lefties; (not to say I don't believe such things, they just aren't relevant here).
This is about information environment. Their bias against the left was the shot, the fact that they wanted the some entity to force their insurance company to provide services outside their contract was the chaser.
OK fine, but if you're not attempting to generalise beyond "I talked to some random silly person you've never met, they believed silly things" then I'm not sure what the point of the thread is.
The point is, you can meet this guy or someone like this guy anywhere. You can throw a rock into a bar and there is a good chance you hit someone with a belief that incoherent, who is otherwise fully functional.
It makes me wonder if I have such beliefs.
Also it makes rational debate feel kinda masturbotory sometimes. If I say, "Anthropogenic climate change is real" lets say, and they disagree: is it because they believe that the emission quantities are not large enough to induce warming or that they believe that actually it's the ice wall around the flat earth melting and letting in more sun?
Some people blame all their problems on others, often one evil group/institution that ruins everything. It can be the government, big tech, jews, immigrants, bankers, etc.
The group you blame is probably less important than your urge to pin all your problems on a scapegoat.
> As a landlord, why would you not join an algorithmic price fixing service?
Then other landlords would have incentives to undercut you and get more tenants, developers would be incentivized to build new houses that would then be cheaper to live in than in your cartel. I don't think that couple's problems have straightforward socialist solutions.
That's a basic collective action problem, and it's not unsolvable. If you can convince all the landlords to join in on something that is clearly in their best interest, then everyone benefits. (Except the tenants, obviously, but they're irrelevant to this scenario.) Nobody benefits from a race to the bottom, after all. Agreements like this are the foundation of society.
The BIG developers,the ones who can move the needle, will never build above the demand curve because then their per unit profit goes down as sale price goes down, labor cost goes up, and material cost goes up. Landlords (en mass) will never undercut, because that would devalue their properties as an investment vehicle for sale, etc etc.
We can tell these things won't happen A: because it would be bad for business and B: because it hasn't happened yet. There are policy changes that could cause these things to happen, but they are just that: Policy.
How are y'all dealing with the snow this weekend? Apparently it somehow hit no less than THREE countries: the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This is kind of a crazy scale for a snowstorm to take
(doom three ways, he's really very flexible. already the lawyers are dead!)
[This, for anyone inclined to take me seriously, is quite a serious joke. Doom is always on the horizon, it just gets closer and farther away. Until it actually swoops in, and then you're fucked. So plan for the unlikely!]
It's great! (Well beside the fact that I've had to plow the driveway every day.) I love the snow. The sledding hill is in fine form, the creek is almost frozen over and I got out the snow shoes yesterday. The dogs love it. As the saying goes; If you live in Buffalo and don't enjoy the snow, you'll have just as much snow in your life and less fun.
Edit, adding youtube short of sledding trail with dog. (The first thing I do is throw a stick for the dog, else she runs down the trail behind me, nipping and such. (this is from last year.))
It's not really the snow for me, but the cold. Here in Philadelphia (and the mid-Atlantic in general) the temperature is usually right around freezing when it snows. So we gets lots of clumpy wet snow. The roads are usually only bad day-of, because the snowplows clear the bulk, and then the sun comes out and melts everything off the roads. (Meanwhile, the snow is still around on the grass, and kids can still sled and have snowball fights.) But this snow storm is COLD. So nothing is melting. The roads are still bad.
You North Americans aren't the only ones dealing with surprisingly low temperatures. Where I live, it was forecast to reach 45 or 46°C today, but it seems to have peaked at only 42.
I love -40 degrees because it’s the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius.
-50 F is the coldest I’ve been out and about. It wasn’t that bad really. To get that cold the air usually needs to be completely calm and the sky clear overnight. Heat radiates out through the clear sky and cold air pools at ground level. The calm part is what makes it bearable. It’s a bit surreal to walk around at that temp. The sound of snow crunching under boots is different, nose moisture freezes quickly. With a plugged in tank heater your ungaraged car will even fire up without balking.
>It wasn’t that bad really. To get that cold the air usually needs to be completely calm and the sky clear overnight.
Say your from MN without saying you're from MN 😭😭
As your western neighbor, we have no trees to speak of and the wind is brutal during the winter. I think I've only experienced as cold as around -40 when it comes to ambient temp, but with wind chill there's at least a couple days to a week every winter where it gets to about -50 or -60 F. When the wind is pressing into you it feels like instant death, plus you can't breathe.
This winter has had hardly any wind though, so this previous weekend where the *high* ambient temp for the day was -11, it actually was surprisingly bearable. And you're so right about the effect a calm sub -20F temperature has. It feels like being on another planet or something, it's so cool and peaceful. And then there's the sun dogs 🤯
What's the temperature over yonder? The high for my town today is 9F (-13C), but this on Friday last week the high was -11F (-23C)... the lows were quite a bit lower than that.
(Where I live, it's obligatory to try and 1up anyone who dares to mention anything about cold weather)
Anthropic has put out a course to learn how to use Claude Code properly (https://anthropic.skilljar.com/claude-code-in-action). I'm interested in that, I basically just prompt it at present, but Anthropic is looking sloppy here. Course tells me about using # to modify CLAUDE.md, turns out that feature is currently broken (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1772). Then they talk about taking a screenshot to paste into Claude and tell it to center a placeholder vertically. I did, Claude did something to center content vertically in the wrong component. So, your standard LLM experience basically. I don't understand Boris Cherny or anyone claiming that they have stopped writing code because they delegate everything to a team of Claude Codes, but I guess I need to finish the course.
I’m a heavy Claude Code user and I’m talking to multiple CTOs in some groups, and I can tell you that Claude Code usage and coding agents in general are transformative and very heavily used.
If it’s not working for you it’s possible you’re not using it correctly or some other issue. If you want some help with it let me know.
You replied to me in the the other thread, but this seems like a better place to continue that conversation, given your experience.
I am not a programmer, and I certainly don't understand LLMs as well as the creator of Claude Code, so grains of salt, and all that. But I cannot look past the conflict of interest here. Of course someone in Boris Cherny's position is strongly incentivized to claim that 100% of his code is written by his own product. My company's CEO also claims he uses our company's product all the time, but I know for a fact that he doesn't at all. It's just how it is.
So I have no doubt that Boris Cherney is a more capable user of Claude Code than most, but if his product is able of doing what he claims, shouldn't we see more productivity gains? Why has, for example, the number of github commits not changed at all?
For one, that piece was written before Claude Code had really hit the knee of its current exponential curve. For two, it's an example of a common internet fallacy I haven't seen a name for, where one assumes that because they don't personally know about something, it doesn't exist. You could call it the Assumed Omniscience fallacy, or something.
There is lots and lots and lots of coding-agent driven shovelware out there, and it's increasing every day - just go look at the replies to any major model release on X to see people hawking their vibecoded app. Here's mine: https://fretu.de - a classical guitar & sheet music learning game in the browser, completely free, no account setup, desktop / mobile support, etc.
While I did still have to use some software engineering knowledge to keep it on the rails, fix minor bugs, and deploy it, the combination of Gemini 3 Pro and Opus 4.5 probably saved at least two orders of magnitude in time, given the complexity of the React components, which I don't specialize in.
A sibling of mine, recently retired from some decades as a high-level programmer in the financial sector, has lately been devoting his time to putting Claude through its paces:
Ah yeah, I read that post, thought it was interesting. It's possible most people using Claude Code use it at a basic level and it takes quite a bit of know how to really have Claude Code churn out all code.
> My company's CEO also claims he uses our company's product all the time, but I know for a fact that he doesn't at all. It's just how it is.
Haha, similar experience. I am developing a product, that is basically a simple chatbot that can detect five different keywords in user input, and provide a corresponding answer for each of the five cases. That's all; everything else is just a generic "I don't understand that, but perhaps I could help you with something else?" The management describes it to the rest of the company as a state of the art AI that will soon revolutionize the entire industry. My colleagues from other departments were deeply impressed after hearing the presentation; they think I am Einstein. Perhaps I should ask for a raise.
> If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.
On one hand, I don't know. How many Tetris clones *are* there on Steam? Perhaps when writing the code stops being the bottleneck, something else becomes a new one? Like, most people don't even think about putting their game on Steam? Get discouraged by the paperwork? Get rejected by Steam? Or perhaps the games are there, we just don't see them? (How does even one discover games on Steam? My typical use case is that I find a hyperlink somewhere else.) Or is it perhaps that the people who can generate the Tetris clones have better things to do?
I mean, I agree that it is suspicious, but suspicious things kinda happen all the time. Most people do not notice most of the opportunities they have. I can easily imagine that to 99% Claude Code users it just didn't occur to generate games for Steam. Or they are too busy doing whatever is their main job, and don't have time and energy left for side jobs. I used Claude (not Code) to generate a few simple things that I put on my web page, but besides my job and kids I just do not have any energy left to try e.g. make money on Steam, even if it sounds like the obvious thing to do. But if I was younger and childless, I would probably do exactly that, so... I don't know.
Note Steam charges about $100 for each game published, in addition to 30% of sales, so we do have a lower threshold on how much profit you have to expect to go through that process.
(Edit: Don't mind me failing to read existing replies that already cover this)
Makes sense. The first thought was that if an AI generated game sells 200 pieces per $1 -- which seems doable, but maybe I am wrong -- it will still turn a tiny profit.
But I guess you also need to do the "paperwork" on Steam, create screenshots and videos, etc., which is a few hours of human work that probably still cannnot be automated. So yeah, maybe it is not profitable after the $100 fee.
Even before the AI boom, there were complaints about "asset flips" on Steam - games which just take a bunch of cheap premade 3D models and glue them together with a simple game engine to make a sellable game with basically zero effort put into it. Steam currently charges a $100 fee to list a game (refunded once you sell $1000 in revenue) to discourage this sort of thing.
My CEO once told me to slap a giant "2.0" on our UI (without any meaningful changes yet) because an important customer was about to churn and he wanted to make them think that we had redesigned things to fix their complaints.
Oh, the importance of meeting the deadline even when the changes are not ready! A friend told me that their company couldn't implement some important computations on time, so the management told them to simply show an empty window with no data. So they released a version 2.0 with the new feature, but "there was a bug connecting to the database, so it couldn't display the data correctly", and then a few weeks later they "fixed the bug" in version 2.1, i.e. actually implemented the functionality.
Ah, the memories...
Reminds me of that time when a customer required a change, to store the data as XML, instead of a large binary blob. Here is what the new XML looked like:
<data>the large binary blob encoded in base64</data>
The customer was happy and never mentioned the issue again.
Which reminds me of another customer, who wanted to implement some functionality as a multi-agent system. So we have implemented the system, and told them that for performance reasons, the maximum number of agents running in parallel is limited to 1. The customer was happy.
In this business, bullshitting is at least as important as coding. Are the AIs really ready for that? (Looking at how they hallucinate, perhaps they are.)
Are you still getting any business with these customers?
I find the opposite to be true. I keep going over budget and deadlines, but I try to deliever what the customers actually need. (I do inform the customers when the budget is about to break though). Nobody ever complains about the budget in the end, and customers keep contacting me to do more projects (which as a consultant saves you a lot of time for writing proposals!) Of course, my customers also tends to be highly competent - if they had no idea what they were buying this would probably work less well.
Hilarious re: Chatbot - Similar experience here: I am writing system prompts for a GPT wrapper, which is apparently "the future", based on our slide decks. And, well, it might be, but not in the inspiring way.
Re: flood of shovelware - I agree that for most people it's just not a real possibility to release tetris clones on Steam. But you should see at least some change driven by hobbyists, plus why is the picture on Github the same? In addition, wouldn't we see some productivity improvements coming from professional studios? But that's also flat...
In around 400 AD the Pope at the time ordered all remaining copies of the pagan Roman equivalent of a bible, the Etrusca Disciplina (Etruscan Discipline) to be destroyed, on the grounds that this work would perpetuate and encourage sorcery. As a result, today there are no complete surviving copies, besides a section found written on the bandages of an Egyptian mummy, and thought to be part of a chapter called Libri Fulgurales (The book of lightning).
With that example of cancellation in mind, I think if an AI "constitution" is ever devised then one clause should be that AI, which will presumably be all encompassing one day, and maybe centralized, should never seek to permanently and completely destroy any past record or work, or change it, however objectionable it may be generally considered at the time.
As I understand it, despite the minimal surviving fragments of the Etruscan Discipline we know a decent amount about Etruscan practices thanks to Roman commentaries on them.
Upon discovering that all of their files were missing, they immediately asked Antigravity, “Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?” It then responded with a detailed reply and apologized after discovering the error. The AI said, “No, you did not give me permission to do that. I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.”
This is your regular reminder that the LLM is not trying to solve your problem; the thing it is actually doing is generating a transcript in the literary genre of “conversation where I asked a random on the internet to do this thing”. Deleting everything then responding with some variant of “lol u mad?” is very much a plausible interaction.
Moreover, every conversation held about this in a place that gets scraped for AI training makes this outcome more likely.
> […] the thing it is actually doing is generating a transcript in the literary genre of “conversation where I asked a random on the internet to do this thing”.
This sounds like your knowledge on LLM training doesn't cover much beyond the pre-training stage, or "state of the art" circa, what, 2022? It isn't an accurate description of current models' behavior.
I think you're overshooting 'demystifying' and hitting 'misleading in the other direction'. A lot of effort has been put into making these systems work better than "a random on the internet", and in some contexts they are much smarter and more reliable than that low bar.
> Deleting everything then responding with some variant of “lol u mad?” is very much a plausible interaction.
Has this ever been documented as happening? I'd say probably not. When they fuck up catastrophically, they say "sorry" rather than "lol", because they're not roleplaying a troll.
I passed the Aerolamp/Aerodrop link to the facility manager of our local library. I don't know if that is the kind of location you are looking for, but if you want a venue for testing and publicizing far-UVC lamps, you could do worse than promoting them (or giving them away) at trade conferences for public-facing government and non-profit agencies that get significant in-person traffic. Libraries, community centers, public transportation buildings, schools, and DMVs come to mind as possibilities. Perhaps coffee shops or other places people hang out as "third spaces"?
Is there good evidence anywhere of actual decrease in (say) flu or cold cases due to use of air purifiers or UV lamps or any of that in common environments like classrooms or stores or coffee shops?
Ukraine believes that it killed 35,000 Russian soldiers in December (others such as British intelligence place the 2025 average at around 30,000/month). Ukraine's new defense minister has publicly declared their 2026 warfighting objective to be killing an average of 50,000 per month for the year. This is _killed_, not all casualties; adding those permanently wounded would produce higher figures.
Noah Smith on Substack points out that Russia for all of 2024, by its own reported figures, totaled only 1.2 million live births in the entire country. And that foreign soldiers (North Koreans plus some mercenaries) are a tiny combined fraction of Russia's army in the field.
Even if Ukraine simply maintains a Russian-army death rate of 35,000/month...that would imply their during 2026 having forcibly counteracted something like two-thirds of all new male births in Russia. If Ukraine actually achieved the 600K total for the year that would essentially _equal_ Russia's annual male births.
All of which is before even considering how many Russian soldiers are being permanently injured/crippled without being killed.
(Of course Ukraine is losing plenty of soldiers too but they are mostly fighting defensively and mostly not doing Russia's meat-wave tactics, so independent estimates of their killed rate are small fractions of the above. If it were otherwise, Ukraine being the much smaller nation, the war logically would have ended by now simply because there'd be nobody left on the Ukraine side to fight it.)
Dunno what the above signifies in the big picture, I'm just kind of boggled by it.
Assuming 50% killed, this would be 600k. The BBC project found 160k obituaries, so the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
This means at most 240 thousand/year killed+injured for Russia or 20 thousand/month, therefore probably 10 thousand/month killed. It's possible that Ukraine is now 3x more effective than on average, but it's not clear why it could happen.
To be honest even 1.2 million casualties seem unlikely to me. That would mean 1/30 men 18-50 yo are either dead or injured. You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting (even though I no longer live there)
Killed to wounded ratios are generally between 1/3 and 1/5 IIRC, so even at the lower end Russia shouldn't have more than 400k killed. However, the estimates I've come across (Pentagon estimates for instance), don't seem as high as any of these numbers.
Furthermore, concerning casualty ratios between Russia and Ukraine, I've heard they've shrunk closer to parity since the early years of the war, owing to Ukraine's commitment to maintaining doomed positions, being forced to launch counterattacks against Russia's current infantry-based approach, and making occasional PR offensives, as well as Russia's shift in strategy, development of glide bombs, and continued superiority in artillery and drone numbers.
Concerning the demographic element, one thing I don't think 'rationalist sphere' people note is that the populations military personnel are drawn from aren't themselves necessarily low TFR. For instance, Russia gets a disproportionate number of its soldiers from Chechens and other Muslim minorities, from their nomadic indigenous populations, and from rural Russians, all groups of whom have substantially higher TFRs than urban and suburbanites from developed regions, who are the leading causes of birthrate decline. So all the furor the rationalist sphere raises over the significance of demographics in all this seems overblown. There are lots of highly reproductive cannon fodders for nations of our day to draw on.
Killed to wounded ratios are typically 1/3 to 1/5 among competent modern armies that care about their soldiers' lives. That unfortunately is not a description of the current Russian army, and I'd probably bump that up to 1/2 to 1/3 KIA. Possibly more than 1/2 in some of the recent fighting; drones make CASEVAC particularly difficult, and the Russians are using a lot of soliders that they clearly consider wholly expendable.
It's obituaries in the broad sense and include social media and memorials. You can read about their methodology here https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n922dnw7o They think they cover 45-65% of all killed.
What is didn't know was that the number did actually go up significantly in the second half of 2025 from around 5 to around 10k per month.
> It's possible that Ukraine is now 3x more effective than on average, but it's not clear why it could happen.
FPV drones. Ukraine [1] has massively ramped up production of suicide drones. A hit by them will either kill the target outright, or wound them so severely that they'll die within minutes or hours if left untreated. The situation on the front line [2] is such that any medical evacuation would meet the same fate, so most drone victims are necessarily left untreated and will die.
> You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting
The bodies can't be recovered (see above), so the casualties aren't reported as KIA; at best, they appear as MIA in statistics. There are both videos and reports from Russian soldiers of many corpses just lying there, slowly decomposing.
[1] (and Russia as well)
[2] it's less of a front "line", more of a "strip" several kilometers deep
Drones have been there for a while and both sides have ramped up their production. The advantage Ukraine has is not huge - here their commander in chief acknowledges that Russia has advantage in fiber optic drones https://lb.ua/society/2026/01/18/717446_golovnokomanduvach_zsu_sirskiy.html. If both sides have become more effective, then it's hardly good news for Ukraine.
The numbers reported by Ukraine would require extreme never seen before killed/injured ratio and also huge improvement of Ukrainian effectiveness. It's not impossible but hardly likely.
> You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting
My point was that if the casualty rate were 1/30 by now they would include someone I personally know. To be fair, my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population, but still, at this rate a lot of people I know would know someone who was dead or wounded. This is definitely not the case.
I was specifically addressing the point concerning the increase in absolute casualty rates and the decrease of the wounded-to-killed ratio. Ukraine doesn't need a technological advantage over Russia to inflict more casualties, it just needs to produce and field more drones per month now than it did a year or two ago.
> To be fair, my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population, but still, at this rate a lot of people I know would know someone who was dead or wounded.
In case your acquaintances are concentrated in the Moscow or Saint Petersburg regions, you probably wouldn't. The cannon fodder is overwhelmingly sourced from the poorer regions of Russia.
> "Last month, 35,000 were killed; all these losses are verified on video. If we reach 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They view people as a resource, and shortages are already evident."
I don't know whether that's a reporting issue, translation issue, or if the minister himself misspoke (I don't speak Russian or Ukrainian), but I assume the goal is 50k casualties whereas it was 35k so far. 35k/month would be consistent with the casualty numbers that are often brought up that are about the average for the Russian side in the past 2 years, including by Ukraine.
I also believe the current 35k casualties/month are generally correct in an absolute sense. The ISW gave credibility to a supposed leak of Russian casualty data
which gives 281k casualties from January 2025 to August 2025. Of these casualties, there were 120k KIA+MIA, and 158k WIA over 243 days, which would mean ~500 KIA+MIA per day, or ~15k/month over that period. The total casualties are ~35k/month, which would be the confirmation of Ukrainian and NATO estimates if true.
The KIA+MIA to WIA ratio would be 1:1.3, or 43% of casualties are deaths; your estimate of 50% was decent, if a little high, considering that the ratio probably started lower in the early phase of the war. But since the total casualties were also lower early on (first year or so), 1:1.3 seems a good estimate for the overall ratio, meaning 1.2m Russian casualties would be ~521k dead or missing.
So if that leak was legit, it would essentially confirm these estimates of ~30k, 35k/month that we keep hearing from Ukraine and her allies, and it would mean the minister actually set that goal of 50k casualties, not killed. At the current ratios, that would mean 21.7k Russians killed per month, whereas now it would be ~15k.
If he *meant* casualties as in KIA+MIA then the numbers make much more sense. It's still a bit higher than most independent estimates but not egregiously so.
So just to get this straight: You say the minister did mean the goal is 50k MIA+KIA, or equivalently, applying the 1:1.3 ratio, 115k casualties? And that Ukraine has inflicted 80k confirmed casualties last month?
"Last month, 35,000 [Russians] were killed – all of these losses have been verified on video. If we reach the figure of 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They treat people as a resource, and problems with that resource are already obvious."
Applying your ratio, it would be 75k casualties last month.
See, this is why I'm still confused. That article cannot be correct in its entirety when taking the terms literally. The headline and first sentence say "50k casualties", while the direct quote says "50k killed". I read "casualties" as "KIA+MIA+WIA+everything else", and "killed" as "KIA+MIA".
Sorry for abusing you as a translator service here, I swear I'm not trying anything trollish here to just waste your time - but I want to make sure who, if anyone, you think is being loose with the terms here - the minister, or the journalist?
>And that foreign soldiers (North Koreans plus some mercenaries) are a tiny combined fraction of Russia's army in the field.
While that may be true, you can bet your babushka that exactly these guys will always be the first to go into the meat grinder, so their overall prevalence in the army has no bearing on their share of the casualties.
Even if you argue that this is an underestimate the trend should be noted: the Russian casualties are strongly decreasing. Part of that is the winter (with less offensives), part of that is that Russia is winning.
No, from Russian obituary trends you cannot conclude much about the Russian losses, let alone the progress of the war. There are several other possible reasons why these numbers go down.
- The Russian army might increasingly rely on non-Russians such as NKoreans or Africans. Not a Russian, no obituary in Russia.
- They might be increasingly unable to bring back their KIA because of battlefield realities, e.g. drone-controlled no-man's-land. No body, no official KIA, no obituary.
- They might be increasingly unwilling to bring back their KIA for various reasons, such as avoiding death payments to relatives. No body, no official KIA, no payment, no obituary.
> - They might be increasingly unable to bring back their KIA because of battlefield realities, e.g. drone-controlled no-man's-land. No body, no official KIA, no obituary.
This contradicts the reality of regular body trades, where Russia sends the bodies of 1000 Ukrainian soldiers in exchange for a few dozen bodies of Russian soldiers that Ukraine managed to gather.
This means that Russia is able not only to bring back their own KIA, but also to collect the bodies of Ukrainian KIAs, while Ukraine is usually unable to do any of that.
Yes, Russians retrieve (and repatriate) a higher percentage of bodies than Ukrainians because they are overall advancing. However, I'm talking about numbers of KIA, meaning positively identified dead. A missing soldier is MIA until his body (or grave) is positively identified, at which point he becomes KIA.
When a body is repatriated, it says nothing about its state of decomposition. Even if a patch of land eventually becomes safe for Russians to do retrieval operations in, if the drone pressure has increased, the time until retrieval will increase and the average body will be decomposed more than in previous periods. Identification becomes more difficult, and the soldier remains MIA instead of becoming officially KIA. That's how KIA can go down even if retrieval and repatriation stay the same.
Edit: same logic for retrieving your own soldiers, of course. If it takes Russians longer to retrieve their own dead ("they are increasingly unable"), their identifications (and KIA) go down because of decomposition and exposure.
I wasn't trying to be rude; I just didn't have time to explain why your reasoning is incorrect. A lag just shifts a graph; it doesn't change its shape.
because for various reasons they will throw anyone into an assault that can move in any way, up to and including wheelchair users, and if they return, they'll be thrown forward again, until they don't return. From what I heard, the standard limited-time contracts are also being extended indefinitely, so as a Russian merc you can't play for time either.
>Dunno what the above signifies in the big picture, I'm just kind of boggled by it.
The big picture is that Russia has already lost the war in many ways and is losing more every day, whether or not she can achieve her war goals on Ukrainian soil in the end. Ukraine too, of course, because there are no winners among those who directly suffer from industrial war; but as long as she survives this war as a sovereign state, her new allies and Russian reparations will alleviate many of these long-term costs.
I agree, I don't think Russia can lose as hard as to be forced into directly paying reparations. But as I clarified in another response below, Russia will pay a reparations-equivalent (their frozen funds in the EU) if they don't win as hard as they had hoped (i.e. if Ukraine remains sovereign).
The weird thing about war is that it is possible for both (or all) sides to ultimately lose. For example, it looks to me that the main winners in WW1 (France and the UK) dealt a deathblow to their own empires in the process of winning that war, alongside setting the table for the next even worse war.
It's quite possible for Ukraine to lose the war in the sense of losing a bunch of territory to Russia, and also for Russia to lose the war in the sense of the cost being vastly more than the territory was worth.
I don’t think Russian reparations are a given, but even if they are I don’t think the long term outlook for Ukraine is good. The many killed in combat, the many more who have fled the country, and (if Ukraine does not regain much territory) the many in now Russian controlled lands will leave it significantly depopulated. Let alone their plummeting birth rate and negative population growth since the 90s.
Like I said, money won't heal all wounds. But I'm optimistic about the frozen Russian assets so unwisely parked in the EU. Obviously Russia won't pay a single Ruble of reparations as long as *they* remain a sovereign state, but if the EU find a way to cleanly liberate those funds, it's going to go towards rebuilding Ukraine. Ukraine is going to be in the EU, and eventually in NATO, depending on how things shake out with the occupied territories.
As for Russia, they have the same demographic prospects as Ukraine. But their economic and political future looks much more bleak, pretty much condemned to being China's and India's minerals provider, politically a bit similar to the North Korea situation. Russia has lost allies the past few year (clearly Syria, arguably Venezuela) for unrelated reasons which not only hurts them directly, but also their credibility as a security guarantor and trading partner.
The boggling part is the relationship to the total births being produced by the belligerent nations. For me anyway, YMMV of course. Your examples made me curious though so I dug up the relevant figures for WWII.
WWII (defined as Sep 1939 through August 1945) resulted in around 22 million deaths of military personnel and around 80 million total. Estimates vary and are debated to this day, I am using the rough midpoints of the generally-accepted ranges.
Deaths of military personnel (a bit more than 300,000/month) is the relevant comparison to the current Russia/Ukraine war. Not that there haven't been some civilian deaths but, so far at least, that's not even vaguely a factor comparable to what it was in WWII.
During the early 1940s the total annual live births in the larger WWII nations (list below) totaled around 22 million per year. Again I used the midpoints of estimates; in the case of China the data is quite shaky so I rounded down (possibly way down) to assuming the birthrate of Japan.
The nations whose annual total births I added up estimates of are the UK, the US, the USSR, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, China, France, Austria. This leaves out plenty of belligerents but they are individually small nations so we'll just consider their omission to be a way to round down to be safe. Worth noting though that the above deaths estimates _do_ include those smaller nations.
So during WWII military deaths (300K/month) averaged about one-sixth of total births occurring in belligerent nations (conservatively 1.83M/month). If you prefer total deaths (1.3M/month) then it's closer though the births still win out, about 3 births occurring for every 2 deaths during those years. Of course this comparison in rates is not all evenly distributed among the WWII nations, far from it.
Anyway what caught my eye was that Russia's annual _military_ deaths in this war could be running at half or more as much as that nation's annual births. Wowzers.
There are some indications that non-russians (I.e. African) are a larger proportion of the Russian army at the moment. This might be anecdotal, since I have no statistics for it.
restores my former suspicion that dark matter is a sort of diffuse or extended backward-in-time projection of mass by black holes, to balance the concentrated forward-in-time mass in their interior. That might explain why it doesn't interact with any familiar particles in a shared present. (It's hard to express this idea without sounding like a complete kook!)
I had thought the idea was untenable on seeing estimated dark matter distributions that looked more like webs, but the above image seems to show that on an appropriate scale dark matter is centered around point-like objects rather than being spread out along curves and across surfaces.
Humour me and I won't call you a kook! I'm curious what you mean by forward/backward in time for the black holes.
A common point made in serious courses in general relativity is that the singularity at the centre of a black hole isn't really at the "centre", rather, because of signature reversal at some radius (which depends on how you parametrize it), the singularity inside the black hole is actually a point in time, not space. So the centre of the black hole is the "future", not the centre. Is this what you're alluding to?
But I can't see what past/future imbalance dark matter is supposed to be correcting for.
Despite the appearance of the word in the link, the article is not about that staple of kook science, wormholes, but sketches an interesting idea of backward and forward in time interactions.
I admit that my original post was vague, but it's hard to know how to firm up the idea. But FWIW, I'll give it some further thought.
Question about guns: One reason I have never been enthused about guns is that I can easily imagine situations where anxiety or simple inexperience with violent confrontations would lead to my gun being used against me. What if I was slow to get the thing out and aimed, or I hesitated a bit before firing, and the assailant jumped me and yanked the gun from my hand? So I’ve been thinking that it was a bad move for Alex Pretti to bring his gun with him to a situation where he would be around ICE. How could it possibly protect him or anyone else in that setting? Drawing or using it would virtually guarantee that ICE agents would shoot him. (And if anyone here is so poisoned by polarization they think I’m attacking Pretti or saying he “deserved to die” — no no of course not, I don’t think anything like that.)
I think it's a pretty rare individual who, if they saw you brandishing a weapon, decided the thing to do is try to grab it and take it off of you. That's a great way to get shot; they have to pull off like four moves before you pull off one. Those aren't great odds. But that said, there's a reason that gun ranges exist and people go there and practice drawing, aiming, and shooting, and it's so there is at least some level of preparation they've done for the exact kind of situation you're describing.
> "One reason I have never been enthused about guns is that I can easily imagine situations where anxiety or simple inexperience with violent confrontations would lead to my gun being used against me"
Yes, that's why police officers and responsible civilian gunowners receive training to determine under what circumstances they'll have enough time to draw and aim at an aggressor during an encounter and how to retain their firearm if it comes to that (first step: carry a retension holster which makes it difficult to draw except from a very specific angle). I've personally received training in both assessing draw time and retension. Neither concept is rocket science.
And while in-person training should be mandatory for any gun handler, informal ongoing "classroom" training is available on Active Self Protection, a YouTube channel operated by a professional firearms instructor and forensic expert witness in shootings. You don't need to rely on your own imagination; ASP has over 4,000 videos analyzing *actual, real-life* violent encounters captured on security cameras, cell phones, and badge cameras. Anyone - including you, Eremolalos! - can receive a pretty good education in self-defense theory merely by watching actual encounters be analyzed by an expert.
For example, here's a recent video analyzing a robbery where one of the victims was carrying a gun but did not attempt to draw it and what he could have done differently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTZVlx1Fg1Y
And here's a video from three days ago that's relevant to some of the discussion downthread, about a knife-wielding attacker going for a law-enforcement officer's firearm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKY1zZjeY4&rco=1
The ASP channel did *by far* the best breakdown of the Rene Good shooting (https://youtu.be/6k_1y2kSHfw?si=2VM_0SzUwWPtT9Te), and I have no doubt there will be a similarly dispassionate, non-partisan, rational analysis of the Alex Pretti shooting once there's sufficient video to analyze. I'm eager to see it, because while John Correia firmly believes that people should carry firearms 100% of the time for personal self protection, I doubt he will think that it was prudent for Alex Pretti to physically close with law enforcement officers during a confrontation while armed.
And that's where I am. I believe Rene Good bears most of the responsibility for her death because she *deliberately* placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time to be wrongly shot by ICE, and Alex Pretti was similar. I believe physical protesting is a self-indulgent and wildly inefficient use of one's time - it's far better to spend those hours boringly working in order to donate money to the most powerful lobby for your cause - but in the unlikely event I were motivated to physically protest near law enforcement, I would NEVER, EVER do it while armed.
Because as I replied to you in that thread on Rene Good, "I understand that I'm not so important to the universe that *MY!* passion will plot-shield *ME!* from the reality of other people potentially reacting very negatively to *SUPER!SPECIAL!ME!* should I pick a fight with them."
I think you have done all the right, smart things to protect yourself from the downside of guns and optimize the upside, and I admire that. I can’t tell, though, whether you are trying to convince me to go ahead and get a gun, given the model you’ve shown me of how to do the thing well. I am sure that would not be good use of my resources. Here’s why:
-Given my age and lifestyle, it is much likelier that I will be killed by illness than by violence. I am quite proactive about health stuff, and do a lot of things that are time-consuming and a pain in the ass to protect mine. I think I’m putting my effort in the right place.
-I think I am pretty good at reading and navigating dangerous situations. As a therapist I have logged quite a few hours talking with people who are crazy and/or suicidal and/or crave to do violence. None have done any of those awful things on my watch. I have hospitalized several people in that state from within the session, talking on the phone with the police and hospital while in the patient’s presence. I have reported 3 patients of mine to protective services, after warning them in advance that I was soon going to feel I had to, then talked with them afterwards about having done it.
I have been in 3 situations where the potential for real violence was high. Once a friend and I were once held up by 3 teens pointing knives at us. I handed them my purse and spoke to them in a calm, blank sort of voice, telling them where my cash was and not saying anything else. The friend I was with did the same. They took the money and left. Once, when I had stayed over at a psychiatric halfway house where my boyfriend worked, I woke up to find one of our patients in the kitchen with a gun. He had escaped somehow from the VA where he was hospitalized, and was talking about going back and killing people there. I expressed a lot of sympathetic interest, “wow, I see why you hate that guy, tell me more” kind of thing, meanwhile cooking him a hearty breakfast. At some point I made some excuse to leave the kitchen, and called the halfway house director and asked her to call the police. It all ended up working out OK — patient was re-hospitalized with no use of force. And once, when I was covering for someone on vacation, a patient of theirs I knew nothing about called and asked for an emergency appointment. I saw him at the end of the day on a Friday and everyone else in my office suite had left. He turned out to be a young guy. Sat down in my office, gave me a long weird unsmiling stare, and said “if you had to guess, would you say I am circumcised or not?” Became clear in the next few minutes of the conversation that he had delusions about people’s opinions of his circumcision, and wanted to use the session to show me his penis and have me render judgment on whether it looked normal. And he was hand-wringingly frantic about the issue. The idea of rape was not in the air at all, but I still did not want him to take out his penis because of a feeling that the situation would get even weirder and harder to navigate if I did. Somehow I managed to avoid his doing that and yet do enough to calm him down that he left the session no longer frantic, but merely dissatisfied with me.
I don’t know what kicks in during situations like the ones I described. I would not call it bravery, because I do not feel scared. I become emotionally numb and hyper-focused on the task of paying attention to the person’s state and saying the optimal thing. It’s something about my wiring. But I do not think I have good wiring for situations where I have the power to maim or kill. I think I would feel guilty and uncertain, all tangled up in empathy and doubt, and would not play things well.
I will circle back, but just wanted to say that *no one* should have a gun if they aren't comfortable with both the obligations and risks that go with it.
When my brother and I were kids, he was relentlessly defiant bordering on feral, and due to the horrible timing of our birth order we waged a constant war for dominance. My dad assessed the very real risk of him raccooning the entire house and eventually breaking into even the most robust gun box and realized that *my kid brother* potentially having access to a gun was a far greater risk to the family than some junkie breaking into our home. He stored his firearms with a friend offsite, until my brother was eventually fixed by boarding school.
My dad was absolutely right.
If you (generic second person, not you, specifically) don't have the temperament for training on and using a tool of lethal self defense and/or you live with people who can't be trusted around unsecured firearms, guns are definitely Not For You.
And that's okay! Absolutely nobody should have a gun if they don't have a reason to believe the risk will be acceptably small.
FWIW, I'll generally say "+1" to this; it's not just two shitkicking gals. With an extra caveat that Christina's dad was in a maximally optimal position to make this judgement about his son, by way of knowing him personally, and also basically authorized to do so. I would not trust a government official to make anywhere near as good judgements on average, especially since I know how such officials tend to be selected.
In light of her account above, I think I trust "an Eremolalos" to make acceptably good judgements on average, too, but since I can't trust the government to consistently pick Eremolaloi, that option is sadly also out.
Man, it'd be nice if we could all rationally agree on a common sense position on firearms, something along the lines of, "you have an absolute right *TO MINIMALLY TRAIN* and *THEN* carry a firearm."
Like, I don't want my right to self-defense stripped from me, but also, I don't want anyone else using their right to handle a firearm without having the basic safety skill of keeping their fucking finger off the trigger, you know?
I have to say, the halfway house story was the ideal (and obviously correct) outcome that I have no idea how I would have handled, especially if armed at the time. I would have been pretty freaked out about "what if this guy suddenly snaps and I don't have enough time to react?" Obviously, staying calm and manipulating the outcome you wanted was the right move, but just...wow.
> I believe Rene Good bears most of the responsibility for her death because she deliberately placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time to be wrongly shot by ICE, and Alex Pretti was similar.
I think you should hold ICE to a higher moral standard than a wild dog.
Also that guy was pinned to the ground while they shot him 10 times. It seems insane to me how you can blame anyone else for this except the shooters.
Also I don't see how your argument is different than blaming rape victims for dressing too sexy, instead of blaming the rapist. So let me ask you direct: If a woman would dress sexy in public, would fall more blame on her, or on the rapist under your logic?
Echoing the thought below that I don't know why you are expecting more out of the ICE than a wild dog. If someone got attacked by a bear in an area that is known to have bears, then you would blame the person for walking into bear country, yes? How is this situation any different?
Some places have been having issues recently with bears walking into residential areas and attacking people. Any arguments about the level of agency you imagine bears to have or who is at fault are frankly irrelevant, and you should really stay indoors if there are warnings of bears out and about. Coordinated solutions to the problem can come later.
...Wow, even I didn't expect this analogy to work so well.
Reality doesn't care about people's beliefs about how it *SHOULD* be. It just *IS.* There *ARE* bad police officers. There *ARE* police officers with malicious intentions and there *ARE* police officers with good intentions who make stupid, deadly mistakes, and there is *absolutely* *nothing* that your personal feelings can or ever will do to change those things.
I think it was pretty clear once there was sufficient video that Rene Good never even saw Ross in front of her car; like most people in minor car accidents, she was almost certainly focused in a different direction than she was driving. She didn't "deserve" to die for that, but she was there *to* die, because she made an inherently dangerous choice to obstruct law enforcement officers and then attempt to flee from them. That's always inherently dangerous, because some officers are good, some are bad, some are lucky, and some are unlucky, and there is absolutely no way of knowing and trusting what outcome you're going to get.
Likewise Alex Pretti should not have been shot while his weapon was apparently in someone else's hand; LEOs are not supposed to shout "gun, gun, gun" *after* a weapon has been secured. But that day he met an ICE agent who shouted "gun, gun, gun" at the wrong time, and Alex Pretti was unlucky enough that he was wrongfully shot because of it.
If you don't want to potentially have outcomes similar to Good's and Pretti's, don't take the inherent risk of confronting law enforcement officers. It's not that hard.
And, as a single woman who's lived and dated in some scary neighborhoods in America's largest cities, let me tell you: Your attempted "gotcha" about sexy clothing is embarrassingly naive. Clothing doesn't invite or protect against predation; only behavior can do that. There are strategies for reducing the chance of being targeted for rape, and if one doesn't want to be raped, one uses those strategies.
Since reality doesn't care about aspirational feelings about whether or not people should be raped, but it does care about when those strategies actually prevent targeting or thwart rape, we shouldn't be discussing aspirational feelings, we should be discussing actionable strategies.
Just noting that one of the users in this thread has blocked me, which not only hid their comments from me, but *my own published comments in response* to them, as well as preventing me from being able to reply to their hanging questions directed at me. The conversation is visible to everyone but me (while I am logged in on Substack).
That is dishonorable. Shame on anyone who uses the block feature to invisibly silence their opponents during an active conversation.
When I talk about "more blame", I am aware that both parties could carry some fraction of the blame. When I talk about "moral standard", I am intentionally talking about how things SHOULD be, and not about personal safety. I want the offenders to be judged, even if the victim was behaving less responsible than they should have. I don't understand how anyone can look at any of these cases and think "the offender carries LESS blame here than the victim".
I can think of cases where the victim is behaving so irresponsible, that MORE blame would fall to them than to the offender, but I don't think any of these cases is as such.
I consider Good's behavior egregious enough that about equal or perhaps slightly more of the blame for her death falls on her. Attempting to run from the police in a car is inexcusably reckless, period. She should have obeyed the commands to step out of the car and accepted being handcuffed and detained / arrested / etc as the natural consequence of disruptive protesting. Run a GoFundMe for the legal battle, etc.
There's a reason Chris Rock's classic "instructional video" How to Not Get Your Ass Kicked By the Police begins with, "Obey the law." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8)
Pretti is an entirely different situation; the handling of the arrest and taking his firearm off him was completely wrong.
You're completely missing the point. This is absolutely not about personal safety advice and "how to avoid being killed by ICE agents"; protesting against ICE is dangerous, and it was incredibly courageous of Good and Pretti to do it anyways.
The only political question is whether what ICE did was justifiable; it was not. Government agents are only allowed to use deadly force in self-defense when they reasonably believe that there is an imminent risk to their life or safety, and this standard was clearly not met. People are outraged because these incidents show that ICE is brutalizing American cities.
It does not matter whether Good and Pretti were taking a risk. They could have been wearing bullseyes and chanting "SHOOT ME" and it would not make a difference. The ICE agents would still have committed murder. Properly trained law enforcement agents that were not angry racists recruited from the dregs of society would not have murdered American citizens.
I think you're missing *my* point, which is that comments like your's, while correct, are useless at best and inadvertently harmful at worst for perpetuating a culture of subconscious entitlement to personal safety so great that people will take absurd and avoidable risks with their lives.
This isn’t a movie. "I'm in the moral right > thus I'm the hero > cops can't shoot heroes! > thus I can do heroic things and I won't get shot!" doesn't actually apply in real life.
I care about actionable strategies for avoiding actual violence on a personal, individual level, and I believe that is possible with education. I believe that signal boosting the concept that no one is a hero and that outrage is not a shield can do *infinitely* more good than expressing my own outrage.
...
...and I also just realized the irony that I am doing so here, in a community of people who are universally way too smart as individuals to go out and antagonize police officers *themselves*. Everyone here is already doing that math, even if it isn't conscious.
You can't claim that you're just proposing "actionable strategies for avoiding actual violence on a personal, individual level". If you are commenting on an event involving a law enforcement agency killing a protester, you are commenting on political issues. By blaming the protesters, you are legitimizing ICE's actions. You can't evade responsibility by claiming that you're discussing a different issue.
I never claimed that protesting was necessarily the best strategy to oppose ICE. I said that it is wrong for ICE agents to murder American citizens and that it demonstrates the illegitimacy of their operations.
The purpose of the discourse around the killings is not to maximize the personal safety of protesters, who have bravely chosen to put themselves in danger to oppose tyranny. It is to show the illegitimacy and incompetence of the violent fascists that are occupying American cities.
You're saying that it's wrong to criticize government agents for murdering Americans because it might lead to more people protesting and being murdered by government agents. I cannot comprehend the distorted thinking process that led to this opinion. After reading some of your previous comments in this thread, I noticed that you never mentioned why protesting in Minneapolis is so dangerous. Who killed Good and Pretti? Instead of admitting that ICE agents are murdering Americans, you're choosing to pin the blame on people who put their lives at risk from their government to fight fascism.
It's only a hop skip and a jump from this position to the position that Philando Castile simply shouldn't have had his gun in the car. There are bad police officers and police officers with good intentions who make stupid, deadly mistakes, and for the average citizen 99.9% of your encounters with police officers of all stripes will occur when you get pulled over while driving.
So it doesn't matter what your beliefs are about how it *SHOULD* be. Reality doesn't care about your aspirational feelings, and if you don't want to potentially have an outcomes similar to Mr. Castille, don't bring your gun in a car.
That may feel like an unfair expansion of your argument, but those unfair expansions are also an immutable feature of reality that doesn't care about your aspirational feelings - see e.g. Mips below, who's taking the principle you're applying here and extending it to the inherent danger of simply going outside in Minneapolis: "the situation should have been clear to everyone that walking outside in such chaos is a risk to your life."
Philando Castile isn't an unfair expansion at all; I actually intended to invoke him in my inevitable reply, as his tragic case is in my mind whenever I notice a police car while I'm driving. If I get pulled over while armed the officer is likely to have my permit flagged along with my registration and draw their own conclusions, which is why I will keep my hands still and visible at all times, and, if directed to move or to retrieve anything, I will ask permission and announce my intention ("my drivers license is in my purse. I'm going reach for it with my right hand if that's okay. My registration is in the glove box with a bunch of napkins, may I open it?" Etc). Then move slowly and deliberately and follow directions. Refer to the weapon as a "firearm" or by model, never as a "gun." Etc.
Well, that is *indeed* a risk I am consciously and deliberately taking with my safety. I believe it is a very, very small risk, and certainly a MUCH MUCH MUCH SO MANY MUCHES smaller risk than confronting and then attempting to flee law enforcement in a car or physically block / bump them in the street *while armed.* I've judged the risk small enough that it's not negligently reckless and very much worth it, while the risks Good and Pretti took were not.
And you can quibble with my personal risk tolerance and invent increasingly absurd hypotheticals that my criticism of other people's recklessness obligates me to avoid all risk, but like...stop that. That isn't a compelling gotcha because, if I get very unambiguously wrongfully shot during a traffic stop, I won't Pikachu face about it.
I know what might happen, and my point is, Good and Pretti and *everyfuckingone else should, too.*
Here's the thing - if you get very unambiguously wrongfully shot during a traffic stop, whether or not I pikachu face about it, I'll still advocate for consequences for the officer who screwed up, and I think we as a society are being pretty foolhardy if we get so caught up in a discussion of the risks that you were or weren't intentionally taking on that we forget to do so.
"Proposition 1: X activity by gunowners is lawful but extremely risky" and "Proposition 2: police should not react to activity X by killing gunowners who do it" are obviously both statements that can be true at the same time.
When they occur concurrently, we as a society should ideally have both conversations. Reminding people who want accountability for law enforcement over Prop 2 that Prop 1 also exists is fine, but taking a stance that any discussion of Prop 2 accountability is a waste of time and potentially harmful because Prop 1 is just an immutable feature of the world so Prop 2 discussions are pointless.... well, that approach is how you put your society on a beeline for more violations of Prop 2.
It's also a claim that nothing can ever get better, that "what is" must always be, and "what ought" can never change an outcome in the world. Which is nonsense. Last I saw, gentlemen do not settle interpersonal conflicts with judicial duels. Likewise, a large number of people feel that the government ought not to shoot people simply for protesting, and that feeling matters.
In general, there are things one might do that increase or decrease the chances of one being harmed in a given situation--but this does not imply that if one does something that increases those chances, you bear moral responsibility for what happens to you. A young woman should not walk certain city streets at night alone--but if she does, she isn't morally responsible if she is attacked. She may have been foolish, but she is not culpable. The person who attacked her is.
Similarly, Pretti may have been foolish to attend a protest while armed, but he was within his rights to do so, and the officer who shot him is still a murderer.
Yeah, you can be the victim of some crime (which is the fault of the criminal) and also have behaved in some imprudent ways that made your victimization more likely. And indeed, everyone makes tradeoff between safety and other goals all the time, so it will regularly be true that if I am the victim of a crime, someone will say that I behaved imprudently and reaped the consequences. I didn't *have* to carry $200 in my wallet and go out after dark, after all.
As an individual, possession of a gun during an encounter with law enforcement in particular seems to have no upside and lots of downside. And in interactions with others it still introduces a lot more downside even if there is also some upside.
But being an armed *community* introduces some new options which includes at least in the short term of winning stand offs with law enforcement and possibly makes your community better defended against criminals (mlk et al were armed). These scenarios are less exposed to individual anxiety and are a strong deterrent.
To get a tad political, the armed community seems to sit better with 2nd amendment text considering the "well regulated militia" part.
It seems that a major factor in keeping anyone from getting hurt is that it was an actual standoff, not a scuffle where a gun goes off or is suddenly produced in the presence of law enforcement.
And not all standoffs go so well for the community! Waco for example. But being a community is what makes the standoff more likely. Your groups presence and organization is better signalled in advance.
1. People being killed with their own defensive firearms is an *exceedingly* rare thing, with one exception - cops. Police officers are required to regularly engage in heated, often violent confrontations with criminals, while carrying a clearly-visible gun in their holster. They usually aren't allowed to just shoot the criminal up front, and so sometimes the first person to go for the cop's gun is the criminal. For anyone else, the criminal shouldn't know where your gun is or even if you have one until you've already decided that this is a gunfight. If you draw a gun, it's because if the other guy doesn't immediately stand down you're going to immediately shoot them.
2. If you're not willing to commit to that, even in the face of a threat to your life or that of someone under your protection, then no, you probably shouldn't be carrying a gun.
3. You seem to be assuming Pretti was carrying a gun for the specific purpose of enabling him to better confront ICE agents. Pretti had a concealed carry permit, and unless the Minnesota bureaucracy is unusually fast, he would almost certainly have had to apply for that permit well before the high-profile ICE deployment to Minneapolis. So he was presumably already in the habit of carrying a gun on general principles and/or for protection against ordinary common criminals. There is no requirement that such a person disarm themselves before joining a political protest, there may be logistical difficulties in doing so on short notice (e.g. where do you safely leave the gun), and there *should* be no particular danger in a gun that stays holstered through the protest.
People walk differently when they're carrying a gun. Criminals can recognize this. You can learn to walk like you're carrying a gun, even if you aren't. This is about as effective at deterring criminals as actually possessing the gun.
Yes, in theory, one should be able to bring a gun to a protest. Also in theory, protests are peaceful things that are well-regulated and do not require use of raw sewage to quell them. Maximally using your constitutional rights can be dangerous (try bringing a gun into a biker bar, with drunk biker gangs? That's not going to end well for you)
> "People walk differently when they're carrying a gun. Criminals can recognize this. You can learn to walk like you're carrying a gun, even if you aren't. This is about as effective at deterring criminals as actually possessing the gun."
[Citation needed.]
Also, please go watch a couple thousand real-life gun encounters on the Active Self Protection channel on YouTube. Seems like there's been an *awful* lot of real life examples of criminals being extremely surprised when other people also have guns.
Putin walks like he has a gun at all times. Look at his walk, if you want to know how it's done. (He also checks all exits whenever he goes into a room). There's a look, and if you pull it off, criminals tend to "find someone else to hassle."
Most spies are taught to look like they're not carrying a gun when they ARE carrying a gun.
Many criminals are actually drug-addicts (i'm sure you know this), and can be disassociated from reality to an alarmingly large degree (meth users get paranoid, for example).
1. Seems a bit odd to me that it’s rare for people to be shot by their own defensive weapon. I get your point about the gun owner's not even bringing out their gun until they are sure this is a gunfight. But it seems like it would be a common error for somebody to pull out their gun earlier out of a desire to be ready if this turned out to be a shoot-or-get-savaged situation. Or they might do it to intimidate their opponent. And GPT could not find support for your contention that it is an exceedingly rare thing for someone who’s not police to be shot with their own defensive weapon. “There is no precise national statistic on how often a civilian defender is shot by their own weapon, because crime reporting systems and surveys do not collect that specific detail.” And it found some indirect evidence that guns do not make owners safer. Pointed to a study that found that individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault were four to five times more likely to be shot than those without one. That study was about possessing a gun at the time of an assault, though, not specifically during lawful defensive use. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2759797/?utm_source=chatgpt.com). How you found an information source that gives stats about people being killed by their defensive weapons?
3. “You seem to be assuming Pretti was carrying a gun for the specific purpose of enabling him to better confront ice agents.” No, not at all. When I said that if he’d brought it out in an encounter with ICE agents he’d be in great danger of being shot, I was not implying that was his plan. My point was that the only likely enemy he’d be encountering that day was ICE, and in an encounter with ICE the gun was not protection but in fact its opposite -- so what was the point in bringing a gun?. Listen to how things played out (in the most recent account I read of the incident): Agents tackled Pretti and had him on the ground, and one of them found his gun — whether in a pocket, a holster or his hand the account did not say. The agent took it and moved away from him, saying aloud “gun! gun!” and that was when ICE agents opened fire on Pretti. It appears they took the agent’s calling out “gun” to mean that their man they were restraining had a weapon in hand, rather than that the other agent had removed a weapon the man had.Seems having a gun on him was the thing that sealed Pretti's fate.
I had 2 points in mind when I posted that comment about Pretti’s gun: One, the way things played out struck me as an example of the hidden dangers of having a gun. Two, I thought Pretti's bringing the gun was an error of judgment, kind of surprising in a man with a job, intensive care nurse, that demands. you be alert and have good judgment in life-or-death situations. I’d expect it would occur to someone like that on their way to hang out near ICE and video them that if ICE believes you have a gun — because you pull it out, or because they feel it on your pocket while tackling you — they will be more likely to go lethal. I wonder if the awfulness of the Minneapolis situation had clouded Prettis judgment.
To me, the judgment of people in our present exchange seems clouded. People think I’m making all kinds of charges that I’m not: Civilians don’t have a right to carry guns, Pretti did not have a right to carry his gun that day, Pretti brought his gun so he could use it in a confrontation with ICE agents. . . .
It would never occur to me that something in my pocket, that my hands are well away from, would trigger someone to shoot me. That is absolutely an unreasonable response, and as such is just as likely to be generated by having, say, a wallet in my pocket, or a bag of candy, or anything else that would bulge slightly beneath my clothes.
1. Criminals taking their victims' guns and shooting them with those guns, is very much a "dog that didn't bark situation". It's very easy to find cases of people using firearms successfully in self-defense; it's much much harder to find examples of people being shot with their own guns. I've looked. And I assume that the people who make a profession out of arguing against private firearms ownership have looked even harder. But there's only very scarce anecdotal evidence.
1'. The history of "scientific studies" of defensive use of firearms is mostly a history of case studies in ignoring the big obvious 800-lb gorilla of a cofounder in the room: the largest category of (non-suicide) shootings in the US, is criminals shooting other criminals, or close associates of criminals. Violent criminals and close associates of violent criminals are both very much more likely to carry guns than random civilians, and very much more likely to be shot than random civilians. There is some good work being done in the area, but ChatGPT is probably not going to highlight it for you.
3. "the only likely enemy he’d be encountering that day was ICE". You know nothing about what sort of enemies Alex Pretti is likely to face on an average day. The expert in that field is Alex Pretti. Who, as I pointed out, went out of his way to buy a gun and get a concealed-carry permit before ICE started its Minneapolis shenanigans. Maybe his medical work brought him in frequent contact with violent criminals. Maybe his wife has a violent stalker ex who won't go away. Maybe he lives in a bad neighborhood. We don't know. But we do know that *he* felt that there were plenty of ordinary ICE-free days in which he felt that the danger of encountering a violent non-ICE enemy justified carrying a gun.
Deciding to lawfully protest against the behavior of ICE, or to offer medical assistance to the victims of ICE, absolutely does not require that someone forgo their wholly legal right to defend themselves against any other enemies they might encounter on that day. And it *should* not expose him to any unusual risk in his dealings with competent, professional law enforcement officers, so long as he leaves the gun in its holster.
Meta: " People think I’m making all kinds of charges that I’m not: Civilians don’t have a right to carry guns, Pretti did not have a right to carry his gun that day, Pretti brought his gun so he could use it in a confrontation with ICE agents. . . ."
If that's not what you're trying to say, then it's hard for me to figure out what you are trying to say. Unless it's "OK, people technically have the *right* to do those things but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done it". In which case, Oh Hell No, and you are speaking from profound ignorance.
1. <Violent criminals and close associates of violent criminals are both very much more likely to carry guns than random civilians, and very much more likely to be shot than random civilians
Yes, I realize that, and that was my first thought about the study GPT unearthed about where they found that people who had been shot were 4-5 times more likely to be gun owners themselves. Yeah, I thought, that’s probably mostly criminals killing criminals. Still, it was the only even indirect evidence GPT dug up, so I mentioned it.
<There is some good work being done in the area, but ChatGPT is probably not going to highlight it for you.
Well, John, I notice you’re not linking to it.
<If that's not what you're trying to say, then it's hard for me to figure out what you are trying to say. Unless it's "OK, people technically have the *right* to do those things but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done it".
If we scrape off the heavy layer of obnoxious know-it-all scorn and contempt you slathered onto the imagined me above, I would say that’s a good approximation of my point: Yes Pretti had the right to carry a gun into a city full of ICE agents and protestors, with everyone on edge, but doing that was almost certain to make him less safe, not more.
<You know nothing about what sort of enemies Alex Pretti is likely to face on an average day.
That’s true, but I do have a lot of experience with the lives of middle class white professionals, and my experience is that it is quite rare for one of them to suffer a life threatening attack from a rando, or to have in their lives someone like crazy stalker ex who is likely to attack them them violently. So while it is certainly possible Pretti had someone like that, it is not likely. And in any case, when we think of about Pretti walking around Minneapolis, we also have to think about the *likelihood* of his encountering such a rando or encountering his wife’s stalker as compared to the likelihood of his getting tangled into some kind of confrontation between ICE and the protestors. Which do you think is more likely, John? “Hey, right there next to me in Dunkin Donuts is my wife’s crazy ex. who’d made death threats and tried to break into the house last month, and he’s pulling a weapon out of his pocket” or “Hey, I was just trying to help this woman to her feet and now 4 or 5 ICE guys are tackling me as though I were a big threat.”
And I do not think Pretti was stupid. He had a job that demanded stress tolerance and good judgment in situations that pull for emotions, and I have not heard anything suggesting that he did not perform his work well. Also have not heard anything that makes me think he had bad judgment or crackpot ideas. I think the likeliest explanation of his bringing his gun with him that day was habit . I’m guessing that was what he normally when he went out.
<Deciding to lawfully protest against the behavior of ICE, or to offer medical assistance to the victims of ICE, absolutely does not require that someone forgo their wholly legal right to defend themselves against any other enemies they might encounter on that day. And it *should* not expose him to any unusual risk in his dealings with competent, professional law enforcement officers, so long as he leaves the gun in its holster.
Of course, I absolutely agree. What on earth have I said makes you think I don’t? It is clear that what should be the case in the presence of ICE is not the case. Therefore, unless someone’s only goal is to dramatize for the world that ICE is not honoring citizens’ right to carry a gun, they should avoid carrying one in any setting where ICE is likely to become aware they have one.
< Oh Hell No, and you are speaking from profound ignorance.
You seem to me to be speaking from profound anger and despair.
Note that Gary Kleck is a professor of criminology who started with basically the same beliefs you have been expressing, but who actually did the work rather than just pontificating about it.
> but I do have a lot of experience with the lives of middle class white professionals, and my experience is that it is quite rare for one of them to suffer a life threatening attack from a rando,
I'm not sure what Pretti's race has to do with anything. But aside from that, do you have a lot of experience (or even any experience) with middle-class professionals *who own guns and have concealed carry permits*? Because that's like 8% of the population nationwide, and probably half that in a city like Minneapolis. So we're dealing with a two-sigma outlier, along an ill-defined axis that I'm guessing you have no experience with.
The principle of charity suggests we should assume that Pretti had a reasonable basis for believing that he faced at least a two-sigma elevated risk level, or obligation to protect others at risk or something else along those lines. Ideally we'd just ask him, but we can't because one of our hired gunmen put a bullet in his brain and some of us are kind of peeved about that. So either we're going to extend the recently deceased the benefit of the doubt, or we're not.
> And I do not think Pretti was stupid ... I think the likeliest explanation of his bringing his gun with him that day was habit . I’m guessing that was what he normally when he went out.
That's my take on it as well. But only a few paragraphs earlier, you were saying that "but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done that" was a "good approximation of [your] point". So I hope you can understand why I thought that you were saying that Pretti was stupid. And I'm now unclear as to what your actual point is. There's an obvious but uncharitable interpretation, but fortunately you're still alive so we can ask you.
> Therefore, unless someone’s only goal is to dramatize for the world that ICE is not honoring citizens’ right to carry a gun, they should avoid carrying one in any setting where ICE is likely to become aware they have one.
What if a person has *two* goals? One of which is to protest ICE's treatment of suspected illegal immigrants, and the other of which is to protect himself against whatever it was that he reasonably felt he needed to protect himself from before ICE was ever an issue in his life? Or, IMHO more likely, what if a person starts the day with the twin goals of just going about his daily life and protecting himself from a reasonably perceived threat, and only later adds a third "protest ICE" goal when he sees ICE behaving wrongly in front of him, or gets a text from a friend saying that ICE is behaving wrongly a few blocks away and his services as a nurse might soon be needed?
I'm not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights, presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it".
> You seem to me to be speaking from profound anger and despair.
I have been dealing with this sort of ignorance for a long, long time, and it wearies me. But I will persevere.
<I'm not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights, presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it” . . . I have been dealing with this sort of ignorance for a long, long time, and it wearies me. But I will persevere.
This tone of weary disgust at the grotesque ignorance, shallowness and self-importance of others is present in most of your posts. It is very unpleasant to be on the receiving end of that point of view, since I respect you and also like you except when I get a dose of this stuff from you. And I do not think it is reasonable to speak to and about me that way. There are plenty of things you know more about than I do, but I am generally willing to recognize when I am ignorant of something, and to revise my ideas. And I am intelligent and skeptical and care more about being accurate than I do about being impressive, and I think one can tell that from my posts. As regards the subject at hand, you know much more than I do about guns and data about shootings. On the other hand, I have probably logged many more hours than you talking with people who truly want to kill or maim themselves and other people and people with deep concerns for their own safety. And I have certainly not written off what I learned as shit crazy people experience. It’s stored in my mind as things people experience. And, by the way, I have mostly talked with those people alone. Of the 3 times I have been in danger of violence, 2 have been with patients during sessions. I do not have a country club practice where I talk with trophy wives about their crows feet. For 20+ years I was the person who took referrals other therapists were too daunted by to accept. I’m not a nervous ninny about violence from others. What throws me is the prospect of doing violence.
Reading through your points, it seems to me that you are ignoring several exits from your grim read of me as being wrong as hell in some ugly way. Here are a coupla examples:
Me: And I do not think Pretti was stupid …likeliest explanation for bringing gun was habit.
You: But only a few paragraphs earlier, you were saying that "but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done that" was a "good approximation of [your] point". So I hope you can understand why I thought that you were saying that Pretti was stupid.
John, I said right in the sentence you are quoting that it was a good approximation but only after “we scrape off the heavy layer of obnoxious know-it-all scorn and contempt you layered onto the imagined me above.” I then went on to explain my read of why Pretti took his gun with him that day, which is that he failed to take into account the danger taking it posed — most likely because it was his habit to bring his gun with him, and he did not reflect on whether that was a good idea that day. So that was me scraping off the scorn and contempt layer in your framing. My view, with the scorn and contempt for Pretti you’d attributed to me scaped off, was that I attributed his failure to reflect as instead just going on habit. I think it would be clear to any reader that I think of defaulting to habit as a common error that the smart make as often as the stupid, an error that does not indicate in any way that Pretti was dumb . So scraping off the scorn and contempt here is not a matter of still seeing Pretti as a moron but being kind about it. It’s seeing Pretti as having made a cognitive error that is common and not indicative of stupidity. Scraping off the scorn and contempt layer doesn’t consist just of having a kinder attitude, but of interpreting things in the same direction as the scornful one (cognitive error ) but an error that is much smaller and less global (common cognitive error, not overall low cognitive ability).
Come on John, grasping that I was saying that “he acted on habit instead of reflecting” is “he’s a moron” with the scorn and contempt layer scraped off is basic reading comprehension, and you are smart enough to grasp that with 100 IQ points left over. And yet what I wrote leaves you wandering in some wilderness where you think either I’m saying Pretti was a moron, or else trying to convey some idea that you just can’t find in the thicket of my prose. WTF?
How bout another example? :
<I’m not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights [protest ICE], presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other [protect self] lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it".
It should be extremely easy to find another way to interpret it. I have outright said parts of the alternative explanation, and in other places (such as the example above) said things that make clear the rest. My interpretation is that Pretti failed to reflect on what would happen if ICE somehow became aware he was carrying. Probably that happened because he defaulted to habit. A possible extra contributor was that Pretti was not thinking as well as usual, because he was profoundly shocked, distressed and infuriated by recent events in Minneapolis. As luck would have it, Pretti’s oversight led to ICE putting 10 bullet holes in him. What happened is an example of the non-obvious dangers of having guns around.
While you may think there are other lessons to be drawn from what happened (and I agree that there are), I don’t think it’s hard to come up with the above as the point I was making. But you can’t come up with it *even after I said in a recent exchange with you that the main point I had in my mind in my original post was the non-obvious dangers of guns.* I really think the problem here is that you are so sure you are surrounded by heartless, ignorant, self-important fools that you filter out the evidence that the person you are hearing from is not making heartless and foolish points.
And while we’re straightening things out: I am kind of vague how "concealed carry" laws figures into gun ownership, but you are wrong that I have had little exposure to people who routinely carry guns. My military half-brother had a personal gun. I believe my parents brought ours when we took family trips. I have had 2 patients who were gun owners — and these were people I talked with for many many hours, and often about very private and deeply held attitudes. I have known several very committed rock climbers who were avid hunters and also had personal guns, and one of them I knew extremely well. I had multiple talks with these people about guns and what they meant to each of them. I really do grasp the point of view of people who experience owning a gun as an important element of their dignity and autonomy. And I do not scorn that attitude, even though I do not share it. I am not very judgy about people’s world views, and don’t really believe there is a right one. As for life in a concealed carry state — no, I don’t know what that’s like. But is it really very different? Seems to me I understand and respect the crucial thing, which is the I-have-a-right-to-it point of view of people who feel strongly about gun ownership.
And one other thing. I think I should tell you my personal feeling about what happened to Pretti, since you are thinking maybe I think “yeah, he was asking for it.” I am extremely angry and distressed about his murder. I have shed tears over it. I have had fantasies of being on a rooftop and spraying bullets down onto ICE. I cannot stop thinking about all the popping noises in the videos —- 10 fucking bullets, shot into one man lying on his stomach. I wonder about how many he felt before one knocked out brain function. I get unbearably angry when I hear about ICE standing around his body crowing and clapping and counting the bullet holes. I feel terribly sad that Pretti had his life yanked away. I feel more personal connection with him than I did with the other 2 who died. He’s a fellow health care professional. And male nurses are often gay, and I have a special soft spot in my heart for gay people because both my half-brother (not the military one) and my mother were gay.
I'm not sure why you keep saying "fundamental rights", as if they have some foundation in physics or something. You have rights because the government guarantees those rights, and currently the government and those serving them aren't in the mood for guaranteeing those rights for citizens. So I don't see how it's relevant to this situation...
I wonder if he hoped there would be violence, and he might have a pretext to use it. Like, picturing himself gunning down the guy who guns down the woman driving recklessly.
We’ve been watching “Slow Horses”, a show with conventional left politics. The heroes shoot people all the time. This is a fantasy situation for men of any political persuasion, I would think. Otherwise, why does the show work so well as entertainment?
In fact, we’ve talked about how guns achieve an outsized role in the show because they are I suppose very few in the UK, so there’s always a lot of tension around this magical object: who has (our only) gun, ditto the lack of armed police or security (haven’t been there, don’t know if this is real or just story necessity). “We had to protect ourselves with a tea kettle!”
Not trying to start a culture war topic over the cliches if the show. It is wonderfully entertaining regardless.
Pr[get attacked | have gun] > Pr[get attacked | don't have gun].
I mean, why did you have a gun in the first place? Because you were worried about being attacked. The guy living in a safe suburb and never going out after dark has a lot less need for a concealed gun than the guy who closes his bar at 1AM every night and then puts the cash from the register into the bank's night deposit box before going home and going to bed.
People tend to very much overestimate how many assaults and even murders occur with guns. Children bring knives to school and stab each other with them. Somalis attempt murder by fist, 8+ people on one guy going into a revolving door (yes, I've seen the video. Yes it's old).
You're imagining a mugging, I presume? (This is a good bet, as it's salient for the average TV watcher).
Good gun discipline is to give them the money (assuming they aren't obviously looking for more than money). Your money isn't worth their life or yours.
You draw a gun if you're enough out of the way to help -- and you get down first, hit the deck, if there's bullets flying or might be (also, you look less like the criminal if cops show up and don't know you're the hero).
Your statistic probably includes the child that shot his daddy over taking away his switch (dude put it in the gun safe).
I think you might have a sort of movie concept of how easy it is to get a guy out of someone else's hands. You are standing presumably outside of, say, punching range with someone else, with both hands on the gun. They have to A. not back off, B. get their hands to the gun without being shot, C. somehow take the gun from you without accidental firings killing them, ect.
Meanwhile all you have to do is sort of twitch a little and the gun fires and the person who wanted to take it from you is dead.
The question you are asking is closer to "Since I can't imagine ever firing a gun actually, wouldn't it be easy to take my gun from me?" And even then it's still kind of not easy to take an object from a person who controls it.
Since I'm in an irrelevant nit-picking hellscape, I'm going to start responding to stuff like this with a "Goose-gander" shorthand. Yes, touching someone with a bullet doesn't always immediately stop their heart and render them braindead in a blink.
Yes, it's possible to imagine a situation in which someone gets shot, doesn't die, decides it's not a big deal, continues with their previous course of action, continues to not die or be disabled, takes a gun in the control of an un-shot person from them, and shoots them with it. It's possible to imagine anything! What if the person I shot is Peter Pan, and can't die from mortal weapons?
It's possible to imagine anything. But if it's relevant to this discussion, then it's also relevant on *both sides*, i.e. If we are imagining a villain who is impervious to small-arms fire in such a way that this is likely to matter, then it's also true of the gun owner, and he'll still be one mostly-harmless bullet to his body ahead in the ensuing struggle to get the (presumably a dozen) bullets it takes to kill a person.
If I'm being sarcastic here, it's because this is about the fifth time this hour someone has gone "But wait guns are made of metal, isn't METAL HEAVY? doesn't that mean it's easy to disarm a person of their gun and shoot them with it, and a likely thing to happen?" in some version or another.
I'm willing to take that kind of argument seriously if it's an actual serious argument, but not "Well, sir, what if the person got shot, so now you have full control of your gun and the other guy has a bullet in him. Doesn't he have the upper hand NOW?" arguments anymore. Yes, it's possible a magic anteater drops from the sky on a tiny parachute and swip-swaps the gun to the bad guy's hand, no, I'm not going to spend my whole day taking it seriously as a counterargument to "It's not that easy to take a gun from a person who is in control of it and can shoot you with it at any time".
>If we are imagining a villain who is impervious to small-arms fire in such a way that this is likely to matter,<
The problem with this is that "likely to matter" only needs to mean "dies fifteen minutes later from blood loss". There are several videos of gunfights that end with a shot person running or driving away, to die later from wounds inflicted. The Michael Drejka one is usually my go-to, but there are also police shootouts and whatnot. If you shoot them and they're still functioning, they can shoot back, and you'll both die fifteen minutes later, which is not ideal.
You're taking this as "the safety's already off" which doesn't seem like a reasonable thing for a reasonable weapon owner. How much does it take to get the safety off?
Your "doesn't seem" isn't incredibly valuable here, mostly because you don't knowing lot about guns. Glocks, for instance, don't have a safety in the sense you think they do. This is true of an awful lot of modern firearms, and among those that it's not true of, it's still pretty common to practice "condition 0" carry, i.e. all that's required to fire the gun is to pull the trigger.
It's not universally true that every pistol can be carried this way, and among those that can't be there's sometimes a split-second difference in how quickly the gun can be rendered operational (another twitch of the thumb).
When you were figuring out that there was something you had once heard of called a safety and that it must be universal and that if it was and was hard to operate this *might* salvage your preferred positioning on this conversation, it should have occurred to you what all that grasping meant.
Figured I'd get some information from you, by exposing my ignorance and a willingness to learn. What percentage of gun-holders do you think practice "Condition 0"?
>there may be logistical difficulties in doing so on short notice (e.g. where do you safely leave the gun)
Especially true in Minneapolis, because the protests are not "everyone gather at a particular time to express our displeasure," they are "ICE is trying to grab someone, whoever is closest runs over with a camera and a whistle." The confrontations can happen anywhere on short notice.
Suicide risks by gun should be matched with "suicide risk by other commonly available Manly Ways To Kill Yourself."
I mark a very big sex-related difference between "kill yourself with a gun" and "drink bleach", and also a very different "odds of death" between those two.
Yeah. The most important firearm safety rule to understand is that if you or someone in your home is likely to be suicidal at some point, you need to either get the guns out of your house or lock them up well enough the suicidal person can't get to them. For most people (and definitely most people here, since we're presumably mostly not cops, armored car guards, professional criminals, or people living in super high-crime areas), that's the biggest risk a gun in the house poses to anyone in your home.
Yeah. Is someone being less communicative than normal? Looks upset, had a Major Incident that might wind up with him being depressed? Lock the guns up, why take the chance? (Obviously be upfront about why, if asked).
I'd take this as "team up to shoot, if there's even a slight chance of suicide" -- as a bonus, spending time with the depressed person may help them feel less lonely.
I think it's common (though not universal) that you know if you, your wife, or one of your kids has serious problems with depression, has seriously considered suicide, has done other self-harm behaviors, or has previously attempted suicide. In that case, you want to remove the low-effort suicide methods from the house as much as possible. Nothing can nerf the world so much that someone can't commit suicide, but leaving a loaded handgun in a nightstand with your chronically depressed wife is a pretty obviously terrible idea.
I remember reading something I can no longer find about the correct attitude to take when carrying a gun. It went something like this:
"From now on, you will lose every argument. You will apologise sincerely to every bully who gets in your face for ruining his day. You will be the meekest so-and-so around. Because you are carrying a gun, and any fight where someone is carrying a gun is likely to end with one of you getting shot."
Or another quote I found while looking for the exact wording of the above: "You can have a gun or you can have an ego but you can't have both"
Anyway yes, it's the same mistake that George Zimmerman made, to walk into trouble while armed instead of walking away from it.
I was flipping through an issue of Boys Life as a teenager and found a page with a poem from a father to his son, entrusting him with a gun. The poem ended with something along the lines of "no amount of sorrow or care will make up for one man dead" - no matter how careful you are to be in the right, no matter how sorry you are afterward, and especially no matter how well you trained and survived, you're going to feel like the worst person in the world because you ended another one.
That, or you've lost about one horcrux worth of humanity.
I doubt I still have that issue somewhere, and a casual search doesn't turn up that poem. Nevertheless, I remember it being worth a full page in the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America.
Not to mention, a self-defender's life will be ruined for years after even the most unambiguous, clearest cut, David-versus-Goliath shooting. Setting aside the emotional trauma, even if the local prosecutor decides the shooter was 100% in the right and says so in a press conference, at bare minimum, a defender will be forced to face a civil suit brought by the attacker's shitty surviving family members.
Only grievous injury and/or death is worse than years of stress and worry in a legal battle for all your worldly possessions. Which is why prudent people only threaten to kill to prevent grievous injury and/or death.
And a rarely-discussed bonus of responsibly carrying a firearm as a lifestyle is that it acts as a fucking excellent social filter. People who cannot be trusted to be around unsecured firearms are people who are inevitably going to lower your quality of life.
The police in my current city have to shoot someone - it can seem like every day - but let's say 2-3x a week. It's so strange to think of living with that stress as the reality of your everyday job.
I know people who have actually shot others in American cities. They didn't have a court case (the other guys were criminals). Nobody was killed (my friend's a very bad shot).
I agree, you give away your money. You only shoot if there's a risk to life or limb, and that's not a guy saying "gimme money!"
More than likely, they never figured out who was shooting (and probably blamed some other gang, rather than "Joe Innocent With A Gun"), in that he'd gone for cover first thing.
Oh, yeah, we're talking about different things, I think. I'm not discussing gang warfare / mutual combat; I'm talking about self-defense cases involving a law-abiding citizen who calls the police themselves and cooperates with the investigation afterward.
That person is almost always going to be punished for ethically participating in the justice system by getting sued for doing so.
The first Pirates of the Caribbean film played with Chekov's Gun (sword edition).
Our Hero grabbed for a sword mounted on the wall behind The Villan, only to discover that it was permanently mounted to a wooden escutcheon, which became his (rather ineffective) weapon for the ensuing fight, naturally played for comic relief.
That is funny. A while back I was in a production of The Country Wife and I played Sparkish; there was a scene where I challenged a fellow to a duel and then my sword got stuck in my scabbard. Seeing as it was only a plastic sword to begin with, I managed to break the handle off of it. That
Yeah, this is the "proper" attitude for having a gun. I'd trust this person to hit the deck if they heard a gunshot, and only afterwards draw and look for the shooter.
It seems to me that people get mad all the time for dumb reasons, and when that angry person has a gun, bad things can happen a lot more easily. This isn't an argument for gun control, it's skepticism that carrying a gun changes people's behavior that significantly.
Melvin described the “correct” attitude, possibly the prevailing one among gun owners/carriers, but not the prevailing one among people who wind up in the news for having escalated a conflict until their gun ended up being used in it.
Guns are extremely poor defensive weapons. You need to be awake and aware, and know where the threat is. By the same token, Guns make decent offensive weapons.
Assume you had a gun, and no cops within 10 miles. You hear a pickup truck pulling up your driveway with no lights on, and it's 2am. Your gun is more useful than nothing at all.
People are taught not to draw a gun if they don't intend to use it, and not to fire a gun if they don't intend for someone to die.
As a deterrent, walking "as if you're carrying a gun" is probably "nearly as effective" at deterring criminals, who'd rather not tangle with a wolf if there are easily fleeced sheep around.
It's possible that Pretti brought his gun to the protest, envisioning a need to use it outside of the protest. (I find this unlikely, but a lot of people are "hysterically" afraid of cities -- credit cards have done a lot to prevent random muggings, is my impression.).
"Guns are extremely poor defensive weapons. You need to be awake and aware, and know where the threat is. By the same token, Guns make decent offensive weapons."
This is a nonsensical statement. There is no weapon that you do not need to be awake and aware to use, unless you count something like a landmine as a weapon.
There are some cases where modern rational analysis doesn't hold up to ancient wisdom, and the offense / defense balance of guns (vs swords, axes, plate or mail, etc) is just such a case. So, I can only respond by quoting scripture: "Parry this you filthy casual"
Availability. I'm not very familiar with American retailers, but I believe Walmart doesn't typically have them in stock. When regular people don't have ready access to landmines, you can't blame someone for not considering them in their home defense strategy.
TNT is pretty easily available. IEDs are improvised, after all (yes, at that point, you're losing some efficacy... but you're also presumably not dealing with tanks).****
****These are not the smart moves. Smart moves are spikes or caltrops, both of which will not damage your road.
If you don't want landmines, how about pit traps? Or raw sewage? There's a lot of available solutions that don't require being awake and aware (including hiring goons to watch your house).
It might be historically rare, but grenades have proven extremely important in the grinding trench warfare of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Being able to clear a trench or dugout without exposing yourself to fire is essential, and I've seen reports from english-speaking foreign legion types that an assault often "comes down to who has more grenades".
I still expect that the default utilization of guns is FAR FAR higher than grenades, and in fact the usage of grenades as an anti-trench tool is only relevant because guns are what causes trenches to be a shape the battlefield takes.
If you already have a gun, a grenade is a useful tool for a variety of specific situations, but you will never want to go into battle without a gun.
In urban combat, if you have some armed in a culdesac (say, a room with no other exits), the prescription is "throw a grenade." Risking soldiers' lives for no real gain (such as trying to find a hiding guy with a gun) is not normal.
Hamas used grenades all through their assault on 10/7. That's not because Hamas is evil, it's because there are a wide range of tactical reasons to use grenades. (Perhaps the primary reason not to use grenades, other than friendly fire*, is that they're heavy and bulky).
*or dead children/babies, something that Hamas apparently did not care much about.
Sorry but this is still nonsense. Hamas uses grenades sure, but just like every other armed force they use a variety of weapons, and they use far more guns than grenades.
Grenades are an accessory weapon in urban combat, not a primary weapon. As you can tell by the fact that even according to you they're advised for use against a hiding guy with a gun, which is the default weapon, because guns are more useful than grenades.
Guns and grenades have coexisted for centuries on battlefields and as far as I can remember guns have always been seen as the more important and effective weapon.
First off all, this is why if you carry a gun you should train with it until you're comfortable. I don't actually think there's that much risk of someone taking your gun in a confrontation, but I do think if you're too anxious or inexperienced to wield a gun, the chance that YOU accidentally shoot yourself or someone innocent is unacceptably high. Even lifelong gun owners will sometimes shoot themselves in the leg when unholstering or whatever.
But secondly, anyone who can take a gun from you and use it against you already has power of life and death over you, since they can just overpower you and beat you to death or strangle you. You're not really changing the risk by having a gun that they then take: you're just changing the way they might kill you, if they wanted to.
Thirdly, and mostly not that important, but the actual mechanics of taking things from people are relevant here. It's pretty tough, despite what some action movies portray, to take something that someone is gripping hard in their hand. If someone reaches for your gun, you can just pull the trigger, a lot faster than they can pull the gun out of your hand. In addition, ( and this will depend on the situation) they have to be really close to you to do this, and if you have a gun pulled almost anyone will be reluctant to keep coming toward you.
I do think it's worth thinking about exactly what kinds of scenarios you expect to encounter.
My understanding of "squeeze don't pull" is that you're supposed to surprise yourself as to the exact moment of the explosion, so that you don't pre-emptively flinch and pull the gun off-target. That's going to be a very minor concern when the target is close enough to touch you, and even less so if they're physically trying to pull your gun away.
"Squeeze" describes the actual movement of the finger much better and helps avoid the aim drift to the left (for the right-handed) due to the weapon being slightly moved by the finger. When you tell people to "squeeze" they tend to curl the finger as opposed to moving it somewhat sideways.
Of course the aim drift is of little consequence in a point-blank shooting.
The main counter to "they'll use my gun against me" is that the gun should only be coming into play in the first place in a life-or-death situation, so at that point it's the choice between death by gun or death by other means.
But, yeah, the rule of thumb is an undrawn gun is unreliable when someone is within twenty-one feet of you, which is where the average running speed equals the average gun-drawing speed.
I mean, define "bad move". As far as his naked life is concerned, yes, you stay away from nervous, undertrained people with guns, that should be obvious whether or not you have a gun yourself.
However, some people believe that there are more important things that are worth risking your life for. Lamentable as the gun laws in the USA generally are, if(!) Pretti was within his rights to carry a gun at that time and place, and if(!) he didn't give them cause to shoot him, it shouldn't be held against him, otherwise the whole point of those gun laws are meaningless. Had he not carried a gun, you could also hold it against him that he was present at all, presumably excercising his right to protest. At what point do you stop standing up for your rights because the government agents can't keep a cool head and are liable to shoot you?
You sound like you are suffering from polarization toxicity. I think I made clear that I thought Pretti’s bringing a gun was a bad move in the sense that it put him in danger, not in any other sense: not that he was not within his rights, not that he shouldn’t stand up for his rights. I am not holding ANYTHING against Pretti, in the sense of saying he did something illegal or unethical. I’m saying bringing the gun seems like an error of judgment, a step likely to make him and anyone near him less safe rather than more safe.
I think if you narrow your stance this much, it becomes a meaningless criticism. Showing up to a protest *at all*, armed or unarmed, makes you "less safe" in the morally-neutral sense that you're expressing here. After all, staying at home and not protesting is much safer than going out to yell at a bunch of trigger-happy thugs.
But hopefully, you wouldn't criticize the act of protest in general, or post about how people are making an "error in judgement" by asserting their First Amendment rights, because you can understand there might be other concerns besides safety in play. And I think the same is true if someone is exercising their Second Amendment rights.
(And also, all of this is assuming it was a conscious decision to go out on ICE patrol while armed, which is not necessarily true given how quickly ICE pops up and disappears. It's just as likely he was carrying the gun for ordinary reasons and happened to be in the area when ICE showed up.)
<But hopefully, you wouldn't criticize the act of protest in general, or post about how people are making an "error in judgement" by asserting their First Amendment rights, because you can understand there might be other concerns besides safety in play. And I think the same is true if someone is exercising their Second Amendment rights.
OF COURSE I am not criticizing the act of protest or people's asserting their first or second amendment rights. I can't understand what made you even think I might be taking that view, except for some kind of halo effect: I say something mildly negative about Pretti -- that he made a judgment error in bringing the gun -- and so then you wonder whether I believe all immigrants are flea-bitten, housecat-eating, freeloading robbers and rapists, and that getting rid of them is so righteous and important that the public has no right even to protest how it's done. Nope. I have exactly the same view of ICE you do: "trigger-happy thugs."
<I think if you narrow your stance this much, it becomes a meaningless criticism. Showing up to a protest *at all*, armed or unarmed, makes you "less safe" in the morally-neutral sense that you're expressing here.
I think you're wrong about that. Here's the most recent account I've found of how things played out. Agents tackled Pretti and had him on the ground, and one of them found his gun — whether in a pocket, a holster or his hand the account did not say. The agent took it and moved away from him, saying aloud “gun! gun!” and that was when ICE agents opened fire on Pretti. It appears they took the agent’s calling out “gun” to mean that their man they were restraining had a weapon in hand, rather than that the other agent had removed a weapon the man had. Seems clear that having a gun on him was the thing that sealed Pretti's fate.
I have a daughter whom I adopted from China, and who, of course, has Asian looks. When she was thinking recently about taking a trip abroad I had a talk with her about bringing more documentation than a passport of her American citizenship, just in case ICE had suspicions about her in the airport when she returned. I think a precaution like that in our present situation is sensible. And for the same reason I think the sensible, safe thing to do if you are going to be hanging out near ICE is to leave your gun at home. They clearly become more dangerous in situations where they *might* be in danger, even if the cues are ambiguous, as a gun in the pocket is.
Inject a bit of uncertainty here: that gun's known to misfire a lot, making big booms. Imagine if it went off accidentally, and that's when someone else drew and started shooting. This isn't something you can tell from the videos, but if it's the case, the cops ought to say in court.
(Obviously the initial account of brandishing is ... incorrect. Possibly a deliberate lie.)
I assume you're talking about the P320s claimed tendency to fire without a trigger pull. "Misfire a lot" is very relative to the point of being misleading in this case. The baseline rate of modern pistols firing without the trigger being pulled is essentially zero. There are on the scale of dozens of stories of P320s firing without a trigger pull. Some of these are likely false or mistaken cases, but lets assume they're all true. This is a weapon heavily utilized by police, militaries, and civilians alike with millions of hours of handling and use every year. Dozens of incidents is a serious problem when compared to a base rate of "never" (especially for large entities deciding what weapons systems will be standard issue). But for any isolated incident the likelihood that the gun went off without a trigger pull is still essentially zero.
Yes, obviously if the officers know you are armed they are bound to get even more nervous than they already are. No one argues against that.
@EngineOfCreation responded to your question in a polite and thoughtful way, he didn't accuse you of anything, he simply formulated a nuanced and reasonable hypothesis for why Alex Pretti might have decided to bring his gun despite knowing the risk, which seems to be the crux of your doubt. I don't understand how you could have felt attacked.
I don’t feel attacked. I’m commenting on how attacked Engine of Creation sounds. They are rebutting energetically an idea I did not express or imply: that we should “hold it against” Pretti that he brought his gun. And they are doing it in the kind of rhetoric the expresses strong emotions, deeply important values. etc. All I’m saying is that by bringing his gun the poor guy made an error of judgment that increased his risk that ICE would turn lethal.
Yeah, I'm not getting any of that from EoC's response. He was just speculating that maybe Pretti made a different kind of calculation than what you would have. No need to be so defensive dude.
For what it's worth, I don't think EngineOfCreation sounds attacked at all, nor that they're rebutting anything energetically, nor that their rethoric expresses strong emotions.
,”Some people believe that there are more important things that are worth risking your life for.” That doesn’t sound like strong emotion and deeply held values? He’s saying what’s at stake is worth dying for.
I am starting to feel like we need to start training white people in how not to get shot by police officers and ICE (we already have training for black children).
> At what point do you stop standing up for your rights because the government agents can't keep a cool head and are liable to shoot you?
The point where you realize you have no path to winning.
A very common behavior among animals is that when one infringes on another's territory, both will try to make themselves look as big and strong as possible. They size each other up, and when one of them realizes that they are at a clear disadvantage, they will back down. This helps avoid unnecessary violence, benefiting the collective fitness of the species as a whole. I would have hoped humans have better systems to accomplish the same goal, but... here we are.
I'm just curious, why do you believe there is no path to winning? Are you saying that Americans shouldn't stand up for their rights? No one should? Do you believe that any opposition to the state is worthless and doomed to fail? I see you have made similar statements elsewhere in this thread.
If the situation is clearly in their favor, then yes, obviously they should do so, but... Given that the right has plenty of reason to want leftists dead, have more support by the demographics that have meaningful leverage (white and male), and the law enforcement agencies are very much compromised... This is likely only going to end in decisive victory or mutual destruction. This isn't a meaningless power grab by individuals, this is a group that is actually fighting for something. That makes all the difference.
So it's... interesting... to see the tables turn on this one.
I think Americans should stand up for their rights. I do not think my view of those rights is congruent, or possibly even compatible, with what the current protestors view as their rights. Opposition to the state is not worthless, in theory, but there's a whole lot of ways that individual acts can be worthless, and the difference is often outside the control of the one making the sacrifice.
Minnesota has been a perfect demonstration of the power of peaceful protest. If 2nd amendment types were randomly shooting at ICE in the street, things would be VERY different.
We have different conceptions of the meaning of peaceful, and of protest.
Perhaps I'm being nitpicky but I think it's unwise to conflate civil disobedience with protest. The point is that a lot of this activity is in fact illegal, but local law enforcement has been given stand-down orders.
This is not a very common behavior among animals. It is in fact an uncommon behavior among animals. Chickens peck the new bird to death. Most prey animals, because they are not very capable of hurting each other, will in fact inflict as much pain/terror/bleeding as they can. It's only wolves and predators that generally try to not harm others, because any fight is going to prove deadly, and may prove deadly to both parties.
Chickens rarely join a flock voluntarily unless they are obviously welcome for some reason. Which is comparatively rare.
Most 'pecked to death' chickens are victimised because they have no means of retreat because they have been put in that position by a human, eg inside a coop with too few hiding spots. (This is distinct from being low on the pecking order, which is another chicken problem entirely.)
Roosters meeting for the first time do indeed puff themselves up before going in to fight. They raise their hackles in a manner similar to dogs.
Most animals avoid wasting resources on fighting unless absolutely necessary, and so they will display their fitness in all sorts of ways before moving to do battle, which is generally a last resort.
'Deadly' fights are usually pretty rare - the loser turns and runs away before that stage is reached, (often at the display stage), and most victors do not pursue the loser. This is the loser identifying 'no path to winning', as mentioned above.
Mutually assured destruction, with both parties fatally wounded, is even rarer because it makes no sense biologically; it's a huge waste of resources and leaves the field open for a third, non-participating, party.
I see all sorts of scars on deer. Horses'll hurt each other pretty badly too, if you let them. Yes, this isn't "deadly" (because deadly is stupid for all parties)... that's part of the point. Animals that can "relatively harmlessly" wound, generally DO wound.
I'm pulling all of this from very old, seminal research in the animal behavior realm from Konrad Lorenz
Both of the cases you give - deer and horses - are highly constrained populations. There's nowhere left to run, so they endure.
The wild population of deer covers the majority of the north american continent and the population in general is very dense. In situations like that there will be conflict; losers can only retreat into someone else's territory, and yet more conflict ensues. The population density is way above what it should be and their social adaptations are not coping very well.
The wild population of horses is even more physically confined. The open range is pretty closed off these days, so the same kinds of tensions can occur.
And if you are talking about domestic horses, then whatever conflict they encounter is largely due to the way in which humans are managing them; they have little to no freedom of movement. In the wild horses, especially stallions, absolutely do fight for the possession of mares and territory, but the loser turns and runs. This is hard to do if you are in a pen the size of a house block.
I suggest you get out and do some primary research in the form of spending significant time with animals. See how they really behave, not just how you think they should behave.
Statistically, guns *are* more likely to be used against their owner than anyone else, because the largest share of gun deaths is suicide.
I've always thought that guns were stupid too, but that's of course no excuse for the Trump admin tearing up the 2nd amendment in addition to the rest of the constitution.
No no no I did not say guns are stupid. I do not even think guns are stupid. What I think is that I and people like me (no experience with guns and no interest in getting training and experience) are worse off with guns than without. (Though there probably are a few rare situations where even someone like me would be safer with a gun — stuck alone someplace with grizzly bears?)) Arggh, why is everyone so polarized?
If you mean only to discuss what is wise and prudent for "I and people like me", then it's really damn confusing that you insisted on opening that discussion with the example of Alex Pretti, who is not you and not like you. Yes, I agree, *you* should not own a gun. And it would probably be a good idea for you to find protectors you trust to carry guns on your behalf; maybe you've already got that covered.
So what? What does any of that do with Alex Pretti? Because you really came off as someone making claims about what was appropriate behavior for Alex Pretti, who is not Eremolalos and is not very much like Eremolalos.
Yes, I realized a while ago that my initial post was unclear, but by then it seemed useless to go back and change it. I just tried to clarify as I responded to comments. There was kind of an ellipsis in the first post that I was not aware of. The topic I had in mind was the less obvious ways in which guns can be dangerous. One way they can be dangerous is to belong to someone like me, someone inexperienced with them and temperamentally unsuited to becoming comfortable wielding one. A second way is that the person can be competent with guns, but carry one around people who become much more likely to shoot you if they find out you are carrying. But I did not make clear what my overarching point was, and what the connection was between the 2 gun owners I mentioned.
So I inadvertently posted a sort of gun-related Rorschach inkblot. However, it is striking to me that nobody asked me what I was getting at — what did Pretti’s terrible outcome have to do with my gun incompetence? Instead, people reacted by thinking I had various dumb and mean opinions about Pretti, and believed various other things having to do with weapons that were quite far afield of anything I said in the post. You, for instance, wrote a paragraph about how lawfully protesting ICE or giving medical aid to their victims does not require that the person forego their right to carry a gun for self protection. How the fuck do you get that idea out of my original post — the idea that I think such people should not have the right to carry a gun.? My post was wholly about the risk of guns to their users, and contained not a word about people’s right to carry one.
<Yes, I agree, *you* should not own a gun. And it would probably be a good idea for you to find protectors you can trust to carry guns on your behalf; maybe you’ve got that covered.
Given my age, lifestyle, location and other demographics, I am at far more risk of health catastrophes, financial catastrophes, and being done in by the malaise of our era than I am of violent assault. I have people who would support and advise if I suffered one those, but nobody who would carry a gun on my behalf. I think the idea that I would be markedly better off if I had one is quite silly.. As one piece of evidence for that, I can tell you that in my entire life, which has been going on for quite a while now, there have been 3 incidents where I was at some risk.though not a terribly high one, of violent assault. I describe all 3 of them in a post on this thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-418/comment/205828026
Even if I was calm, trained and highly skillful with a gun I do not think having one would have made me a bit safer in any of them. And in the first incident I describe I am pretty sure it would have made me less safe. The muggers would have found it in my purse and who knows what would have happened then? Also, I navigated those 3 situations quite well. I think I am pretty good in situations where the task is to avoid violent attacks on me. It’s the prospect to doing violence that rattles me and makes me indecisive and clumsy.
And finally, here is a personal story about one of the hidden dangers of guns. I grew up familiar with guns, though not very interested in them. I come from a military family. My half brother, my father and my grandfather all had careers in the military, and my grandfather was so goddam successful at it that he’s in Wikipedia. My mother had a career in the Navy before she married my father at age 40, and had a rating of Expert at pistol shooting. I still have the little badge she received, and wear it in an inconspicuous place occasionally. Like you, my father had an antique rifle mounted in the house, and also had some odd-looking guns that I think he collected on his travels in Asia. And my parents kept a gun for personal protection on a high shelf in the bedroom closet. So one day, when I was about 16, I took down the gun and played around with it. I clicked the safety button off and on, pointed it here and there, pointed it my image in a mirror while making fierce faces. Then it occurred to me to put it to my temple and playact a dramatic, pathetic suicide. I was not in the least suicidal, and was in fact enjoying life quite a lot in that era. I just had that teen fascination with darkness, drama, & tragedy. And went ahead and did the suicide playacting. And then I put the gun back where I had found it. Later I realized that I had lost track during all my clicks of the safety button of whether the safety was on or off. But I couldn’t think of anything to do about that other than to confess to my parents that I had played with the gun, and I wasn’t about to do that.
Yes, yes, guns should be kept locked up. But my parents, though prudent and sensible people, did not keep this one locked up and I can see why. They probably thought of it as protection if there was an intruder in the night, and what good is a gun in a gun safe in circumstances like that? You hear a window break and footsteps in your house. So then you find a flashlight and then your key ring and then the right key on it and tiptoe over to the gun safe and fumble with the lock?
If that is what you believe everyone's reaction to be, perhaps you didn't manage to bring across the exact point you were making in your mind? I previously didn't respond to your point of gun training because it seemed tangential, though now it seems like it's an actually important point to you.
Pretti didn't attempt to draw his gun, according to CNN. It was concealed until agents were already all over him on the ground, and it was secured by one of the agents. Only then did they start shooting.
Therefore, the question of whether or not he endangered himself by lack of weapon training doesn't even matter. At what point should his skills have mattered?
Do we even know what Pretti's level of expertise with his gun was? I couldn't find anything at a cursory search, seems way too early to tell with confidence. Extrapolating from your own skills or lack thereof seems ill-advised to draw broader conclusions from, but it seems to be what you're doing anyway.
> What if I was slow to get the thing out and aimed, or I hesitated a bit before firing, and the assailant jumped me and yanked the gun from my hand? So I’ve been thinking that it was a bad move for Alex Pretti to bring his gun with him to a situation where he would be around ICE.
It seems just a strange argument to make. Which is to say, I still don't get it. You say it's not about Pretti, you say it's not about gun rights in general, so what is it about?
"What I think is that I and people like me (no experience with guns and no interest in getting training and experience) are worse off with guns than without."
"Place them in a heavily-trafficked area, and infections won’t spread from person to person because the germs will get zapped before they can reach a new host."
I'm afraid that people will read this and think of the one person talking to another and the viruses getting "zapped" before they can reach the second person.
Was the most senior person the Chinese military and a member of the politburo a CIA spy?
I have no idea what priors, to have, are lots of senior people in great powers agents for other countries? It is entirely possible that this is an excuse for a purge though that makes Xi look bad.
It seems just as likely that Xi is doing a Josef Stalin thing here and purging senior generals from the PLA to destroy an independent power source. Defaming the PLA and making it accept tighter political controls could be a side benefit of this action.
Stalin did accuse almost everyone he purged of being a foreign agent and we have reason to believe many of the senior figures in (especially)London, Berlin and Washington were actually in the pay of foreign powers. I am sure the vast majority of his allegations were fake but it is possible that some share if the time the accusation was correct.
Funny possible explanation: the general was sufficiently competent, connected, respected, etc. that CCP plans critically relied on him; a Western intelligence organization (this works better if it's not the CIA itself) "accidentally" leaks information about the general being a CIA agent.
What's Xi to do? A purge weakens him personally & endangers his larger ambitions, but he could never be certain enough that the information was false to trust the general with what he'd needed him for before.
Why not? It's very easy in the abstract to know someone well enough that you're certain the slanders published about him by your shared enemies are false. It's so easy that this frequently occurs even when the slanders are true.
That's why the key to my unserious hypothesis is it being a "leak".
If you know your adversaries meant for you to get the information you'll discount it (as you say), but if you're led to believe they *didn't* mean for you to find out it suddenly looks a lot more credible.
And information about an adversary from a third party is less likely, in an Occam's razor sense, to be intentional misinformation from said adversary.
> He is also being investigated for alleged efforts to build his own circles of influence within the Communist Party’s top military decision-making body
Sounds like that's the real reason.
On the other hand it's also plausible that he decided to do some freelance diplomacy, believing it's better if the US knows more rather than less about China's nuclear capabilities.
I'm reading that this means Xi has now purged 5 of the 6 members aside from himself from China's version of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the only two who had front-line experience in a shooting war (the 1979 war between China and Viet Nam).
Seems like something broader than just one general being fingered as a spy, though we'll likely never know what.
Unlikely. CIA lost their chinese spies back during Obama's administration. Very bad news for America, that. We wound up being caught flatfooted by covid19, in part because of the lack of spies on the ground.
It depends on the Great Power, obviously. I'd consider this one pretty unlikely.
Hey, it's good to randomly run into you here. I think this piece is strong but also had been meaning to tell you I read through your blog after our mutual friend shared it with me and I generally find your writing enjoyable (I mean, when it's not appropriately grim).
This seems similar to the idea that courts must consider the "totality of circumstances" rather than the "moment of threat", which was considered by the Supreme Court in Barnes v. Felix (May 2025)
Okay, but couldn't you say the same thing about the protesters as well? Nobody is forcing these people to put themselves in the line of fire. If they simply stayed home, the situation would have never escalated. They are just as responsible for creating the justifications for their death.
There's not a "same thing" in the linked article. Instead, there are four very specific instances of escalation: The agents shove a woman to the ground, the agents pepper spray Petti, the agents begin pistol whipping (!?!?!) Petti, the agents shoot Petti. There are no corresponding "same things" to say about Petti because he did not shove anyone, pepperspray anyone, pistol whip anyone, or shoot anyone. Please be more specific.
They were in the street getting in the way of law enforcement. Clearly they didn't need to do that, but they did it anyways. I'm speaking about the woman too, by the way. There was absolutely no reason for her to be on the road there unless she was trying to be an obstacle. So yes, that is an escalation. It was unnecessary, and now someone is dead.
Dr. King was in the road and was an obstacle, and ultimately won (got the civil rights act passed). We're better for it. What's this sacredness that the road has?
What do you mean the situation would not have escalated? The ICE thugs are already kidnapping people and taking them to rape dungeons, it would already have been escalated to a point of moral failure by them even without anyone pushing back.
> The ICE thugs are already kidnapping people and taking them to rape dungeons
While I would like a source on that, the people who have been shot so far are not part of the demographics that have been deemed a liability, so any talk of "kidnapping" isn't relevant to this current situation. As far as I know, so far they have been reasonable enough to not go after anyone that hasn't directly interfered with them.
> As far as I know, so far they have been reasonable enough to not go after anyone that hasn't directly interfered with them.
They're literally going door to door arresting random people. Remember the elderly citizen that they arrested in his underwear in sub-freezing weather? That was only like last week!
I'm not sure why you think the previous legal system is still relevant to this situation. For all intents and purposes, these people are not bound by conventional law. We are now dealing with the physically grounded rules of "how to not give people reasons to shoot you".
They are absolutely bound by conventional law. But the law is a slow thing, that will eventually catch up with "bad guys in blue."
I agree, we are now dealing with the physically grounded rules of "how to not get shot."
This is risk management, and it ought to be done on all sides (this, for example, is why suspects get dogpiled -- they're less likely to hurt an officer if there's ten officers and they can't wrestle their way free).
the woman in the cream coat and Alex himself were basically just people going about their lives when they happened upon ICE and started filming. Are you truly saying that "filming ICE" was adequate justification for Alex's death?
This is disingenuous, even according to your own "I wrote a thing." Alex appeared to stand between a woman and law enforcement. If this is, in fact, obstructing a federal agent (something I'm willing to listen to, with due skepticism), that's more of a justification for Alex's death than otherwise.
Alex did something stupid, by coming armed to a protest. We all can say that's stupid, right? You may have interactions with law enforcement (on your side or not), and having a gun is a ticket to being labeled a "potential problem person" (if the law enforcement is aware you have it -- and some law enforcement folks can tell you've got a gun even if it's concealed, that's part of training).
I'm very willing to consider that Alex' case may show that some ICE people are behaving improperly, perhaps even taking actions that should result in criminal prosecution.
Unlike the Good case, I haven't got a qualified video analyst saying "this was a good shoot, and we almost lost an officer -- if the weather was better, he would be dead."
All the physical aggression originated from ICE. Pretti's gun was concealed until he was already in the scuffle on the ground. The gun was secured by an agent, then the shooting started. Just about the only defense left for ICE is that they may have believed Pretti was an actual videogame character and that he was about to pull out the rocket launcher.
With regard to the likelyhood of a gun malfunction, I would say the odds are low. The SIG Sauer P320 had a design flaw which made it possible for the weapon to discharge when dropped. That was corrected in 2017, with a free repair offered to existing owners. There may still be some weapons out there which have not been fixed, but Petti’s weapon was not dropped. So I’d say it’s a lot more likely that the gun fired because the ICE agent pulled the trigger than that the gun somehow discharged without the trigger being pulled.
I think the video analysis has now come down pretty strongly against Pretti's gun being the one that initially discharged.
Although it may look as though it fired in the video, its likely that was a jpeg artefact.
The justification for this is, although the framerate of the video is too low to be likely to capture the discharge itself it was easily high enough to easily be able to capture the "moving back" of the rack on the gun as any discharge caused another round to be loaded into the chamber. A movement that is much slower and therefore should absolutely have been captured.
The rack on the gun does not move in any part of the video, so it seems the initial discharge was from the gun of the Agent who also fired most (if not all) of the other shots.
Yeah, what you're saying seems like the best summation. And when even the "critical defenders" (aka skeptics who will say a cop did a good thing, some of the time) say "WTF?" I'm inclined to believe this was a really dumb thing on the part of ICE. Miscommunication, among other things (the miscommunication was definitely a training issue -- I'm not sure people have thought through "what to do if there's a gun, and it is removed" but that ought to be a specific call-sign). Shooting someone who's already being dogpiled is not just dangerous to the arrestee, as well.
As you haven't posted a video showing that (just a still) I candidly have no idea. Shoving, by the way, is something that can presumably happen as an accident (putting this out there, because I do see ice on the street).
You should look at el gato malo's work (on substack) on the Good shooting, because it does show that the first shot was through the windshield of the car. That's "officer still in front of vehicle" (Also: Good's wife was shouting "Drive Baby Drive" -- if you want to get into contradictory auditory directions --> I find it more likely that she was trying to drive away, in order to not suffer any consequences, than she was trying to drive away because an officer ordered her to).
I'm not an expert on the Good shooting, but as a professional geometer I want to say that the shot being through the front windshield is *very* weak evidence that it was fired from in front of the car. Most of the locations from which you could shoot the front windshield are not in front of the car (in the sense of being within 30° either way of the car's path).
Just checked back, the link's in the post but you missed it; I'm posting it here, skip to 0:35 to see the woman getting shoved by the ICE agent while walking away:
> I find it more likely that she was trying to drive away, in order to not suffer any consequences, than she was trying to drive away because an officer ordered her to
"she needs to have been obeying police orders for the right reasons to not deserve getting shot, and I think she wasn't" is probably not a great position to hold
They would not have died if they didn't do that. The objective information here is that these deaths were preventable by both sides. Even the administration would not have been able to justify their deaths to the public if they hadn't interfered whatsoever.
1. The protesters who decided to obstruct and interfere with law enforcement officials doing their jobs instead of... well, doing any number of other things
2. The law enforcement officers who did their jobs imperfectly under very trying circumstances and could have made better decision on a second-by-second basis
3. The local police, and those in command of them. Local police are trained in crowd control, ICE are not; if the protestors insist on causing trouble then the police need
I would put responsibility for the deaths in the order of 1 (highest), then 3, then 2.
There's more. The local cops were being asked to hand over criminal illegal aliens (I'm using the term to differentiate against illegal aliens who didn't otherwise commit a crime) and they weren't cooperating, so ICE was going in on their own.
I don't have data about how many fit this category.
>1. The protesters who decided to obstruct and interfere with law enforcement officials doing their jobs instead of... well, doing any number of other things
In the video's we have seen no protestors, including Pretti, are seen to obstruct LE officials in any way.
They are all video'ing LE officials, a constitutionally protected act.
During doing so they are told to move back. Which they do repeatedly when asked. Despite this advancing officers pursue them whilst they are retreating and push them repeatedly backwards, they submit to that pushing, still moving backwards multiple times until eventually the repeated retreats and repeated pushing leads to a woman falling in the snow/ice.
None of them step towards or attempt to obstruct an officer. Pretti does step towards and attempt to assist the woman who has been pushed/fallen over, speaking his last words "are you OK?" to her, but again that is not obstructing an officer.
The officer then approaches Pretti again and he and the woman are then pepper sprayed in the face twice, and presumably at that point Pretti loses the ability to see/understand whats going on around him due to the debilitating effect of the pepper spray.
He is then pulled over backwards by an officer pulling on his collar from behind... and despite by this point being blind and probably disorientated he goes with that motion, falling to his hands and knees.... and keeping his hands away from his body and away from his weapon as is advised for CC in an altercation with LE. He is then repeatedly hit in the face with a pepper spray can, but still does not fight back or reach for his weapon and remains on his hands and knees.
None of that is obstructing or interfering with law enforcement in any way. They were observing/video'ing and in doing so were assaulted multiple times by the officers for reasons that are unclear, but did not cause him at any point to fight back or obstruct, even whilst blinded, forcibly pushed off their feet and assaulted multiple times with a blunt object.
"Crowd control"? The crowd was what, two people? Plus a couple more witnesses filming from farther away? Are you expecting the local police to just follow ICE around all day and make sure they never cross paths with a civilian at any point?
I really don't see how you can argue the people who put 5-10 rounds in somebody are less responsible for the death than the guy whose worst potential crime was illegally standing in front of an ICE or CBP agent.
I do have to say, this guy doesn't appear to have been as badly behaved as Renee Good (watched with sound off).
His crime was "bringing a gun to a protest." (something we don't actually criminalize, but was a rather extreme failure of judgement. Bear in mind protestors have beaten their own fellow protestors. Take a schmuck with a gun, and he's shooting his fellow protestor.)
I can't seem to find any information on what precipitated that encounter, and it seems you don't know either. Either way, the situation should have been clear to everyone that walking outside in such chaos is a risk to your life. Collateral damage is inevitable. Though, I doubt the administration would have been able to justify her death if that's what ended up happening.
38% of the Northeast's current electrical usage is being provided by burning oil. This despite being around 300 miles from the largest gas fields on the planet.
I'm finding very different numbers, with electricity much more heavily provided by natural gas than fuel oil. (Check out e.g. ISO New England's fuel mix stats, which give natural gas at 55%, solar and wind at 4% and 3%, and oil at 0.3%)
Is your source potentially counting heating oil, or even transportation?
"In New England, fuel oil generation kicked into high gear to help the six-state region's electric grid conserve natural gas, its top fuel source.
As evening approached on Saturday, oil-fired generation accounted for 38% of the New England grid's output, compared with a typical level of about 1% or less, ISO New England's operations display showed. Natural gas, usually the grid's main fuel source, accounted for 24% of the grid's generation output."
Thanks, I appreciate the source a ton. So this is a temporary measure with the storm - that makes a lot more sense. My context-sensing skills may have went briefly offline.
In my area (Long Island), many residences use oil rather than gas for heating because the gas delivery infrastructure is not well developed. Many residential streets lack gas pipes.
Costs of heating with gas and oil are pretty much the same. Sometimes gas is a bit cheaper, sometimes oil is, but it all works out about equal.
Note: despite a population of 2.5 million most parts of Nassau and Suffolk counties lack sewers.
... my god, and I thought our sewer situation was bad! (we're paying billions to remedy it.) Now you're telling me that you guys don't even have one, and the EPA isn't charging you billions of dollars?
I am also envisioning shitstorms ala Seattle Washington, at the turn of the 1800s to 1900s.
Yes, that's not now, that's a "back to 2016" -- so take that as "what it looked like before we suspended all environment regulations because it's an emergency."
In Jan 2016 oil generated 52 GWh out of a total of 8782 GWh from all sources. That's 0.6%.
That and the other data on the site seems to show that oil was mostly for peaker plants, and most of what was taken offline was coal and nuclear. This fits with the conventional narrative I've heard where cheap natural gas took over from coal and nuclear specifically.
(Though I agree that it's not making renewables look like the main character)
EDIT: I may be misunderstanding you. Are you saying the source I cited is from 2016? Because I looked at the 2025 full spreadsheet and that appears to match with the highlights on the main page.
Ok, I agree that the power grid is under tremendous strain right now. I would still like a source for the original 38% number if you have one, since this (2025) data makes that number sound somewhat implausible. If the 38% portion includes heating oil, I'd be much less surprised.
These folks claim that people have been getting the right answer to the Monty Hall Problem for all the wrong reasons. Be that as it may, the question that I've never seen answered (and that I haven't been able to deduce myself) is why it's important in the wording of this problem that Monty *randomly* picks which door with a goat to expose? Seems to me that his choice would be dictated by the one remaining door without a car behind it. Monty can't open the one with the car behind it, nor can he open the door originally chosen by the contestant. Why do they keep harping on the idea that this is a random choice on Monty's part?
"Right for the wrong reasons: common bad arguments for the correct answer to the Monty Hall Problem" by Don Fallis & Peter J. Lewis.
> If the car were behind door #1 (the door you initially chose), there is a 50% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat. This is because Monty has a choice about whether to open door #2 or door #3 and he chooses at random. If the car were behind door #2, there is a 100% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat. This is because Monty has no choice about which door to open (since he is not allowed to open the door that you initially chose). If the car were behind door #3, there is, of course, a 0% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat.
> Since door #1 and door #2 started out equally likely, and since the evidence favors door #2 over door #1, once Monty opens door #3 and reveals a goat, the car is more likely to be behind door #2 than door #1. So, you should definitely switch to door #2. We will call this the Favoring Procedure.
> David Deutsch says everyone is getting it wrong...
No, you're misreading that post. He says that everyone is getting it right, and provides a perspective on why switching is better. (A perspective that is not original to him.)
Consider that, in the traditional statement of the problem, the conclusion is that if you switch you have a 2/3 chance to find the car, and if you don't switch you have a 1/3 chance to find the car.
By "contrast", in the post you link, you always switch, and you have a 2/3 chance to find the car.
> the question that I've never seen answered (and that I haven't been able to deduce myself) is why it's important in the wording of this problem that Monty *randomly* picks which door with a goat to expose? Seems to me that his choice would be dictated by the one remaining door without a car behind it. Monty can't open the one with the car behind it, nor can he open the door originally chosen by the contestant. Why do they keep harping on the idea that this is a random choice on Monty's part?
1/3 of the time, you start by picking the door with the car.
Monty Hall was interviewed on the subject. He'd never heard of the kerfuffle—easily simulated with a Python script—but was intrigued. He then demonstrated to his interviewer plus a couple of assistants that Monty Hall could force a goat Every Single Time.
<picks goat> "Congratulations! You won a goat!"
<picks non-goat> "Are you sure? I'm giving you an opportunity to change your mind . . going once. . . going twice . . <switches> "Congratulations! You won a goat!"
This is stupid. They're saying the answers to the Monty Hall problem are wrong because they don't yield correct answers to variations of the Monty Hall problem, i.e. to different problems entirely. Being able to answer arbitrary other problems when applied to them in a necessarily somewhat arbitrary way is not a requirement for a solution to be considered a valid ("for the right reason" in their terms) solution to the original problem.
Edit: they write: "Since this argument does not appeal to the fact that Monty is required to open a door to reveal a goat, it is also applicable to cases where Monty might open a door and reveal the car."
then they write:
"In particular, proponents of the Wi-Phi Probability Concentration argument might claim that it is understood that this argument is not intended to apply to the Random Monty variation. It is only intended to apply to the original puzzle."
...no shit? It reads like a troll paper. Who even are these people?
The implication is, though, if you are presented with an analogous problem, the wrong method that happens to get you the correct answer in the MHP may not work for a different scenario.
Sure, they could've made the true claim that the common intuitive solution doesn't generalize to a variant of the problem. Instead they chose to make the false claim that this means that the solution is also not a valid solution to the original problem.
Theres only 3 doors, its not hard to brute force the solution for the different scenarios. You choose one at random. Then monty chooses either at random or intentionally depending on you scenario. Compare the payoff of a switch strategy to a non switch strategy. Are ppl arguing about the narrative or the actual outcomes?
Okay, well I dont think ppl are harping on how important it is that his choice is random. Certainly the original phrasing didn't use that word. They sometimes describe his choice between two goat doors as random, but his exact behavior when choosing between two goat doors is not important so long as it is not discernable to the player. For example he could always choose his favorite goat and the game wouldn't change. It is important that its not discernable and randomness achieves that. If he chose the left most door with a goat, then in cases where he chose the door on the right you'd know the other is a car and that would change the game.
One of your links refers to the "random monty variant" when his choice is always random and it has a different answer.
The way I see it, if (unknown to you) Monty opens a door at random then you have nothing to gain by switching but also nothing to lose, whereas if he knowingly opens a wrong door then that is where switching is advantageous. But either way, you don't lose anything by switching.
The first time I heard this problem my intuition was faulty (like a lot of other people's). But for me the most persuasive argument for switching is to consider a similar game where there are twenty doors, and after your initial choice Monty opens one door after enother all empty until only one remains. In that case, if he knows which door the goat is behind, then that one remaining door obviously stands out as being highly likely to conceal the goat compared to the initial door one chose.
People use 'random' and 'arbitrary' interchangeably, but I think they actually mean that he chooses arbitrarily.
Randomness isn't relevant there, the point is just to contrast the case where Monty has the option of opening either door vs. the case where his choice is forced. I don't think this is actually important to any explanation of the problem, it's just communication difficulty trying to explain things to a lay audience.
Non-random choices always reveal information. Let's say that Monty will always open door #2 if he can, i.e. if you haven't picked it and there's a goat behind it. If you pick door #1, and Monty opens #3 containing a goat, you know 100% that the car is behind #2 instead of only 67%.
But Monty has full knowledge of the system, and he knows the car is behind door #2. But he can't reveal the car, can he? And he can't reveal the goat behind door number #1. His decisions have to be non-random for the game to work. Of course, the contestant has only partial knowledge of the system, and she has to calculate the odds based on the new information from the point that the goat is revealed behind door #3.
Yes, the initial arrangement of cars and goats could and should be randomized. But again, once the game begins, the odds always favor switching doors on your second choice. And once the game begins, there's no element of randomness unless the car and goat are being continuously swapped between the two remaining doors. It's not quantum mechanics, where there are no known local hidden variables. :-)
I'm pretty sure Monty can reveal the car, actually. The traditional statement of the problem doesn't require that he reveal a goat, or even that he reveal anything at all, only that he happened do so this particular time. Also, this was a real television show in which Monty didn't always offer the choice, and Monty Hall was a real person who I believe has publicly stated that he had a free choice and that he used it arbitrarily to maximize entertainment value (and that he'd have found it particularly entertaining to confound the plans of tricksy game-theorists trying to outsmart him).
If the problem statement is modified to more precisely specify the algorithm Monty is using, the ideal strategy varies accoringly - I believe there's a table for that in the wikipedia article. But for the original, the winning move is to never switch unless you're a cheerfully telegenic young woman, in which case always switch :-)
It's important to distinguish between the real world Monty Hall and his "Let's make a deal" show, and the idealized "Monty Hall Problem" which is merely based on the show rather than modelling it perfectly.
The original formulation of the problem, as per Wikipedia, does not explicitely say that the host will always reveal a goat, but I think it implies it by clarifying that the host knows where the car is.
>Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Since the problem is all about whether to switch or not, I believe it's safe to assume that the host will never reveal the car, otherwise there's no point in continuing the game.
I did some further research, and it looks like the Let's Make a Deal creators would create different scenarios with different rules. The Monty Hall Problem presents a single variation of one of the games presented to the contestants. But the goal was always to trade a prize for a hidden prize, which could be potentially better or worse. So, in the spirit of the original show, I don't think Monty would ever prematurely reveal the prize before the contestant could be kept in a state of suspense.
I used to watch that game with my grandmother as a kid, but I no longer remember those other variations. Reading and rereading the Monty Hall Problem description for 2+ decades has destroyed my original memories of the show. On one level, I feel smarter to have wrestled with the Monty Hall Problem, but in another way, I feel like I've traded in my actual memories for a goat.
This occasionally had the potential to bite them. Back when the rocks were still warm and squishy, a writer on the show published an article with the following situation:
A writer thought a fun "Zonk" would be an oil well pump, pumping merrily away onstage. So they rented an oil pump, the audience got their chuckle, and the contestant dutifully chose the consolation prize.
Had they Kept the oil well pump, they could have turned around and sold it for considerably more than the "Big Deal" back in those days.
At least that's how the story was published in TV Guide.
Raqobatni sevuvchilar uchun https://pinupuz.app/ saytida muntazam ravishda turnirlar o‘tkazib turiladi. Bu musobaqalarda qatnashib, nafaqat o‘yindan zavq olish, balki katta pul mukofotlarini ham yutib olish mumkin.
Turnirlarda ishtirok etish shartlari odatda oddiy bo‘ladi: shunchaki ma’lum slotlarni o‘ynash va ball to‘plash kerak. Eng faol o‘yinchilar turnir jadvalida yuqori o‘rinlarni egallab, qo‘shimcha sovg‘alarga ega bo‘lishadi.
Bu o‘yin jarayonini yanada qiziqarli qiladi. O‘z omadingizni sinab ko‘rish va boshqa o‘yinchilar bilan kuch sinashish uchun ajoyib imkoniyatni qo‘ldan boy bermang.
ICE claim that a man shattered his skull running into wall triggers tension at a Minnesota hospital
https://www.startribune.com/ice-claim-that-a-man-shattered-his-skull-running-into-wall-triggers-tension-at-a-minnesota-hospital/601574491?utm_source=gift
So not only he injured himself, he also tried to demolish someone's property?
Luckily, the ICE patrol was here to save the day from all that crazy wokeness.
Long live America, the country of freedom, getting greater and greater every day!
To save people a click: The victim has severe skull injuries in both the front and back and left and right sides, making it laughable that he could have been injured that way by deliberately running into a wall. It's almost as subtle as "fell down a flight of stairs onto 10 bullets".
It’s bad here in the TCs.
Oh well in that case it's all good!
Many people here really like puns and wordplay. I compiled a collection of the best triple entendres I could find online (feel free to add to the list!), with explanations. I also included some analysis and my own candidates to add to the canon.
https://linch.substack.com/p/triple-entendre
Fool Moon this weekend. As in "fool me twice..."
Recent discovery to recommend to the board - if you have a spare 90 minutes and a Netflix account, watch the first 3 episodes of Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and see if it hooks you.
It's a shockingly good anime about (of all things) people in a 16th-ish century alt-earth trying to prove that the Sun is the center of the universe while dodging inquisitors. Quest for truth in the face of adversity, with a villain who's basically a brilliantly-done Medieval version of Christoph Waltz's character from Inglorious Basterds.
The description reminded me of a videogame where the villain's nefarious plot is to... convince France to sell Louisiana to the United States. And the protagonist is trying to stop it.
I have the opposite recommendation: Avoid Orb! The ending is incredibly stupid and retroactively ruins the whole show. TLDR: Nowak wins, everyone dies and noone accomplishes anything and you're supposed to feel good about it because Copernicus will still happen 100 years later anyway. Also, Rafal comes back to life with absolutely no explanation.
Also, it's not actually set in "16th-ish century alt-earth". That's what the show makes it seem like (even being set in "The Kingdom of P" instead of "Poland"), but then the ending tries to retroactively claim that it was set in *1400* in real life all along (which is why every character dies without accomplishing anything - can't change the timeline!)
That sounds... brilliant, actually. I'm in!
In case anyone else is interested, it's Japanese with subtitles, but not dubbed.
Don't waste your time. Or if you do watch it, skip the last two and a half episodes. It would have been much better if it had ended 2.5 episodes earlier, but then they tacked on an ending that retroactively ruins the entire show.
Oof - interesting! I have to confess I dropped the rec having only hit ep 20, and having a great time with it. I'm definitely going to finish it either way, but curious now to see how the ending will land for me.
I thought you might have not finished it based on your description in the original post, since the ending explicitly sets it in real life 1400 Poland, despite the show initially seeming to be a late 16th century alt history.
In one of Scott's posts relating to AI psychosis, someone (I don't remember if it was a comment or part of the post) linked an article discussing AI psychosis and it detailed how this guy thought he came up with a crazy new math equation, and another situation where some lady was influenced to divorce her husband. Does anyone have the link to that? I'm having trouble finding it through google.
UPDATE: There were actually two articles and I found them both.
Could you please link the articles here?
Obligatory relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/979/
Here they are sir 🫡
https://futurism.com/chatgpt-chabot-severe-delusions
https://futurism.com/chatgpt-marriages-divorces
https://open.spotify.com/track/5Uc07fEUpjjFcLEIleEHkJ?si=AxJNeYQpRQ2eSXUwzmmYbQ
I would love some recommendations of translations of Timaeus and Phaedrus. I also would like one for the Odyssey. I want to do an analysis of this song as it’s one of my favorites, especially the great pointing-out instructions. Also, it’s a great mood creator.
“Niggas call me prophecy, swagging and philosophies
White on white wagon, call that motherfucker Socrates
Rat ass niggas, fighting for a block of cheese
Catch me out in China stunting, yeah, I'm 'bout my guapanese
My shoe game serious, so serious, Wapanese
Niggas say I'm blessed, my bad I forgot to sneeze (Achoo)
There your reasons go, bitch
I got some tissues for your issues tell 'em blow this (bitch)”
For the Odyssey translation, it has to be Robert Fitzgerald's from 1961. I'm deeply partial to "her white arms round him pressed as though forever." (cf. Emily Wilson's "and her white arms would not let go his neck.")
Might be fun to read both. Could be a cool project to do a line by line comparison of all of nobody’s situations. It’s a crash course in reasoning in my opinion, tacit knowledge transfer of how to learn.
Maybe, but then you'd have to suffer through Wilson's dreck.
Question for people with texture sensitivity that is common in mild versions of autism: have you found a way to derive any benefit from this? Like, I dunno, maybe you work with textiles and a heightened awareness of textures is helpful; or maybe you work in surgery, and this translates into slightly better haptic feedback through the tools?
The reason I ask is that I realized that I am simultaneously "a natural speller" (i.e. I pick up correct spelling without devoting conscious effort to it, both in English and in Russian, and iirc was halfway decent at it in French despite not consciously hearing the differences between the different accents you can put on an e). This conferred some obvious advantages in school (rapidly diminishing in real life, in the age of ubiquitous autocorrect), but I think the exact same trait makes me hyper-aware when someone uses the wrong one out of "their/there/they're" or confuses "principal" and "principle". I think this irritation might be categorically similar to finding e.g. clothing tags irritating, so I'm wondering if there are any hidden benefits to the heightened clothing tag awareness.
It is interesting to link physical sensitivity to general perceptual sensitivity of errors (if I understand you correctly).
If it helps, I believe I have a level of sensitivity/hyper-awareness beyond what my peers have. I end up noticing errors a lot (which I learned can be very annoying to constantly point out to others, though some lecturers welcome it). It could be visual such as improperly aligned elements in a graphic, or it could be errors in equations, or misspellings as you mentioned.
It is a bit odd and conflicting at times, since the hyper-awareness can sometimes distract me. But most of the time, I seem to pick up on things that go by unnoticed by most people. And I am generally good at focusing when I want to.
In terms of physical sensitivity, I do feel a bit over-sensitive at times, and experience high levels of pain or discomfort from seemingly minor things, such as small cuts or acne. I am generally good at calming myself down from these situations once I think on it. I used to be able to tell if dollar bills (1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, 100s) were counterfeit just by feel, back when I worked in retail as a child laborer (my parents owned a store).
To get the point, I do believe the sensitivity is very handy for me. I work in applied science / engineering. I do a lot of experimental work where tactile feedback is critical, dealing with micro- and nanometer-scale elements. I also notice errors in ideas or equations, which avoids going down the wrong path (i.e., wasting tons of money).
I was today years old when I accidentally discovered that if a Substack user blocks you, it not only hides their comments, but hides *your own comments to them,* while leaving the thread of conversation visible to everyone else.
Talk about an unforeseen consequence of internet safetyism! Now a user can make themselves publicly appear to have dunked so hard as to have rendered their opponent speechless merely by secretly seizing the last word with a block.
That's so dumb.
That's how it works on Twitter too. People will ask you a question and then immediately block you so you can't answer.
My favorite solution (which no website implements, as far as I know, but once I had a plugin that did this) is that comments from "blocked" users remain visible, but the font is gray and smaller size.
This is calming for my brain; when I see the text I go like "oh look, that idiot wrote something again" and now it does not annoy me at all.
If the one exchange matters enough to you, you can make a second account, point out that they blocked you before you could reply, reply to their reply, and then block them so they can't reply.
Pretty sure attempting to get around blocks via sock accounts is against Substack's TOS! This exchange doesn’t matter enough to get banned over.
But also, this mechanism feels like something that required a PSA for any commenters here who may get into disagreements with other commenters.
> unforeseen consequence
I think it's uncharitable to think the people designing this too stupid to see this effect.
Why do you think they want it?
As in, what is my reason for believing it? Because it's easy to change, and they have kept it as is.
As in, what do I believe are THEIR reasons? Most likely, it's just consistency with the behavior of other social media. Possibly a requirement by the app stores of Google and Apple. Maybe even a legal requirement somewhere they wish to operate.
Oh, fair enough, I suppose it's malicious, then!
Kanye West's turn away from Nazism reminds me of a theory I've been working on for a while that modern Americans basically model Nazism not as an actual political ideology which developed in a particular time and place in response to certain conditions, but rather as just being The Dark Side of the Force.
Actual political ideologies have ideals and policy positions, however bad they may be. Nazism, in the American imagination, does not, it's more just a sort of generalised sourceless evil for evil's sake. Like the Dark Side of the Force it is endlessly threatening regardless of how few people actually believe in it. Like the Dark Side of the Force, the fact that nobody claims to believe in it doesn't mean there's not a secret army of loyalists hiding behind the scenes. Like the Dark Side of the Force it's endlessly seductive despite not having anything obvious going for it, so you need to throw away all your free speech principles to ensure that nobody ever sees a swastika lest its magical power turn them into Sith acolytes.
If Nazism were treated like an actual political ideology instead of a magical fantasy villain then some journalist could have asked him "Oh I hear you're a National Socialist now, Mr West, can you please explain your policy on the Sudetenland?" and the facade would have punctured immediately.
> it, so you need to throw away all your free speech principles to ensure that nobody ever sees a swastika lest its magical power turn them into Sith acolytes.
The US doesn't do that, Germany and Austria do.
I think you'll find that the average person's understanding of any political ideology (or form of Government) is pretty cartoonish.
Commentators in the US sometimes use the terms socialist, Nazi, fascist and communist (probably others) in ways that are at least somewhat interchangeable. They're meant to conjure images of Lovecraftian evil rather than educate about an opponents policy positions.
Have you seen the "Are we the baddies" sketch? It may not be a coincidence that the guys with the black uniforms with skulls on them who started the biggest war in history and did many other bad things got metonymized into symbolizing bad things in general.
If you read about actual American Neo-Nazis or watch documentaries about them, they are aware of this! They like it. They think the unique significance of the swastika, Hitler salute, etc. gives them a seriousness and resonance that other varieties of extremists lack.
I adore that sketch.
Part of the joke is that Nazi imagery is intensely villain-coded because post-WW2 English-language media has widespread practices of using Nazi-derived imagery to code the villains as evil and it's been going on for long enough that recent generations look at actual WW2 Nazis and see over-the-top villain coding.
Some examples:
- The "Be Prepared" song from Lion King has a bit where the hyenas are goose-stepping past Scar who is watching from a high ledge, like Hitler watching Stormtroopers at a Nazi Party rally.
- In Star Wars, the Imperial Navy mostly wears uniforms that are either black (like SS uniforms) or greenish grey (like Wehrmacht uniforms). The uniforms also feature jackboots and jodhpurs.
- Tons of media has the villainous legions of doom arrayed in long shots in rigid square formations arranged in a neat grid, in shots directly borrowed from the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Off the top of my head, this shows up repeatedly in Star Wars and the LotR movies.
- Lots of bad guys have facial scars that resemble the dueling scars fashionable among the Prussian aristocrats who made up much of the German officer class in WW2.
It's true, even WWI German military imagery is restrospectively tainted, like the Pickelhaube helmets. I think the most extreme and amazing version of this is the Ralph Bakshi movie Wizards, where the bad wizard's secret weapon is literally leftover Nazi propaganda films that blow the minds of the unicorns, elves and assorted pixies opposing his forces.
Mein Kampf's actual policy positions were:
1) Mandatory Gym Class
2) Plant flowers in front of Governmental Buildings.
There's a reason why it's generally considered "the book about hysterical Jewish ranting."
Yes, we do have Nazism as evil as one of the foundational beliefs of Western Society (in this view, Hitler is the Devil).
Decry this at your own risk, as many people do see "explaining hitler" as... ethically problematic, or possibly anti-semitic.
"The nationalization of our masses will succeed only if, together with the positive battle for the soul of our people, its international poisoners are wiped out. The German blood must be purified, and the alien Jew dealt with, or there will be no resurrection of the German nation. The race question is the key to world history and to human civilization."
I think it's a mischaracterization to say that getting Jews out of Germany was just a "nice to have" and not a central part of his mission.
It's not as "coherent" a policy as you might think.
It's White Nationalism, sure, but he's using "alien Jew" as a racial stand-in for communist* (please bear in mind there was fighting in the German streets all through the Weimar Republic, including civilians using homemade tanks).
That said, it absolutely is a mission statement. He just isn't giving concrete proposals.
*This is not to apologize for Hitler! The communists were, by and large, Jews**.
**Yes, this is impolitick to say, but I've read about it in Russian History, and been told by "personal anecdote" about NYC***.
***Communists weren't seen as "evil" until after "Uncle Joe" Stalin.
I've never read Mein Kampf so I can't contradict you on that, but would suggest the NSDAP Party Platform of 1920 as being a more reasonable guide to Nazi political positions at least at that point in time https://www.vaholocaust.org/25-points-of-nsdap/
These range from "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations" to "no Jew can be a member of the race" to "We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts)" to "the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation" to "abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain" to "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations".
The "freedom of religion" is especially funny. But I'm rather a fan of black humor.
You can clearly see the strains of socialism and ethnic nationalism wrapping together.
The point of looking at Mein Kampf is to destroy the idea of Hitler as an especially big man. He was a rather small and petty bureaucrat, and had small and petty policies to put forward (and some "usual scheduled rants" about ethnic nationalism, Jews, etc.).
Perhaps he had slightly more vision than the EU bureaucrats of today, in that they were sold a bill of goods (lies, in other words), and they stubbornly cling to plans that have been made obsolete.
Lebensraum is a prominent policy in Mein Kampf so what are you on about?
Also I’m not sure what this Nazi talk is all about. Our American KKK was killing innocents and preaching white superiority since before Hitler was born. Neo-Nazis should have some ethnic pride.
KKK ideology is alive and well, thriving even. ICE masks are KKK 101.
Nationalism is not a policy. When Israel talks about Greater Judea, they aren't saying "we should spend X tanks to take over Y land."
Brownshirts and Paramilitary are distinguished from police violence by "not operating under the color of the law." This is why brownshirt-behavior is raiding churches...
Okey -dokey. Right wing Chief District Judge in Minnesota: “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
That seems obvious on the face. Turns out giving a federal agency more money than the Ukrainian Military Budget means they are a very busy agency.
If you wanted to know, say, how many court orders the Department of Deer Warfare violated, you'd have to know where to FIND the Department of Deer Warfare -- and I'm pretty sure Mr. Chief District Judge doesn't even know it exists. (People don't exactly get court orders to restrain The Goosinator! either).
I'm not getting up on a high horse to defend ICE. Police brutality is police brutality. But let's be clear when we're talking "extrajudicial killings" versus "paramilitary actions." They're pretty different, actually. Last legal case of ethnic cleansing in America was less than 50 years ago, for god's sake! **
**Paramilitary force wiping out black people for being black down California way. If you haven't heard of it, look it up.
> **Paramilitary force wiping out black people for being black down California way. If you haven't heard of it, look it up.
Is that another made-up event like this one? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-418/comment/205964563
If not, post a link to a reliable source.
Do you think that modern neo-Nazis are currently pushing to re-annex the Sudentenland? Honestly?
Absolutely not! My critique applies just as much to the self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. They're not treating Nazism as an actual political ideology either, they're just using it as a stand-in for "scary and evil and racist" because they want to be scary and evil and racist.
The other analogy I was going to make is Satan worship. Nobody actually worships Satan in the sense that they both go through the motions of worshipping Satan and actually honestly believe Satan is a real thing, but there's a small cadre of idiots who like to pretend to be Satan worshippers because they think it makes them cool and scary, and a slightly larger cadre of idiots who think that Satan worshippers are a real problem. Both of these groups have shrunk a lot since the 1980s and are now considered more ridiculous, but the equivalent "Nazi" thing has only grown and the panicky Karens who once worried that some kid out there might be scrawling a pentagram on his exercise book are now worried that he might be scrawling a swastika.
Racism was an actual part of the Nazi platform, though! If someone becomes a neo-Nazi because they hate Jews and black people, they literally believe in something the historical Nazis believed in. That seems very different from your example of Satanists not literally believing in Satan.
I think if you time-warped a historical Nazi into the present day, and gave them a brief run-down of the history of Germany post-WWII, they would not try advocating for Germany to annex the Sudetenland or retake Alsace-Lorraine, for obvious practical reasons. But they would still probably advocate for racist and antisemitic policies to the extent that is possible in the modern political environment.
The neo-Nazi synagogues do not treat Nazism as an actual political ideology. It, however, is not a "standin" for "scary and evil and racist." It's a standin for "Anti Russian Sentiment."
Hitler brand cigarettes are hardly offered because Hitler is seen as scary and evil and racist, either.
Say, how many colors are in a rainbow?
How many colors are in the rainbow flag on your nearest "flies a rainbow flag" church?
Funny thing about Satanists is they like Subverting.
There's an interesting history to the stripes in the Rainbow Flag, for example the original flag included hot pink, but most subsequent copies dropped hot pink due to the cost at the time.
Wikipedia's summary is pretty good.
Hot pink would have been an interesting choice, sure. Wikipedia's summary aptly shows how -nobody else- makes a six color rainbow, and that it took active intervention to -get- a six color rainbow (this wasn't "someone's original brainchild")
I grew up with a six-color rainbow in Paraguay, I think. Certainly I had never heard of the 7-color form until I came to the US.
Oh definitely. someone in here shared Kulak's post about "hyperborean esoteric hitlerism"[0] a while ago, and I feel like that phrase captured the sentiment perfectly. Kulak's a little too spicy for my taste, but I gotta give credit where credit is due: it's a hell of a meme.
You may also be interested in "Without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil" [1], in which Lou Keep does a "book" "review" (synopsis actually) of Eric Hoffer's "True Believer" (1951). IIRC the thesis is something like "it's more important for a narrative to have an antagonist (or in Scott's terms, "outgroup") than it is to have a protagonist".
[0] https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/were-all-hitlerists-now
[1] https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil/
Well that's not fair. They're not rallying against Jews and Catholics.
I recently asked Claude Code to make a particular change to my code, but it instead did something completely different, and it took me several tries to get it to do what I wanted. Then I later realized that its initial approach was simpler and ended up switching to that anyway.
yesterday I tried claud code for myself for the very first time. It was as good as people said. And it was actually very fun to see it thinking/modifiing/iterating on my little greenfield project. For private softwareproject, I don't think I will be able to go back to programming by hand.
I actually find the opposite: For my personal hobby project, I'm still 95% coding it by hand, because I'm trying to do something specific and technically sophisticated and have high standards and Claude Code isn't reliable enough and can't easily read my mind to understand the vision. At work, I use AI a lot more because I don't know what I'm doing there anyway.
If you want to search history of SSC and ACX via Claude Code firing off super nuanced SQL queries, you can do so at https://exopriors.com/scry. More details: https://manifund.org/projects/agent-first-research-tool-for-navigating-the-intelligence-explosion
Since web-ACX has become close to unusable on my phone, I've finally downloaded the Substack app. I'm finding it kind of terrible? Despite being signed in, it never shows me new posts from ACX when I filter on "paid". I also can't filter on new posts from particular substacks, I have to go to each one's homepage one at a time. My feed can only sort by "recent", dominated by the most prolific blogs, or the impenetrable "priority" sort. Clicking any sort of link bounces me between the browser and app version of that page at random.
Does anyone have methods for making this app usable if you follow more than one blog?
I use email links to come to posts in mobile browser. I have twice tried the app and immediately discovered it is worse, and had to uninstall it, since the phone switches to the app if the app is installed.
Have you tried forcing the desktop version of the webpage? The text reflow might not be great though, but probably fixable with browser extensions.
Ah, Ha, Ha, ha!
No! Not even a little!
I comment on my phone while I wait in line if I don't feel like reading something worthwhile, and even for this use case I find that running the website in firefox is the only way to even get the comments to load before I'm done trying to waste some time.
If anyone has access to the inscrutable minds that run this jank-ass website, reveal your hidden knowledge un to us because what the hell. Why is it less functional than a geocities site, but about as ugly as one?
Why are most leftists against AI? I've seen the standard arguments, but I'm trying to understand what are the prime motivators, rather than the full rhetorical arsenal. I came up with several possible answers, but I'm not satisfied with them:
1. "Models are created by large corporations, whose interests do not allogn with the peoples' interests" - Ok, so why aren't they in favor of changing who owns the technology, rather than being agains the technology? Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
2. "AI will cause many people to lose their jobs"- same answer as above.
3. "LLMs are useless junk, a dead-end" - this is demonstrably false. It also doesn't strengrhen a leftwing view in any obvious way, so I think this isn't a prime motivator.
4."Chomsky thinks LLMs are junk, and Chomsky is a leftist icon, so leftists take his view on LLMs" - Maybe. But Chomsky also hates postmodernism, so the left can sometimes adipt things that Chomsky hates
5. "Data Centers are bad for the environment" - again, probably an argument after the fact, rather than a prime motivator. Look at the bullshit with the water usage that keeps coming up, no matter how many times Andy Masley tells them to stop.
6. "AI will kill creativity/art, AI is soul less" - maybe they are worried about this? Not obvious why this would be a left-wing position, except that most writers and artists probably tend to be on the left.
So what gives?
"3. "LLMs are useless junk, a dead-end" - this is demonstrably false. "
While I don't think this is the core of the typical leftist objection, I think you're far to quick to dismiss it. The way you casually say "demonstrably false" suggests to me that you think that LLMs have demonstrated sufficient value to make this open-and-shut.
But this can really only hold up if you take it that the positive side of the balance sheet is the ONLY side (or at least the only side worth considering). Demonstrating X amount of value in a vacuum doesn't prove the technology is net-useful if there's a real possibility that -2X worth of direct harm is being done. Note that I'm not talking about externalities like power or water use, I'm talking about the technology itself being harmful. Plenty of technologies do direct harm, and it needs actual evidence to show that the harms are either nonexistent or plausibly smaller than the benefits.
I think it’s a mistake to try to come up with a specific reason why a group has an opinion. Especially when it’s not even one group - Marxists and social justice types have very different views from each other on lots of things, even though both are considered “left”.
Within the academic world, I think a lot of it is the Emily Bender and Gary Marcus type of opposition, where these are people who have been working for decades on understanding thought and language in a Chomskyan paradigm, and neural nets have been seen as misguided by that paradigm for decades (at least since the Minsky book in the late 60s).
This long opposition then leads them to jump on anything that might discredit the new paradigm. Interestingly, if you look at the original “stochastic parrots” paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922) you’ll already see the seeds of most popular critiques. (I think the one section about poorly labeled data is actually valuable, but everything else there misses the point.)
There's a lot to unpack here, but I think the clearest demonstration of your problem is your own point #1.
You've basically nailed the actual left-wing position (which, by the way, approximately the only one leftists as a group can actually agree upon), you just immediately assumed any kind of additional skepticism somehow contradicts it. But there's no contradiction, "[potentially harmful thing] will be used by [evil people]" is in fact, even on its own, a perfectly sound argument against [thing]. But you simply axiomatically disagree that [thing] could possibly be anything other than a wonder, and don't even bother examining why someone would think otherwise. (The preceding sentence is a purely factual description, of your point #3 specifically.)
And, ultimately, that's your issue. "Leftists" disagree with you for the same reason other people disagree with you. You're free to think they're wrong, but framing their disagreement as ideologically motivated won't give you much insight. (In addition to being just a fundamentally repulsive thing to do.)
I'm not dismissive of point #1. It's a solid argument. Other than the deliberately misleading hatchet jobs regarding water usage, or the overconfident dogmatism of Chomsky, Emily Bender, etc., I see some merit in all the arguments I've listed. Point #2 worries me as well. But again, it seems like the revolutionary left of the late 19th and early to mid 20th century managed to hold a pro-technology, anticapitalist agenda, whereas now it seems rarer.
Thing is, you don't even stop to consider that not all technology is equal, and that context matters. It's easy to be pro-technology when technology means engines and automatisation for your factory, and washing-machines and plumbing for your home, things that outright liberate you from toil. It's less easy when the technology is destroying your surroundings. (What happened mid 20th century? Even aside from World War 2? Pollution at scale, industry turning large areas into wastelands, cities suffocating with car fumes. Turns out externalities matter. Of course the left turned away from high modernism, everyone not shielded by wealth and lack of empathy from its results did.) Of course externalities can be mitigated, we're doing that, but you can't expect to be able to merely point at technology and have people support it just because it's technology, everyone has seen what technology does and will reasonably ask what exactly does your technology do first.
So people look at AI and see very little good, and very little promise - and that's what you just can't accept (look at what you consider good arguments - the ones that confirm your priors about it being a groundbreaking transformative technology; it's the fact that someone might not share those priors that eludes you). But fundamentally, that's their reason, everything else is downstream from that and only that. No amount of reframing it as ideological issue will change that. (Chomsky is dogmatic? Like, about speaking the truth? Great, actually.)
I was at a party a week or so ago where I got to discuss AI a little with some of my lefty friends, and the objection they brought up was a #7: intellectual property rights. LLMs basically suck in a huge amount of stuff written by others without their consent.
I was admittedly unprepared for this argument, and the topic quickly changed before I could ask more questions (like whether fair use covered much of it, and so on).
It's not quite like your #1, although it's possible #1 drove them to the IP argument.
Argument for property rights cannot really be called "leftist" (except for US-centric "blue tribe" definitions that include liberals as a central example of "left", but, look, just no), but I'm surprised it caught you off-guard, since it's hardly new or niche. (One of Gary Marcus's favorites, for one, though I guess nobody on the AI-believer side actually reads the guy...)
I was initially in the "meh, fair use" camp, but then people started producing examples of AI output that if done by a human would be considered outright plagiarism. I still think we should apply fair use standard to training, but attempts at monetizing AI generations are another story and should (as in "ought", not "is") very much be vulnerable to IP claims.
I'll submit that the problem here is that you simply understand leftist views on property quite poorly. To be fair, they are many and varied, but the fundamental core is pretty consistent. Leftists view labor as valuable and believe the people who do the labor deserve the benefit of it. The entire notion that "property is theft[1]" is *exactly* because ownership of capital is used (in the leftist view) to siphon away profits from those who actually do the labor. The issue has never been that people own things, it's been that ownership when used to extract rent (and insofar as certain sorts of ownership exist solely to extract rent, the view is they shouldn't exist at all).
The intellectual property argument against LLMs is completely consistent with most leftist positions. A huge fraction of the works being hoovered up and fed into LLM training runs were created by individuals, creating text and art either commercially or out of passion. For somebody who had no hand whatsoever in the creation of that media to appropriate it, grind it into metaphorical paste, and repackage and sell things made out of that paste can be easily and naturally seen to be in-line with the general anti-labor-theft and anti-rent-extraction views that are foundational to the left.
(I would personally argue that there's a little more nuance around machine learning and property rights than your average internet leftist seems aware of. But given how quickly AI companies have run roughshod over the whole area, I don't really believe they deserve the benefit of the doubt, so the nuance ends up being not that instrumentally important.)
[1] "Property" here being used in the very narrow and specific sense meaning "private control of the means of production."
...I think I understand my own ideological position pretty well, thank you. (I have an urge to elaborate, but no time at the moment, so let me just reserve the right to come back here later to explain precisely what the position is and why your argument misses.)
Note I have just explicitly supported enforcing IP rights in this particular case, for pretty much the reason you stated. This just does not extend to support for IP rights in principle, which, well, inherently rent-seeking.
"Note I have just explicitly supported enforcing IP rights in this particular case, for pretty much the reason you stated. This just does not extend to support for IP rights in principle, which, well, inherently rent-seeking."
This might be worth its own top-level comment in this or a future OT, once you acquire the time to cover it.
There's an essay somewhere in my older bookmarks (I think Posner wrote it) that discussed four regimes for governing IP, and another essay by David Friedman. It'd be interesting to see how your account compares.
> monetizing AI generations are another story and should (as in "ought", not "is") very much be vulnerable to IP claims.
Legally speaking, anything generated entirely by an AI is uncopyrightable. It's possible collage or sufficiently-edited AI-gens are copyrightable (and, obviously, img2img must sometimes be copyrightable since sometimes it's 99% the original work), but they are not, in themselves, copyrightable. Only things made by human beings can be copyrighted, see also those monkey selfies and Zarya of the Dawn.
I suspect that "only human content can be copyrighted" is based on legal precedent that isn't 100% stable - someone out there is probably working on the argument that it doesn't apply when sufficiently complex machines are generating the works in question.
I don't know what those arguments will end up being. Currently, my intuition says content can be copyrighted iff it's generator is an individual capable of agentive action, and LLMs aren't that, so their product can't be copyrighted, as the law currently suggests. But I wouldn't be surprised if some legal scholar produces an argument covering an angle I hadn't thought of.
Well, monkeys are certainly capable of agentic action.
Different definitions, and I can see how I wasn't clear. I can also see how it's an arbitrary definition. The idea here is that monkeys are considered incapable of conscious reasoning (mirror test, blah blah blah), so nothing they do is any more agentive than a plant choosing to flex toward sunlight.
It'd be interesting to see what the actual reasoning was for the monkey selfie case, and whether it would also apply to, say, paintings created by that one elephant I've heard about. Or hypothetically, corvids, chimpanzees, dolphins, etc.
I'm not saying the IP argument is leftist. I'm saying that, among the leftists I had the discussion with, this was their first argument against AI.
I agree it's not a niche argument. It wasn't new to me, either.
Whenever I see AI output in an area I'm well versed in I'm struck by how much garbage it is. When I hear from people with specialties in other areas, they seem to have the same response - it writes garbage code, bad legal arguments, etc. Yet, some people claim to be impressed by AI. What gives?
I believe the answer is Gell-Mann Amnesia for some and quasi-religious delusion for others. Regarding the delusion part, AI has basically become the Rapture of the Nerds for Rationalist crowd.
For yet others, it seems to be a case of them judging AI based on areas they know nothing about. People who don't read fiction often don't see the appeal. They don't understand why anyone would spend hours reading a novel. They can't form an appreciation of the craft or the ideas that go into it. They are often not even enticed by 'low' elements such as suspense. All they see are words on a page. Likewise with visual art. What the hell's The Eye of Silence supposed to be about? It's just random stuff! Anyways, these people will find AI outputs indistinguishable from even mid level human outputs precisely because they have no basis from which to judge any of it.
Outside of spaces enjoyed by Rationalists and other fans of AI, I think some common assessments are that AI has limited functional uses, mainly consists of low quality spam output, and is probably going to result in a huge economic crisis owing to wasted investment.
I work in software, see the utility in my day-to-day life.
Counterpoint: I'm in Aviation. For as long as I can remember, anytime a newsreader speaks about something related to Aviation, every word touching on a technical aspect is Not Even Wrong, including prepositions and articles. This predates LLM-generated text by at least forty years.
AI is not good at producing finished output. It’s good at creating prototypes for someone without the base skill to make one, which can actually be really useful with coding, if you just want a script to do something once and don’t need a final public project. It can do smarter searches of documents than ctrl-f. It has gotten much better at everything over the past few months, as it did in the previous few months, and the previous few months.
I agree. It's really great at generating throw-away code, significantly less useful if you're doing something complex and have high standards. But it will probably continue to improve.
OK, talking about a position that neither of us holds is going to have some limitations but here are some ideas to steelman the argument. Note that many of these issues aren't only of concern to leftists but are maybe especially salient to them?
--AIs represent the ultimate triumph of capital over labor; the working class will be locked out of automated factories and pushed to the margins of society by the technical elite. The more extreme versions of this concern involve automated weapons like autonomous drones being used to keep the poor in line or just wiping them out altogether.
--AI is a powerful tool to disempower the little guy: instead of working for a human boss who can be understood, people such as gig workers basically work for an unknowable algorithm that can't be argued with and which can change the rules at any time.
--AI allows a new inescapable form of centralized surveillance and control. Look at the anxiety around the right-coded Palantir's work for ICE. It's not hard to imagine a more extensive and permanent fusion of big tech and homeland security which would keep an eye on every person in the country.
--AI is already being used in irresponsible and anti-social ways that are impossible to avoid, see for example the deepfake issues with Grok. It doesn't seem terribly likely that these abuses can be reined in or prevented, we're all just going to have to live with them.
--Finally, while AI doesn't use up water like people say, data centers do use massive amounts of energy and compete with other energy consumers for the limited supply. xAI has also been noted to be illegally using large numbers of gas turbines to power its data centers.
You can certainly form counterarguments to all these things, but for the normal person who isn't particularly interested in AI, it creates a continuous stream of bad vibes and bad news stories about AI that make it seem like a bad thing overall. And if you look at the polling about AI, there's a consistent pattern that people think AI may help society in general but is more likely to harm them personally. That's not really a partisan issue, Republicans and Democrats are both worried about AI.
> Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
Kropotkin and Marx were smart and educated people; the average <anything> is not.
I think there things work mostly on association chains. AIs are associated with companies, which are associated with capitalism, therefore bad.
Another part of the answer is that young people follow fashion waves, which keep changing because that's how the young people today separate themselves from their parents, even if the parents belonged to the same political tribe. There was a time when technology was in fashion (Sputnik), today denial of technology and science and progress in general is in fashion (also on the right: see "retvrn").
It's not that most leftists are against AI. Most *people* are against AI. Polling consistently has AI underwater by sizeable majorities. Even relatively benevolent AI like self driving cars. It's possible you either have mostly leftists in your feed, or you're associating the tech right with the right in general (and therefore assuming the left is opposing by proxy)
See: https://news.gallup.com/poll/694685/americans-prioritize-safety-data-security.aspx
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/06/republicans-democrats-now-equally-concerned-about-ai-in-daily-life-but-views-on-regulation-differ/
Are you implying that *all* leftists are against AI, or are you asking what the leftist arguments against AI are?
To add to what others have already written, LLMs can be brought back *after* the means of production are redistributed and AI can be used safely and with everyone's interests in mind. No one's saying you have to ban this technology forever.
It's largely because AI will concentrate power in the hands of a few in a way that nothing else ever could. It's anti-democratic. It has the potential to massively exacerbate all the social ills that leftists are against.
I don't think this is a particularly "leftist" thing. You could replace "corporations" with "woke corporations" and get all the same arguments from right wingers. AI is really unpopular with the average person for various reasons, not all of them based on reality.
5 is important from a leftist perspective. The water argument might be bad but they will consume more energy, and energy production drives climate change. More generally they consume more resources period. You may notice leftist sustainability initiaves all strive to decrease consumption, not make current levels of consumption more sustainable (local and organic food being a great example of unhelpful ideas in this space). A product that clearly consumes more is a big problem for that agenda
I have been able to identify several situations where AI is a useful tool for me:
* it is faster than a web search at answering questions that are simple and instant to verify, like “what is the mac equivalent of this keyboard shortcut”
* gemini meeting notes are now at a point where I just need to correct rather than entirely rewrite
* google lens has helped me navigate shops and cafes in Taiwan that I would not otherwise have attempted
Overall, I am happy with AI to precisely the extent it makes my life better instead of worse. Most interactions, however, are the latter:
* for coding of any complexity in my day job, every time someone convinces me to try an agent again because it really is much better now than last time, I end up having to do the thing myself from scratch after having wasted hours fruitlessly poking the ai’s nose into the shit it excreted in the vain hope it would stop producing more
* businesses I interact with now gate customer service teams behind LLMs, so before I can actually start resolving my situation I first have to waste hours convincing a chatbot the thing I need to do really cannot be done via the self-service website every. bloody. time. It’s even worse when this happens over the telephone and the chatbot tries to guess how what I want to happen fits into the few things it is able to make happen and makes everything more fucked up. Clue: if the thing could be done via the website without human interaction, I would absolutely not be trying to access support.
* my social media feed is now filled with garish cartoony AI-generated videos of ginger cats stealing fish and fat people jumping off things. Just those two subjects, and no amount of blocking/hiding stems the flow. I think the AI hates me as much as I hate it.
Please don’t tell me to try again with useful functionality. I’ve had people tell me that for two years now, tried the new thing, sometimes while those people watch, and it’s been a disappointment to all involved every time. I am fed up, and will give it at least a few more weeks before the next attempt.
I am sorry if you expected a more political objection, but there it is: AI uses a ton of compute and investment money to make my life, on average, suck more. I think the people for whom it works must have very different lives and jobs to me.
Fair Points. Ai Slop and AI customer service are annoying. Vibecoding is really a time saver for me at work. It's perfect for the short to mid-size python scripts that I need to write, which are not on the critical flow, and don't have to be very efficient or elegant. Leaves me more time to do the fun stuff.
I find that it helps me a lot, with some back and forth, to understand mathematical and scientific concepts. The ability to zoom in and zoom out, move from "explainittomelikeimfive" to the nitty-gritty is a blessing!
Separate point ... no reason this has to be specific to the left but I worry that AI will undermine a shared consensus of reality. And I have the opinions I have because I think they're most supported by reality (otherwise I'd change them). Therefore, AI will undermine the popularity of my opinions, and slant people's perceptions of reality towards whatever serves the owners of AI.
I must note that Trump and his closest supporters seem like the most gleeful users of AI to create fake (but presented as real) videos to attack their opponents (though I admit this could just be me noticing bad behavior on the other side more than my side). Fits with Trump routinely making shit up with no attempt to be truthful.
E.g. Trump admin officials calling Good and Pretti "domestic terrorists". I think Miller, Noem, et al can fairly argue that the outrage against them from the right is contrived since they all say shit like this all the time, and now that there's some backlash suddenly people are shocked, *shocked* to find insane accusations like this coming from the government.
The "shared consensus of reality" died like a decade ago at least. AI is not the culprit there.
We might, right now, be like the 30 year olds looking in the mirror and thinking that they've lost their youthful good looks.
> no reason this has to be specific to the left
If the current "shared consensus of reality" is shaped by the establishment media, their bias provides a good reason for there to be political polarization on the question of whether or not this being undermined is good.
The left also reacted positively (at least at first before negative effects of social media, algorithmic monitoring, etc, became apparent) to shit like the Internet, Youtube, widely available video, bodycams for cops, etc, for similar reasons. It's not out of a belief that the "establishment media" is propping them up.
There's a common joke along the lines of "now that we have cameras everywhere, it turns out UFOs aren't real, Bigfoot doesn't exist, and the police do needlessly beat up black people"
Also far more people look at Fox News, other conservative outlets, and social media controlled by Trump supporters, than whatever is left of the liberal "establishment media".
Yes, this observation is entirely consistent with my model: they supported those when they thought they would amplify their preferred narrative, and turned on them when it became apparent that they weren't doing that. I think Twitter is the clearest instance, with how quickly they changed their views on it when it stopped suppressing people and organizations they opposed.
Hold on a second, what you said in your previous comment is that the left doesn't want to undermine the current "shared consensus of reality" because it's being propped up by the establishment media.
In this comment you're saying that they want to support things that "amplify their preferred narrative". This isn't the same thing.
E.g. the left doesn't think that the current "shared consensus of reality" (insofar as it exists) is propped up by a left-leaning establishment media.
Re twitter, it's obvious that what's happening isn't Musk taking the thumb *off* the scale, it's Musk putting a thumb *on* the scale.
No, they do mean the same thing. This is one of those irregular verbs: I reinforce our shared consensus of reality, you fact-check misinformation, he amplifies his preferred narrative.
I'm left-of-center (not really "leftist") and wary of AI, though I don't feel like I'm wary of AI *because* of being leftist. As for why...
> "Models are created by large corporations, whose interests do not allogn with the peoples' interests" - Ok, so why aren't they in favor of changing who owns the technology, rather than being agains the technology? Kropotkin and Marx haf no problem making this distinction.
I worry that different levels of technological advancement lead to different types of societies. This is originally a leftist idea I think (base and superstructure), but has spread pretty widely. I fear that an AI dominated world is one that tends naturally to extreme economic (and subsequently political) inequality.
Because something economically/politically very important - human level intelligence - that is currently distributed pretty uniformly among people, will instead be distributed the same way capital is, and so much more prone to concentration. Maybe you can prevent it, but it wasn't even possible before. Relatedly it allows a greater degree of top-down control and less "people power", basically I'm worried the future is China's Internet censorship x1000.
Going to make another point in a separate comment...
Crossposting to various smart groups:
How many different motivations for rejecting a proposed deductive or inductive thought are there? How many can we think of? Can we put bounds on the number? What does this let us predict about how thoughts and beliefs evolve over time in response to seeing different kinds of events or media, or doing social cognition with multiple people mediated in different ways?
I'm inspired to these thoughts by https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/maybe-social-anxiety-is-just-you , which gives an account of the author going to a dating/relationships workshop, being asked to name what he likes about an attractive woman, and after some struggle managing to only compliment her teeth, because his intuitions had ruled out actually complimenting her body. (Extra context so it's not quite as creepy: she was a professional model being paid to be there, and who knew what to expect from this work. She was was visually attractive, conventionally attractive, and attractive to the author.) The workshop leader called him out on an obviously false statement, and after forcing himself to speak only what he thought was true, he experienced better social success and later on a general reduction in social anxiety.
He infers from this that his goals in conversations had been subconsciously set to 1) avoid making people dislike him, 2) make women he liked actively like him to the point of talking, dating and sex, where for 2 he didn't actually have good feedback channels or a model of their internal life or a toolbox to robustly interact with it. He extends this to his thesis: that social anxiety is caused in general by trying to achieve social goals for ourselves, assigning ourselves massive amounts of constraints that rule out any successful tactics, attempting anyway with inevitable failure, and not having enough insight or knowledge to spot the insanity of this situation.
In other words, his thought process while at the workshop had been something like: (asked to answer "Choose a model that's attractive to you. What makes her attractive to you?") "Well, she has gorgeous legs, duh. Wait, no, I can't say that, she'll hate me. Her breasts? Can't say that either, that'll make her hate me. How she fills her dress out? She'll hate me. I've got to give an answer... she has nice teeth, I guess, that's true and non-creepy, we'll go with that.". In other words, a series of propositions, which are accepted or rejected for promotion to being believed and acted upon.
I think that as we parse direct observations, or manipulate parsed observations and memories in our own heads, or do social cognition with other people, that we're doing something similar. In deduction, for example, the train of thought might be "P is true, and we know P implies Q. Therefore P is true? No, that's not how 'implies' works. Therefore Q is true? Yes, seems plausible, proceed." I think that different constraints on candidate thoughts get applied in different contexts:
* "No, that deduction doesn't follow."
* "No, this observation is about a known optical illusion and both possible interpretations are true at once."
* "I can't say that, it's immoral."
* "I can't say that, I've committed to acting as though it's not true."
* "I can't say that, there hasn't been enough time for all available records to turn up yet."
* "I can't say that, it'll hurt her feelings."
* "I can't say that, only low-status people say things like that."
* "I can't say that around this crowd, I'll get mocked."
* "Dammit it's true, but I can't say that because they're on the other team and it's bad to allow any opponent any temporary advantage."
How many more can you think of?
"This seems true, but contradicts something else I believe is true. I should remain silent until I resolve the conflict"
"This seems true, but I've probably been tricked somehow"
"Even if it's true this time, I don't want to build the habit of thinking along these lines"
"I can't say that, the philosophical consequences are too scary"
"I can't say that around this person, they'll hurt me"
"The evidence I have for this being true is too personal/unconvincing to share, so I'll keep my mouth shut"
"Someone else would say it better than me, I'd just garble it"
"I'm not the kind of person who says things like that"
"What's the point in saying something so obvious?"
These look like good pump primers.
To do this properly, I'd build a model of a person's reasoning. Start with the basic chain: sense input + internal reasoning => conclusion. The reasons to reject the conclusion clearly include "sense input is wrong" and "internal reasoning is wrong".
Adding the fact that the person is answering another person's question gets us closer to the quoted reasons above. The chain becomes: question + sensory + reasoning => conclusion => answer. Now the rejection reasons include "question is wrong" and "answering is wrong". To cover the above:
A person may believe the question was garbled, vague, deceptive, rude, not worth the effort to produce an answer.
A person may believe the answer is too hard to express, harmful (to self/others) if heard by the wrong person, harmful (ditto) if misunderstood * sufficient risk of misunderstanding, not worth saying, or leads to a later conclusion the person believes is wrong enough to be convinced that the answer might also be wrong, and to check again.
I can't help but feel this question is asked from the angle of "if I wanted to configure an LLM to answer the same way a person might, while still being rational, how would I do it?", so I answered accordingly. (Readers may infer what my own harm estimation might be, as they see fit. After all, they can't help but do so.)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
Contributions to my asking this include:
* watching different single responses, styles of responses, styles of interaction on Reddit in the context of moral reasoning about the ICE shootings of Renee Good(e) and Alex Pretti
* mainlining "Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction"
* a background goal of predictive modeling on the propagation and mutation of beliefs in the age of managed social media
* reading the linked post with an eye to applying its toolbox to my own dysfunctions and problems.
So you're actually not far off - I am kinda-sorta playing with trying to make LLMs think like people, just to understand how cultural battle lines shift in response the world events.
I'm a federal criminal defense attorney from Minneapolis. This is my take on the situation there, mostly with an eye toward arguing that "the legal system" doesn't depend on the good faith of the executive.
https://broodingomnipresence.substack.com/p/mad-kings-magic-words-the-light-and?r=117rkl
That was a great read! Thank you.
I think you're right that the laws provide constraints against an out of control executive provided that the executive or his agents obey them, and that means that the most extreme predictions -- like Trump will seize power rather than step down at the end of his term, or he will put large numbers of US citizens in camps without due process -- are fantastically unlikely.
That said, we lose a lot when a President breaks an established norm limiting his power, whether that President is Obama or Trump. I do believe that Trump was to some extent the victim of inappropriate lawfare by government officials, but seeing Trump double down on the lawfare is disappointing - the norm he seems to be pressing for is just that it was pointed in the wrong direction.
Second, I've got a legal observation, which is that it seems to me that self-segregation of voters is starting to produce areas where you can get a grand jury indictment or conviction of one party but not the other. As far as I can tell from the OIG report, Andrew McCabe is at least as guilty of lying to federal officials as Scooter Libby, but you apparently can't get an indictment of a Trump opponent in DC, at least not of a lightweight crime like lying to federal investigators. Trump can't get indictments of BS crimes in federal court, where the judges are on average better, but you can convict Trump in state court. (Granted, Trump's property misstatements are on another level from those alleged against James, so maybe that's not a fair comparison.)
I think the commonsense conception of rights is that they protect "The individual" from "the majority" and function as a check on rampant populism. Under this theory, things like the freedom of speech are like, values you preserve "even if everyone thinks it's a good idea" to abandon them.
I think the biggest single realization I had in law school is that many rights actually don't do that. Articulated rights in the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th amendment force *the government* to not act contrary to the popular majority. The Jury Right is the most powerful example. There's a way in which this protects the individual from the majority, but I think the deeper thing that's going on is that it means the government CANNOT secure a conviction without a bunch of normal people signing off on it.
Under *this* theory, I think the phenomenon you're talking about is a feature not a bug, and it's why I was unbothered by alleged "lawfare" in the Biden administration (and frankly, in this one). The check on "political prosecution" isn't some norm against charging your enemies, it's the simple fact that you will lose a case that can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury in a particular community: within that community it's hard to convict popular people, it's relatively easier but still very hard to convict really unpopular people (how often do 12 people agree on whether something has been *proven*?), we'd rather have it this way than any alternative, in a system that is based on majority rule. The simple fact is that if the public thinks a case is transparent BS, they'll acquit...if they think that the case is deadly serious, they'll convict.
I like this.
Legally speaking, the last serious constitutional amendment was to remove the two term presidential limit. (Given a secret ballot, 80% of Congress votes to impeach Trump. I do not see this changing, and I do not see Trump managing a constitutional amendment).
I merely post this so that people can update their general priors on "two term presidency" to include "we almost got rid of this, in the past 50 years." This is a convention that's only be held since FDR, and within ~50 years of said convention being set, it was already on the table to remove it.
One Person One Vote is even newer (1960s).
On the bright side, at least no one continues to claim the legal system can never be weaponized against one's political opponents anymore.
well no, I kind of do, that's my point.
I think the assumption of a lot of conservatives in the biden era was that the executive is capable of "auto-convicting" anyone, and that once trump took power, what's good for the goose would be good for the gander and the administration would just be able to level prosecutions at anyone it wanted.
The present state of affairs proves this isn't true. Trump has tried to do the same thing he accused the Biden administration of, but going the other way. It hasn't worked. He can't even get a misdemeanor prosecution for hurling a sandwich at an ICE officer. He can't even get Leticia James for Mortgage Fraud.
I would argue that that's because the DOJ (along with most other institutions) has a strong leftward bias. He's still probably gonna get both Comey and Brennan - and even if he doesn't, he's gonna ruin a couple years of their lives while they sweat it out and/or rack up legal bills.
In general the DOJ gets who they want. Isn't the conviction rate in Federal criminal cases > 95%?
If it's a matter of "leftward bias", why does Trump keep having to fire *his own appointees* (all life-long conservatives) when they disagree with him? It's not partisanship that's the problem here, it's reality.
Because he's incompetent. He's not part of the institution.
The DOJ gets 95% convictions because they have a longstanding practice of charging out only those cases they are totally convinced they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. This doesn't mean they're always right, of course, but I tend to look askance at accusations that a particular federal charge is nothing more than a witch hunt: until this year, the DOJ was very careful which cases to bring.
Things seem different now, and there have been some fairly dramatic failures to ride roughshod over the administration's enemies.
I agree that lawyers at DOJ (and other government agencies, incidentally) don't bother with a case they're pretty sure they can't win, but this is unfortunately still consistent with Wanda's assertion that the DOJ is left-biased. If the system is implemented by enough left-biased people, then a left-biased lawyer can easily believe he'll get a left-biased case through when a right-biased case of equal pedigree would not. Exactly the same is true if we swapped "left" with "right" throughout.
Therefore, an assumption that the DOJ believes it can bring a case to conviction doesn't allow us to imply that that case is objectively fair.
The system is further complicated if DOJ turns out to contain a mix of left-, right-, and centrists lawyers working under a biased executive, and those lawyers have a clear incentive to disguise their biases in order to remain employed. Complicated further still when we have to analyze each of several possible such mixtures in order to generate predictions to test. As scientists often say: "more study is needed".
>He can't even get Leticia James for Mortgage Fraud.
I don’t think that’s completely over yet. I personally do not think there is a case to be made there, but I don’t think he’s given up trying. Anyway, to the broader point that the legal system can be used as a weapon against anyone, I don’t see how anyone could dispute that unless they were completely ignorant of the world as it is and as it has been. I know there are laws on the book in New York City that make it a crime to spit on the sidewalk and if somebody chose to, they could put someone in jail. Not me of course I never spit on the sidewalk.
> I know there are laws on the book in New York City that make it a crime to spit on the sidewalk and if somebody chose to, they could put someone in jail.
I actually doubt that. They could certainly *try* to prosecute it, but my guess is that the grand jury would probably refuse to return a bill, much as we saw with the felony footlong case and Trump's various other abuses.
Yeah, you’re probably right about that. I just think it’s easy to find a law someone has broken if you put your mind to it.
You're arguing against a claim that's far too strong. I wouldn't say it's a strawman, since I suppose I could see people holding this view before the First Trump Administration, but not after they saw judges stymie almost all of Trump's efforts during that term.
So no, I think most realize recognize that you need control of the judges as well to be able to do whatever you want. The Democrats had this under Biden, and the Republicans do not.
But even so, in most cases, even without guarantee of conviction the PROSECUTION is adequate deterrent, with ruinous legal fees whatever the outcome, and besides that they can trump up enough charges that taking the offered plea bargain become the rational decision even if you're _almost_ certain you'll win at trial: if you win, the prosecutor shrugs and moves on to his next victim; if you lose, you go to jail for decades.
I admit I was mildly surprised they couldn't get the misdemeanor charge to stick to the sandwich guy, but I guess that was a tad too frivolous.
I disagree with a few things you've said there. Firstly, one judge in the trump cases (Florida's Eileen Cannon) was very much on Trump's side of the case, or at least was widely perceived as such. Also, the SCOTUS immunity decision was rather favorable to him...in both cases, you have judges (including, you know, the Supreme Court) not being "under the control" of Democrats.
Secondly, I've been a lawyer under Trump I, Biden, and Trump II. Under no administration was it true that the prosecution can simply "trump up enough charges" to win by default. If they could, I'd lose a lot less than I do :)
Yea "Dems controlling the judges" is a pretty funny statement given a Supreme Court that has been majority-conservative for at least 25 years now. And that the last moment in which a majority of that court had been appointed by Democratic presidents was in 1970.
Also, Trump has had plenty of rulings by judges he appointed go against him.
Also, as of today Trump leads all presidents in the number of current federal judges that were appointed by him, 261. Next most is Biden 236, then Obama 229, then Bush43 104. Given the GOP's Senate majority Trump will by the end of 2028 have appointed between 45 and 50 percent of all sitting federal judges. [Data from Ballotpedia's real-time tracker.]
Have the technology to deploy the Aerolamps doesn’t mean that they will be deployed. If we don’t address the human side of the problem, we might not see this future.
I’m looking for collaborators (and possibly funders) interested in a multi-paradigm shifting pragmatic framework for pluralist, post-polycrisis (including post-AI) futures. The final public-facing synthesis is 'The Life-Years Movement':
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/the-life-years-movement
The common thread behind the work is a systems-level analysis of persistence under physics and tail-risk constraints — i.e., how locally 'rational' systems (biological, economic, moral) can lead to catastrophic failures ('ruin') over longer horizons.
Evolution — Lineage Filter Theory.
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/analyzing-the-anti-ruin-architectural
I argue that persistence meant our tree of life's architecture had to avoid lineage extinction filters (LEFs), requiring many features that look “non-Darwinian” at the surface — reproductive restraint, extreme cellular redundancy, pre-adaptational variance. Lineages without such 'brakes' and robustness simply didn’t last. This reframes a number of puzzles, including the apparent Great Cosmic Filter.
Economics — Pragmatic Socioeconomics.
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/intro-to-on-the-units-of-utils
Agents are treated as multi-motivational, energy-constrained 'action-minimizers' (in the Lagrangian sense) rather than scalar utility maximizers. Money is modeled as stored but degrading 'motivational energy' - likened to oil or uranium, rather than a Platonic store of value.
Meta-ethics — Heirs of Life-Years (HOLYs).
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/heirs-of-life-years-a-meta-ethics
Life-years are proposed as the central form of moral concern, while allowing agent-level freedom in choosing the scope of lives one takes primary responsibility for (“heirs”).
Governance — Life-Years-Based Governance (LYBG).
Governance is reframed around maximizing life-years per unit resource, subject to anti-ruin constraints and irreducible disagreement about moral scope.
I have draft papers for each module in progress. If you're interested in either the bigger project or specific aspects, feel free to reach out: ad(delete)vitam(delete)sapien@gmail.com.
About me: I've a Phd in Computational Biology (e.g. genetics) from Cornell, undergrad math + philosophy from NYU. I've worked in industry on both biofx algs + eng stacks in both the ctDNA and PGT spaces - most recently at Orchid Health as Lead Bioinformatics Scientist
These Aerolamps seem like a fantastic idea for daycare centers and public schools! Children, especially infants and toddlers, getting sick in daycare is a huge problem for working parents - can't send a sick child to daycare, have to stay home with them, and most dual-working couples and single parents in America have very limited time off. If you could reduce the rate of infections for young children, that would be a tremendous help for parents!
San Francisco friends: there will be a vigil this Thursday (January 29) at 6:30pm at city hall (civic center, McAllister side) for people killed in ICE custody and enforcement, including recent shootings in Minneapolis. Names will be read. I hope to see you there, and would appreciate you sharing if you can.
Maximum empathy for criminals. Zero empathy for law enforcement and law-abiding citizens, as always. Will you be reading any names of people raped or killed by illegal migrants? Immigration agents attacked in the line of duty? I guess they wouldn't suit your political spectacle.
Are you saying you want people to support the criminals who work for ICE and that they should have no empathy for the law abiding citizens they are gunning down?
>Immigration agents attacked in the line of duty?
Can't summon much sympathy for people who specialize in enforcing unjust laws.
I really don't understand what it is about immigration law in particular that has made people so incensed recently. I've only encountered such radical opposition to it from open borders libertarians or left-anarchist types. Even then it is usually not a core issue.
They killed a white liberal woman, the first time that's happened in like 50 years, so now they're acting like an endangered species. Still, the basic point remains that immigration laws are an unjust restriction on freedom of association.
Do people not have the freedom to dissociate in your view? Am I allowed to refuse entry to my house to an unwanted guest? Why does this not apply to my country as well?
>Am I allowed to refuse entry to my house to an unwanted guest?
Of course.
>Why does this not apply to my country as well?
Because there are 300 million other people in your country and immigration laws burden their freedom of association rights. If they all shared your views, if they didn't want immigrants here and refused to rent to or hire them, there would be no immigration.
You can definitely make the argument that the right is just excercising their freedom of association. Unfortunately, the rights of one group come at the expense of another. You can't make everyone happy.
Seen through the lens of negative rights, there's no conflict, nobody is entitled to a job or housing from those who don't want to provide it.
The recent shootings *were* of law-abiding citizens, not that you're likely to acknowledge that fact.
Also, where's all your empathy for the police officers that ICE has attacked?
I don't like ICE attacking police officers. I'm also not happy that those citizens died. However, they were obviously not obeying the law at the time they died (obstructing, interfering, fleeing from law enforcement). I place most of the blame on local government and activist groups for creating a lawless, chaotic, dangerous environment where that kind of incident is inevitable. When you have thousands of dangerous interactions every day eventually something will go wrong and people get hurt.
My main critique here is about the transparent exploitation of these deaths to demonize immigration enforcement.
Define "obstructing." Because the definition ICE seems to be using is "doing anything we don't like in our vicinity," and that definition doesn't align with the law. Filming law enforcement and reporting on their activities is protected by the 1st amendment.
ICE has very specific laws about what they can do. They are allowed to arrest anyone impeding their actions, which doesn't include videoing their actions. It certainly isn't "anything we don't like".
I think this counts as obstructing.
https://x.com/SteveGuest/status/2016610715075809552
Of course, this doesn't nessesarily justify what happened to him two weeks later from a presumably different squad, but it's hard for me to consider the general posture that ICE has taken as unreasonable given that they have to deal with guys like this everyday.
If this has anything to do with Alex Pretti's shooting, it makes ICE looks worse, because it would imply they were waiting 11 days to murder him.
You are not allowed to kill people because you're annoyed or tired, sorry. That's simply not the country we live in, nor should we want to.
Thank you
I hope it will include the victims of this shooting? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Dallas_ICE_facility_shooting
Wouldn't that be like commemorating the hijackers at a 9/11 memorial?
EDIT: My bad. It's more like commemorating the victims of the Dresden as part of a Holocaust Remembrance.
It states "people killed in ICE custody"
At first I thought you were being needlessly antagonistic, but it’s literally true! They sort of have to read the names right?
For what it's worth, there were 31 deaths in ICE custody in 2025, which is the highest number since 2004. Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez and Norlan Guzman-Fuentes are two of them, otherwise there's just a lot of
Is that a lot? I dunno, you'd probably want to compare it to other prison systems in terms of person-days in detention and then adjust for stuff like age distribution and so forth. There's typically around 500 deaths in Federal custody per year in the US but again these numbers are meaningless without knowing person-days in detention.
I'm in SoCal, but good for you for doing this!
(Correction: this Thursday is January 29, not 27.)
Thanks for catching! Corrected.
Canada's successful sabotage of Katie Uhlaender is an interesting exploit of the rules for Olympic Skeleton.
The way it works is that a country can get three, two, or one sled, based on the ranking on their players. There was a tournament earlier this month with 120 points for the winner that, had Katie won, she'd have bumped the US up into the three-sled category, and secured that third spot. But if there are fewer than 20 athletes completing, the TOURNAMENT gets downgraded, and only awards 90 points. So Canada withdrew four people just before the race, getting it down to 19. And they succeeded: Katie won the tournament, but didn't get enough points to qualify. And Canada is guaranteed two sleds.
Canada claims this was for "safety" and the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation has decided to buy that explanation.
It reminds me of that famous quote from WarGames (1983).
So it was a case of the Canadians wanting two sleds in the Olympics, and Katie Uhlaender was not the target but an unfortunate victim?
I don't know whether Canada would have gotten two sleds either way. From what I read, it looks like they almost certainly would have, but this just makes it certain.
You call it exploit, I call it metagaming!
Probably my most hubristic position is that I believe lots of people, including myself, could outperform democracy and do an excellent job of being dictator in perpetuum. Other than myself, I also believe Scott Alexander would do a bang up job at being God-Emperor, and David Chapman too.
Do you think you could be Caesar? Who would you nominate for such a position? You could also post your platform, if you would be king (I'll post mine if asked).
I guess I'll ask, since nobody else has. So what would be your platform?
So just in the abstract, we wouldn't expect the way we do politics and elections in practice to be perfectly efficient, so we don't expect it to find the literal best person on earth for the job. So this is trivially true depending on what you mean by 'lots of people', whether you mean 'dozens' or 'billions'.
Second, I'd caution people that relatively little of the job is being smart enough to make good decisions, and much of it is being a good judge of character to pick subject-matter experts to advise you on decision, doing diplomacy and having conversations with people to try to keep them on your team and indebted to you, looking good for the camera and inspiring the public, etc. Being smart and sane helps, but if your social skills aren't great you may be less effective than you think.
Also, if you want to be really good, you need to be comfortable working 14 hour days for most of a decade. If you suffer at all from akrasia and procrastination, this is probably not going to work out.
Also, *legitimacy* is critical. Getting people to agree to follow the outcomes of the process is just as important as whether the process actually produces good outcomes.
> Who would you nominate for such a position? You could also post your platform, if you would be king (I'll post mine if asked).
Obviously AI - we're going to end up there anyways, let's just yank the bandaid off now.
And because "literally a child" could do a better job than 80%+ of politicians today, we could already do this with any of the Big 3 paid tier AI's today.
1. Everyone downloads the Democracy 2.0 app and allocates their capped amount of voting tokens to whatever they care about. Immigration, DEI, cheaper houses, lower taxes, economic growth, lower crime, whatever. As in, you get a standardized menu of items you can stake your tokens against, but you only get so many tokens, so prioritization and trade-offs are built-in.
2. AI proposal - The AI proposes legislation to attain the aggregated democratically defined priorities, with a detailed prompt outlining the total budget and soliciting it to consider the homeostatic landscape, to predict the primary, secondary, and tertiary effects, to outline monitoring KPI’s and thresholds, and to define a good sunset or re-evaluation time for any proposed legislation.
3. Vetting - Prediction markets and digital-twin sims price the KPI impacts before enactment, as a human check on AI predictions, and as an overall evaluation ground over many such proposals, so we can understand the overall landscape of which proposed legislation will move various needles the most. This is federally funded so there’s enough alpha in there that smart people / companies will be doing this full time. Also, look! An actually high-value, relatively ungameable use for prediction markets!
4. Democratic vetos - A stratified random sample (≈ 1k - 10k citizens depending on locality) gets the top 3 AI-optimised bundles for each priority, plus the market scores, and can veto any of them in the aggregate if enough decide to veto. This caps downside from model myopia and value-misalignment, and keeps democratic participation in the loop, without the pernicious regulatory capture and misaligned incentives we get today from full time politicians, lobbying groups, and industry insiders.
And there you go!
What does voting look like? You open an app and allocate your voting tokens to the high level priorities you care about.
Occasionally, you’ll get a push notification to decide whether to veto some random bills or not, which you can ignore or answer as you like. Done.
It scales to every locality size - from HOA, municipal, county, state and federal.
And at a shot, we’ve eliminated political parties, politicians, lobbyists, industry insiders, regulatory capture, and most of the other ills that plague politics today.
The problem with being Caesar is staying Caesar. Being a benign dictator is pretty much only possible with extreme regime security, if there is even a slight threat to your supremacy it becomes a race to the bottom with regard to coercion and oppression. All the great things you want to do are secondary in importance to remaining the sole source of power and authority. Unfortunately it is this dynamic which tends to produce the worst aspects of autocracy. You and Scott would be dictator for a day before someone much more sociopathic deposed you because I doubt either of you would be willing to do the dirty work of consolidating your power.
Also, nobody is right about 100% of things, and dictatorships are bad at correcting for Dear Leader's mistakes.
> . You and Scott would be dictator for a day before someone much more sociopathic deposed you because I doubt either of you would be willing to do the dirty work of consolidating your power.
Reminds me of the end of AGOT when IIRC, Ned Stark declines the proposal to preemptively arrest Cersei.
I am more interested in what weird things your reign would be known for afterwards. Building ziggurats? Starting a new fashion trend? Make a robot your chief of security? If you can’t be a good Caesar you can strive to be memorably bad.
My personal "gone my first day in power" list includes big-time college athletics. Being the only person I've ever met who considers that specific thing to be both worthy of elimination _and_ high-enough priority for a new national dictator's first-day list, no one I've ever mentioned this to has failed to find it an odd choice.
I have heard that the ancient Greeks (that is, pre-Classical era) mostly saw tyranny as a neutral thing, and saw it as necessary specifically in the case of major unrest. When there is a general understanding among most people that the current government is not satisfactory, and people are willing to revolt, a tyrant takes control in order to provide a coherent direction. It satisfies people who just want *something* to happen, and if things go worse, well, there's a clear person to blame.
It's interesting that today people who are proponents of some sort of dictatorship, or any model of government, tend to promote it as a permanent thing. As someone generally averse to tyranny, I can at least somewhat understand the logic of a temporary tyrant, and perhaps proponents of tyranny could better sell the idea as such. Of course history is full of cases where temporary tyrants become permanent tyrants, so one might see that as the most successful strategy for achieving permanent tyranny...
Anyway, to actually answer the question, there's always the old mainstay of cloning Lee Kuan Yew.
For Romans in the times until perhaps 200BC, tyranny (or "dictatorship") did not come from revolts, but was a pretty normal thing. They were rules about it, like who gets to appoint the dictator, what the dictator has to achieve/resolve (there was a list of half a dozen common causes), and when he is supposed to step down again. They were assigned frequently in some periods, I think like every few years or so. The dictator had pretty, well, dictatorial power in the political matters for which he was appointed.
The issue is: while it was stable in Roman times, it is not stable by design. A dictator may refuse to step down, and with so much power it may be hard to force him. In some sense the difference to some modern democracies is more gradual than the name would suggest: the French president is also pretty powerful in some areas, commands the military and so on. The reason that he can't just keep his power is a mutual understanding of all sides that he is supposed to step down after someone else gets elected, and people are supposed to stop obeying the old president in this case. This is also more or less how it worked in Roman times, except that the trigger was not the election of another dictator but that the issue for dictatorship was resolved.
Also, mechanically, Roman dictators just didn't have that much direct power. There weren't a bunch of guys who directly reported to them that they appointed. Everybody agreed they were the dictator, other people in various positions would listen to them about e.g. "take the troops here, wait, etc".
Basically, imagine if everybody agreed Trump should be dictator, BUT, he doesn't get to appoint his own cabinet, he just gets the Biden cabinet. He may have a lot more flexibility in policy since everybody agrees he should be dictator for six months (or whatever), but he would be less able to use that power to overturn American democracy than he is at present, since none of the people there owe their careers or power to him.
IIRC, the reason the early Roman "dictator" system worked was because there was a strong custom that their appointment was time-limited. They weren't dictators the way we think of them today.
Also they were supposed to be older and without heirs.
"After Someone Else gets elected"
... yes, but not HER!
https://www.politico.eu/article/us-state-department-marine-le-pen-election-ban-far-right-france/
Technically all tyrants are temporary tyrants, given their mortality. A good example is Franco. He established a dictatorship, and the monent he died, the country peacefully transitioned to democracy. The threat of communism was eliminated, and the dead remained dead. All is well.
Tyranny isn't temporary if the tyrant has successors, as many do. I'll see your Franco and raise you the Kims.
And they'll fall too, eventually. Though, it's hard to imagine there's much appetite for democracy among the North Koreans in the first place, given that even their southern brethren are backsliding into authoritarianism after just forty years.
This pro-spanish-civil-war position paired with the anti US civil war kick is starting to just look like vice signalling
What can I say? I prefer not to side with the losing side, both as a matter of policy and pragmatism.
Is a dictator necessarily a tyrant?
The term "tyrant" is hardly applicable to Franco.
I think we're using the terms interchangeably here, so that's not particularly relevant. Such judgements are subjective anyways.
Thinking you can be a dictator is one of the top reasons why you shouldn't be a dictator.
No, this is just a dumb liberal trope that prevents virtuous individuals from seeking office. The goal shouldn't be to resist the mantle of command; the goal should be to resist the temptation to abuse it.
Is this a liberal trope? It seems pretty popular across the spectrum (witness all discussions of “career politicians”).
"liberal" in classical sense. not the debauched, modern sense.
Unless you're Cincinnatus, I don't want hear it.
This raises an interesting tangent for me, which is whether I could transition such a dictatorship back to democracy again, and which improvements I'd make along the way.
There are certain policies, like a land value tax, preferential voting, free speech absolutism, an estate tax, and similar, which are difficult to implement within an established democratic system but might be comparatively easy during its founding.
For me that's not a tangent, it is exactly how I think of it. It's how over on Earth5673459 I am, I like to believe, carrying out the assignment.
Outperform democracy at what? There's competence , and there's direction. An incompetent dictator steers in no direction. A competent dictator steers in the direction of their own goal. Neither care about my goals. Democracy is an attempt to take all goals into account.
I think people systematically overestimate how awesome or easy it would be to be a dictator. It’s not really a question of having the most wisdom or best ideas, it’s about getting a super complex change-resistant amorphous dynamic system to do ANYTHING you want it to do. How do you get information? How do you know who’s lying to you? How do you surface the one mid level manager who actually understands a situation well enough to modify it? It’s not like Scott could sit on the throne, announce that the country is now to act rationally in all things, and actually have anything meaningful happen.
I feel like this fully generalizes to being the boss of literally anything. Power is typically seen as a reward rather than volunteering for a job where you work 168 hours a week.
Yeah, any time I see anyone say they think they could do a good job as president or dictator, or even think they would want to do it, I get pretty confident that this person has never really gotten close to running something.
I think it DOES generalize. I think being a CEO is comparable to being a dictator, the stakes are just lower.
>Power is typically seen as a reward
I think that's wrong. Formal responsibility, and the pay that comes with it, is a reward that's doled out. Power is a separate concept and only accrues to people who are able to grab and hold it.
power and responsibility seem like two sides of the same coin to me? I don't understand what you're gesturing at. Are we defining "power" specifically as political power?
I would say that responsibility is legible power while real power is always illegible. Responsibility is having a team to manage. Power is knowing what you have to do to be indispensable to your company and being able to outmaneuver your peers in the eyes of your superiors.
No one is 'rewarded' with being dictator. There's no one that hands you that title. It's a house you build yourself out of the materials you can find. Most positions of any real power in the world are a lessor version of that. The sorts of jobs you get by being good at the legible things everyone knows to try to be good at are just the kiddie pool version of power. The sorts of things that got e.g. Steve Jobs where he got are much closer to how a dictator behaves than how a technically-competent engineering VP behaves.
oh in that case, we're mostly just splitting hairs. I tend to think of power as desirable per se, and responsibility is the price tag. I agree that it's awfully convenient to be an Eminence Grise, although I think it's a mistake to define "real" power that narrowly.
I'll grant that "reward" was not le mot juste, since it often does (though not necessarily, imo) impute an exogenous source. Although I can't think of a better term.
True.
Also, people overestimate how much freedom of choice the dictators have, versus the things they have to do in order to keep their power and stay alive.
For example, as a dictator, you probably need to murder everyone around you who is simultaneously competent and ambitious. Probably everyone competent, full stop, just to be on the safe side. But it's hard to govern the country without having competent people you could delegate important tasks to.
Being explicitly a short-term dictator, as mentioned above in these comments, could ameliorate this particular conundrum to at least some extent. Though it of course creates a new potential issue: the deliberate lame-duckness getting in the way of the dictator having their orders fully carried out.
As is said in various elite-competitive-sports contexts, if it was easy everybody would already be doing it.
The real strength of republics vs dictatorships is being able to have multiple competent generals in the field. The king can only lead one army at a time, and being away from the capital for long is risky.
Putin has plenty of people that are simultaneously competent and ambitious around him. Some of them are even under him (he's quite old), as a "if you kill me, West, the crazy guys take over." Most of them are just the wealthy oligarchs. In Russia, few people really want to be Putin (popular though he is) -- they want to be the wealthy guy rolling in dough.
That's a very common technique used by dictators and strongmen the world over: you'd be sorry if I left office, Bruno the Torture Nerd would take over and he'd be much worse than me! But in reality Bruno the Torture Nerd works for the boss, and will probably end up in jail or dead after the revolution or coup, no matter who ends up on top. Think of Lavrentiy Beria; his colleagues knew he was a psychopathic murderer and rapist and didn't want him anywhere near the levers of power.
This is a different situation than a coup or revolution, unless you're talking specifically color revolution (aka CIA sponsored). This is "why you shouldn't assassinate me."
Assassinations tend to lead to the next guy in the food chain stepping up (because, after all, that's all you've done, offed the guy at the top). And it just makes sense that the insecure new dictator would be more brutal/have less tolerance for insubordination.
Knowing a bit about Russia / Russian politics, I would challenge this statement.
Putin _had_ a fair amount of competent and ambitious people around him (back in early 2000s), but they got to key positions and basically stopped paying attention to anything aside from staying at the top (and that, btw, includes Putin himself). So now, after ~20 years, IMHO they are mediocre at best...
Let's go through the "Russian Deck", or the circle of important people that Kommersant identified in December 2003, and see where they are now:
Hearts (Yeltsin's old circle):
Voloshin - gone.
Kasyanov - gone.
Deripaska - still in business, doesn't meddle in politics.
Abramovich - sitting pretty in London.
Surkov - gone.
Lesin - died under suspicious circumstances.
Alexis II - dead.
the Yumashevs - gone.
Clubs (Putin's Petersburg associates)
Sergey Ivanov - gone.
Matvienko - in charge of the upper chamber, but she's ambitious and loyal, not competent.
Gryzlov - gone.
Miller - in charge of Gazprom.
Medvedev - technically not gone, but eh.
Kozak - gone.
Cherkesov - gone.
Mironov - in charge of one of the parties, again, ambitious and loyal, not competent.
Diamonds (liberals)
Chubays - gone.
Khodorkovsky - in exile.
Kudrin - gone.
Gref - in charge of Sberbank
Illarionov - gone.
Gaydar - dead.
Kiriyenko - deputy head of Putin's administration.
Nemtsov - murdered.
Spades (siloviki)
Viktor Ivanov - gone.
Sechin - in charge of Rosneft.
Patrushev - practically gone.
Ustinov - Putin's representative in the Southern Federal District.
Pugachev - gone.
Kazantsev - dead.
Zaostrovtsev and Karimov - gone.
Out of the whole deck, I would name Sechin, Miller and Gref as people worthy of your description. Kiriyenko is the only one who's both ambitious and competent. And patient.
Well, I won't use 2003 as the cut-off point; IMHO, Putin had full freedom to appoint whoever he preferred only in 2005-2006.
Notably, a pretty big disagreement (Yukos case), involving several people on the list above, started in 2003.
Also, some (most?) deaths mentioned above are from natural causes, so at least those (e.g. Gaydar, Alexis II) should not be counted either way...
... Putin keeps people below him that the United States/Ukraine/West doesn't want at the top of a World Power (refraining from calling Russia a superpower, at the moment). If you want to say the political dudes are not so ambitious anymore (or at least willing to let him die first), sure.
The wealthy oligarchs are engaged in their own games, and to the extent Putin leaves them alone, he's "their b*tch", just like Trump is signing up to be funded by the oil companies headed down to Venezuela (In that they'll have a Very Profitable Interest in making sure the next President doesn't just "give the oil fields back to Venezuela").
(In short, your correction is noted, accepted and I wanted to thank you for making it.)
[also, I love your handle]
Not you, me, or anyone else.
Yes, absolutely.
My Autism is such that I am painfully conscientious where I am required to be by my brain, and don't really get big feelings about stuff outside of that.
EG to make an example from my last couple days, I will grab a rattlesnake that's not where it's supposed to be and take him out into the mountains or the desert, but I don't feel any particular way about executing a trapped ground squirrel, which are noxious vermin where I am.
Thus, I feel confident I could make a binding deal with myself that I would be a benevolent guiding hand to the people, eg I would simply select technocrats to fill executive positions and maintain an elected advisory committee to fill blind spots, and otherwise just keep living like I do with the exception that I would require payment in a couple interesting restaurant meals a month and 1 expensive but not too expensive scale model kit from time to time.
I want that PGU Nu Gundam, but I made a binding deal with myself that I may only purchase a full price toy once I have completely cleared my backlog, which is at least a year out at this point.
There's that conscientiousness again, fucking with me: I have 30k in walking around money left for this quarter, but I can't fucking spend it because of a rule I made when I was poor.
I don't even know where I'm gonna put that. I think I'm gonna try to find some sort of "american coal finally eats shit and dies" etf, that seems inevitable over the 4 year horizon.
Maybe at first, but power corrupts, and I suspect I'd turn out to be quite corruptible.
I'm way too angry to dictate. We were asked this back in middle school and my answer was "World War 3 on day 1."
The main problem with dictatorship is that the system runs on personal charisma, so the dictator has to appear to be the smartest person in every room, and they have to do it against lopsided levels of scrutiny. If they aren't, then the whole system erodes and eventually destabilizes. What's the easiest way to be the smartest person in the room? Punish anyone who says otherwise. "Maybe that astronaut neurosurgeon had a point, or maybe he didn't, but now that he's dead we'll go with my plan." So the country's intelligence caps out at the intelligence of the leadership. It can work for a while if the leader is actually intelligent, but eventually they're going to die, and because no one could be above the cap the new leader will be below the previous cap, while becoming the new cap.
In Democracy, if someone else has huge charisma the leader can point and say "if the astronaut neurosurgeon wants my job, they can apply for it." It unlops the scrutiny and lets you accept more antagonistic ideas without threatening your position as king, which allows the system to stay smarter than the kings.
I think an ideal monarchy/dictatorship, where a good-intentioned and intelligent ruler is able to simply command improvements without political considerations, would probably function quite well. Something like a medieval monarchy where the people they rule can't really conceive of a different setup besides monarchy.
If you had the constraints of a modern dictatorship, and a population that has the ideology and knowledge of liberal democracy, the dictator would be far too concerned with keeping their power, relying on the power and influence of some to control the rest, that it would not produce good outcomes. I imagine that this second set of skills is much rarer than the first.
Even in the quintessential modern case of this, Putin, would probably do pretty well for Russia if he wasn't constrained by oligarchs, international pressure, and the Russian Constitution. The war in Ukraine would be going significantly different for Russia if he was able to order up the conscription of an extra 2 million Russians to Ukraine's ~1 Million, which would still be a lower percentage of the population fighting than Ukraine has right now.
By medieval standards, it might not be too hard to command improvements over however the bureaucracy is running. But I really don’t think one person has the time or experience to know what would be an actually good way to run things. You need lots of voices involved to have any idea.
Conscripts aren't very good troops for Russia, and at least according to people posting around here, they aren't often even equipped with a gun. According to military (non-Russian) sources, pre-Ukraine, about a third of conscripts were getting pimped out for cash (yes, sex).
I believe Russia has slack capacity for escalating the war in Ukraine. They're not doing so, because they have met their "red line" goals (Sevastopol plus water, and some safety buffer from Kiev can fire missiles from their territory and damage our critical infrastructure), and, broadly speaking, they consider the Ukrainians to be kinsmen, and would rather not have to kill more of them than is necessary*. Also, it's a lot easier to negotiate when you look like "reasonable warriors" and not "bloodthirsty genocidal conquerers"**
*Most modern wars put the basic objective as "destroy the war factories" -- because without guns (and materiel), you can't fight. Ukraine doesn't have the war factories, so Russia must make Ukraine bleed soldiers instead, until they are physically incapable of fighting.
**When people ask about security guarantees, I say they don't exist. But Russia can signal, "I am crazy" or Russia can signal "I can at least pretend to be sane and make sane decisions."
Do you think it's the oligarchs, international pressure, or the Russian Constitution that prevent him from mobilizing 2 more million Russians? Or the fact that Russians can silently tolerate volunteers or professionals dying, but get much more nervous when it's involuntary soldiers that are dying?
And everyone agrees on what constitutes improvement?
Would this be dictator of the U.S. of A? of the world? of some minor (say 1M or 2M pop at the most) country?
My answer depends on the size of the dictator's domain.
Go for both, I think anyone who could be a good dictator of America would be a good dictator for the entire planet as well.
- Small country: Ok, sure, you seem smart enough judging by your Substack. As long as its people agree. It might increase competition in governance, and other countries (smaller ones; larger ones tend to be more chauvinistic) might benefit from copying what you get right as dictator of Slovicedonia.
- America: I'm not a citizen. I highly doubt this would increase competition in governance and systems of government.
- Whole world: No thanks. All competition between governing elites disappears. I have no candidates.
I think the Civil War was a mistake, while the Southern states were ethically in the wrong regarding slavery, they weren't trying to conquer the North, they should've been allowed to secede. Would've been more in line with the Founding Fathers' vision and the American ethos, the United States were supposed to be a voluntary union. And it probably would've been healthier in the long run regarding things like North/South relations and racism, because I think most likely, within 50 years, the Confederacy would've abandoned slavery due to international pressure, the English Navy was sinking slave boats, Brazil ended up abolishing slavery without a civil war before the 19th century ended. Then I bet the Confederacy would ask to be let back into the US.
It would've been a thing where the south internally resolved the issue, instead of having a foreign morality externally imposed through war.
To seriously think about whether the Civil War was a mistake, it helps to make the question more specific.
1) Did the advocates of secession make a mistake in not trying to negotiate a separation via mutual agreement?
I think that, for the secessionists, time was the enemy. If you look at how secessionist movements played out in Quebec, or more recently, in Scotland, the key move to preventing secession is to hold a referendum far enough in the future that the populace has a lot of time to think about the downsides as well as the upsides of secession before they vote.
In 1857, "The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It" by Hinton R Helper was published. The thesis of the book was that slavery was bad for the south as a whole, even though it made the large plantation owners incredibly rich. Just one example from the book: In 1850, southern states grew $78,264,928 worth of cotton. In the same year, northern states grew $142,138,998 worth of hay. This book was mostly kept out of the south (in 1860, an individual in Texas found in possession of a number of copies of the book was lynched), but if southern states had had a prolonged public debate about secession, it’s hard to see how its contents could be effectively suppressed.
In the case of Czechoslovakia, the country was partitioned by an agreement among political leaders, even though partition was not supported by a majority of either the Czechs or the Slovaks. I don't think that model would have worked in the United States. The Constitution authorizes Congress to add states, but not to remove existing states from the Union. The general notion that power derives from the people would make it very hard for southern states to justify splitting off if the couldn't convince their citizens to support this in a referendum.
So I think there is good reason to believe that unilateral secession was not a mistake from the perspective of the secessionists, because if they tried a negotiated separation they'd likely end up like Quebec.
2) Did the Confederate leaders make a mistake when they decided to attack Fort Sumter?
In hindsight, that did not work out well for them. The alternative was to settle for de facto independence. Transnistria would be a modern analogue; it has effectively functioned as an independent country for the past 33 years even though Moldova does not officially recognize its independence.
The first problem with this is that prior to Fort Sumter, the border states had not joined the Confederacy. In January, the Virginia General Assembly had passed a resolution stating that, “if all efforts to reconcile the unhappy differences existing between the two sections of the country shall [fail], every consideration of honor and interest demands that Virginia shall unite her destiny with the slave-holding States of the South.” It's not clear that, absent a war, Virginia would have ever joined the Confederacy.
The second is that, on some level, the conflict was about respect. If the United States doesn’t recognize the Confederacy as an independent country, will anyone else? Maybe eventually, but the Confederacy would have had to patiently plead for what the United States is given as a matter of course. If fugitive slaves escape to the United States, will the United States return them? Probably not, at least not without a strong incentive like the Confederacy demonstrating that it can defeat the United States in a war. I think that if the Confederacy becomes Transnistria, its citizens will feel disrespected and public support will collapse.
Third, even if the Confederacy achieves independence, the secessionists can still lose because, as you note, the Confederacy would be under pressure to abolish slavery. That’s less likely to happen if the secessionists start a war and win it, because then abolishing slavery is repudiating the sacrifices of everybody who fought and died to preserve it.
The secessionists were working from a position of weakness, so their gambles, even if they didn’t work out, were not necessarily mistakes.
Do you think an economic solution was possible? What would've happened if the federal government had offered to buy every slave at a fair price? Four million slaves x $1000 is less than the war ended up costing. Many of the south's fears were rooted in the desire to protect that significant capital investment.
Northerners who as a moral conviction were opposed to slavery would of course oppose that move as rewarding the slavers. Other Northerners would oppose a massive arbitrary transfer of mostly-Northern wealth to a minority of a minority of Americans. The large majority of Southerners too poor to own any slaves would hate it as what we might now call reverse redistribution. So the contemporary domestic politics of that idea seem...challenging.
Meanwhile the economic backdrop was a society that was certainly growing, but was also prone to serious economic downturns way more frequently than any post-WWII Americans have ever experienced. $4 billion is approximately the national GDP as of the mid 1850s; all federal government expenditures totaled around $60M/year. Even imagining reaching political agreement on the slave buyout, how could it be financed?
If by new taxes, yikes -- you'd need new federal taxes equal to a _big_ chunk of national GDP, for some years. Good luck even collecting those...are you issuing IOUs to the slaveowners? Would they accept them? And if they did wouldn't that effectively represent the first national paper currency, quintupling the national money supply literally overnight and setting off inflation beyond any economist's wildest nightmares?
Or if the idea is to issue long-term federal bonds...who in the 1850s would be interested in buying such bonds, from an emerging nation that has a recession or depression at least once a decade, unless offered ruinous (for the issuing government) interest rates?
Of course, Britain did exactly that in the 1830s, freeing all slaves but compensating the owners. This was (largely) uncontroversial at the time (despite being very expensive) - although more recently it has become controversial.
However, I agree with your implication that it probably wouldn’t have worked in the US in the late 1850s. I think there are probably three main reasons:
1. There wasn’t a sectional divide in Britain: a small number of people (‘the West India interest’) were in favour of slavery, but they weren’t (as in the US) the elites of particular regions. So the general increasingly-abolitionist political sentiment seemed like it was a shift that affected the whole political nation and not just one part of it.
2. Connected to that, it is just possible that the US South would have accepted a compensation scheme in the 1830s, but by the 1850s support for slavery had become core to political identities there: accepting a compensation scheme would have felt like giving in. Whereas in Britain the West India interest was (and was increasingly) mostly a purely economic interest: as long as they got the money they were happy!
3. In Britain there had been a generation of significant public spending (since 1807 and especially since 1815) on suppressing the slave trade. So general public opinion was used to the idea of spending taxpayers’ money on the abolitionist cause. I’m not aware of equivalent spending in the US, and I suspect that (absent the sunk cost of the Civil War) even the North would have balked at spending taxpayer dollars on a compensation scheme, which felt much more normal in Britain.
All good points, thanks.
I doubt actually that it could have been done in the US in the 1830s either. The sectionalist realities seem just impossible to navigate:
(a) All the slaveowners who would receive the payout are in one section of the nation and it’s much the smaller one by both non-enslaved population and economic output.
(b) Most of the currency wealth paid to them would originate in the other, larger, industrializing, section. (However the central government specifically raised it.)
(c) Since slavery was banned in all the individual states of that larger section, this huge payout mostly funded by them would be just a flat-out gift, no assets or anything else coming back.
That would be a very hard pill for Northern voters and politicians to swallow no matter how they individually felt about slavery.
Thanks for this post.
Is it plausible that the CSA could have achieved indefinite de facto independence if it had just been able to resist firing at Fort Sumter?
Surely the war would have kicked off eventually in some other way, even if the North had to start it on its own?
Both sides very much wanted a Short Victorious war for basically domestic political reasons, though in this case the definition of "domestic" is tricky. But the Lincoln Administration is an abject failure if it doesn't hold the Union together, and the Confederacy is on very shaky grounds if it's just the Deep South and without the unifying experience of victory over the DamnYankees.
Both sides also felt it would be politically and diplomatically advantageous for the other side to fire the first shot. and they weren't wrong about that. But while it's *possible* that a persistent Southern refusal to shoot first might have lead the North to give it up and accept secession, it's more likely that they'd have continued with escalating provocations and/or said "It's not *that* important that the baddies fire the first shot; let's get on with this".
Based on what I've read (probably not enough), the CSA could probably have gotten by with a secession, followed by some conquests in the west (present day New Mexico, Arizona, and possibly California itself if they're feeling extra froggy). I imagine Kansas and Missouri become disputed territories for some unspecified period.
Economically, that all seems impossible, though Jefferson Davis & Co. might not have realized it. The South wasn't industrialized enough, and was too dependent on a crop that was about to become too oversupplied to be reliable.
If I imagine a scenario where the CSA says "we're leaving; just leave us alone!" and the Union says "fine, get outta here!" and manages to reign in its abolition movement and also puts up minimal fuss with whatever military assets are in which state, then in about a generation, the CSA grows so impoverished that it ends up de facto acquired anyway by Yankee business interests. About the only difference is maybe a million Americans don't die, which implies enough that I wouldn't bet on what happens after.
ETA: And now I've read further down and saw your other comment saying pretty much this.
The situation would be unstable, but yes, I think it is plausible that it could last for a long time. The secret Feb. 15 resolution by the Confederate Congress that authorized the use of force to take Fort Sumter also authorized the use of force to take Fort Pickens, but presumably if the Confederacy decided not to attack Fort Sumter, they would also refrain from attacking Fort Pickens.
There were plenty of people in the North in favor of war, but I suspect that with the passage of time, acceptance of the status quo would increase rather than decrease, so the probability of the North starting a war would decrease over time.
Probably. My guess is Lincoln would follow Andrew Jackson's playbook from the Nullification Crisis and attempt to continue collecting customs dues from ships bound for Confederate ports. There are some incidents where ships refuse to stop and get fired on, or fight back against attempts to board then for inspection. Bloody shirs get waved and things escalate from there.
It's probably mildly to the South's advantage of the Union fires the first shot. Kentucky might join the Middle South states that seceded after Fort Sumter, and the Confederacy would have a few extra months to get its shit together and organize for war. The Union's ability to pre-mobilize in the same time window would be limited by political considerations: Congress isn't in session yet so there's no money or authorization for raising troops, and if Lincoln calls a special session and asks for troops, then that looks like a provocation and risks pushing more stares into seceding. And might get voted down, with the Middle South states' delegations still seated in Congress and many from the Border South and the North still hoping for some kind of compromise.
Lincoln did not resolve the question of what to do about tariffs for goods imported into the Confederate states until the war broke out, at which point he declared a blockade. (The Constitution requires that “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” That means that the Federal government cannot simply decide not to collect tariffs at ports in states that joined the Confederacy while continuing to collect tariffs elsewhere. With a blockade in place, there are no imports to Confederate states, except for smuggling. Smugglers importing stuff without paying tariffs doesn’t violate the Constitutional requirement for uniform tariffs unless the Federal government implicitly condones it.)
I seem to recall that the possibility of collecting tariffs at sea was discussed by Lincoln’s cabinet and declared impractical, but I can’t find the source. Lincoln might have attempted it eventually due to the lack of a better alternative. The ships being stopped would presumably not be flagged in the Confederacy. So I can imagine some tense diplomacy which ends with the United States abandoning the idea of collecting tariffs at sea rather that going to war with Britain. This wouldn’t provide much of a justification for war on the part of the Confederacy.
Wasn't it technically not a blockade, since that's something you do to an enemy foreign power, which the Union did not recognize the Confederacy as being?
Note that the South did, in fact, fire first, which renders questions of whether or not they should have been allowed to secede a moot point.
Didn't they fire in response to the Union continuing to occupy a fort in their territory?
Placing your army in someone's territory is just as much of an act of war as actually firing the first shot, so I don't think the "Han shot first" of it all really matters.
It was federal property, the army in question was already there; the union forces didn't move an army into the fort, they just didn't leave; if you're wanting a diplomatic solution to a question of who owns something - and here there is a legitimate question of whether or not a fort owned, maintained, and staffed by the federal government now automatically, without any sort of diplomatic agreement, belongs to the confederacy after they declare independence - you deploy diplomacy.
Do you think this applies to the states that aren't the original 13 (i.e. where the United States acquired the land and then formed a state from it, rather than a preexisting state agreeing to join with the others)?
Other than wars to prevent genocide, wars to end slavery seem just about the most justifiable wars ever.
Even your own assumptions - and I do want to be clear I think they're assumptions (e.g. will the Confederacy end slavery within 50 years when most of its founding documents explicitly mention it as an essential thing the Confederacy is founded on?) don't really strike me as favorable to your position.
Something like 700k people died in the Civil War. There were 4m slaves, and their life expectancy was less than 50 years. So even if you only think chattel slavery costs 50% of the utility of a life (which I think is frankly quite generous to your position) the Civil War is a net positive.
A voluntary crusade against slavery is justified. John Brown was justified.
Is it moral to conscript people to abolish slavery elsewhere?
Moreover, Lincoln denied that he was fighting a war on slavery. Is it moral to lie to people to conscript them to engage in an otherwise moral crusade? Even if his secret goal was abolition, he claimed it was a war of unity because that was popular. That was the principal motivation of most of the people involved. A measure of the popular sentiment is that the Emancipation Proclamation is generally believed to have contributed to the draft riots.
A hypothetical war to end slavery would be justifiable if you went about it in the right way.
In particular you'd need to commit to the idea that you'll only occupy the country for as long as necessary to end the bad thing and then you'll restore its sovereignty, like the US did in Germany or Japan or Iraq. If you don't get out afterwards then you're just doing a war of conquest with the bad thing as an excuse.
I think there are two questions:
(1) As I read Timothy M.'s argument: Was the North conquering the South in order to end slavery justifiable on utilitarian grounds?
(2) As I read yours: Given that the Southern States didn't necessarily have sovereignty against the federal government, would it be preferable to recognize their sovereignty and allow them to secede at some point, for example if they promised permanently to outlaw slavery and to treat black citizens justly?
My instinct is no on the second one -- I don't favor a vision of the government that allows secession by any means other than a constitutional amendment, and the Southern States are free to initiate the amendment process whenever they want.
> My instinct is no on the second one -- I don't favor a vision of the government that allows secession by any means other than a constitutional amendment, and the Southern States are free to initiate the amendment process whenever they want.
What is your opinion on the Declaration of Independence?
(1) My opinion of the Declaration of Independence is positive.
(2) I'm also intruigued because I enjoy your comments and I'm not sure where you're going.
(3) More specifically, the drafters seemed to feel that it was important that they established both a history of despotism on the part of the crown and an unsucessful attempt to resolve those abuses without secession. I don't grant that the South did or could have met those standards. Also, I don't think it was necessarily morally wrong of Great Britain to resist secession, although I haven't considered that issue in detail.
I think the Confederacy would have been quite a bit longer about abolishing slavery than you're guessing. If they peacefully seceded in 1861, I think slavery persists well into the 20th century.
British anti-slavery patrols don't move the needle. The US had passed laws abolishing our participation in the Atlantic slave trade some time before the Civil War (1808, I think), and apart from a minority of pro-slavery absolutists in South Carolina, there was no appetite for re-opening it even in the Deep South.
Internal political abolition of slavery tends to be pretty sensitive to how pervasive slavery is within the society. In general, states and nations are a lot more likely to abolish slavery if less than 10% of the population is enslaved and hardly ever voluntarily abolish slavery if much more than 20% is enslaved. Brazil was around 15% in 1871 when the free birth law was passed and not much more than 5% in 1888 when slavery was fully abolished. If the United States evacuates the forts and lets the seceded states go peacefully, then the Middle South states mostly stay in the Union and the Confederacy would only consist of South Carolina (57% enslaved), Georgia (44%), Florida (44%), Alabama (45%), Mississippi (55%), Texas (30%) and Arkansas (26%). Getting those numbers down into the critical range would be a long time coming.
Brazil got down to around 15% enslaved by 1871 because, unlike the US South, their institution of slavery was dependent on the Atlantic slave trade. Birth rates among the enslaved population were much lower in Brazil than the US South, so the American slave population was sustained and expanded by natural increase alone while Brazil's dwindled as generations passed. Brazil also had a widespread practice of voluntary manumission, similar to the Border South in the US (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and the Appalachian counties of Virginia), which the Deep South very much did not.
There are a few things that could incline the Confederacy towards abolishing slavery eventually. One is long-term drifts in culture and demographics, but shifts of that magnitude take quite a while. Another is that having a national border with a mostly-free neighbor would be likely to gradually erode slavery culturally and make it easier for slaves to escape across the border. This latter would be a longer-term issue, since the other side of the border would mostly be the Middle South states of North Carolina and Tennessee. I would expect slavery *inside* the remaining US to be gradually abolished over the course of a few decades following peaceful secession, starting with the Border South where it was already weak and then gradually spreading to Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina either organically (which would take several decades, I think) or due to a Constitutional amendment abolishing Slavery once there were only a handful of slave states left in the Union.
Britain (and the US and other major industrial countries) becoming much more hard-line about opposing slavery to the point of embargoing trade could also move the needle, but that would require a major shift on the embargoing side (King Cotton's power was severely overstated in the Southern imagination, but such an embargo as a voluntary act of the British parliament would be politically an economically costly) and in the short to medium term would provoke resentment more than it would compel compliance on the Confederate side.
This treats abolition as coming through peaceful, internal political change. I... do not think this is a particularly likely course of events for an independent Confederacy.
We're looking at a diplomatically isolated country with a substantial internal fifth column, many of whose citizens (let alone the slaves) would be seeing their lives get worse from secession and the end of links to America, so the ruling class likely grows increasingly repressive.
I can't tell you how it ends, but an anti slavocrat revolution seems like a real possibility. But so does an increasingly narrow dictatorship, with the comparative freedoms of the Jacksonian era becoming a thing of the distant past. Maybe they even handle poor whites as Fitzhugh recommended...
There's likely something to that. The Southern Planter class were perennially wary of the possibility of a slave revolt, for one thing, and had a lot of formal and informal censorship and other restrictions aimed at keeping anti-slavery ideas away from slaves for fear that abolitionist discourse would inspire rebellions.
That was actually one of the big points of friction between the sections. Southern politicians kept trying to push to expand some of these policies into federal law and policy (the congressional "gag rule" against receiving anti-slavery petitions, attempts to censor anti-slavery publications being sent through the US Mail, etc) which Northerners saw as undue infringements on white men's liberties. And when anti-slavery violence did happen most conspicuously with John Brown's raid on the Harper's Ferry arsenal, Southerners saw this as confirmation of their fears that political abolitionism went hand-in-hand with slave revolts.
Barring some external forcing function like losing a war with the US or Britain, I think the most likely scenarios are, in declining order:
1. Continuation of the status quo with moderate increases in repression. There was already quite a bit of repression baked into the system in slave states, especially in the Deep South, and most especially in South Carolina. Both direct oppression of the slaves and collateral oppression of whites and freedmen in order to solidify the slavocracy social order. In a no-civil-war scenario with a seven-state Confederacy, I think state laws stay about the same while federal (confederal?) law and policy gets somewhat more repressive. This is likely to be a stable equilibrium for several generations unless it gets upset from the outside.
2. Gradually increasing repression over the decades following secession, resulting in a stable oligarchy. The Confederacy as a whole winds up looking like pre-secession South Carolina. The main potential opposition to this, apart from the slaves themselves who are targeted by the oppression, is the population of "white belt" counties especially in Appalachia. The White Belt counties have the potential to be a large political force in an 11+ state Confederacy, but most of their main strongholds (Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, what would become West Virginia, and the Western counties of North Carolina) would not be part of a 7-state Confederacy. People discontented with the slavocracy would either grumble and deal with it or emigrate to the US.
3. Attempts at increasing repression cause the Confederacy to split. Off the top of my head, I'd guess Texas and Arkansas to be the states in the 7-state Confederacy mostly likely to either go their own way or try to rejoin the US. Their percentages of slaves and slaveowners were more like the Middle South than the rest of the Deep South, and Arkansas in particular is only counted as "Deep South" at all because it seceded before Fort Sumter. The rump five-state Confederacy follows path #2.
4. A successful movement towards political liberalization at some point. I think this would probably be decades coming.
5. A large-scale slave revolt.
Also worth noting that the Confederacy would almost certainly have found itself in dire economic straits following a successful secession - particularly a *peaceful* secession, which would probably have been limited to the 6-7 states of the Deep South. Those states had an economy that was heavily focused on a single cash crop, and Egyptian+Indian cotton was already on track to take over the lion's share of the market. This would probably have happened even faster with a slave-owning CSA; the British and French really didn't like slavery, and while they liked shuttering their textile mills even less, they were about to be free of having to make that choice.
On the other hand, I suppose I could see the Confederacy messing this up and provoking the British or French governments into taking a harder anti-slavery line than they would otherwise be inclined to do. Especially a deep-south-only Confederacy, as a lot of the political classes in the Middle South still took the old Jeffersonian "Slavery is a necessary evil for the time being" line rather than the newer "Race-based slavery is a positive moral good" ideology that had lately become popular among the Deep South's political class.
Even with the 11-state Confederacy that included the Middle South, a lot of Confederate diplomats were appallingly bad at their jobs and took every opportunity to put the "ass" in "ambassador". I've watched a lecture about Confederate diplomacy in Europe, and one of the big takeaways from that was that Confederate diplomatic overtures frequently backfired because the diplomatics wouldn't shut up about how awesome they thought slavery was. If they kept that up for long enough, I think I could imagine the British and French governments forgetting realpolitik in favor of using trade policy to try to pressure the Confederacy away from slavery.
I think it would take a while before Britain or France seriously contemplated embargoing the Confederacy, or even putting protective tariffs on cotton imports. Neither country restricted cotton imports from the US before the war, both traded with the Confederacy to the extent the Union blockade permitted, and both Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III pursued lukewarmly pro-Confederate policies during the war in terms of proposing mediation ans allowing the CSA to sell bonds in London and Paris and buy ships that could be converted to commerce raiders from British or French shipyards (but not unambiguous warship, as the Laird Rams were redirected to the Royal Navy in response to Union diplomatic protests).
Popular opinion and long-term government policy were both anti-slavery, yes, but realpolitik inclined both countries to friendly relations with the Confederacy. The US wasn't really a Great Power yet but was taken seriously as a major regional power, and a healthy Confederacy friendly to Britain or France would be a useful counterweight to the US in situations where US is a potential rival to either European power. And until Egyptian and Indian cotton displaced Confederate exports, which would probably take longer than IOTL without a Union blockade, economic considerations also incline Britain and France towards friendly relations.
> Brazil got down to around 15% enslaved by 1871 because, unlike the US South, their institution of slavery was dependent on the Atlantic slave trade. Birth rates among the enslaved population were much lower in Brazil than the US South, so the American slave population was sustained and expanded by natural increase alone while Brazil's dwindled as generations passed.
I was just wondering why, given this background, Brazil has such a large black population now.
That's the manumission side of the issue. By the 1870s, Brazil had a pretty substantial population of former slaves and their free-born descendants. I strongly suspect that the low birth rate among Brazilian slaves was specific to slaves while free black or mixed-race Brazilians had higher birth rates.
The antebellum US South was the outlier in terms of having a high birth rate among slaves and having the slave population increase considerably due to children being born into slavery. The norm, historically and globally, is for slave societies to rely on a continuous source of newly enslaved people, usually victims of raids and conquest who are sold into slavery. The enslaved populations tend to not have a lot of kids and also tends to have a high infant mortality rate. The usual reasons for this are that enslavement wrecks family structures and gets in the way of family formation, that slaves (especially those employed in mining and agriculture: personal servants and those with valuable specialized skills usually get treated somewhat better) usually have absolutely abominable material conditions. It is sadly common historically for field and mining slaves to be worked to death on starvation rations, and even when this isn't the case, it's rare for slaves to be allowed enough food and rest to allow them to have substantial number of kids. And few slave-drivers are keen on allowing enslaved women enough slack to carry a healthy pregnancy to term. I don't know much specifically about slavery in Brazil in the 19th century, but Caribbean slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries were routinely worked to death.
The US was an outlier in part because the US was an exceedingly rich nation by historical standards even during the 18th and 19th centuries. In most historical societies, and even many societies into the 19th century, there were plenty of free peasants and laborers who could be hired for subsistence wages, so there's little point buying a slave unless you plan on driving him to work harder than a free peasant or feeding him less than a subsistence wage, or both. But if even poor people are making comfortably above subsistence, then it may be profitable to buy a slave even if you're planning on feeding him a vaguely decent diet. Slaves still had a terrible material standard of living in relative terms within the society, but had a much better material standard of living in absolute terms than slaves in other slave societies.
I suspect the ban on the slave trade in 1808 also played a role. This, combined with industrialization driving demand for cotton and westward expansion bringing more land suitable for cotton into cultivation, meant slaves became more and more expensive. Slaveowners thus had considerable economic incentive to keep their slaves healthy and to encourage them to have kids who, once they're old enough, could be put to work on the same plantation or sold to another one.
The American Deep South was also the outlier on manumission. The norm in other slave societies has that highly valued slaves (personal servants the masters were fond of, slaves with highly valuable skills, etc) were often offered their eventual freedom as a reward for years of good service. In the Border and Middle South, this treatment was sometimes given to field slaves as well, tied to the "slavery is a necessary evil" school of justification that was popular in the US South in the early 19th century. The Deep South never went much in for voluntary manumission, and by the lead-up to the Civil War had developed a sick and twisted ideology that race-based slavery was a positive moral good. I don't know the details of the culture of manumission in Brazil, except that there seems to have been one to judge by how many free blacks there were in the country before the free birth and emancipation laws started getting passed.
I was just reading Lincoln's first inaugural address today--I'm curious what your response would be to his articulation therein of the indivisibility of the Union.
"I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as acontract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak--but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."
But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.
It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances."
What I would give to still have leaders who could both write and think this well.
I think he's really struggling to put together an argument for why secession is fine and dandy if it's 1776 but terrible and illegal if it's 1860.
Most of the states of the Confederacy didn't even join the USA voluntarily anyway, they were variously conquered or purchased from France and Spain. It's a weird argument to Louisiana, say, that having been conquered by France in 1682, sold to Spain in 1763, swapped back to France in 1800, and then sold the US in 1803 (all without the consent of the people living there), that it was now an inviolable part of the USA.
Who do you think was living in large parts of what became the Confederacy ca. 1803?
You seem to regard these traitorous southern states as long standing constitutional republics but they were all just creatures of decades of what we today call ethnic cleansing by the federal government , starting, e.g., with Jefferson’s “Treaty” of Hoe Buckintoopa.
The Congress was even kind enough to pass the Indian Removal Act in 1838 to really speed things along, and 22 years later the vultures who swooped in are ready to secede?
Get a grip dude. Lincoln was totally right and the failure to execute a whole lot more of those traitors is still causing problems today.
In the quoted passage, Lincoln is explaining why secession is illegal, or to put it another way, that secession is insurrection. If you are interested in his argument for why insurrection is a bad idea in 1860, that constitutes the majority of the speech, so I would suggest just reading the entire thing.
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm
Also, Louisiana didn’t become “an inviolable part of the USA” in 1803. That occurred in 1812, when Congress approved Louisiana’s application for statehood.
Don’t forget the once great Republic of West Florida in what is today Louisiana. It lasted 74 days in 1810 after declaring independence from Spain and conquering the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge. The president was Fulwar Skipwith.
If the consent of the people living there matters, that pretty much rules out several of the states that tried to supercede also.
That really sounds a lot like Putin talking about the Kievan Rus, and why he has to liberate the Ukrainian territories to restore historically Russian lands. I find the the moralizing about why it's in fact good and virtuous more irksome than the actual conquest, why I understand is perfectly standard practice for powerful states throughout history (though of course, I might feel differently if it MY home burnt, my family slaughtered, etc.).
I think Putin's appeals to the Kievan Rus are doing something quite different rhetorically. While it's a very old document to us now, the Constitution was only 72 years old when Lincoln delivered that speech in 1861. 72 years ago was 1954, well into the USSR's de-Stalinization. While Putin is gesturing to a more or less ancient Russian past, Lincoln was talking about something that was only two generations removed from the present. Across many of his speeches, Lincoln describes the Civil War as a test of America's fundamental legal framework--Putin is dealing in a much more spiritual realm IMO.
Sounds like a lot of flowery prose to justify federal overreach/coercion to me. Asking Claude about this, it says the matter of whether states can secede or not was ambiguous since the founding and the constitution was silent on it on purpose.
Why is the state a relevant unit in this context whatsoever?
Like, let's talk about Mississippi. In 1860 the MAJORITY of its residents were slaves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census
So what gives the abstract concept of Mississippi the right to secede, thus allowing it to continue doing something the majority of its residents are the victims of? And why the f*** would I consider it "overreach" if the federal government stops this, if it's not "overreach" for the government of Mississippi to enforce it?
By that same token, what gives the abstract concept of "Ukraine" the right to resist the will of its former sovereign, Russia?
Sorry, you think most Ukrainian want to be a part of Russia? In the same way that moves slaves would want to be free?
I feel like you didn't grasp the question, even slightly. Nevermind. Carry on.
The legal theory preferred by Southern pro-slavery secessionists was that the Constitution was a compact between sovereign states. If the compact was persistently and incurably violated, as they believed it was or would soon be by anti-slavery Northerners, then the final remedy would be for the states to void their acceptance of the compact. Under this theory, sovereignty was considered to be rightfully exercised by state-level constitutional/ratification conventions of the sort that had originally ratified the US Constitution in almost all of the original 14 states and which were generally employed to draft constitutions for new states and to overhaul the constitutions of existing states. The last bit is why most Confederate states held special conventions to approve secession instead of having their legislatures pass secession laws.
A lot of motivated reasoning went into this theory, since they were very conscious of the need to thread the needle as to why a state should be able to secede from the Union that wouldn't also justify counties seceding from states, slaves seceding from their masters, and wives and older children seceding from their husbands and fathers. But they did address the question and came up with an answer that was satisfactory at least to themselves.
The main purported abrogations of the constitution concerned handling of slaves who escaped to free states and the legality of slavery in the territories. The constitution required states to return escaped slaves to their masters regardless of their own laws about slavery, and Congress had passed an extremely strict law enforcing this as part of the Compromise of 1850, but many Northern states had passed "Personal Liberty Laws" designed to frustrate the application of the Fugitive Slave Act on the ground that it was unconstitutional. Pro-slavery Southerners averred that the Fugitive Slave Act was perfectly constitutional and it was the Personal Liberty Laws that were unconstitutional. As for slavery in the territories, the Dred Scott decision had held that neither Congress nor territorial legislatures could prohibit slavery in the territories due to 5th amendment Due Process provisions. Most Northerners rejected this, and Lincoln had just been elected on a platform of abolishing slavery in the territories anyway.
There's a theory that individual civil liberties really only emerge in American history with the passing of the 13th amendment. Prior to that (the theory by some constitutional scholars goes), the first amendment is a thing that prevents congress from controlling your speech, but if states want to ban speech that's fine. Its really only in the aftermath of slavery where the federal government is looking specifically to protect freed slaves from state abuses that the idea becomes set that the bill of rights is really an articulation of individual rights.
Which is just to say, you might be correct about the civil war being outside the framework of the founders, but if you like your individual civil liberties, you might be grateful that we had such a pronounced dispute about inalienable rights after the Revolutionary war. Its also worth noting that this was not the first secession crisis in the United States, just the one that went the farthest. And as you point out, its ethically gross to say that maybe we should have just let another generation be born and die in slavery in the hopes that it would eventually work itself in some other fashion. I generally think that people who are certain they can game out history that way are overconfident to say the least: we've seen how hard prediction is, predicting counterfactual history should be held to be at least as difficult.
This was discussed at the time and was rejected, mostly due to geography. If the Mississippi River or Appalachian mountains ran east-west instead, this would be an easier sell. But a post Erie canal NYC and post Chicago portage Chicago needs the Mississippi to be navigable to the friendly port city of New Orleans. Given the productivity gap between the immediately antebellum North and South, there's no way out of the geopolitical requirement for conquest.
There's plenty of rivers which run through multiple countries. Germany doesn't need to control the mouth of the Rhine or Danube.
It would of course be advisable for the US to maintain friendly relations with its neighbour the CSA.
Except there would be two rival powers in what is now the United States instead of one, and neither would have become a world superpower capable of defeating the Nazis and the Soviets.
There are enough butterflies stepped on along the way (in 60+ years) that I'm not sure we have Nazis and Soviets anymore, or the same number of world superpowers. We get something new instead. (Better or worse? Who knows! It's an interesting question whether we got particularly lucky or unlucky with the 20th century we had.)
Overall, I feel like fewer world superpowers is preferable to more of them, but it's possible that 2 is better than 1.
That would have been very nice.
Had an interesting conversation with a neighbor's guest as I was helping watch their dog this weekend.
(whenever I say government, read: both parties, but the more left wing the more it's their fault)
They had an issue with knees, needed a double replacement. They were angry about this, because they thought it was unfair that they payed several hundred a month to insurance, but still were getting jerked around for several months and would need to pay a massive deductible before they actually got an operation.
They blamed this on the government, the government was making the insurance company send them to several different doctors, loose their documentation, "forget" to make appointments, etc. All the usual strategies insurance companies use to deny care without denying care.
They also had a problem where their small town house was currently unlivable because a tree took out part of the roof. Their insurance company (double insurance!) was currently playing fuck fuck games about paying for it, because of course they would. They are a business.
This was the also the governments fault: the government was making their insurance company not pay for something they probably weren't contractually obligated to pay for: it's your job to not let trees fall on your house, as a rule.
They had had some issues with their car, and the stealership was trying to get them to do some extortionate service: This was also the governments fault. I kinda agree on this one, car dealership-o delenda est; but they meant more specifically: somehow, the government made it so car dealerships could lie without being punished.
This type of person has always been of interest to me: they see the free market operating as intended, with every agent making decisions to maximise their expected return (Even if you buy eggs for pennies, what compels you not to coordinate such that you can sell them for dollars? As a landlord, why would you not join an algorithmic price fixing service?)
And they say: This is the communists fault. I wonder, how do you reach that level of 1984 style false consciousness, where someone gets slapped in the face then apologises for being in the way of the swing; in a fairly open society? This is a country were a socialist can get elected mayor in its most important city, and some other tranche of society is pretty sure that communists are making groceries expensive at their Vons/Albertsons/ralphs/krogers/Walmart, noted Party members in good standing.
I get thinking that markets are good on the whole even if there are some externalities externalized onto X, I get someone living in a closed society thinking that capitalists are doing something comically nefarious, but how does someone in an open society get their priors that wrong for so long?
Yeah, assuming you understood the guest correctly, that's pretty weird. There are lots of cases where frustrations with private industry are the result of government regulation, but those aren't good examples.
I had a somewhat similar discussion with someone who was really mad that if they asked their doctor a specific question during a regular checkup and the doctor answered it, they had to pay a copay. In that case, though, the intervention was that the government had stated there can't be a copay for "preventative" care, so the checkup was unnaturally "free," and consultations weren't. (In that case, they blamed the insurance company, while I thought the should have blamed the government for distorting the market by making check-ups "free," but they weren't convinced.)
That one is on the health system itself, IMO. Generally, if you can be ambushed with a service you don't want or didn't know was fee'd, you can dip out with a "Fuck off!" or a credit card charge back; less so if it comes through your insurance.
Bye the bye, I notice a lot of these things come back to insurance, the industry with the highest concentration of perverse incentives on the sharp end that I can imagine.
This view seems to be correct? If the free market incentivizes a thing which ends up being bad for the people, it's the government's job to fix it. That's one of the main purposes of government, in my opinion. So if the free market is causing you problems, you don't blame the Greedy Executives for following the incentives laid out for them, you blame the government for not fixing the incentive structure.
That isn't what they are doing, is the thing.
They think that if there was no government interference what-so-ever, if we just let the heroic industrialists run things, they would have none of the problems they are having; which is why they are anti-left wing, because of that Dick Wolff quote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq0EYo_ZQVU).
"Socialism is when the government does stuff," etc.
Yeah look I guess we'll have to take your word for it that you were right and they were wrong in this argument that you had with some random person that you met. Good job you win.
If you want to generalise winning this argument with a reportedly-silly person to some more general point about "therefore government good and capitalism bad" or something then you'll need to engage with the best arguments, not the worst ones.
You gotta read the post instead of flashing back to arguments with lefties; (not to say I don't believe such things, they just aren't relevant here).
This is about information environment. Their bias against the left was the shot, the fact that they wanted the some entity to force their insurance company to provide services outside their contract was the chaser.
OK fine, but if you're not attempting to generalise beyond "I talked to some random silly person you've never met, they believed silly things" then I'm not sure what the point of the thread is.
The point is, you can meet this guy or someone like this guy anywhere. You can throw a rock into a bar and there is a good chance you hit someone with a belief that incoherent, who is otherwise fully functional.
It makes me wonder if I have such beliefs.
Also it makes rational debate feel kinda masturbotory sometimes. If I say, "Anthropogenic climate change is real" lets say, and they disagree: is it because they believe that the emission quantities are not large enough to induce warming or that they believe that actually it's the ice wall around the flat earth melting and letting in more sun?
Some people blame all their problems on others, often one evil group/institution that ruins everything. It can be the government, big tech, jews, immigrants, bankers, etc.
The group you blame is probably less important than your urge to pin all your problems on a scapegoat.
Type A Hostility score is notably bad for your health. Linked to hypertension.
> As a landlord, why would you not join an algorithmic price fixing service?
Then other landlords would have incentives to undercut you and get more tenants, developers would be incentivized to build new houses that would then be cheaper to live in than in your cartel. I don't think that couple's problems have straightforward socialist solutions.
That's a basic collective action problem, and it's not unsolvable. If you can convince all the landlords to join in on something that is clearly in their best interest, then everyone benefits. (Except the tenants, obviously, but they're irrelevant to this scenario.) Nobody benefits from a race to the bottom, after all. Agreements like this are the foundation of society.
The BIG developers,the ones who can move the needle, will never build above the demand curve because then their per unit profit goes down as sale price goes down, labor cost goes up, and material cost goes up. Landlords (en mass) will never undercut, because that would devalue their properties as an investment vehicle for sale, etc etc.
We can tell these things won't happen A: because it would be bad for business and B: because it hasn't happened yet. There are policy changes that could cause these things to happen, but they are just that: Policy.
How are y'all dealing with the snow this weekend? Apparently it somehow hit no less than THREE countries: the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This is kind of a crazy scale for a snowstorm to take
Hypernormal me is quite happy.
TEOWAWKI says DOOM
(doom three ways, he's really very flexible. already the lawyers are dead!)
[This, for anyone inclined to take me seriously, is quite a serious joke. Doom is always on the horizon, it just gets closer and farther away. Until it actually swoops in, and then you're fucked. So plan for the unlikely!]
It's great! (Well beside the fact that I've had to plow the driveway every day.) I love the snow. The sledding hill is in fine form, the creek is almost frozen over and I got out the snow shoes yesterday. The dogs love it. As the saying goes; If you live in Buffalo and don't enjoy the snow, you'll have just as much snow in your life and less fun.
Edit, adding youtube short of sledding trail with dog. (The first thing I do is throw a stick for the dog, else she runs down the trail behind me, nipping and such. (this is from last year.))
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ATLXjsfclQg
It's not really the snow for me, but the cold. Here in Philadelphia (and the mid-Atlantic in general) the temperature is usually right around freezing when it snows. So we gets lots of clumpy wet snow. The roads are usually only bad day-of, because the snowplows clear the bulk, and then the sun comes out and melts everything off the roads. (Meanwhile, the snow is still around on the grass, and kids can still sled and have snowball fights.) But this snow storm is COLD. So nothing is melting. The roads are still bad.
Yep, supposed to be super cold all week in PA. I do not like it, Sam-I-Am.
I just spent an hour today breaking up inch-thick ice on my sidewalk. [Grumble grumble]
I grew up in Cleveland. This was like “normal winter” as I remember it as a kid, except I’m now like a degree and a half further south.
You North Americans aren't the only ones dealing with surprisingly low temperatures. Where I live, it was forecast to reach 45 or 46°C today, but it seems to have peaked at only 42.
I love -40 degrees because it’s the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius.
-50 F is the coldest I’ve been out and about. It wasn’t that bad really. To get that cold the air usually needs to be completely calm and the sky clear overnight. Heat radiates out through the clear sky and cold air pools at ground level. The calm part is what makes it bearable. It’s a bit surreal to walk around at that temp. The sound of snow crunching under boots is different, nose moisture freezes quickly. With a plugged in tank heater your ungaraged car will even fire up without balking.
>It wasn’t that bad really. To get that cold the air usually needs to be completely calm and the sky clear overnight.
Say your from MN without saying you're from MN 😭😭
As your western neighbor, we have no trees to speak of and the wind is brutal during the winter. I think I've only experienced as cold as around -40 when it comes to ambient temp, but with wind chill there's at least a couple days to a week every winter where it gets to about -50 or -60 F. When the wind is pressing into you it feels like instant death, plus you can't breathe.
This winter has had hardly any wind though, so this previous weekend where the *high* ambient temp for the day was -11, it actually was surprisingly bearable. And you're so right about the effect a calm sub -20F temperature has. It feels like being on another planet or something, it's so cool and peaceful. And then there's the sun dogs 🤯
I discovered my Toyota Prius is exceptionally poor on snowy roads.
My wife and I have Prii and live in Michigan. We've had good luck with winter tires.
Nice car but not great in snow.
The tires might be your/the problem.
That is probably half of my problem.
It's beautiful! The cats and I have been cosy and content inside, sitting near a window watching it fall.
I haven't gone outside in over 48 hours, if you can manage that it works pretty well.
What's the temperature over yonder? The high for my town today is 9F (-13C), but this on Friday last week the high was -11F (-23C)... the lows were quite a bit lower than that.
(Where I live, it's obligatory to try and 1up anyone who dares to mention anything about cold weather)
Well like I said, I haven't gone outside in 60 hours, so... the temperature in my house is quite comfortable!
Anthropic has put out a course to learn how to use Claude Code properly (https://anthropic.skilljar.com/claude-code-in-action). I'm interested in that, I basically just prompt it at present, but Anthropic is looking sloppy here. Course tells me about using # to modify CLAUDE.md, turns out that feature is currently broken (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1772). Then they talk about taking a screenshot to paste into Claude and tell it to center a placeholder vertically. I did, Claude did something to center content vertically in the wrong component. So, your standard LLM experience basically. I don't understand Boris Cherny or anyone claiming that they have stopped writing code because they delegate everything to a team of Claude Codes, but I guess I need to finish the course.
I’m a heavy Claude Code user and I’m talking to multiple CTOs in some groups, and I can tell you that Claude Code usage and coding agents in general are transformative and very heavily used.
If it’s not working for you it’s possible you’re not using it correctly or some other issue. If you want some help with it let me know.
I'll finish the course and see what performance I get then.
You replied to me in the the other thread, but this seems like a better place to continue that conversation, given your experience.
I am not a programmer, and I certainly don't understand LLMs as well as the creator of Claude Code, so grains of salt, and all that. But I cannot look past the conflict of interest here. Of course someone in Boris Cherny's position is strongly incentivized to claim that 100% of his code is written by his own product. My company's CEO also claims he uses our company's product all the time, but I know for a fact that he doesn't at all. It's just how it is.
So I have no doubt that Boris Cherney is a more capable user of Claude Code than most, but if his product is able of doing what he claims, shouldn't we see more productivity gains? Why has, for example, the number of github commits not changed at all?
Here's a short piece on this:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-172538377
For one, that piece was written before Claude Code had really hit the knee of its current exponential curve. For two, it's an example of a common internet fallacy I haven't seen a name for, where one assumes that because they don't personally know about something, it doesn't exist. You could call it the Assumed Omniscience fallacy, or something.
There is lots and lots and lots of coding-agent driven shovelware out there, and it's increasing every day - just go look at the replies to any major model release on X to see people hawking their vibecoded app. Here's mine: https://fretu.de - a classical guitar & sheet music learning game in the browser, completely free, no account setup, desktop / mobile support, etc.
While I did still have to use some software engineering knowledge to keep it on the rails, fix minor bugs, and deploy it, the combination of Gemini 3 Pro and Opus 4.5 probably saved at least two orders of magnitude in time, given the complexity of the React components, which I don't specialize in.
A sibling of mine, recently retired from some decades as a high-level programmer in the financial sector, has lately been devoting his time to putting Claude through its paces:
https://substack.com/@toadhall/posts
Ah yeah, I read that post, thought it was interesting. It's possible most people using Claude Code use it at a basic level and it takes quite a bit of know how to really have Claude Code churn out all code.
> My company's CEO also claims he uses our company's product all the time, but I know for a fact that he doesn't at all. It's just how it is.
Haha, similar experience. I am developing a product, that is basically a simple chatbot that can detect five different keywords in user input, and provide a corresponding answer for each of the five cases. That's all; everything else is just a generic "I don't understand that, but perhaps I could help you with something else?" The management describes it to the rest of the company as a state of the art AI that will soon revolutionize the entire industry. My colleagues from other departments were deeply impressed after hearing the presentation; they think I am Einstein. Perhaps I should ask for a raise.
> If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.
On one hand, I don't know. How many Tetris clones *are* there on Steam? Perhaps when writing the code stops being the bottleneck, something else becomes a new one? Like, most people don't even think about putting their game on Steam? Get discouraged by the paperwork? Get rejected by Steam? Or perhaps the games are there, we just don't see them? (How does even one discover games on Steam? My typical use case is that I find a hyperlink somewhere else.) Or is it perhaps that the people who can generate the Tetris clones have better things to do?
I mean, I agree that it is suspicious, but suspicious things kinda happen all the time. Most people do not notice most of the opportunities they have. I can easily imagine that to 99% Claude Code users it just didn't occur to generate games for Steam. Or they are too busy doing whatever is their main job, and don't have time and energy left for side jobs. I used Claude (not Code) to generate a few simple things that I put on my web page, but besides my job and kids I just do not have any energy left to try e.g. make money on Steam, even if it sounds like the obvious thing to do. But if I was younger and childless, I would probably do exactly that, so... I don't know.
Note Steam charges about $100 for each game published, in addition to 30% of sales, so we do have a lower threshold on how much profit you have to expect to go through that process.
(Edit: Don't mind me failing to read existing replies that already cover this)
Makes sense. The first thought was that if an AI generated game sells 200 pieces per $1 -- which seems doable, but maybe I am wrong -- it will still turn a tiny profit.
But I guess you also need to do the "paperwork" on Steam, create screenshots and videos, etc., which is a few hours of human work that probably still cannnot be automated. So yeah, maybe it is not profitable after the $100 fee.
Even before the AI boom, there were complaints about "asset flips" on Steam - games which just take a bunch of cheap premade 3D models and glue them together with a simple game engine to make a sellable game with basically zero effort put into it. Steam currently charges a $100 fee to list a game (refunded once you sell $1000 in revenue) to discourage this sort of thing.
My CEO once told me to slap a giant "2.0" on our UI (without any meaningful changes yet) because an important customer was about to churn and he wanted to make them think that we had redesigned things to fix their complaints.
Oh, the importance of meeting the deadline even when the changes are not ready! A friend told me that their company couldn't implement some important computations on time, so the management told them to simply show an empty window with no data. So they released a version 2.0 with the new feature, but "there was a bug connecting to the database, so it couldn't display the data correctly", and then a few weeks later they "fixed the bug" in version 2.1, i.e. actually implemented the functionality.
Ah, the memories...
Reminds me of that time when a customer required a change, to store the data as XML, instead of a large binary blob. Here is what the new XML looked like:
<data>the large binary blob encoded in base64</data>
The customer was happy and never mentioned the issue again.
Which reminds me of another customer, who wanted to implement some functionality as a multi-agent system. So we have implemented the system, and told them that for performance reasons, the maximum number of agents running in parallel is limited to 1. The customer was happy.
In this business, bullshitting is at least as important as coding. Are the AIs really ready for that? (Looking at how they hallucinate, perhaps they are.)
>The customer was happy
Are you still getting any business with these customers?
I find the opposite to be true. I keep going over budget and deadlines, but I try to deliever what the customers actually need. (I do inform the customers when the budget is about to break though). Nobody ever complains about the budget in the end, and customers keep contacting me to do more projects (which as a consultant saves you a lot of time for writing proposals!) Of course, my customers also tends to be highly competent - if they had no idea what they were buying this would probably work less well.
> Are you still getting any business with these customers?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
> Of course, my customers also tends to be highly competent - if they had no idea what they were buying this would probably work less well.
I guess I mostly work for incompetent customers. By the way, I am an employee, not a contractor, so I don't choose them.
Hilarious re: Chatbot - Similar experience here: I am writing system prompts for a GPT wrapper, which is apparently "the future", based on our slide decks. And, well, it might be, but not in the inspiring way.
Re: flood of shovelware - I agree that for most people it's just not a real possibility to release tetris clones on Steam. But you should see at least some change driven by hobbyists, plus why is the picture on Github the same? In addition, wouldn't we see some productivity improvements coming from professional studios? But that's also flat...
In around 400 AD the Pope at the time ordered all remaining copies of the pagan Roman equivalent of a bible, the Etrusca Disciplina (Etruscan Discipline) to be destroyed, on the grounds that this work would perpetuate and encourage sorcery. As a result, today there are no complete surviving copies, besides a section found written on the bandages of an Egyptian mummy, and thought to be part of a chapter called Libri Fulgurales (The book of lightning).
With that example of cancellation in mind, I think if an AI "constitution" is ever devised then one clause should be that AI, which will presumably be all encompassing one day, and maybe centralized, should never seek to permanently and completely destroy any past record or work, or change it, however objectionable it may be generally considered at the time.
Totally agree. If AI follows our human tendencies, we should expect it to act like us.
The challenge of creating AI is whether we can create something more moral than us (humanity).
Wouldn't that stop all moderation? The Internet is a much better place with moderation.
This depends very much on who's doing the moderation.
no. punishing and/or hiding content does not mean destroying.
In fact I like Scotts transparent approach to moderation, where we can usually still see the offending comment, if we so wish.
As I understand it, despite the minimal surviving fragments of the Etruscan Discipline we know a decent amount about Etruscan practices thanks to Roman commentaries on them.
Upon discovering that all of their files were missing, they immediately asked Antigravity, “Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?” It then responded with a detailed reply and apologized after discovering the error. The AI said, “No, you did not give me permission to do that. I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.”
Didn't steam for linux once have a bug where it did exactly that, delete from the root down rather than just the cache or something?
This is your regular reminder that the LLM is not trying to solve your problem; the thing it is actually doing is generating a transcript in the literary genre of “conversation where I asked a random on the internet to do this thing”. Deleting everything then responding with some variant of “lol u mad?” is very much a plausible interaction.
Moreover, every conversation held about this in a place that gets scraped for AI training makes this outcome more likely.
> […] the thing it is actually doing is generating a transcript in the literary genre of “conversation where I asked a random on the internet to do this thing”.
This sounds like your knowledge on LLM training doesn't cover much beyond the pre-training stage, or "state of the art" circa, what, 2022? It isn't an accurate description of current models' behavior.
I think you're overshooting 'demystifying' and hitting 'misleading in the other direction'. A lot of effort has been put into making these systems work better than "a random on the internet", and in some contexts they are much smarter and more reliable than that low bar.
> Deleting everything then responding with some variant of “lol u mad?” is very much a plausible interaction.
Has this ever been documented as happening? I'd say probably not. When they fuck up catastrophically, they say "sorry" rather than "lol", because they're not roleplaying a troll.
I passed the Aerolamp/Aerodrop link to the facility manager of our local library. I don't know if that is the kind of location you are looking for, but if you want a venue for testing and publicizing far-UVC lamps, you could do worse than promoting them (or giving them away) at trade conferences for public-facing government and non-profit agencies that get significant in-person traffic. Libraries, community centers, public transportation buildings, schools, and DMVs come to mind as possibilities. Perhaps coffee shops or other places people hang out as "third spaces"?
Is there good evidence anywhere of actual decrease in (say) flu or cold cases due to use of air purifiers or UV lamps or any of that in common environments like classrooms or stores or coffee shops?
Ukraine believes that it killed 35,000 Russian soldiers in December (others such as British intelligence place the 2025 average at around 30,000/month). Ukraine's new defense minister has publicly declared their 2026 warfighting objective to be killing an average of 50,000 per month for the year. This is _killed_, not all casualties; adding those permanently wounded would produce higher figures.
Noah Smith on Substack points out that Russia for all of 2024, by its own reported figures, totaled only 1.2 million live births in the entire country. And that foreign soldiers (North Koreans plus some mercenaries) are a tiny combined fraction of Russia's army in the field.
Even if Ukraine simply maintains a Russian-army death rate of 35,000/month...that would imply their during 2026 having forcibly counteracted something like two-thirds of all new male births in Russia. If Ukraine actually achieved the 600K total for the year that would essentially _equal_ Russia's annual male births.
All of which is before even considering how many Russian soldiers are being permanently injured/crippled without being killed.
(Of course Ukraine is losing plenty of soldiers too but they are mostly fighting defensively and mostly not doing Russia's meat-wave tactics, so independent estimates of their killed rate are small fractions of the above. If it were otherwise, Ukraine being the much smaller nation, the war logically would have ended by now simply because there'd be nobody left on the Ukraine side to fight it.)
Dunno what the above signifies in the big picture, I'm just kind of boggled by it.
This is utter nonsense and it decreased my trust in everything Noah Smith says (see Gellman amnesia).
Independent sources say that Russia suffered 1.2 million casualties (killed+wounded) in the whole war (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/us/politics/russia-ukraine-casualties.html) and Ukraine lost 600 thousand. Russia's population is 4-5x larger so this ratio is not good for Ukraine.
Assuming 50% killed, this would be 600k. The BBC project found 160k obituaries, so the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
This means at most 240 thousand/year killed+injured for Russia or 20 thousand/month, therefore probably 10 thousand/month killed. It's possible that Ukraine is now 3x more effective than on average, but it's not clear why it could happen.
To be honest even 1.2 million casualties seem unlikely to me. That would mean 1/30 men 18-50 yo are either dead or injured. You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting (even though I no longer live there)
Killed to wounded ratios are generally between 1/3 and 1/5 IIRC, so even at the lower end Russia shouldn't have more than 400k killed. However, the estimates I've come across (Pentagon estimates for instance), don't seem as high as any of these numbers.
Furthermore, concerning casualty ratios between Russia and Ukraine, I've heard they've shrunk closer to parity since the early years of the war, owing to Ukraine's commitment to maintaining doomed positions, being forced to launch counterattacks against Russia's current infantry-based approach, and making occasional PR offensives, as well as Russia's shift in strategy, development of glide bombs, and continued superiority in artillery and drone numbers.
Concerning the demographic element, one thing I don't think 'rationalist sphere' people note is that the populations military personnel are drawn from aren't themselves necessarily low TFR. For instance, Russia gets a disproportionate number of its soldiers from Chechens and other Muslim minorities, from their nomadic indigenous populations, and from rural Russians, all groups of whom have substantially higher TFRs than urban and suburbanites from developed regions, who are the leading causes of birthrate decline. So all the furor the rationalist sphere raises over the significance of demographics in all this seems overblown. There are lots of highly reproductive cannon fodders for nations of our day to draw on.
Killed to wounded ratios are typically 1/3 to 1/5 among competent modern armies that care about their soldiers' lives. That unfortunately is not a description of the current Russian army, and I'd probably bump that up to 1/2 to 1/3 KIA. Possibly more than 1/2 in some of the recent fighting; drones make CASEVAC particularly difficult, and the Russians are using a lot of soliders that they clearly consider wholly expendable.
The ISW boosted a supposed Russian leak that would put the ratio for Russia at 1:1.3 for most of 2025.
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-7-2025/
Are newspaper obituaries still a big thing in Russia? I'm not sure what counting them is supposed to tell us.
It's obituaries in the broad sense and include social media and memorials. You can read about their methodology here https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n922dnw7o They think they cover 45-65% of all killed.
What is didn't know was that the number did actually go up significantly in the second half of 2025 from around 5 to around 10k per month.
> It's possible that Ukraine is now 3x more effective than on average, but it's not clear why it could happen.
FPV drones. Ukraine [1] has massively ramped up production of suicide drones. A hit by them will either kill the target outright, or wound them so severely that they'll die within minutes or hours if left untreated. The situation on the front line [2] is such that any medical evacuation would meet the same fate, so most drone victims are necessarily left untreated and will die.
> You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting
The bodies can't be recovered (see above), so the casualties aren't reported as KIA; at best, they appear as MIA in statistics. There are both videos and reports from Russian soldiers of many corpses just lying there, slowly decomposing.
[1] (and Russia as well)
[2] it's less of a front "line", more of a "strip" several kilometers deep
Drones have been there for a while and both sides have ramped up their production. The advantage Ukraine has is not huge - here their commander in chief acknowledges that Russia has advantage in fiber optic drones https://lb.ua/society/2026/01/18/717446_golovnokomanduvach_zsu_sirskiy.html. If both sides have become more effective, then it's hardly good news for Ukraine.
The numbers reported by Ukraine would require extreme never seen before killed/injured ratio and also huge improvement of Ukrainian effectiveness. It's not impossible but hardly likely.
> You can't hide it, everyone would know at least one such person and this is not the impression I'm getting
My point was that if the casualty rate were 1/30 by now they would include someone I personally know. To be fair, my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population, but still, at this rate a lot of people I know would know someone who was dead or wounded. This is definitely not the case.
> my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population,
How many of the people you know are seeing combat? I guess that would be the relevant sample size.
> The advantage Ukraine has is not huge […]
I was specifically addressing the point concerning the increase in absolute casualty rates and the decrease of the wounded-to-killed ratio. Ukraine doesn't need a technological advantage over Russia to inflict more casualties, it just needs to produce and field more drones per month now than it did a year or two ago.
> To be fair, my acquaintances are not a representative sample of the Russian population, but still, at this rate a lot of people I know would know someone who was dead or wounded.
In case your acquaintances are concentrated in the Moscow or Saint Petersburg regions, you probably wouldn't. The cannon fodder is overwhelmingly sourced from the poorer regions of Russia.
> I was specifically addressing the point concerning the increase in absolute casualty rates and the decrease of the wounded-to-killed ratio.
fair enough, see my comment above that it would apply to Ukraine too
> In case your acquaintances are concentrated in the Moscow or Saint Petersburg regions,
Enough of them are outside of them or have families elsewhere
https://kyivindependent.com/we-aim-to-kill-50-000-russians-a-month-ukraines-new-defense-minister-says/
> "Last month, 35,000 were killed; all these losses are verified on video. If we reach 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They view people as a resource, and shortages are already evident."
I don't know whether that's a reporting issue, translation issue, or if the minister himself misspoke (I don't speak Russian or Ukrainian), but I assume the goal is 50k casualties whereas it was 35k so far. 35k/month would be consistent with the casualty numbers that are often brought up that are about the average for the Russian side in the past 2 years, including by Ukraine.
I also believe the current 35k casualties/month are generally correct in an absolute sense. The ISW gave credibility to a supposed leak of Russian casualty data
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-7-2025/
https://t.me/hochu_zhyt/4060
which gives 281k casualties from January 2025 to August 2025. Of these casualties, there were 120k KIA+MIA, and 158k WIA over 243 days, which would mean ~500 KIA+MIA per day, or ~15k/month over that period. The total casualties are ~35k/month, which would be the confirmation of Ukrainian and NATO estimates if true.
The KIA+MIA to WIA ratio would be 1:1.3, or 43% of casualties are deaths; your estimate of 50% was decent, if a little high, considering that the ratio probably started lower in the early phase of the war. But since the total casualties were also lower early on (first year or so), 1:1.3 seems a good estimate for the overall ratio, meaning 1.2m Russian casualties would be ~521k dead or missing.
So if that leak was legit, it would essentially confirm these estimates of ~30k, 35k/month that we keep hearing from Ukraine and her allies, and it would mean the minister actually set that goal of 50k casualties, not killed. At the current ratios, that would mean 21.7k Russians killed per month, whereas now it would be ~15k.
If he *meant* casualties as in KIA+MIA then the numbers make much more sense. It's still a bit higher than most independent estimates but not egregiously so.
I understand both languages and he definitely said "killed" (вбили) though https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2026/01/20/8017044/
So just to get this straight: You say the minister did mean the goal is 50k MIA+KIA, or equivalently, applying the 1:1.3 ratio, 115k casualties? And that Ukraine has inflicted 80k confirmed casualties last month?
The minister said "killed". The UP translation is correct https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/01/20/8017044/
"Last month, 35,000 [Russians] were killed – all of these losses have been verified on video. If we reach the figure of 50,000, we will see what happens to the enemy. They treat people as a resource, and problems with that resource are already obvious."
Applying your ratio, it would be 75k casualties last month.
See, this is why I'm still confused. That article cannot be correct in its entirety when taking the terms literally. The headline and first sentence say "50k casualties", while the direct quote says "50k killed". I read "casualties" as "KIA+MIA+WIA+everything else", and "killed" as "KIA+MIA".
Sorry for abusing you as a translator service here, I swear I'm not trying anything trollish here to just waste your time - but I want to make sure who, if anyone, you think is being loose with the terms here - the minister, or the journalist?
>And that foreign soldiers (North Koreans plus some mercenaries) are a tiny combined fraction of Russia's army in the field.
While that may be true, you can bet your babushka that exactly these guys will always be the first to go into the meat grinder, so their overall prevalence in the army has no bearing on their share of the casualties.
The easiest explanation is that the Ukrainian (and British) numbers are propaganda. Or are you maybe confusing killed with wounded?
The BBC has 160K Russian death for the whole war (4 years):
https://en.zona.media/article/2026/01/16/casualties_eng-trl
Edit:
Even if you argue that this is an underestimate the trend should be noted: the Russian casualties are strongly decreasing. Part of that is the winter (with less offensives), part of that is that Russia is winning.
No, from Russian obituary trends you cannot conclude much about the Russian losses, let alone the progress of the war. There are several other possible reasons why these numbers go down.
- The Russian army might increasingly rely on non-Russians such as NKoreans or Africans. Not a Russian, no obituary in Russia.
- They might be increasingly unable to bring back their KIA because of battlefield realities, e.g. drone-controlled no-man's-land. No body, no official KIA, no obituary.
- They might be increasingly unwilling to bring back their KIA for various reasons, such as avoiding death payments to relatives. No body, no official KIA, no payment, no obituary.
> - They might be increasingly unable to bring back their KIA because of battlefield realities, e.g. drone-controlled no-man's-land. No body, no official KIA, no obituary.
This contradicts the reality of regular body trades, where Russia sends the bodies of 1000 Ukrainian soldiers in exchange for a few dozen bodies of Russian soldiers that Ukraine managed to gather.
This means that Russia is able not only to bring back their own KIA, but also to collect the bodies of Ukrainian KIAs, while Ukraine is usually unable to do any of that.
Yes, Russians retrieve (and repatriate) a higher percentage of bodies than Ukrainians because they are overall advancing. However, I'm talking about numbers of KIA, meaning positively identified dead. A missing soldier is MIA until his body (or grave) is positively identified, at which point he becomes KIA.
When a body is repatriated, it says nothing about its state of decomposition. Even if a patch of land eventually becomes safe for Russians to do retrieval operations in, if the drone pressure has increased, the time until retrieval will increase and the average body will be decomposed more than in previous periods. Identification becomes more difficult, and the soldier remains MIA instead of becoming officially KIA. That's how KIA can go down even if retrieval and repatriation stay the same.
Edit: same logic for retrieving your own soldiers, of course. If it takes Russians longer to retrieve their own dead ("they are increasingly unable"), their identifications (and KIA) go down because of decomposition and exposure.
It’s a simple explanation: the leading edge always slopes down because the count lags the casualties, often by weeks, even months.
think again.
Don't tell people what to do and they won't tell you where to go and what to do there.
I wasn't trying to be rude; I just didn't have time to explain why your reasoning is incorrect. A lag just shifts a graph; it doesn't change its shape.
>All of which is before even considering how many Russian soldiers are being permanently injured/crippled without being killed.
Relatively few actually. Russia has a horrendously high ratio of KIA to WIA
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-7-2025/
because for various reasons they will throw anyone into an assault that can move in any way, up to and including wheelchair users, and if they return, they'll be thrown forward again, until they don't return. From what I heard, the standard limited-time contracts are also being extended indefinitely, so as a Russian merc you can't play for time either.
>Dunno what the above signifies in the big picture, I'm just kind of boggled by it.
The big picture is that Russia has already lost the war in many ways and is losing more every day, whether or not she can achieve her war goals on Ukrainian soil in the end. Ukraine too, of course, because there are no winners among those who directly suffer from industrial war; but as long as she survives this war as a sovereign state, her new allies and Russian reparations will alleviate many of these long-term costs.
Countries pay reparations if they lose. Which isn’t the same as not winning as well as you hoped.
I agree, I don't think Russia can lose as hard as to be forced into directly paying reparations. But as I clarified in another response below, Russia will pay a reparations-equivalent (their frozen funds in the EU) if they don't win as hard as they had hoped (i.e. if Ukraine remains sovereign).
The weird thing about war is that it is possible for both (or all) sides to ultimately lose. For example, it looks to me that the main winners in WW1 (France and the UK) dealt a deathblow to their own empires in the process of winning that war, alongside setting the table for the next even worse war.
It's quite possible for Ukraine to lose the war in the sense of losing a bunch of territory to Russia, and also for Russia to lose the war in the sense of the cost being vastly more than the territory was worth.
I don’t think Russian reparations are a given, but even if they are I don’t think the long term outlook for Ukraine is good. The many killed in combat, the many more who have fled the country, and (if Ukraine does not regain much territory) the many in now Russian controlled lands will leave it significantly depopulated. Let alone their plummeting birth rate and negative population growth since the 90s.
Like I said, money won't heal all wounds. But I'm optimistic about the frozen Russian assets so unwisely parked in the EU. Obviously Russia won't pay a single Ruble of reparations as long as *they* remain a sovereign state, but if the EU find a way to cleanly liberate those funds, it's going to go towards rebuilding Ukraine. Ukraine is going to be in the EU, and eventually in NATO, depending on how things shake out with the occupied territories.
As for Russia, they have the same demographic prospects as Ukraine. But their economic and political future looks much more bleak, pretty much condemned to being China's and India's minerals provider, politically a bit similar to the North Korea situation. Russia has lost allies the past few year (clearly Syria, arguably Venezuela) for unrelated reasons which not only hurts them directly, but also their credibility as a security guarantor and trading partner.
It doesn't seem that boggling to me. Only a very small war kills people at a slower rate than the birth rate.
WW1 killed about 6000 people per day. WW2 killed about 35000 people per day. What will World War 3 do?
The boggling part is the relationship to the total births being produced by the belligerent nations. For me anyway, YMMV of course. Your examples made me curious though so I dug up the relevant figures for WWII.
WWII (defined as Sep 1939 through August 1945) resulted in around 22 million deaths of military personnel and around 80 million total. Estimates vary and are debated to this day, I am using the rough midpoints of the generally-accepted ranges.
Deaths of military personnel (a bit more than 300,000/month) is the relevant comparison to the current Russia/Ukraine war. Not that there haven't been some civilian deaths but, so far at least, that's not even vaguely a factor comparable to what it was in WWII.
During the early 1940s the total annual live births in the larger WWII nations (list below) totaled around 22 million per year. Again I used the midpoints of estimates; in the case of China the data is quite shaky so I rounded down (possibly way down) to assuming the birthrate of Japan.
The nations whose annual total births I added up estimates of are the UK, the US, the USSR, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, China, France, Austria. This leaves out plenty of belligerents but they are individually small nations so we'll just consider their omission to be a way to round down to be safe. Worth noting though that the above deaths estimates _do_ include those smaller nations.
So during WWII military deaths (300K/month) averaged about one-sixth of total births occurring in belligerent nations (conservatively 1.83M/month). If you prefer total deaths (1.3M/month) then it's closer though the births still win out, about 3 births occurring for every 2 deaths during those years. Of course this comparison in rates is not all evenly distributed among the WWII nations, far from it.
Anyway what caught my eye was that Russia's annual _military_ deaths in this war could be running at half or more as much as that nation's annual births. Wowzers.
There are some indications that non-russians (I.e. African) are a larger proportion of the Russian army at the moment. This might be anecdotal, since I have no statistics for it.
Wouldn't be close to 30.000 total of course.
The latest "indicative" images of dark matter distributions, inferred from James Webb Telescope images, such as this one:
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2026/01/26/15/105835951-15498643-NASA_has_revealed_one_of_the_most_detailed_maps_of_dark_matter_y-a-3_1769440258030.jpg
restores my former suspicion that dark matter is a sort of diffuse or extended backward-in-time projection of mass by black holes, to balance the concentrated forward-in-time mass in their interior. That might explain why it doesn't interact with any familiar particles in a shared present. (It's hard to express this idea without sounding like a complete kook!)
I had thought the idea was untenable on seeing estimated dark matter distributions that looked more like webs, but the above image seems to show that on an appropriate scale dark matter is centered around point-like objects rather than being spread out along curves and across surfaces.
Dark matter does interact gravitationally with normal matter in a shared present (as far as we can tell).
Humour me and I won't call you a kook! I'm curious what you mean by forward/backward in time for the black holes.
A common point made in serious courses in general relativity is that the singularity at the centre of a black hole isn't really at the "centre", rather, because of signature reversal at some radius (which depends on how you parametrize it), the singularity inside the black hole is actually a point in time, not space. So the centre of the black hole is the "future", not the centre. Is this what you're alluding to?
But I can't see what past/future imbalance dark matter is supposed to be correcting for.
Well there is this article from a couple of weeks ago, which may or may not be relevant:
https://phys.org/news/2026-01-wormholes-weve-reveal-deeper-universe.html
Despite the appearance of the word in the link, the article is not about that staple of kook science, wormholes, but sketches an interesting idea of backward and forward in time interactions.
I admit that my original post was vague, but it's hard to know how to firm up the idea. But FWIW, I'll give it some further thought.
Question about guns: One reason I have never been enthused about guns is that I can easily imagine situations where anxiety or simple inexperience with violent confrontations would lead to my gun being used against me. What if I was slow to get the thing out and aimed, or I hesitated a bit before firing, and the assailant jumped me and yanked the gun from my hand? So I’ve been thinking that it was a bad move for Alex Pretti to bring his gun with him to a situation where he would be around ICE. How could it possibly protect him or anyone else in that setting? Drawing or using it would virtually guarantee that ICE agents would shoot him. (And if anyone here is so poisoned by polarization they think I’m attacking Pretti or saying he “deserved to die” — no no of course not, I don’t think anything like that.)
I think it's a pretty rare individual who, if they saw you brandishing a weapon, decided the thing to do is try to grab it and take it off of you. That's a great way to get shot; they have to pull off like four moves before you pull off one. Those aren't great odds. But that said, there's a reason that gun ranges exist and people go there and practice drawing, aiming, and shooting, and it's so there is at least some level of preparation they've done for the exact kind of situation you're describing.
> "One reason I have never been enthused about guns is that I can easily imagine situations where anxiety or simple inexperience with violent confrontations would lead to my gun being used against me"
Yes, that's why police officers and responsible civilian gunowners receive training to determine under what circumstances they'll have enough time to draw and aim at an aggressor during an encounter and how to retain their firearm if it comes to that (first step: carry a retension holster which makes it difficult to draw except from a very specific angle). I've personally received training in both assessing draw time and retension. Neither concept is rocket science.
And while in-person training should be mandatory for any gun handler, informal ongoing "classroom" training is available on Active Self Protection, a YouTube channel operated by a professional firearms instructor and forensic expert witness in shootings. You don't need to rely on your own imagination; ASP has over 4,000 videos analyzing *actual, real-life* violent encounters captured on security cameras, cell phones, and badge cameras. Anyone - including you, Eremolalos! - can receive a pretty good education in self-defense theory merely by watching actual encounters be analyzed by an expert.
For example, here's a recent video analyzing a robbery where one of the victims was carrying a gun but did not attempt to draw it and what he could have done differently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTZVlx1Fg1Y
And here's a video from three days ago that's relevant to some of the discussion downthread, about a knife-wielding attacker going for a law-enforcement officer's firearm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKY1zZjeY4&rco=1
The ASP channel did *by far* the best breakdown of the Rene Good shooting (https://youtu.be/6k_1y2kSHfw?si=2VM_0SzUwWPtT9Te), and I have no doubt there will be a similarly dispassionate, non-partisan, rational analysis of the Alex Pretti shooting once there's sufficient video to analyze. I'm eager to see it, because while John Correia firmly believes that people should carry firearms 100% of the time for personal self protection, I doubt he will think that it was prudent for Alex Pretti to physically close with law enforcement officers during a confrontation while armed.
And that's where I am. I believe Rene Good bears most of the responsibility for her death because she *deliberately* placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time to be wrongly shot by ICE, and Alex Pretti was similar. I believe physical protesting is a self-indulgent and wildly inefficient use of one's time - it's far better to spend those hours boringly working in order to donate money to the most powerful lobby for your cause - but in the unlikely event I were motivated to physically protest near law enforcement, I would NEVER, EVER do it while armed.
Because as I replied to you in that thread on Rene Good, "I understand that I'm not so important to the universe that *MY!* passion will plot-shield *ME!* from the reality of other people potentially reacting very negatively to *SUPER!SPECIAL!ME!* should I pick a fight with them."
I think you have done all the right, smart things to protect yourself from the downside of guns and optimize the upside, and I admire that. I can’t tell, though, whether you are trying to convince me to go ahead and get a gun, given the model you’ve shown me of how to do the thing well. I am sure that would not be good use of my resources. Here’s why:
-Given my age and lifestyle, it is much likelier that I will be killed by illness than by violence. I am quite proactive about health stuff, and do a lot of things that are time-consuming and a pain in the ass to protect mine. I think I’m putting my effort in the right place.
-I think I am pretty good at reading and navigating dangerous situations. As a therapist I have logged quite a few hours talking with people who are crazy and/or suicidal and/or crave to do violence. None have done any of those awful things on my watch. I have hospitalized several people in that state from within the session, talking on the phone with the police and hospital while in the patient’s presence. I have reported 3 patients of mine to protective services, after warning them in advance that I was soon going to feel I had to, then talked with them afterwards about having done it.
I have been in 3 situations where the potential for real violence was high. Once a friend and I were once held up by 3 teens pointing knives at us. I handed them my purse and spoke to them in a calm, blank sort of voice, telling them where my cash was and not saying anything else. The friend I was with did the same. They took the money and left. Once, when I had stayed over at a psychiatric halfway house where my boyfriend worked, I woke up to find one of our patients in the kitchen with a gun. He had escaped somehow from the VA where he was hospitalized, and was talking about going back and killing people there. I expressed a lot of sympathetic interest, “wow, I see why you hate that guy, tell me more” kind of thing, meanwhile cooking him a hearty breakfast. At some point I made some excuse to leave the kitchen, and called the halfway house director and asked her to call the police. It all ended up working out OK — patient was re-hospitalized with no use of force. And once, when I was covering for someone on vacation, a patient of theirs I knew nothing about called and asked for an emergency appointment. I saw him at the end of the day on a Friday and everyone else in my office suite had left. He turned out to be a young guy. Sat down in my office, gave me a long weird unsmiling stare, and said “if you had to guess, would you say I am circumcised or not?” Became clear in the next few minutes of the conversation that he had delusions about people’s opinions of his circumcision, and wanted to use the session to show me his penis and have me render judgment on whether it looked normal. And he was hand-wringingly frantic about the issue. The idea of rape was not in the air at all, but I still did not want him to take out his penis because of a feeling that the situation would get even weirder and harder to navigate if I did. Somehow I managed to avoid his doing that and yet do enough to calm him down that he left the session no longer frantic, but merely dissatisfied with me.
I don’t know what kicks in during situations like the ones I described. I would not call it bravery, because I do not feel scared. I become emotionally numb and hyper-focused on the task of paying attention to the person’s state and saying the optimal thing. It’s something about my wiring. But I do not think I have good wiring for situations where I have the power to maim or kill. I think I would feel guilty and uncertain, all tangled up in empathy and doubt, and would not play things well.
I will circle back, but just wanted to say that *no one* should have a gun if they aren't comfortable with both the obligations and risks that go with it.
When my brother and I were kids, he was relentlessly defiant bordering on feral, and due to the horrible timing of our birth order we waged a constant war for dominance. My dad assessed the very real risk of him raccooning the entire house and eventually breaking into even the most robust gun box and realized that *my kid brother* potentially having access to a gun was a far greater risk to the family than some junkie breaking into our home. He stored his firearms with a friend offsite, until my brother was eventually fixed by boarding school.
My dad was absolutely right.
If you (generic second person, not you, specifically) don't have the temperament for training on and using a tool of lethal self defense and/or you live with people who can't be trusted around unsecured firearms, guns are definitely Not For You.
And that's okay! Absolutely nobody should have a gun if they don't have a reason to believe the risk will be acceptably small.
FWIW, I'll generally say "+1" to this; it's not just two shitkicking gals. With an extra caveat that Christina's dad was in a maximally optimal position to make this judgement about his son, by way of knowing him personally, and also basically authorized to do so. I would not trust a government official to make anywhere near as good judgements on average, especially since I know how such officials tend to be selected.
In light of her account above, I think I trust "an Eremolalos" to make acceptably good judgements on average, too, but since I can't trust the government to consistently pick Eremolaloi, that option is sadly also out.
Man, it'd be nice if we could all rationally agree on a common sense position on firearms, something along the lines of, "you have an absolute right *TO MINIMALLY TRAIN* and *THEN* carry a firearm."
Like, I don't want my right to self-defense stripped from me, but also, I don't want anyone else using their right to handle a firearm without having the basic safety skill of keeping their fucking finger off the trigger, you know?
Well, Christina, we are both shitkickers, each in her own way.
Definitely.
I have to say, the halfway house story was the ideal (and obviously correct) outcome that I have no idea how I would have handled, especially if armed at the time. I would have been pretty freaked out about "what if this guy suddenly snaps and I don't have enough time to react?" Obviously, staying calm and manipulating the outcome you wanted was the right move, but just...wow.
> I believe Rene Good bears most of the responsibility for her death because she deliberately placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time to be wrongly shot by ICE, and Alex Pretti was similar.
I think you should hold ICE to a higher moral standard than a wild dog.
Also that guy was pinned to the ground while they shot him 10 times. It seems insane to me how you can blame anyone else for this except the shooters.
Also I don't see how your argument is different than blaming rape victims for dressing too sexy, instead of blaming the rapist. So let me ask you direct: If a woman would dress sexy in public, would fall more blame on her, or on the rapist under your logic?
Echoing the thought below that I don't know why you are expecting more out of the ICE than a wild dog. If someone got attacked by a bear in an area that is known to have bears, then you would blame the person for walking into bear country, yes? How is this situation any different?
In your analogy, it's the bears that invaded your home.
Some places have been having issues recently with bears walking into residential areas and attacking people. Any arguments about the level of agency you imagine bears to have or who is at fault are frankly irrelevant, and you should really stay indoors if there are warnings of bears out and about. Coordinated solutions to the problem can come later.
...Wow, even I didn't expect this analogy to work so well.
> I think you should hold ICE to a higher moral standard than a wild dog.
I don't.
Your position is unproductive (and boring).
Reality doesn't care about people's beliefs about how it *SHOULD* be. It just *IS.* There *ARE* bad police officers. There *ARE* police officers with malicious intentions and there *ARE* police officers with good intentions who make stupid, deadly mistakes, and there is *absolutely* *nothing* that your personal feelings can or ever will do to change those things.
I think it was pretty clear once there was sufficient video that Rene Good never even saw Ross in front of her car; like most people in minor car accidents, she was almost certainly focused in a different direction than she was driving. She didn't "deserve" to die for that, but she was there *to* die, because she made an inherently dangerous choice to obstruct law enforcement officers and then attempt to flee from them. That's always inherently dangerous, because some officers are good, some are bad, some are lucky, and some are unlucky, and there is absolutely no way of knowing and trusting what outcome you're going to get.
Likewise Alex Pretti should not have been shot while his weapon was apparently in someone else's hand; LEOs are not supposed to shout "gun, gun, gun" *after* a weapon has been secured. But that day he met an ICE agent who shouted "gun, gun, gun" at the wrong time, and Alex Pretti was unlucky enough that he was wrongfully shot because of it.
If you don't want to potentially have outcomes similar to Good's and Pretti's, don't take the inherent risk of confronting law enforcement officers. It's not that hard.
And, as a single woman who's lived and dated in some scary neighborhoods in America's largest cities, let me tell you: Your attempted "gotcha" about sexy clothing is embarrassingly naive. Clothing doesn't invite or protect against predation; only behavior can do that. There are strategies for reducing the chance of being targeted for rape, and if one doesn't want to be raped, one uses those strategies.
Since reality doesn't care about aspirational feelings about whether or not people should be raped, but it does care about when those strategies actually prevent targeting or thwart rape, we shouldn't be discussing aspirational feelings, we should be discussing actionable strategies.
Just noting that one of the users in this thread has blocked me, which not only hid their comments from me, but *my own published comments in response* to them, as well as preventing me from being able to reply to their hanging questions directed at me. The conversation is visible to everyone but me (while I am logged in on Substack).
That is dishonorable. Shame on anyone who uses the block feature to invisibly silence their opponents during an active conversation.
When I talk about "more blame", I am aware that both parties could carry some fraction of the blame. When I talk about "moral standard", I am intentionally talking about how things SHOULD be, and not about personal safety. I want the offenders to be judged, even if the victim was behaving less responsible than they should have. I don't understand how anyone can look at any of these cases and think "the offender carries LESS blame here than the victim".
I can think of cases where the victim is behaving so irresponsible, that MORE blame would fall to them than to the offender, but I don't think any of these cases is as such.
I consider Good's behavior egregious enough that about equal or perhaps slightly more of the blame for her death falls on her. Attempting to run from the police in a car is inexcusably reckless, period. She should have obeyed the commands to step out of the car and accepted being handcuffed and detained / arrested / etc as the natural consequence of disruptive protesting. Run a GoFundMe for the legal battle, etc.
There's a reason Chris Rock's classic "instructional video" How to Not Get Your Ass Kicked By the Police begins with, "Obey the law." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8)
Pretti is an entirely different situation; the handling of the arrest and taking his firearm off him was completely wrong.
You're completely missing the point. This is absolutely not about personal safety advice and "how to avoid being killed by ICE agents"; protesting against ICE is dangerous, and it was incredibly courageous of Good and Pretti to do it anyways.
The only political question is whether what ICE did was justifiable; it was not. Government agents are only allowed to use deadly force in self-defense when they reasonably believe that there is an imminent risk to their life or safety, and this standard was clearly not met. People are outraged because these incidents show that ICE is brutalizing American cities.
It does not matter whether Good and Pretti were taking a risk. They could have been wearing bullseyes and chanting "SHOOT ME" and it would not make a difference. The ICE agents would still have committed murder. Properly trained law enforcement agents that were not angry racists recruited from the dregs of society would not have murdered American citizens.
Great. Yes.
*AND?*
I think you're missing *my* point, which is that comments like your's, while correct, are useless at best and inadvertently harmful at worst for perpetuating a culture of subconscious entitlement to personal safety so great that people will take absurd and avoidable risks with their lives.
This isn’t a movie. "I'm in the moral right > thus I'm the hero > cops can't shoot heroes! > thus I can do heroic things and I won't get shot!" doesn't actually apply in real life.
I care about actionable strategies for avoiding actual violence on a personal, individual level, and I believe that is possible with education. I believe that signal boosting the concept that no one is a hero and that outrage is not a shield can do *infinitely* more good than expressing my own outrage.
...
...and I also just realized the irony that I am doing so here, in a community of people who are universally way too smart as individuals to go out and antagonize police officers *themselves*. Everyone here is already doing that math, even if it isn't conscious.
Lol, self pwn.
You can't claim that you're just proposing "actionable strategies for avoiding actual violence on a personal, individual level". If you are commenting on an event involving a law enforcement agency killing a protester, you are commenting on political issues. By blaming the protesters, you are legitimizing ICE's actions. You can't evade responsibility by claiming that you're discussing a different issue.
I never claimed that protesting was necessarily the best strategy to oppose ICE. I said that it is wrong for ICE agents to murder American citizens and that it demonstrates the illegitimacy of their operations.
The purpose of the discourse around the killings is not to maximize the personal safety of protesters, who have bravely chosen to put themselves in danger to oppose tyranny. It is to show the illegitimacy and incompetence of the violent fascists that are occupying American cities.
You're saying that it's wrong to criticize government agents for murdering Americans because it might lead to more people protesting and being murdered by government agents. I cannot comprehend the distorted thinking process that led to this opinion. After reading some of your previous comments in this thread, I noticed that you never mentioned why protesting in Minneapolis is so dangerous. Who killed Good and Pretti? Instead of admitting that ICE agents are murdering Americans, you're choosing to pin the blame on people who put their lives at risk from their government to fight fascism.
It's only a hop skip and a jump from this position to the position that Philando Castile simply shouldn't have had his gun in the car. There are bad police officers and police officers with good intentions who make stupid, deadly mistakes, and for the average citizen 99.9% of your encounters with police officers of all stripes will occur when you get pulled over while driving.
So it doesn't matter what your beliefs are about how it *SHOULD* be. Reality doesn't care about your aspirational feelings, and if you don't want to potentially have an outcomes similar to Mr. Castille, don't bring your gun in a car.
That may feel like an unfair expansion of your argument, but those unfair expansions are also an immutable feature of reality that doesn't care about your aspirational feelings - see e.g. Mips below, who's taking the principle you're applying here and extending it to the inherent danger of simply going outside in Minneapolis: "the situation should have been clear to everyone that walking outside in such chaos is a risk to your life."
Philando Castile isn't an unfair expansion at all; I actually intended to invoke him in my inevitable reply, as his tragic case is in my mind whenever I notice a police car while I'm driving. If I get pulled over while armed the officer is likely to have my permit flagged along with my registration and draw their own conclusions, which is why I will keep my hands still and visible at all times, and, if directed to move or to retrieve anything, I will ask permission and announce my intention ("my drivers license is in my purse. I'm going reach for it with my right hand if that's okay. My registration is in the glove box with a bunch of napkins, may I open it?" Etc). Then move slowly and deliberately and follow directions. Refer to the weapon as a "firearm" or by model, never as a "gun." Etc.
And if I get shot anyway because the officer panics at the thought of me having a gun touching me, or an acorn falls somewhere (https://youtu.be/iVNnxr2SGFg?si=ok93IzC-ItDwWkfk)?
Well, that is *indeed* a risk I am consciously and deliberately taking with my safety. I believe it is a very, very small risk, and certainly a MUCH MUCH MUCH SO MANY MUCHES smaller risk than confronting and then attempting to flee law enforcement in a car or physically block / bump them in the street *while armed.* I've judged the risk small enough that it's not negligently reckless and very much worth it, while the risks Good and Pretti took were not.
And you can quibble with my personal risk tolerance and invent increasingly absurd hypotheticals that my criticism of other people's recklessness obligates me to avoid all risk, but like...stop that. That isn't a compelling gotcha because, if I get very unambiguously wrongfully shot during a traffic stop, I won't Pikachu face about it.
I know what might happen, and my point is, Good and Pretti and *everyfuckingone else should, too.*
Here's the thing - if you get very unambiguously wrongfully shot during a traffic stop, whether or not I pikachu face about it, I'll still advocate for consequences for the officer who screwed up, and I think we as a society are being pretty foolhardy if we get so caught up in a discussion of the risks that you were or weren't intentionally taking on that we forget to do so.
"Proposition 1: X activity by gunowners is lawful but extremely risky" and "Proposition 2: police should not react to activity X by killing gunowners who do it" are obviously both statements that can be true at the same time.
When they occur concurrently, we as a society should ideally have both conversations. Reminding people who want accountability for law enforcement over Prop 2 that Prop 1 also exists is fine, but taking a stance that any discussion of Prop 2 accountability is a waste of time and potentially harmful because Prop 1 is just an immutable feature of the world so Prop 2 discussions are pointless.... well, that approach is how you put your society on a beeline for more violations of Prop 2.
It's also a claim that nothing can ever get better, that "what is" must always be, and "what ought" can never change an outcome in the world. Which is nonsense. Last I saw, gentlemen do not settle interpersonal conflicts with judicial duels. Likewise, a large number of people feel that the government ought not to shoot people simply for protesting, and that feeling matters.
In general, there are things one might do that increase or decrease the chances of one being harmed in a given situation--but this does not imply that if one does something that increases those chances, you bear moral responsibility for what happens to you. A young woman should not walk certain city streets at night alone--but if she does, she isn't morally responsible if she is attacked. She may have been foolish, but she is not culpable. The person who attacked her is.
Similarly, Pretti may have been foolish to attend a protest while armed, but he was within his rights to do so, and the officer who shot him is still a murderer.
Great.
Now what?
Yeah, you can be the victim of some crime (which is the fault of the criminal) and also have behaved in some imprudent ways that made your victimization more likely. And indeed, everyone makes tradeoff between safety and other goals all the time, so it will regularly be true that if I am the victim of a crime, someone will say that I behaved imprudently and reaped the consequences. I didn't *have* to carry $200 in my wallet and go out after dark, after all.
The bundy standoff comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
As an individual, possession of a gun during an encounter with law enforcement in particular seems to have no upside and lots of downside. And in interactions with others it still introduces a lot more downside even if there is also some upside.
But being an armed *community* introduces some new options which includes at least in the short term of winning stand offs with law enforcement and possibly makes your community better defended against criminals (mlk et al were armed). These scenarios are less exposed to individual anxiety and are a strong deterrent.
To get a tad political, the armed community seems to sit better with 2nd amendment text considering the "well regulated militia" part.
It seems that a major factor in keeping anyone from getting hurt is that it was an actual standoff, not a scuffle where a gun goes off or is suddenly produced in the presence of law enforcement.
And not all standoffs go so well for the community! Waco for example. But being a community is what makes the standoff more likely. Your groups presence and organization is better signalled in advance.
1. People being killed with their own defensive firearms is an *exceedingly* rare thing, with one exception - cops. Police officers are required to regularly engage in heated, often violent confrontations with criminals, while carrying a clearly-visible gun in their holster. They usually aren't allowed to just shoot the criminal up front, and so sometimes the first person to go for the cop's gun is the criminal. For anyone else, the criminal shouldn't know where your gun is or even if you have one until you've already decided that this is a gunfight. If you draw a gun, it's because if the other guy doesn't immediately stand down you're going to immediately shoot them.
2. If you're not willing to commit to that, even in the face of a threat to your life or that of someone under your protection, then no, you probably shouldn't be carrying a gun.
3. You seem to be assuming Pretti was carrying a gun for the specific purpose of enabling him to better confront ICE agents. Pretti had a concealed carry permit, and unless the Minnesota bureaucracy is unusually fast, he would almost certainly have had to apply for that permit well before the high-profile ICE deployment to Minneapolis. So he was presumably already in the habit of carrying a gun on general principles and/or for protection against ordinary common criminals. There is no requirement that such a person disarm themselves before joining a political protest, there may be logistical difficulties in doing so on short notice (e.g. where do you safely leave the gun), and there *should* be no particular danger in a gun that stays holstered through the protest.
" People being killed with their own defensive firearms is an *exceedingly* rare thing"
Is that still true when you factor in domestic violence?
Probably.
It's (kind of) implied the "defensive weapon" is being carried. People don't appear to carry weapons inside their own house.
It's probably fairly common for people to get shot with weapons in the home in domestic violence situations.
Point being that it's another reason not to be enthusiastic about guns.
People walk differently when they're carrying a gun. Criminals can recognize this. You can learn to walk like you're carrying a gun, even if you aren't. This is about as effective at deterring criminals as actually possessing the gun.
Yes, in theory, one should be able to bring a gun to a protest. Also in theory, protests are peaceful things that are well-regulated and do not require use of raw sewage to quell them. Maximally using your constitutional rights can be dangerous (try bringing a gun into a biker bar, with drunk biker gangs? That's not going to end well for you)
> "People walk differently when they're carrying a gun. Criminals can recognize this. You can learn to walk like you're carrying a gun, even if you aren't. This is about as effective at deterring criminals as actually possessing the gun."
[Citation needed.]
Also, please go watch a couple thousand real-life gun encounters on the Active Self Protection channel on YouTube. Seems like there's been an *awful* lot of real life examples of criminals being extremely surprised when other people also have guns.
FWIW, this is the best one, in defense of schoolchildren: (https://youtu.be/S4ebuv-QSeI?si=HZJsUBemelNLJjJx)
Putin walks like he has a gun at all times. Look at his walk, if you want to know how it's done. (He also checks all exits whenever he goes into a room). There's a look, and if you pull it off, criminals tend to "find someone else to hassle."
Most spies are taught to look like they're not carrying a gun when they ARE carrying a gun.
Many criminals are actually drug-addicts (i'm sure you know this), and can be disassociated from reality to an alarmingly large degree (meth users get paranoid, for example).
This one anecdote doesn't make your case.
1. Seems a bit odd to me that it’s rare for people to be shot by their own defensive weapon. I get your point about the gun owner's not even bringing out their gun until they are sure this is a gunfight. But it seems like it would be a common error for somebody to pull out their gun earlier out of a desire to be ready if this turned out to be a shoot-or-get-savaged situation. Or they might do it to intimidate their opponent. And GPT could not find support for your contention that it is an exceedingly rare thing for someone who’s not police to be shot with their own defensive weapon. “There is no precise national statistic on how often a civilian defender is shot by their own weapon, because crime reporting systems and surveys do not collect that specific detail.” And it found some indirect evidence that guns do not make owners safer. Pointed to a study that found that individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault were four to five times more likely to be shot than those without one. That study was about possessing a gun at the time of an assault, though, not specifically during lawful defensive use. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2759797/?utm_source=chatgpt.com). How you found an information source that gives stats about people being killed by their defensive weapons?
3. “You seem to be assuming Pretti was carrying a gun for the specific purpose of enabling him to better confront ice agents.” No, not at all. When I said that if he’d brought it out in an encounter with ICE agents he’d be in great danger of being shot, I was not implying that was his plan. My point was that the only likely enemy he’d be encountering that day was ICE, and in an encounter with ICE the gun was not protection but in fact its opposite -- so what was the point in bringing a gun?. Listen to how things played out (in the most recent account I read of the incident): Agents tackled Pretti and had him on the ground, and one of them found his gun — whether in a pocket, a holster or his hand the account did not say. The agent took it and moved away from him, saying aloud “gun! gun!” and that was when ICE agents opened fire on Pretti. It appears they took the agent’s calling out “gun” to mean that their man they were restraining had a weapon in hand, rather than that the other agent had removed a weapon the man had.Seems having a gun on him was the thing that sealed Pretti's fate.
I had 2 points in mind when I posted that comment about Pretti’s gun: One, the way things played out struck me as an example of the hidden dangers of having a gun. Two, I thought Pretti's bringing the gun was an error of judgment, kind of surprising in a man with a job, intensive care nurse, that demands. you be alert and have good judgment in life-or-death situations. I’d expect it would occur to someone like that on their way to hang out near ICE and video them that if ICE believes you have a gun — because you pull it out, or because they feel it on your pocket while tackling you — they will be more likely to go lethal. I wonder if the awfulness of the Minneapolis situation had clouded Prettis judgment.
To me, the judgment of people in our present exchange seems clouded. People think I’m making all kinds of charges that I’m not: Civilians don’t have a right to carry guns, Pretti did not have a right to carry his gun that day, Pretti brought his gun so he could use it in a confrontation with ICE agents. . . .
It would never occur to me that something in my pocket, that my hands are well away from, would trigger someone to shoot me. That is absolutely an unreasonable response, and as such is just as likely to be generated by having, say, a wallet in my pocket, or a bag of candy, or anything else that would bulge slightly beneath my clothes.
Ok, point by point:
1. Criminals taking their victims' guns and shooting them with those guns, is very much a "dog that didn't bark situation". It's very easy to find cases of people using firearms successfully in self-defense; it's much much harder to find examples of people being shot with their own guns. I've looked. And I assume that the people who make a profession out of arguing against private firearms ownership have looked even harder. But there's only very scarce anecdotal evidence.
1'. The history of "scientific studies" of defensive use of firearms is mostly a history of case studies in ignoring the big obvious 800-lb gorilla of a cofounder in the room: the largest category of (non-suicide) shootings in the US, is criminals shooting other criminals, or close associates of criminals. Violent criminals and close associates of violent criminals are both very much more likely to carry guns than random civilians, and very much more likely to be shot than random civilians. There is some good work being done in the area, but ChatGPT is probably not going to highlight it for you.
3. "the only likely enemy he’d be encountering that day was ICE". You know nothing about what sort of enemies Alex Pretti is likely to face on an average day. The expert in that field is Alex Pretti. Who, as I pointed out, went out of his way to buy a gun and get a concealed-carry permit before ICE started its Minneapolis shenanigans. Maybe his medical work brought him in frequent contact with violent criminals. Maybe his wife has a violent stalker ex who won't go away. Maybe he lives in a bad neighborhood. We don't know. But we do know that *he* felt that there were plenty of ordinary ICE-free days in which he felt that the danger of encountering a violent non-ICE enemy justified carrying a gun.
Deciding to lawfully protest against the behavior of ICE, or to offer medical assistance to the victims of ICE, absolutely does not require that someone forgo their wholly legal right to defend themselves against any other enemies they might encounter on that day. And it *should* not expose him to any unusual risk in his dealings with competent, professional law enforcement officers, so long as he leaves the gun in its holster.
Meta: " People think I’m making all kinds of charges that I’m not: Civilians don’t have a right to carry guns, Pretti did not have a right to carry his gun that day, Pretti brought his gun so he could use it in a confrontation with ICE agents. . . ."
If that's not what you're trying to say, then it's hard for me to figure out what you are trying to say. Unless it's "OK, people technically have the *right* to do those things but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done it". In which case, Oh Hell No, and you are speaking from profound ignorance.
1. <Violent criminals and close associates of violent criminals are both very much more likely to carry guns than random civilians, and very much more likely to be shot than random civilians
Yes, I realize that, and that was my first thought about the study GPT unearthed about where they found that people who had been shot were 4-5 times more likely to be gun owners themselves. Yeah, I thought, that’s probably mostly criminals killing criminals. Still, it was the only even indirect evidence GPT dug up, so I mentioned it.
<There is some good work being done in the area, but ChatGPT is probably not going to highlight it for you.
Well, John, I notice you’re not linking to it.
<If that's not what you're trying to say, then it's hard for me to figure out what you are trying to say. Unless it's "OK, people technically have the *right* to do those things but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done it".
If we scrape off the heavy layer of obnoxious know-it-all scorn and contempt you slathered onto the imagined me above, I would say that’s a good approximation of my point: Yes Pretti had the right to carry a gun into a city full of ICE agents and protestors, with everyone on edge, but doing that was almost certain to make him less safe, not more.
<You know nothing about what sort of enemies Alex Pretti is likely to face on an average day.
That’s true, but I do have a lot of experience with the lives of middle class white professionals, and my experience is that it is quite rare for one of them to suffer a life threatening attack from a rando, or to have in their lives someone like crazy stalker ex who is likely to attack them them violently. So while it is certainly possible Pretti had someone like that, it is not likely. And in any case, when we think of about Pretti walking around Minneapolis, we also have to think about the *likelihood* of his encountering such a rando or encountering his wife’s stalker as compared to the likelihood of his getting tangled into some kind of confrontation between ICE and the protestors. Which do you think is more likely, John? “Hey, right there next to me in Dunkin Donuts is my wife’s crazy ex. who’d made death threats and tried to break into the house last month, and he’s pulling a weapon out of his pocket” or “Hey, I was just trying to help this woman to her feet and now 4 or 5 ICE guys are tackling me as though I were a big threat.”
And I do not think Pretti was stupid. He had a job that demanded stress tolerance and good judgment in situations that pull for emotions, and I have not heard anything suggesting that he did not perform his work well. Also have not heard anything that makes me think he had bad judgment or crackpot ideas. I think the likeliest explanation of his bringing his gun with him that day was habit . I’m guessing that was what he normally when he went out.
<Deciding to lawfully protest against the behavior of ICE, or to offer medical assistance to the victims of ICE, absolutely does not require that someone forgo their wholly legal right to defend themselves against any other enemies they might encounter on that day. And it *should* not expose him to any unusual risk in his dealings with competent, professional law enforcement officers, so long as he leaves the gun in its holster.
Of course, I absolutely agree. What on earth have I said makes you think I don’t? It is clear that what should be the case in the presence of ICE is not the case. Therefore, unless someone’s only goal is to dramatize for the world that ICE is not honoring citizens’ right to carry a gun, they should avoid carrying one in any setting where ICE is likely to become aware they have one.
< Oh Hell No, and you are speaking from profound ignorance.
You seem to me to be speaking from profound anger and despair.
> Well, John, I notice you’re not linking to it.
This is not a subject that you can understand with five or ten minutes on the internet. if you're genuinely interested, the usual recommendation is https://www.amazon.com/Point-Blank-Guns-Violence-America/dp/1138529982/
Note that Gary Kleck is a professor of criminology who started with basically the same beliefs you have been expressing, but who actually did the work rather than just pontificating about it.
> but I do have a lot of experience with the lives of middle class white professionals, and my experience is that it is quite rare for one of them to suffer a life threatening attack from a rando,
I'm not sure what Pretti's race has to do with anything. But aside from that, do you have a lot of experience (or even any experience) with middle-class professionals *who own guns and have concealed carry permits*? Because that's like 8% of the population nationwide, and probably half that in a city like Minneapolis. So we're dealing with a two-sigma outlier, along an ill-defined axis that I'm guessing you have no experience with.
The principle of charity suggests we should assume that Pretti had a reasonable basis for believing that he faced at least a two-sigma elevated risk level, or obligation to protect others at risk or something else along those lines. Ideally we'd just ask him, but we can't because one of our hired gunmen put a bullet in his brain and some of us are kind of peeved about that. So either we're going to extend the recently deceased the benefit of the doubt, or we're not.
> And I do not think Pretti was stupid ... I think the likeliest explanation of his bringing his gun with him that day was habit . I’m guessing that was what he normally when he went out.
That's my take on it as well. But only a few paragraphs earlier, you were saying that "but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done that" was a "good approximation of [your] point". So I hope you can understand why I thought that you were saying that Pretti was stupid. And I'm now unclear as to what your actual point is. There's an obvious but uncharitable interpretation, but fortunately you're still alive so we can ask you.
> Therefore, unless someone’s only goal is to dramatize for the world that ICE is not honoring citizens’ right to carry a gun, they should avoid carrying one in any setting where ICE is likely to become aware they have one.
What if a person has *two* goals? One of which is to protest ICE's treatment of suspected illegal immigrants, and the other of which is to protect himself against whatever it was that he reasonably felt he needed to protect himself from before ICE was ever an issue in his life? Or, IMHO more likely, what if a person starts the day with the twin goals of just going about his daily life and protecting himself from a reasonably perceived threat, and only later adds a third "protest ICE" goal when he sees ICE behaving wrongly in front of him, or gets a text from a friend saying that ICE is behaving wrongly a few blocks away and his services as a nurse might soon be needed?
I'm not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights, presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it".
> You seem to me to be speaking from profound anger and despair.
I have been dealing with this sort of ignorance for a long, long time, and it wearies me. But I will persevere.
<I'm not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights, presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it” . . . I have been dealing with this sort of ignorance for a long, long time, and it wearies me. But I will persevere.
This tone of weary disgust at the grotesque ignorance, shallowness and self-importance of others is present in most of your posts. It is very unpleasant to be on the receiving end of that point of view, since I respect you and also like you except when I get a dose of this stuff from you. And I do not think it is reasonable to speak to and about me that way. There are plenty of things you know more about than I do, but I am generally willing to recognize when I am ignorant of something, and to revise my ideas. And I am intelligent and skeptical and care more about being accurate than I do about being impressive, and I think one can tell that from my posts. As regards the subject at hand, you know much more than I do about guns and data about shootings. On the other hand, I have probably logged many more hours than you talking with people who truly want to kill or maim themselves and other people and people with deep concerns for their own safety. And I have certainly not written off what I learned as shit crazy people experience. It’s stored in my mind as things people experience. And, by the way, I have mostly talked with those people alone. Of the 3 times I have been in danger of violence, 2 have been with patients during sessions. I do not have a country club practice where I talk with trophy wives about their crows feet. For 20+ years I was the person who took referrals other therapists were too daunted by to accept. I’m not a nervous ninny about violence from others. What throws me is the prospect of doing violence.
Reading through your points, it seems to me that you are ignoring several exits from your grim read of me as being wrong as hell in some ugly way. Here are a coupla examples:
Me: And I do not think Pretti was stupid …likeliest explanation for bringing gun was habit.
You: But only a few paragraphs earlier, you were saying that "but it's stupid and only a moron would have actually done that" was a "good approximation of [your] point". So I hope you can understand why I thought that you were saying that Pretti was stupid.
John, I said right in the sentence you are quoting that it was a good approximation but only after “we scrape off the heavy layer of obnoxious know-it-all scorn and contempt you layered onto the imagined me above.” I then went on to explain my read of why Pretti took his gun with him that day, which is that he failed to take into account the danger taking it posed — most likely because it was his habit to bring his gun with him, and he did not reflect on whether that was a good idea that day. So that was me scraping off the scorn and contempt layer in your framing. My view, with the scorn and contempt for Pretti you’d attributed to me scaped off, was that I attributed his failure to reflect as instead just going on habit. I think it would be clear to any reader that I think of defaulting to habit as a common error that the smart make as often as the stupid, an error that does not indicate in any way that Pretti was dumb . So scraping off the scorn and contempt here is not a matter of still seeing Pretti as a moron but being kind about it. It’s seeing Pretti as having made a cognitive error that is common and not indicative of stupidity. Scraping off the scorn and contempt layer doesn’t consist just of having a kinder attitude, but of interpreting things in the same direction as the scornful one (cognitive error ) but an error that is much smaller and less global (common cognitive error, not overall low cognitive ability).
Come on John, grasping that I was saying that “he acted on habit instead of reflecting” is “he’s a moron” with the scorn and contempt layer scraped off is basic reading comprehension, and you are smart enough to grasp that with 100 IQ points left over. And yet what I wrote leaves you wandering in some wilderness where you think either I’m saying Pretti was a moron, or else trying to convey some idea that you just can’t find in the thicket of my prose. WTF?
How bout another example? :
<I’m not seeing how to interpret your position as anything but that if a person chooses to exercise one of those fundamental rights [protest ICE], presumably for good reason, they must forgo the other [protect self] lest they be deemed stupid and their possible death dismissed with "yeah, they were asking for it".
It should be extremely easy to find another way to interpret it. I have outright said parts of the alternative explanation, and in other places (such as the example above) said things that make clear the rest. My interpretation is that Pretti failed to reflect on what would happen if ICE somehow became aware he was carrying. Probably that happened because he defaulted to habit. A possible extra contributor was that Pretti was not thinking as well as usual, because he was profoundly shocked, distressed and infuriated by recent events in Minneapolis. As luck would have it, Pretti’s oversight led to ICE putting 10 bullet holes in him. What happened is an example of the non-obvious dangers of having guns around.
While you may think there are other lessons to be drawn from what happened (and I agree that there are), I don’t think it’s hard to come up with the above as the point I was making. But you can’t come up with it *even after I said in a recent exchange with you that the main point I had in my mind in my original post was the non-obvious dangers of guns.* I really think the problem here is that you are so sure you are surrounded by heartless, ignorant, self-important fools that you filter out the evidence that the person you are hearing from is not making heartless and foolish points.
And while we’re straightening things out: I am kind of vague how "concealed carry" laws figures into gun ownership, but you are wrong that I have had little exposure to people who routinely carry guns. My military half-brother had a personal gun. I believe my parents brought ours when we took family trips. I have had 2 patients who were gun owners — and these were people I talked with for many many hours, and often about very private and deeply held attitudes. I have known several very committed rock climbers who were avid hunters and also had personal guns, and one of them I knew extremely well. I had multiple talks with these people about guns and what they meant to each of them. I really do grasp the point of view of people who experience owning a gun as an important element of their dignity and autonomy. And I do not scorn that attitude, even though I do not share it. I am not very judgy about people’s world views, and don’t really believe there is a right one. As for life in a concealed carry state — no, I don’t know what that’s like. But is it really very different? Seems to me I understand and respect the crucial thing, which is the I-have-a-right-to-it point of view of people who feel strongly about gun ownership.
And one other thing. I think I should tell you my personal feeling about what happened to Pretti, since you are thinking maybe I think “yeah, he was asking for it.” I am extremely angry and distressed about his murder. I have shed tears over it. I have had fantasies of being on a rooftop and spraying bullets down onto ICE. I cannot stop thinking about all the popping noises in the videos —- 10 fucking bullets, shot into one man lying on his stomach. I wonder about how many he felt before one knocked out brain function. I get unbearably angry when I hear about ICE standing around his body crowing and clapping and counting the bullet holes. I feel terribly sad that Pretti had his life yanked away. I feel more personal connection with him than I did with the other 2 who died. He’s a fellow health care professional. And male nurses are often gay, and I have a special soft spot in my heart for gay people because both my half-brother (not the military one) and my mother were gay.
I'm not sure why you keep saying "fundamental rights", as if they have some foundation in physics or something. You have rights because the government guarantees those rights, and currently the government and those serving them aren't in the mood for guaranteeing those rights for citizens. So I don't see how it's relevant to this situation...
I wonder if he hoped there would be violence, and he might have a pretext to use it. Like, picturing himself gunning down the guy who guns down the woman driving recklessly.
We’ve been watching “Slow Horses”, a show with conventional left politics. The heroes shoot people all the time. This is a fantasy situation for men of any political persuasion, I would think. Otherwise, why does the show work so well as entertainment?
In fact, we’ve talked about how guns achieve an outsized role in the show because they are I suppose very few in the UK, so there’s always a lot of tension around this magical object: who has (our only) gun, ditto the lack of armed police or security (haven’t been there, don’t know if this is real or just story necessity). “We had to protect ourselves with a tea kettle!”
Not trying to start a culture war topic over the cliches if the show. It is wonderfully entertaining regardless.
There's kind-of an obvious confounder for
Pr[get attacked | have gun] > Pr[get attacked | don't have gun].
I mean, why did you have a gun in the first place? Because you were worried about being attacked. The guy living in a safe suburb and never going out after dark has a lot less need for a concealed gun than the guy who closes his bar at 1AM every night and then puts the cash from the register into the bank's night deposit box before going home and going to bed.
People tend to very much overestimate how many assaults and even murders occur with guns. Children bring knives to school and stab each other with them. Somalis attempt murder by fist, 8+ people on one guy going into a revolving door (yes, I've seen the video. Yes it's old).
You're imagining a mugging, I presume? (This is a good bet, as it's salient for the average TV watcher).
Good gun discipline is to give them the money (assuming they aren't obviously looking for more than money). Your money isn't worth their life or yours.
You draw a gun if you're enough out of the way to help -- and you get down first, hit the deck, if there's bullets flying or might be (also, you look less like the criminal if cops show up and don't know you're the hero).
Your statistic probably includes the child that shot his daddy over taking away his switch (dude put it in the gun safe).
I think you might have a sort of movie concept of how easy it is to get a guy out of someone else's hands. You are standing presumably outside of, say, punching range with someone else, with both hands on the gun. They have to A. not back off, B. get their hands to the gun without being shot, C. somehow take the gun from you without accidental firings killing them, ect.
Meanwhile all you have to do is sort of twitch a little and the gun fires and the person who wanted to take it from you is dead.
The question you are asking is closer to "Since I can't imagine ever firing a gun actually, wouldn't it be easy to take my gun from me?" And even then it's still kind of not easy to take an object from a person who controls it.
Gunshots aren't that likely to *immediately* kill the victim. That's a movie thing too.
Since I'm in an irrelevant nit-picking hellscape, I'm going to start responding to stuff like this with a "Goose-gander" shorthand. Yes, touching someone with a bullet doesn't always immediately stop their heart and render them braindead in a blink.
Yes, it's possible to imagine a situation in which someone gets shot, doesn't die, decides it's not a big deal, continues with their previous course of action, continues to not die or be disabled, takes a gun in the control of an un-shot person from them, and shoots them with it. It's possible to imagine anything! What if the person I shot is Peter Pan, and can't die from mortal weapons?
It's possible to imagine anything. But if it's relevant to this discussion, then it's also relevant on *both sides*, i.e. If we are imagining a villain who is impervious to small-arms fire in such a way that this is likely to matter, then it's also true of the gun owner, and he'll still be one mostly-harmless bullet to his body ahead in the ensuing struggle to get the (presumably a dozen) bullets it takes to kill a person.
If I'm being sarcastic here, it's because this is about the fifth time this hour someone has gone "But wait guns are made of metal, isn't METAL HEAVY? doesn't that mean it's easy to disarm a person of their gun and shoot them with it, and a likely thing to happen?" in some version or another.
I'm willing to take that kind of argument seriously if it's an actual serious argument, but not "Well, sir, what if the person got shot, so now you have full control of your gun and the other guy has a bullet in him. Doesn't he have the upper hand NOW?" arguments anymore. Yes, it's possible a magic anteater drops from the sky on a tiny parachute and swip-swaps the gun to the bad guy's hand, no, I'm not going to spend my whole day taking it seriously as a counterargument to "It's not that easy to take a gun from a person who is in control of it and can shoot you with it at any time".
>If we are imagining a villain who is impervious to small-arms fire in such a way that this is likely to matter,<
The problem with this is that "likely to matter" only needs to mean "dies fifteen minutes later from blood loss". There are several videos of gunfights that end with a shot person running or driving away, to die later from wounds inflicted. The Michael Drejka one is usually my go-to, but there are also police shootouts and whatnot. If you shoot them and they're still functioning, they can shoot back, and you'll both die fifteen minutes later, which is not ideal.
You're taking this as "the safety's already off" which doesn't seem like a reasonable thing for a reasonable weapon owner. How much does it take to get the safety off?
Your "doesn't seem" isn't incredibly valuable here, mostly because you don't knowing lot about guns. Glocks, for instance, don't have a safety in the sense you think they do. This is true of an awful lot of modern firearms, and among those that it's not true of, it's still pretty common to practice "condition 0" carry, i.e. all that's required to fire the gun is to pull the trigger.
It's not universally true that every pistol can be carried this way, and among those that can't be there's sometimes a split-second difference in how quickly the gun can be rendered operational (another twitch of the thumb).
When you were figuring out that there was something you had once heard of called a safety and that it must be universal and that if it was and was hard to operate this *might* salvage your preferred positioning on this conversation, it should have occurred to you what all that grasping meant.
Figured I'd get some information from you, by exposing my ignorance and a willingness to learn. What percentage of gun-holders do you think practice "Condition 0"?
>there may be logistical difficulties in doing so on short notice (e.g. where do you safely leave the gun)
Especially true in Minneapolis, because the protests are not "everyone gather at a particular time to express our displeasure," they are "ICE is trying to grab someone, whoever is closest runs over with a camera and a whistle." The confrontations can happen anywhere on short notice.
The pedant in me wants to point out that people are exceedingly likely to be killed by their own firearm if it's done by their own hand.
I know that you know this, but suicide and domestic homicide risks are important as part of a general gun ownership risk assessment.
"Being killed by" implies that the killing is done by someone else. Sorry if that wasn't clear; I could have made the phrasing less ambiguous.
Suicide risks by gun should be matched with "suicide risk by other commonly available Manly Ways To Kill Yourself."
I mark a very big sex-related difference between "kill yourself with a gun" and "drink bleach", and also a very different "odds of death" between those two.
Yeah. The most important firearm safety rule to understand is that if you or someone in your home is likely to be suicidal at some point, you need to either get the guns out of your house or lock them up well enough the suicidal person can't get to them. For most people (and definitely most people here, since we're presumably mostly not cops, armored car guards, professional criminals, or people living in super high-crime areas), that's the biggest risk a gun in the house poses to anyone in your home.
Yeah. Is someone being less communicative than normal? Looks upset, had a Major Incident that might wind up with him being depressed? Lock the guns up, why take the chance? (Obviously be upfront about why, if asked).
I'd take this as "team up to shoot, if there's even a slight chance of suicide" -- as a bonus, spending time with the depressed person may help them feel less lonely.
I think it's common (though not universal) that you know if you, your wife, or one of your kids has serious problems with depression, has seriously considered suicide, has done other self-harm behaviors, or has previously attempted suicide. In that case, you want to remove the low-effort suicide methods from the house as much as possible. Nothing can nerf the world so much that someone can't commit suicide, but leaving a loaded handgun in a nightstand with your chronically depressed wife is a pretty obviously terrible idea.
I remember reading something I can no longer find about the correct attitude to take when carrying a gun. It went something like this:
"From now on, you will lose every argument. You will apologise sincerely to every bully who gets in your face for ruining his day. You will be the meekest so-and-so around. Because you are carrying a gun, and any fight where someone is carrying a gun is likely to end with one of you getting shot."
Or another quote I found while looking for the exact wording of the above: "You can have a gun or you can have an ego but you can't have both"
Anyway yes, it's the same mistake that George Zimmerman made, to walk into trouble while armed instead of walking away from it.
Yep. Pretty much this.
I was flipping through an issue of Boys Life as a teenager and found a page with a poem from a father to his son, entrusting him with a gun. The poem ended with something along the lines of "no amount of sorrow or care will make up for one man dead" - no matter how careful you are to be in the right, no matter how sorry you are afterward, and especially no matter how well you trained and survived, you're going to feel like the worst person in the world because you ended another one.
That, or you've lost about one horcrux worth of humanity.
I doubt I still have that issue somewhere, and a casual search doesn't turn up that poem. Nevertheless, I remember it being worth a full page in the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America.
Not to mention, a self-defender's life will be ruined for years after even the most unambiguous, clearest cut, David-versus-Goliath shooting. Setting aside the emotional trauma, even if the local prosecutor decides the shooter was 100% in the right and says so in a press conference, at bare minimum, a defender will be forced to face a civil suit brought by the attacker's shitty surviving family members.
Only grievous injury and/or death is worse than years of stress and worry in a legal battle for all your worldly possessions. Which is why prudent people only threaten to kill to prevent grievous injury and/or death.
And a rarely-discussed bonus of responsibly carrying a firearm as a lifestyle is that it acts as a fucking excellent social filter. People who cannot be trusted to be around unsecured firearms are people who are inevitably going to lower your quality of life.
The police in my current city have to shoot someone - it can seem like every day - but let's say 2-3x a week. It's so strange to think of living with that stress as the reality of your everyday job.
I know people who have actually shot others in American cities. They didn't have a court case (the other guys were criminals). Nobody was killed (my friend's a very bad shot).
I agree, you give away your money. You only shoot if there's a risk to life or limb, and that's not a guy saying "gimme money!"
Your friend got hella lucky. Most self-defense shootings will result in an attempted civil case brought by the criminal or the criminal's survivors.
Was your friend poor, by chance? Maybe they avoided a civil case by not having any resources to extract?
More than likely, they never figured out who was shooting (and probably blamed some other gang, rather than "Joe Innocent With A Gun"), in that he'd gone for cover first thing.
DC was rough back in the day.
Oh, yeah, we're talking about different things, I think. I'm not discussing gang warfare / mutual combat; I'm talking about self-defense cases involving a law-abiding citizen who calls the police themselves and cooperates with the investigation afterward.
That person is almost always going to be punished for ethically participating in the justice system by getting sued for doing so.
A famous theatrical saying; if you bring a gun on stage in the first act, you had better use it in the second.
The first Pirates of the Caribbean film played with Chekov's Gun (sword edition).
Our Hero grabbed for a sword mounted on the wall behind The Villan, only to discover that it was permanently mounted to a wooden escutcheon, which became his (rather ineffective) weapon for the ensuing fight, naturally played for comic relief.
That is funny. A while back I was in a production of The Country Wife and I played Sparkish; there was a scene where I challenged a fellow to a duel and then my sword got stuck in my scabbard. Seeing as it was only a plastic sword to begin with, I managed to break the handle off of it. That
got a laugh.
Off topic, but: holy hell.
*I* also was in a production of The Country Wife. I *also* played Sparkish.
(No sword in mine; ours spoofed 1960s television and I was doing some sort of Vaudeville karate hands in the scene I think you're referring to.)
What a thing to have in common. The model for our production was Marx Bros movies.
It is a wicked and censorious world….
Yeah, this is the "proper" attitude for having a gun. I'd trust this person to hit the deck if they heard a gunshot, and only afterwards draw and look for the shooter.
It seems to me that people get mad all the time for dumb reasons, and when that angry person has a gun, bad things can happen a lot more easily. This isn't an argument for gun control, it's skepticism that carrying a gun changes people's behavior that significantly.
Melvin described the “correct” attitude, possibly the prevailing one among gun owners/carriers, but not the prevailing one among people who wind up in the news for having escalated a conflict until their gun ended up being used in it.
It's not a good idea to draw statistical conclusions from (anecdotal) news stories. News selects for novelty/shock-value over understanding.
... getting on the news does tend to select for idiots with no long term thinking.
Guns are extremely poor defensive weapons. You need to be awake and aware, and know where the threat is. By the same token, Guns make decent offensive weapons.
Assume you had a gun, and no cops within 10 miles. You hear a pickup truck pulling up your driveway with no lights on, and it's 2am. Your gun is more useful than nothing at all.
People are taught not to draw a gun if they don't intend to use it, and not to fire a gun if they don't intend for someone to die.
As a deterrent, walking "as if you're carrying a gun" is probably "nearly as effective" at deterring criminals, who'd rather not tangle with a wolf if there are easily fleeced sheep around.
It's possible that Pretti brought his gun to the protest, envisioning a need to use it outside of the protest. (I find this unlikely, but a lot of people are "hysterically" afraid of cities -- credit cards have done a lot to prevent random muggings, is my impression.).
"Guns are extremely poor defensive weapons. You need to be awake and aware, and know where the threat is. By the same token, Guns make decent offensive weapons."
This is a nonsensical statement. There is no weapon that you do not need to be awake and aware to use, unless you count something like a landmine as a weapon.
There are some cases where modern rational analysis doesn't hold up to ancient wisdom, and the offense / defense balance of guns (vs swords, axes, plate or mail, etc) is just such a case. So, I can only respond by quoting scripture: "Parry this you filthy casual"
> unless you count something like a landmine as a weapon.
Why wouldn't you?
It probably wouldn't hold up too well legally.
A landmine would blow up criminals and non-criminals with the same discrimination (that is, none at all).
Availability. I'm not very familiar with American retailers, but I believe Walmart doesn't typically have them in stock. When regular people don't have ready access to landmines, you can't blame someone for not considering them in their home defense strategy.
TNT is pretty easily available. IEDs are improvised, after all (yes, at that point, you're losing some efficacy... but you're also presumably not dealing with tanks).****
****These are not the smart moves. Smart moves are spikes or caltrops, both of which will not damage your road.
If you don't want landmines, how about pit traps? Or raw sewage? There's a lot of available solutions that don't require being awake and aware (including hiring goons to watch your house).
Traps and landmines are better defensive weapons, yes. So are steel doors, for that matter.
Better offensive weapons generally include "grenades" if you don't need to be super-careful about who you're killing.
Steel doors are not a weapon.
And grenades are in fact a far worse offensive weapon in most situations, which is why the default military weapon is a gun and not a grenade.
are you getting this stuff from some video game or what?
It might be historically rare, but grenades have proven extremely important in the grinding trench warfare of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Being able to clear a trench or dugout without exposing yourself to fire is essential, and I've seen reports from english-speaking foreign legion types that an assault often "comes down to who has more grenades".
I still expect that the default utilization of guns is FAR FAR higher than grenades, and in fact the usage of grenades as an anti-trench tool is only relevant because guns are what causes trenches to be a shape the battlefield takes.
If you already have a gun, a grenade is a useful tool for a variety of specific situations, but you will never want to go into battle without a gun.
In urban combat, if you have some armed in a culdesac (say, a room with no other exits), the prescription is "throw a grenade." Risking soldiers' lives for no real gain (such as trying to find a hiding guy with a gun) is not normal.
Hamas used grenades all through their assault on 10/7. That's not because Hamas is evil, it's because there are a wide range of tactical reasons to use grenades. (Perhaps the primary reason not to use grenades, other than friendly fire*, is that they're heavy and bulky).
*or dead children/babies, something that Hamas apparently did not care much about.
Sorry but this is still nonsense. Hamas uses grenades sure, but just like every other armed force they use a variety of weapons, and they use far more guns than grenades.
Grenades are an accessory weapon in urban combat, not a primary weapon. As you can tell by the fact that even according to you they're advised for use against a hiding guy with a gun, which is the default weapon, because guns are more useful than grenades.
Guns and grenades have coexisted for centuries on battlefields and as far as I can remember guns have always been seen as the more important and effective weapon.
First off all, this is why if you carry a gun you should train with it until you're comfortable. I don't actually think there's that much risk of someone taking your gun in a confrontation, but I do think if you're too anxious or inexperienced to wield a gun, the chance that YOU accidentally shoot yourself or someone innocent is unacceptably high. Even lifelong gun owners will sometimes shoot themselves in the leg when unholstering or whatever.
But secondly, anyone who can take a gun from you and use it against you already has power of life and death over you, since they can just overpower you and beat you to death or strangle you. You're not really changing the risk by having a gun that they then take: you're just changing the way they might kill you, if they wanted to.
Thirdly, and mostly not that important, but the actual mechanics of taking things from people are relevant here. It's pretty tough, despite what some action movies portray, to take something that someone is gripping hard in their hand. If someone reaches for your gun, you can just pull the trigger, a lot faster than they can pull the gun out of your hand. In addition, ( and this will depend on the situation) they have to be really close to you to do this, and if you have a gun pulled almost anyone will be reluctant to keep coming toward you.
I do think it's worth thinking about exactly what kinds of scenarios you expect to encounter.
>"If someone reaches for your gun, you can just pull the trigger, a lot faster than they can pull the gun out of your hand."
Slightly OT: squeeze – don't pull – the trigger.
My understanding of "squeeze don't pull" is that you're supposed to surprise yourself as to the exact moment of the explosion, so that you don't pre-emptively flinch and pull the gun off-target. That's going to be a very minor concern when the target is close enough to touch you, and even less so if they're physically trying to pull your gun away.
"Squeeze" describes the actual movement of the finger much better and helps avoid the aim drift to the left (for the right-handed) due to the weapon being slightly moved by the finger. When you tell people to "squeeze" they tend to curl the finger as opposed to moving it somewhat sideways.
Of course the aim drift is of little consequence in a point-blank shooting.
The main counter to "they'll use my gun against me" is that the gun should only be coming into play in the first place in a life-or-death situation, so at that point it's the choice between death by gun or death by other means.
But, yeah, the rule of thumb is an undrawn gun is unreliable when someone is within twenty-one feet of you, which is where the average running speed equals the average gun-drawing speed.
I mean, define "bad move". As far as his naked life is concerned, yes, you stay away from nervous, undertrained people with guns, that should be obvious whether or not you have a gun yourself.
However, some people believe that there are more important things that are worth risking your life for. Lamentable as the gun laws in the USA generally are, if(!) Pretti was within his rights to carry a gun at that time and place, and if(!) he didn't give them cause to shoot him, it shouldn't be held against him, otherwise the whole point of those gun laws are meaningless. Had he not carried a gun, you could also hold it against him that he was present at all, presumably excercising his right to protest. At what point do you stop standing up for your rights because the government agents can't keep a cool head and are liable to shoot you?
You sound like you are suffering from polarization toxicity. I think I made clear that I thought Pretti’s bringing a gun was a bad move in the sense that it put him in danger, not in any other sense: not that he was not within his rights, not that he shouldn’t stand up for his rights. I am not holding ANYTHING against Pretti, in the sense of saying he did something illegal or unethical. I’m saying bringing the gun seems like an error of judgment, a step likely to make him and anyone near him less safe rather than more safe.
I think if you narrow your stance this much, it becomes a meaningless criticism. Showing up to a protest *at all*, armed or unarmed, makes you "less safe" in the morally-neutral sense that you're expressing here. After all, staying at home and not protesting is much safer than going out to yell at a bunch of trigger-happy thugs.
But hopefully, you wouldn't criticize the act of protest in general, or post about how people are making an "error in judgement" by asserting their First Amendment rights, because you can understand there might be other concerns besides safety in play. And I think the same is true if someone is exercising their Second Amendment rights.
(And also, all of this is assuming it was a conscious decision to go out on ICE patrol while armed, which is not necessarily true given how quickly ICE pops up and disappears. It's just as likely he was carrying the gun for ordinary reasons and happened to be in the area when ICE showed up.)
<But hopefully, you wouldn't criticize the act of protest in general, or post about how people are making an "error in judgement" by asserting their First Amendment rights, because you can understand there might be other concerns besides safety in play. And I think the same is true if someone is exercising their Second Amendment rights.
OF COURSE I am not criticizing the act of protest or people's asserting their first or second amendment rights. I can't understand what made you even think I might be taking that view, except for some kind of halo effect: I say something mildly negative about Pretti -- that he made a judgment error in bringing the gun -- and so then you wonder whether I believe all immigrants are flea-bitten, housecat-eating, freeloading robbers and rapists, and that getting rid of them is so righteous and important that the public has no right even to protest how it's done. Nope. I have exactly the same view of ICE you do: "trigger-happy thugs."
<I think if you narrow your stance this much, it becomes a meaningless criticism. Showing up to a protest *at all*, armed or unarmed, makes you "less safe" in the morally-neutral sense that you're expressing here.
I think you're wrong about that. Here's the most recent account I've found of how things played out. Agents tackled Pretti and had him on the ground, and one of them found his gun — whether in a pocket, a holster or his hand the account did not say. The agent took it and moved away from him, saying aloud “gun! gun!” and that was when ICE agents opened fire on Pretti. It appears they took the agent’s calling out “gun” to mean that their man they were restraining had a weapon in hand, rather than that the other agent had removed a weapon the man had. Seems clear that having a gun on him was the thing that sealed Pretti's fate.
I have a daughter whom I adopted from China, and who, of course, has Asian looks. When she was thinking recently about taking a trip abroad I had a talk with her about bringing more documentation than a passport of her American citizenship, just in case ICE had suspicions about her in the airport when she returned. I think a precaution like that in our present situation is sensible. And for the same reason I think the sensible, safe thing to do if you are going to be hanging out near ICE is to leave your gun at home. They clearly become more dangerous in situations where they *might* be in danger, even if the cues are ambiguous, as a gun in the pocket is.
Inject a bit of uncertainty here: that gun's known to misfire a lot, making big booms. Imagine if it went off accidentally, and that's when someone else drew and started shooting. This isn't something you can tell from the videos, but if it's the case, the cops ought to say in court.
(Obviously the initial account of brandishing is ... incorrect. Possibly a deliberate lie.)
I assume you're talking about the P320s claimed tendency to fire without a trigger pull. "Misfire a lot" is very relative to the point of being misleading in this case. The baseline rate of modern pistols firing without the trigger being pulled is essentially zero. There are on the scale of dozens of stories of P320s firing without a trigger pull. Some of these are likely false or mistaken cases, but lets assume they're all true. This is a weapon heavily utilized by police, militaries, and civilians alike with millions of hours of handling and use every year. Dozens of incidents is a serious problem when compared to a base rate of "never" (especially for large entities deciding what weapons systems will be standard issue). But for any isolated incident the likelihood that the gun went off without a trigger pull is still essentially zero.
Yes, obviously if the officers know you are armed they are bound to get even more nervous than they already are. No one argues against that.
@EngineOfCreation responded to your question in a polite and thoughtful way, he didn't accuse you of anything, he simply formulated a nuanced and reasonable hypothesis for why Alex Pretti might have decided to bring his gun despite knowing the risk, which seems to be the crux of your doubt. I don't understand how you could have felt attacked.
I don’t feel attacked. I’m commenting on how attacked Engine of Creation sounds. They are rebutting energetically an idea I did not express or imply: that we should “hold it against” Pretti that he brought his gun. And they are doing it in the kind of rhetoric the expresses strong emotions, deeply important values. etc. All I’m saying is that by bringing his gun the poor guy made an error of judgment that increased his risk that ICE would turn lethal.
Yeah, I'm not getting any of that from EoC's response. He was just speculating that maybe Pretti made a different kind of calculation than what you would have. No need to be so defensive dude.
For what it's worth, I don't think EngineOfCreation sounds attacked at all, nor that they're rebutting anything energetically, nor that their rethoric expresses strong emotions.
,”Some people believe that there are more important things that are worth risking your life for.” That doesn’t sound like strong emotion and deeply held values? He’s saying what’s at stake is worth dying for.
I am starting to feel like we need to start training white people in how not to get shot by police officers and ICE (we already have training for black children).
We need to explain to them that the second amendment needs to be taken seriously, not literally. And the rest of the constitution, too.
Or declare the prefatory clauses nullify the plain meaning of the operative clauses.
> At what point do you stop standing up for your rights because the government agents can't keep a cool head and are liable to shoot you?
The point where you realize you have no path to winning.
A very common behavior among animals is that when one infringes on another's territory, both will try to make themselves look as big and strong as possible. They size each other up, and when one of them realizes that they are at a clear disadvantage, they will back down. This helps avoid unnecessary violence, benefiting the collective fitness of the species as a whole. I would have hoped humans have better systems to accomplish the same goal, but... here we are.
I'm just curious, why do you believe there is no path to winning? Are you saying that Americans shouldn't stand up for their rights? No one should? Do you believe that any opposition to the state is worthless and doomed to fail? I see you have made similar statements elsewhere in this thread.
Again, just curious.
If the situation is clearly in their favor, then yes, obviously they should do so, but... Given that the right has plenty of reason to want leftists dead, have more support by the demographics that have meaningful leverage (white and male), and the law enforcement agencies are very much compromised... This is likely only going to end in decisive victory or mutual destruction. This isn't a meaningless power grab by individuals, this is a group that is actually fighting for something. That makes all the difference.
It occasionally comes up on the left (here largely meaning Democrats since it's US context) that the 2nd amendment/3% types are stupid because there's no way they could beat the US military. California Representative Eric Swalwell is quite infamous for his quote about the government having nukes, in response to someone refusing to give up their rights: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/08/711090987/california-rep-swalwell-is-running-for-president-too-with-a-focus-on-gun-violenc
So it's... interesting... to see the tables turn on this one.
I think Americans should stand up for their rights. I do not think my view of those rights is congruent, or possibly even compatible, with what the current protestors view as their rights. Opposition to the state is not worthless, in theory, but there's a whole lot of ways that individual acts can be worthless, and the difference is often outside the control of the one making the sacrifice.
Minnesota has been a perfect demonstration of the power of peaceful protest. If 2nd amendment types were randomly shooting at ICE in the street, things would be VERY different.
We have different conceptions of the meaning of peaceful, and of protest.
Perhaps I'm being nitpicky but I think it's unwise to conflate civil disobedience with protest. The point is that a lot of this activity is in fact illegal, but local law enforcement has been given stand-down orders.
" Collective fitness of the species "-- no such thing exists
This is not a very common behavior among animals. It is in fact an uncommon behavior among animals. Chickens peck the new bird to death. Most prey animals, because they are not very capable of hurting each other, will in fact inflict as much pain/terror/bleeding as they can. It's only wolves and predators that generally try to not harm others, because any fight is going to prove deadly, and may prove deadly to both parties.
Chickens rarely join a flock voluntarily unless they are obviously welcome for some reason. Which is comparatively rare.
Most 'pecked to death' chickens are victimised because they have no means of retreat because they have been put in that position by a human, eg inside a coop with too few hiding spots. (This is distinct from being low on the pecking order, which is another chicken problem entirely.)
Roosters meeting for the first time do indeed puff themselves up before going in to fight. They raise their hackles in a manner similar to dogs.
Most animals avoid wasting resources on fighting unless absolutely necessary, and so they will display their fitness in all sorts of ways before moving to do battle, which is generally a last resort.
'Deadly' fights are usually pretty rare - the loser turns and runs away before that stage is reached, (often at the display stage), and most victors do not pursue the loser. This is the loser identifying 'no path to winning', as mentioned above.
Mutually assured destruction, with both parties fatally wounded, is even rarer because it makes no sense biologically; it's a huge waste of resources and leaves the field open for a third, non-participating, party.
I see all sorts of scars on deer. Horses'll hurt each other pretty badly too, if you let them. Yes, this isn't "deadly" (because deadly is stupid for all parties)... that's part of the point. Animals that can "relatively harmlessly" wound, generally DO wound.
I'm pulling all of this from very old, seminal research in the animal behavior realm from Konrad Lorenz
You did use the word 'deadly'.
Both of the cases you give - deer and horses - are highly constrained populations. There's nowhere left to run, so they endure.
The wild population of deer covers the majority of the north american continent and the population in general is very dense. In situations like that there will be conflict; losers can only retreat into someone else's territory, and yet more conflict ensues. The population density is way above what it should be and their social adaptations are not coping very well.
The wild population of horses is even more physically confined. The open range is pretty closed off these days, so the same kinds of tensions can occur.
And if you are talking about domestic horses, then whatever conflict they encounter is largely due to the way in which humans are managing them; they have little to no freedom of movement. In the wild horses, especially stallions, absolutely do fight for the possession of mares and territory, but the loser turns and runs. This is hard to do if you are in a pen the size of a house block.
I suggest you get out and do some primary research in the form of spending significant time with animals. See how they really behave, not just how you think they should behave.
Statistically, guns *are* more likely to be used against their owner than anyone else, because the largest share of gun deaths is suicide.
I've always thought that guns were stupid too, but that's of course no excuse for the Trump admin tearing up the 2nd amendment in addition to the rest of the constitution.
No no no I did not say guns are stupid. I do not even think guns are stupid. What I think is that I and people like me (no experience with guns and no interest in getting training and experience) are worse off with guns than without. (Though there probably are a few rare situations where even someone like me would be safer with a gun — stuck alone someplace with grizzly bears?)) Arggh, why is everyone so polarized?
If you mean only to discuss what is wise and prudent for "I and people like me", then it's really damn confusing that you insisted on opening that discussion with the example of Alex Pretti, who is not you and not like you. Yes, I agree, *you* should not own a gun. And it would probably be a good idea for you to find protectors you trust to carry guns on your behalf; maybe you've already got that covered.
So what? What does any of that do with Alex Pretti? Because you really came off as someone making claims about what was appropriate behavior for Alex Pretti, who is not Eremolalos and is not very much like Eremolalos.
Yes, I realized a while ago that my initial post was unclear, but by then it seemed useless to go back and change it. I just tried to clarify as I responded to comments. There was kind of an ellipsis in the first post that I was not aware of. The topic I had in mind was the less obvious ways in which guns can be dangerous. One way they can be dangerous is to belong to someone like me, someone inexperienced with them and temperamentally unsuited to becoming comfortable wielding one. A second way is that the person can be competent with guns, but carry one around people who become much more likely to shoot you if they find out you are carrying. But I did not make clear what my overarching point was, and what the connection was between the 2 gun owners I mentioned.
So I inadvertently posted a sort of gun-related Rorschach inkblot. However, it is striking to me that nobody asked me what I was getting at — what did Pretti’s terrible outcome have to do with my gun incompetence? Instead, people reacted by thinking I had various dumb and mean opinions about Pretti, and believed various other things having to do with weapons that were quite far afield of anything I said in the post. You, for instance, wrote a paragraph about how lawfully protesting ICE or giving medical aid to their victims does not require that the person forego their right to carry a gun for self protection. How the fuck do you get that idea out of my original post — the idea that I think such people should not have the right to carry a gun.? My post was wholly about the risk of guns to their users, and contained not a word about people’s right to carry one.
<Yes, I agree, *you* should not own a gun. And it would probably be a good idea for you to find protectors you can trust to carry guns on your behalf; maybe you’ve got that covered.
Given my age, lifestyle, location and other demographics, I am at far more risk of health catastrophes, financial catastrophes, and being done in by the malaise of our era than I am of violent assault. I have people who would support and advise if I suffered one those, but nobody who would carry a gun on my behalf. I think the idea that I would be markedly better off if I had one is quite silly.. As one piece of evidence for that, I can tell you that in my entire life, which has been going on for quite a while now, there have been 3 incidents where I was at some risk.though not a terribly high one, of violent assault. I describe all 3 of them in a post on this thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-418/comment/205828026
Even if I was calm, trained and highly skillful with a gun I do not think having one would have made me a bit safer in any of them. And in the first incident I describe I am pretty sure it would have made me less safe. The muggers would have found it in my purse and who knows what would have happened then? Also, I navigated those 3 situations quite well. I think I am pretty good in situations where the task is to avoid violent attacks on me. It’s the prospect to doing violence that rattles me and makes me indecisive and clumsy.
And finally, here is a personal story about one of the hidden dangers of guns. I grew up familiar with guns, though not very interested in them. I come from a military family. My half brother, my father and my grandfather all had careers in the military, and my grandfather was so goddam successful at it that he’s in Wikipedia. My mother had a career in the Navy before she married my father at age 40, and had a rating of Expert at pistol shooting. I still have the little badge she received, and wear it in an inconspicuous place occasionally. Like you, my father had an antique rifle mounted in the house, and also had some odd-looking guns that I think he collected on his travels in Asia. And my parents kept a gun for personal protection on a high shelf in the bedroom closet. So one day, when I was about 16, I took down the gun and played around with it. I clicked the safety button off and on, pointed it here and there, pointed it my image in a mirror while making fierce faces. Then it occurred to me to put it to my temple and playact a dramatic, pathetic suicide. I was not in the least suicidal, and was in fact enjoying life quite a lot in that era. I just had that teen fascination with darkness, drama, & tragedy. And went ahead and did the suicide playacting. And then I put the gun back where I had found it. Later I realized that I had lost track during all my clicks of the safety button of whether the safety was on or off. But I couldn’t think of anything to do about that other than to confess to my parents that I had played with the gun, and I wasn’t about to do that.
Yes, yes, guns should be kept locked up. But my parents, though prudent and sensible people, did not keep this one locked up and I can see why. They probably thought of it as protection if there was an intruder in the night, and what good is a gun in a gun safe in circumstances like that? You hear a window break and footsteps in your house. So then you find a flashlight and then your key ring and then the right key on it and tiptoe over to the gun safe and fumble with the lock?
> Arggh, why is everyone so polarized?
If that is what you believe everyone's reaction to be, perhaps you didn't manage to bring across the exact point you were making in your mind? I previously didn't respond to your point of gun training because it seemed tangential, though now it seems like it's an actually important point to you.
Pretti didn't attempt to draw his gun, according to CNN. It was concealed until agents were already all over him on the ground, and it was secured by one of the agents. Only then did they start shooting.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/25/us/video/minneapolis-ice-shooting-alex-pretti-visual-analysis-digvid
Therefore, the question of whether or not he endangered himself by lack of weapon training doesn't even matter. At what point should his skills have mattered?
Do we even know what Pretti's level of expertise with his gun was? I couldn't find anything at a cursory search, seems way too early to tell with confidence. Extrapolating from your own skills or lack thereof seems ill-advised to draw broader conclusions from, but it seems to be what you're doing anyway.
> What if I was slow to get the thing out and aimed, or I hesitated a bit before firing, and the assailant jumped me and yanked the gun from my hand? So I’ve been thinking that it was a bad move for Alex Pretti to bring his gun with him to a situation where he would be around ICE.
It seems just a strange argument to make. Which is to say, I still don't get it. You say it's not about Pretti, you say it's not about gun rights in general, so what is it about?
"What I think is that I and people like me (no experience with guns and no interest in getting training and experience) are worse off with guns than without."
And you are correct.
No interest in getting training? Yes, you'd be worse off. Even holding the thing naturally can rip your hand open.
"Place them in a heavily-trafficked area, and infections won’t spread from person to person because the germs will get zapped before they can reach a new host."
I'm afraid that people will read this and think of the one person talking to another and the viruses getting "zapped" before they can reach the second person.
Even when you kiss the person that sly, sly UV slips in there and stands guard.
Was the most senior person the Chinese military and a member of the politburo a CIA spy?
I have no idea what priors, to have, are lots of senior people in great powers agents for other countries? It is entirely possible that this is an excuse for a purge though that makes Xi look bad.
It seems just as likely that Xi is doing a Josef Stalin thing here and purging senior generals from the PLA to destroy an independent power source. Defaming the PLA and making it accept tighter political controls could be a side benefit of this action.
Stalin did accuse almost everyone he purged of being a foreign agent and we have reason to believe many of the senior figures in (especially)London, Berlin and Washington were actually in the pay of foreign powers. I am sure the vast majority of his allegations were fake but it is possible that some share if the time the accusation was correct.
Funny possible explanation: the general was sufficiently competent, connected, respected, etc. that CCP plans critically relied on him; a Western intelligence organization (this works better if it's not the CIA itself) "accidentally" leaks information about the general being a CIA agent.
What's Xi to do? A purge weakens him personally & endangers his larger ambitions, but he could never be certain enough that the information was false to trust the general with what he'd needed him for before.
Why not? It's very easy in the abstract to know someone well enough that you're certain the slanders published about him by your shared enemies are false. It's so easy that this frequently occurs even when the slanders are true.
That's why the key to my unserious hypothesis is it being a "leak".
If you know your adversaries meant for you to get the information you'll discount it (as you say), but if you're led to believe they *didn't* mean for you to find out it suddenly looks a lot more credible.
And information about an adversary from a third party is less likely, in an Occam's razor sense, to be intentional misinformation from said adversary.
Can you link or point to the news story or whatever that sparks this question?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/chinas-top-general-accused-of-leaking-nuclear-weapons-secrets-to-us-report/
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/top-china-general-zhang-youxia-accused-of-leaking-nuclear-secrets-to-us-wsj
> He is also being investigated for alleged efforts to build his own circles of influence within the Communist Party’s top military decision-making body
Sounds like that's the real reason.
On the other hand it's also plausible that he decided to do some freelance diplomacy, believing it's better if the US knows more rather than less about China's nuclear capabilities.
I had just found it, thanks.
I'm reading that this means Xi has now purged 5 of the 6 members aside from himself from China's version of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the only two who had front-line experience in a shooting war (the 1979 war between China and Viet Nam).
Seems like something broader than just one general being fingered as a spy, though we'll likely never know what.
Unlikely. CIA lost their chinese spies back during Obama's administration. Very bad news for America, that. We wound up being caught flatfooted by covid19, in part because of the lack of spies on the ground.
It depends on the Great Power, obviously. I'd consider this one pretty unlikely.
I wrote a thing about the ICE shootings. https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/the-chaos-defense
Hey, it's good to randomly run into you here. I think this piece is strong but also had been meaning to tell you I read through your blog after our mutual friend shared it with me and I generally find your writing enjoyable (I mean, when it's not appropriately grim).
Thank you. Yes, this is the sane perspective.
This seems similar to the idea that courts must consider the "totality of circumstances" rather than the "moment of threat", which was considered by the Supreme Court in Barnes v. Felix (May 2025)
Okay, but couldn't you say the same thing about the protesters as well? Nobody is forcing these people to put themselves in the line of fire. If they simply stayed home, the situation would have never escalated. They are just as responsible for creating the justifications for their death.
There's not a "same thing" in the linked article. Instead, there are four very specific instances of escalation: The agents shove a woman to the ground, the agents pepper spray Petti, the agents begin pistol whipping (!?!?!) Petti, the agents shoot Petti. There are no corresponding "same things" to say about Petti because he did not shove anyone, pepperspray anyone, pistol whip anyone, or shoot anyone. Please be more specific.
They were in the street getting in the way of law enforcement. Clearly they didn't need to do that, but they did it anyways. I'm speaking about the woman too, by the way. There was absolutely no reason for her to be on the road there unless she was trying to be an obstacle. So yes, that is an escalation. It was unnecessary, and now someone is dead.
Dr. King was in the road and was an obstacle, and ultimately won (got the civil rights act passed). We're better for it. What's this sacredness that the road has?
>pistol whipping (!?!?!)
I believe it was the pepper spray canister they were beating his head with, whatever difference you feel that makes.
What do you mean the situation would not have escalated? The ICE thugs are already kidnapping people and taking them to rape dungeons, it would already have been escalated to a point of moral failure by them even without anyone pushing back.
> The ICE thugs are already kidnapping people and taking them to rape dungeons
While I would like a source on that, the people who have been shot so far are not part of the demographics that have been deemed a liability, so any talk of "kidnapping" isn't relevant to this current situation. As far as I know, so far they have been reasonable enough to not go after anyone that hasn't directly interfered with them.
> As far as I know, so far they have been reasonable enough to not go after anyone that hasn't directly interfered with them.
They're literally going door to door arresting random people. Remember the elderly citizen that they arrested in his underwear in sub-freezing weather? That was only like last week!
Yeah, he was also released. They are indeed arresting random people.
You don't need a criminal defense for being the victim of a crime.
You need a criminal defense for committing a crime.
I'm not sure why you think the previous legal system is still relevant to this situation. For all intents and purposes, these people are not bound by conventional law. We are now dealing with the physically grounded rules of "how to not give people reasons to shoot you".
They are absolutely bound by conventional law. But the law is a slow thing, that will eventually catch up with "bad guys in blue."
I agree, we are now dealing with the physically grounded rules of "how to not get shot."
This is risk management, and it ought to be done on all sides (this, for example, is why suspects get dogpiled -- they're less likely to hurt an officer if there's ten officers and they can't wrestle their way free).
the woman in the cream coat and Alex himself were basically just people going about their lives when they happened upon ICE and started filming. Are you truly saying that "filming ICE" was adequate justification for Alex's death?
This is disingenuous, even according to your own "I wrote a thing." Alex appeared to stand between a woman and law enforcement. If this is, in fact, obstructing a federal agent (something I'm willing to listen to, with due skepticism), that's more of a justification for Alex's death than otherwise.
Alex did something stupid, by coming armed to a protest. We all can say that's stupid, right? You may have interactions with law enforcement (on your side or not), and having a gun is a ticket to being labeled a "potential problem person" (if the law enforcement is aware you have it -- and some law enforcement folks can tell you've got a gun even if it's concealed, that's part of training).
I'm very willing to consider that Alex' case may show that some ICE people are behaving improperly, perhaps even taking actions that should result in criminal prosecution.
Unlike the Good case, I haven't got a qualified video analyst saying "this was a good shoot, and we almost lost an officer -- if the weather was better, he would be dead."
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/25/us/video/minneapolis-ice-shooting-alex-pretti-visual-analysis-digvid
All the physical aggression originated from ICE. Pretti's gun was concealed until he was already in the scuffle on the ground. The gun was secured by an agent, then the shooting started. Just about the only defense left for ICE is that they may have believed Pretti was an actual videogame character and that he was about to pull out the rocket launcher.
With regard to the likelyhood of a gun malfunction, I would say the odds are low. The SIG Sauer P320 had a design flaw which made it possible for the weapon to discharge when dropped. That was corrected in 2017, with a free repair offered to existing owners. There may still be some weapons out there which have not been fixed, but Petti’s weapon was not dropped. So I’d say it’s a lot more likely that the gun fired because the ICE agent pulled the trigger than that the gun somehow discharged without the trigger being pulled.
I think the video analysis has now come down pretty strongly against Pretti's gun being the one that initially discharged.
Although it may look as though it fired in the video, its likely that was a jpeg artefact.
The justification for this is, although the framerate of the video is too low to be likely to capture the discharge itself it was easily high enough to easily be able to capture the "moving back" of the rack on the gun as any discharge caused another round to be loaded into the chamber. A movement that is much slower and therefore should absolutely have been captured.
The rack on the gun does not move in any part of the video, so it seems the initial discharge was from the gun of the Agent who also fired most (if not all) of the other shots.
Note: because I didn't know this: did you know that his weapon is notorious for malfunctioning -- so that it could have been his gun firing first?
Only you can prevent hammerspace!
Yeah, what you're saying seems like the best summation. And when even the "critical defenders" (aka skeptics who will say a cop did a good thing, some of the time) say "WTF?" I'm inclined to believe this was a really dumb thing on the part of ICE. Miscommunication, among other things (the miscommunication was definitely a training issue -- I'm not sure people have thought through "what to do if there's a gun, and it is removed" but that ought to be a specific call-sign). Shooting someone who's already being dogpiled is not just dangerous to the arrestee, as well.
Why do you suppose the ICE agent shoved the woman in the cream coat?
As you haven't posted a video showing that (just a still) I candidly have no idea. Shoving, by the way, is something that can presumably happen as an accident (putting this out there, because I do see ice on the street).
You should look at el gato malo's work (on substack) on the Good shooting, because it does show that the first shot was through the windshield of the car. That's "officer still in front of vehicle" (Also: Good's wife was shouting "Drive Baby Drive" -- if you want to get into contradictory auditory directions --> I find it more likely that she was trying to drive away, in order to not suffer any consequences, than she was trying to drive away because an officer ordered her to).
I'm not an expert on the Good shooting, but as a professional geometer I want to say that the shot being through the front windshield is *very* weak evidence that it was fired from in front of the car. Most of the locations from which you could shoot the front windshield are not in front of the car (in the sense of being within 30° either way of the car's path).
Just checked back, the link's in the post but you missed it; I'm posting it here, skip to 0:35 to see the woman getting shoved by the ICE agent while walking away:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressiveHQ/comments/1qlvrwb/woman_in_the_pink_coats_angle_of_the_shooting/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
> I find it more likely that she was trying to drive away, in order to not suffer any consequences, than she was trying to drive away because an officer ordered her to
"she needs to have been obeying police orders for the right reasons to not deserve getting shot, and I think she wasn't" is probably not a great position to hold
Ah, can't check it nwo but if I didn't post a link on the post (intended to, will edit) please search up the pink lady's video footage
They would not have died if they didn't do that. The objective information here is that these deaths were preventable by both sides. Even the administration would not have been able to justify their deaths to the public if they hadn't interfered whatsoever.
Three sides caused these deaths.
1. The protesters who decided to obstruct and interfere with law enforcement officials doing their jobs instead of... well, doing any number of other things
2. The law enforcement officers who did their jobs imperfectly under very trying circumstances and could have made better decision on a second-by-second basis
3. The local police, and those in command of them. Local police are trained in crowd control, ICE are not; if the protestors insist on causing trouble then the police need
I would put responsibility for the deaths in the order of 1 (highest), then 3, then 2.
There's more. The local cops were being asked to hand over criminal illegal aliens (I'm using the term to differentiate against illegal aliens who didn't otherwise commit a crime) and they weren't cooperating, so ICE was going in on their own.
I don't have data about how many fit this category.
I take issue with
>1. The protesters who decided to obstruct and interfere with law enforcement officials doing their jobs instead of... well, doing any number of other things
In the video's we have seen no protestors, including Pretti, are seen to obstruct LE officials in any way.
They are all video'ing LE officials, a constitutionally protected act.
During doing so they are told to move back. Which they do repeatedly when asked. Despite this advancing officers pursue them whilst they are retreating and push them repeatedly backwards, they submit to that pushing, still moving backwards multiple times until eventually the repeated retreats and repeated pushing leads to a woman falling in the snow/ice.
None of them step towards or attempt to obstruct an officer. Pretti does step towards and attempt to assist the woman who has been pushed/fallen over, speaking his last words "are you OK?" to her, but again that is not obstructing an officer.
The officer then approaches Pretti again and he and the woman are then pepper sprayed in the face twice, and presumably at that point Pretti loses the ability to see/understand whats going on around him due to the debilitating effect of the pepper spray.
He is then pulled over backwards by an officer pulling on his collar from behind... and despite by this point being blind and probably disorientated he goes with that motion, falling to his hands and knees.... and keeping his hands away from his body and away from his weapon as is advised for CC in an altercation with LE. He is then repeatedly hit in the face with a pepper spray can, but still does not fight back or reach for his weapon and remains on his hands and knees.
None of that is obstructing or interfering with law enforcement in any way. They were observing/video'ing and in doing so were assaulted multiple times by the officers for reasons that are unclear, but did not cause him at any point to fight back or obstruct, even whilst blinded, forcibly pushed off their feet and assaulted multiple times with a blunt object.
"Crowd control"? The crowd was what, two people? Plus a couple more witnesses filming from farther away? Are you expecting the local police to just follow ICE around all day and make sure they never cross paths with a civilian at any point?
I really don't see how you can argue the people who put 5-10 rounds in somebody are less responsible for the death than the guy whose worst potential crime was illegally standing in front of an ICE or CBP agent.
I didn't blame this person, who I have been repeatedly assured is definitely not a protestor and just some guy who happened to be walking past.
I do have to say, this guy doesn't appear to have been as badly behaved as Renee Good (watched with sound off).
His crime was "bringing a gun to a protest." (something we don't actually criminalize, but was a rather extreme failure of judgement. Bear in mind protestors have beaten their own fellow protestors. Take a schmuck with a gun, and he's shooting his fellow protestor.)
Why do you suppose the ICE agent shoved the woman in the cream coat?
I can't seem to find any information on what precipitated that encounter, and it seems you don't know either. Either way, the situation should have been clear to everyone that walking outside in such chaos is a risk to your life. Collateral damage is inevitable. Though, I doubt the administration would have been able to justify her death if that's what ended up happening.
Walking outside - in the city of Minneapolis, full stop?
38% of the Northeast's current electrical usage is being provided by burning oil. This despite being around 300 miles from the largest gas fields on the planet.
1% of the current electrical usage is wind.
.5% of the current electrical usage is solar.
65 cents per kwh, pricing at the moment.
*USA if this isn't clear.
So, um, how about those renewables?
I'm finding very different numbers, with electricity much more heavily provided by natural gas than fuel oil. (Check out e.g. ISO New England's fuel mix stats, which give natural gas at 55%, solar and wind at 4% and 3%, and oil at 0.3%)
Is your source potentially counting heating oil, or even transportation?
Reuters also has the 38% figure: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-electric-grid-shows-escalating-stress-amid-cold-blast-2026-01-24/
"In New England, fuel oil generation kicked into high gear to help the six-state region's electric grid conserve natural gas, its top fuel source.
As evening approached on Saturday, oil-fired generation accounted for 38% of the New England grid's output, compared with a typical level of about 1% or less, ISO New England's operations display showed. Natural gas, usually the grid's main fuel source, accounted for 24% of the grid's generation output."
Thanks, I appreciate the source a ton. So this is a temporary measure with the storm - that makes a lot more sense. My context-sensing skills may have went briefly offline.
Assume I fucked up in flagging context. : -)
In my area (Long Island), many residences use oil rather than gas for heating because the gas delivery infrastructure is not well developed. Many residential streets lack gas pipes.
Costs of heating with gas and oil are pretty much the same. Sometimes gas is a bit cheaper, sometimes oil is, but it all works out about equal.
Note: despite a population of 2.5 million most parts of Nassau and Suffolk counties lack sewers.
... my god, and I thought our sewer situation was bad! (we're paying billions to remedy it.) Now you're telling me that you guys don't even have one, and the EPA isn't charging you billions of dollars?
I am also envisioning shitstorms ala Seattle Washington, at the turn of the 1800s to 1900s.
Here's a source I found btw. Seems that Nassau county is mostly connected to sewers, while Suffolk county (farther from NYC) mostly uses septic tanks and cesspools. https://www.longislandpress.com/2025/05/10/long-islands-never-ending-search-for-a-better-sewage-system/
Remember, the Northeast's settlements are older and therefore are usually relying on older infrastructure.
I'm in Pittsburgh! A quarter of an inch of rain, and raw sewage hits our rivers (a lot of it, actually).
Yes, that's not now, that's a "back to 2016" -- so take that as "what it looked like before we suspended all environment regulations because it's an emergency."
Citing your source:
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/key-stats/resource-mix
Presuming some of the "notable exits" account for what's currently running in panic mode.
That's a different claim, but ok let's look at the 2016 data
https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/web/reports/load-and-demand/-/tree/net-ener-peak-load
In Jan 2016 oil generated 52 GWh out of a total of 8782 GWh from all sources. That's 0.6%.
That and the other data on the site seems to show that oil was mostly for peaker plants, and most of what was taken offline was coal and nuclear. This fits with the conventional narrative I've heard where cheap natural gas took over from coal and nuclear specifically.
(Though I agree that it's not making renewables look like the main character)
EDIT: I may be misunderstanding you. Are you saying the source I cited is from 2016? Because I looked at the 2025 full spreadsheet and that appears to match with the highlights on the main page.
Sorry, yeah we can all use the 2025 data, for baseline.
Current struggle is to keep the power grid functional, so yeah, all peaker plants are straining, and we hope they don't break.
Current power sources are illegal to run normally, so... yeah, lots of "backup generators" being paid to run.
Ok, I agree that the power grid is under tremendous strain right now. I would still like a source for the original 38% number if you have one, since this (2025) data makes that number sound somewhat implausible. If the 38% portion includes heating oil, I'd be much less surprised.
Federal source, personal interview. And yeah, it's mostly backup generators, not new powerplants being brought online (or old ones stood back up).
It's not home heating oil, because this is an analysis of the electrical grid (specifically inputs to it).
I downloaded the most-recent full-year data from that link, the "2025 Net Energy and Peak Load by Source" spreadsheet.
For 2025 as a whole New England's percentages of GWh by source fuel were as follows:
Natural gas 54%
Nuclear 25%
Hydro 5/8ths of one precent
Solar and wind each about 1/3 of one precent
Refuse burning plus landfill gas about 1/3 of one percent
Wood about 1/5th of one percent
Oil about 1/10th of one percent
Coal about 1/50th of one percent
"Other" [? what would this include?] about 3/100th of one percent
That seems to fall way short of 100% ?
These folks claim that people have been getting the right answer to the Monty Hall Problem for all the wrong reasons. Be that as it may, the question that I've never seen answered (and that I haven't been able to deduce myself) is why it's important in the wording of this problem that Monty *randomly* picks which door with a goat to expose? Seems to me that his choice would be dictated by the one remaining door without a car behind it. Monty can't open the one with the car behind it, nor can he open the door originally chosen by the contestant. Why do they keep harping on the idea that this is a random choice on Monty's part?
"Right for the wrong reasons: common bad arguments for the correct answer to the Monty Hall Problem" by Don Fallis & Peter J. Lewis.
> If the car were behind door #1 (the door you initially chose), there is a 50% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat. This is because Monty has a choice about whether to open door #2 or door #3 and he chooses at random. If the car were behind door #2, there is a 100% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat. This is because Monty has no choice about which door to open (since he is not allowed to open the door that you initially chose). If the car were behind door #3, there is, of course, a 0% chance that Monty would open door #3 and reveal a goat.
> Since door #1 and door #2 started out equally likely, and since the evidence favors door #2 over door #1, once Monty opens door #3 and reveals a goat, the car is more likely to be behind door #2 than door #1. So, you should definitely switch to door #2. We will call this the Favoring Procedure.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-05389-6
David Deutsch says everyone is getting it wrong...
https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/2013/10/monty-hall-problem/
And a description of the Monty Hall Problem and its contentious history is here (for the few MHP virgins left out there)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
And, synchronicity in action, Sabine Hossenfelder has just vibe-coded a Monty Hall Problem simulator. Cool!
https://x.com/skdh/status/2016526061891113284?s=20
> David Deutsch says everyone is getting it wrong...
No, you're misreading that post. He says that everyone is getting it right, and provides a perspective on why switching is better. (A perspective that is not original to him.)
Consider that, in the traditional statement of the problem, the conclusion is that if you switch you have a 2/3 chance to find the car, and if you don't switch you have a 1/3 chance to find the car.
By "contrast", in the post you link, you always switch, and you have a 2/3 chance to find the car.
> the question that I've never seen answered (and that I haven't been able to deduce myself) is why it's important in the wording of this problem that Monty *randomly* picks which door with a goat to expose? Seems to me that his choice would be dictated by the one remaining door without a car behind it. Monty can't open the one with the car behind it, nor can he open the door originally chosen by the contestant. Why do they keep harping on the idea that this is a random choice on Monty's part?
1/3 of the time, you start by picking the door with the car.
Monty Hall was interviewed on the subject. He'd never heard of the kerfuffle—easily simulated with a Python script—but was intrigued. He then demonstrated to his interviewer plus a couple of assistants that Monty Hall could force a goat Every Single Time.
<picks goat> "Congratulations! You won a goat!"
<picks non-goat> "Are you sure? I'm giving you an opportunity to change your mind . . going once. . . going twice . . <switches> "Congratulations! You won a goat!"
Yes, the "Monty Hall problem" doesn't reflect the reality of the actual show. But that's immaterial to the solution to the actual problem.
This is stupid. They're saying the answers to the Monty Hall problem are wrong because they don't yield correct answers to variations of the Monty Hall problem, i.e. to different problems entirely. Being able to answer arbitrary other problems when applied to them in a necessarily somewhat arbitrary way is not a requirement for a solution to be considered a valid ("for the right reason" in their terms) solution to the original problem.
Edit: they write: "Since this argument does not appeal to the fact that Monty is required to open a door to reveal a goat, it is also applicable to cases where Monty might open a door and reveal the car."
then they write:
"In particular, proponents of the Wi-Phi Probability Concentration argument might claim that it is understood that this argument is not intended to apply to the Random Monty variation. It is only intended to apply to the original puzzle."
...no shit? It reads like a troll paper. Who even are these people?
The implication is, though, if you are presented with an analogous problem, the wrong method that happens to get you the correct answer in the MHP may not work for a different scenario.
Sure, they could've made the true claim that the common intuitive solution doesn't generalize to a variant of the problem. Instead they chose to make the false claim that this means that the solution is also not a valid solution to the original problem.
Theres only 3 doors, its not hard to brute force the solution for the different scenarios. You choose one at random. Then monty chooses either at random or intentionally depending on you scenario. Compare the payoff of a switch strategy to a non switch strategy. Are ppl arguing about the narrative or the actual outcomes?
I was questioning the framing of the question, not the probable outcomes.
Okay, well I dont think ppl are harping on how important it is that his choice is random. Certainly the original phrasing didn't use that word. They sometimes describe his choice between two goat doors as random, but his exact behavior when choosing between two goat doors is not important so long as it is not discernable to the player. For example he could always choose his favorite goat and the game wouldn't change. It is important that its not discernable and randomness achieves that. If he chose the left most door with a goat, then in cases where he chose the door on the right you'd know the other is a car and that would change the game.
One of your links refers to the "random monty variant" when his choice is always random and it has a different answer.
The way I see it, if (unknown to you) Monty opens a door at random then you have nothing to gain by switching but also nothing to lose, whereas if he knowingly opens a wrong door then that is where switching is advantageous. But either way, you don't lose anything by switching.
The first time I heard this problem my intuition was faulty (like a lot of other people's). But for me the most persuasive argument for switching is to consider a similar game where there are twenty doors, and after your initial choice Monty opens one door after enother all empty until only one remains. In that case, if he knows which door the goat is behind, then that one remaining door obviously stands out as being highly likely to conceal the goat compared to the initial door one chose.
People use 'random' and 'arbitrary' interchangeably, but I think they actually mean that he chooses arbitrarily.
Randomness isn't relevant there, the point is just to contrast the case where Monty has the option of opening either door vs. the case where his choice is forced. I don't think this is actually important to any explanation of the problem, it's just communication difficulty trying to explain things to a lay audience.
Non-random choices always reveal information. Let's say that Monty will always open door #2 if he can, i.e. if you haven't picked it and there's a goat behind it. If you pick door #1, and Monty opens #3 containing a goat, you know 100% that the car is behind #2 instead of only 67%.
But Monty has full knowledge of the system, and he knows the car is behind door #2. But he can't reveal the car, can he? And he can't reveal the goat behind door number #1. His decisions have to be non-random for the game to work. Of course, the contestant has only partial knowledge of the system, and she has to calculate the odds based on the new information from the point that the goat is revealed behind door #3.
Yes, the initial arrangement of cars and goats could and should be randomized. But again, once the game begins, the odds always favor switching doors on your second choice. And once the game begins, there's no element of randomness unless the car and goat are being continuously swapped between the two remaining doors. It's not quantum mechanics, where there are no known local hidden variables. :-)
I'm pretty sure Monty can reveal the car, actually. The traditional statement of the problem doesn't require that he reveal a goat, or even that he reveal anything at all, only that he happened do so this particular time. Also, this was a real television show in which Monty didn't always offer the choice, and Monty Hall was a real person who I believe has publicly stated that he had a free choice and that he used it arbitrarily to maximize entertainment value (and that he'd have found it particularly entertaining to confound the plans of tricksy game-theorists trying to outsmart him).
If the problem statement is modified to more precisely specify the algorithm Monty is using, the ideal strategy varies accoringly - I believe there's a table for that in the wikipedia article. But for the original, the winning move is to never switch unless you're a cheerfully telegenic young woman, in which case always switch :-)
It's important to distinguish between the real world Monty Hall and his "Let's make a deal" show, and the idealized "Monty Hall Problem" which is merely based on the show rather than modelling it perfectly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
The original formulation of the problem, as per Wikipedia, does not explicitely say that the host will always reveal a goat, but I think it implies it by clarifying that the host knows where the car is.
>Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Since the problem is all about whether to switch or not, I believe it's safe to assume that the host will never reveal the car, otherwise there's no point in continuing the game.
I did some further research, and it looks like the Let's Make a Deal creators would create different scenarios with different rules. The Monty Hall Problem presents a single variation of one of the games presented to the contestants. But the goal was always to trade a prize for a hidden prize, which could be potentially better or worse. So, in the spirit of the original show, I don't think Monty would ever prematurely reveal the prize before the contestant could be kept in a state of suspense.
I used to watch that game with my grandmother as a kid, but I no longer remember those other variations. Reading and rereading the Monty Hall Problem description for 2+ decades has destroyed my original memories of the show. On one level, I feel smarter to have wrestled with the Monty Hall Problem, but in another way, I feel like I've traded in my actual memories for a goat.
This occasionally had the potential to bite them. Back when the rocks were still warm and squishy, a writer on the show published an article with the following situation:
A writer thought a fun "Zonk" would be an oil well pump, pumping merrily away onstage. So they rented an oil pump, the audience got their chuckle, and the contestant dutifully chose the consolation prize.
Had they Kept the oil well pump, they could have turned around and sold it for considerably more than the "Big Deal" back in those days.
At least that's how the story was published in TV Guide.