This is premature, but I want to walk you though why some of the charges coming through are incredible significant. This is one of the recently unsealed complaints.

1512(b) is a very, very strong crime. Section 1512 is about obstruction of the administration of justice. The statute is supposedly about disrupting court proceedings, but it's broader. The way it's written, Congressional Proceedings count.

The statutory maximum for a single violation of 1512(b) is 20 years in prison. That's a lot. Most related federal crimes—231 civil disorder, 2101 riots—are only 5 years on the top end.

But that's not all.

See, federal sentencing is done via a complicated formula that computes sentencing guidelines.

Sentencing guidelines are based on the statute, the elements of the criminal offense, and the defendant's criminal history. It also factors in things like if the defendant takes responsibility, and takes a plea deal, etc.

Alright, time to stop ignoring the J6 discourse...

It is necessary to confront the Proud Boys because the Proud Boys are only coming to DC to fight "antifa," and if there are no antifascists there, they will simply assault whoever they determine is "antifa."

Because the Proud Boys are racist, sexist homophobes, this generally ends up being racial, ethnic, or sexual minorities.

This happens and the police allow this to happen. Some form of pushback is necessary.

The Proud Boys exist only to create violence. They are not a drinking club, they are a militant political wing of the Republican Party, and their mission is to generate a cultural notion of right wing immunity.

This is the violent obverse of the same coin that has the Republican Party's other immunities on the reverse: the ability to tamper with elections, engage in financial fraud, ignore the Constitution, and in general participate in corruption.

However, while the Proud Boys must be confronted, we must also recognize that their entire raison d'être is that antifa also shows up to face this confrontation.

Having spent a lot of time over the past several years thinking about and studying ethics in technology, the more I am convinced that the discussions about ethics in technology have a major, irreconcilable blind spot.

“If you are neutral in the face of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” as Desmond Tutu summarized.

Our discussion about eliminating bias in AI is an aggressive march towards neutrality. Our measure of fairness is a line drawn too early.

Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to eliminate bias in AI. Maybe we should be designing for bias in the favor of the oppressed. Worth thinking about.

Should we be eliminating power dynamics or inverting power dynamics? If we try to scrub power dynamics from a system too early in a neatly bounded space, we just let those power dynamics to creep back in, or we need those boundaries to be impenetrable.

My next ethics talk may just be a single slide that says REVOLUTION

I know we’re all enamored with the new Christmas tradition of blowing up an entire city block on Christmas Day, so I must join the chorus of concerned folks who worry that if we don’t provide a forum for people who want to blow up city blocks, a vital Xmas tradition will be lost.

If we don‘t let angry white men blow up city blocks, then we will lose so many other vital liberties. How can you connect with other people exploring gender, if your city blocks aren’t blowing up?

I’m here today to honor those dead in the latest Target mass shooting, a tragic but necessary cost of our freedoms, without their sacrifice we might not be able to express displeasure at our cable companies.

^ this is what y’all sound like

The digital freedom movement has not proposed a single solution for dealing with Nazi murder and has essentially decided that that is not its problem.

Here's the challenge with disrupting militia plots: most militia dudes are Dunning-Kruger levels of incompetent, but not Dunning-Kruger levels of dangerous.

So the problem is that militia culture is wrapped up in this sort of virtue signalling nonstop. It's all around trying to project yourself as a leader, a military expert, a tactical master, based entirely on what you've read in Tom Clancy novels

So a militia might say things like, alright, here's the plan. We're gonna get 1000 guys, and we're gonna set up a barricade at each of the three entrances to the statehouse, and then we're gonna neutralize the security forces.

Super scary stuff! Just one problem.

Where are they gonna get 1000 guys? How are they going to implement a Command and Control structure for 1000 guys? What are they gonna make the barricades out of?

This requires a high-level of coordination and logistics support that they really just don't actually have the talent or network for. Let alone that the number of guys they claim is always a factor of 100 larger than the number of guys who actually guy.