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.

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.

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.

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

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.

1. I was walking in the woods yesterday and I had an epiphany. It wasn’t one I wanted to have. I was thinking about today’s class, where we are reading Kimmerer’s ‘Gathering Moss’. I’ve taught Braiding Sweetgrass in multiple classes every year since 2016. It’s eminently teachable

2. Both books are beautifully written. Students uniformly enjoy them as assigned reading. They do a great job communicating to non-Indigenous folks the contours of basic Indigenous relationships to more-than-human beings. They’re wildly popular with white readers.

3. I’ve found Braiding Sweetgrass to be a great entry point for non-Indigenous folks to Indigenous scholarship. But this is where yesterday’s epiphany comes in. Neither Braiding Sweetgrass or Gathering Moss tends to the deep deep lineages of Indigenous scholarship in Canada or US

4. As the popularity of ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ has soared, I’ve seen more and more white folks wax on about ‘braiding knowledge’. But they often don’t know any of the lineages of these concepts beyond what is presented in this one book. They confidently run with this.

5. Kimmerer does a commendable job of weaving in her own experiences, her family stories+nods to some very important knowledge keepers who deserve to be celebrated for their work. But Braiding Sweetgrass does not tend to the citational politics Sara Ahmed & others teach us about

1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi

2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.

4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.

In the 90s I was a host on a talk radio station in LA, the same that aired Rush. I was president of LA NOW, & the liberal wkend host when he visited the station. He was so vilified by my then-crowd, I expected a monster. Instead, I met a remarkable, kind and encouraging man... 1/

He was gregarious & generous when we met. He shook my hand & I was shocked that he was nice & genuinely curious about my radio work and activism. I realized I was going to have a fascinating conversation 2/

There were many events during this time as a radio talk show host that changed me. It was my first job in the medium starting in 1993. My meeting Rush & our conversations made me realize the left had been lying to me about many things... 3/

Rush was not a monster, he wasn’t evil, he did not mean people harm, he wasn’t a bigot, or any of the other smears lobbed against him by my leftist associates. I liked him very much, and while we disagreed on many things (then) he was nothing has he had been painted 4/

In my conversations with him, we talked about the issues and despite the disagreements, he also took time to give me advice about hosting, style, connecting w the audience, etc. He encouraged me and gave me advice that made a huge difference in my career… 5/

Recently heard the podcast by @sikhyaent on Saravana Bhavan founder P Rajagopal, who stalked the young daughter of an employee & had her husband killed. Observations: the podcast's title ('Dosa King') glorifies PR, the script trivialises his crime, calling it a mere "scandal"

It refers to the whole stalking and murder episode as something that led to Rajagopal's "fall" - i.e a story of crime against a woman is turned into a story about the impact of the said crime on its perpetrator, not its victim.

It refers to the stalking victim as a fit antagonist for the protagonist Rajagopal, as Rajagopal's nemesis. But the point is, she set out to be neither. She didn't make him part of her life story. He forcibly, violently disrupted her life.

The podcast ends by telling us how Rajagopal's employees and friends and many others abuse the woman he stalked, for pursuing the case of her husband's murder and bringing Rajagopal to justice. It also tells us that some admire her. And it "asks us to decide" where we stand

I find it disturbing that a story of a powerful man feeling entitled to ruin a woman's life & trying to get away with murder, is turned into a story of HIS "rise, popularity, and fall".