I have problems and wish to know what this story is and where it can be found.

That is certainly a way you can use to describe a course of action that you would consider morally good. I don’t know if you should, but I suppose it is not a physical impossibility.

A small sidenote on a dynamic relevant to how I am thinking about policing in these cases:

A classical example of microeconomics-informed reasoning about criminal justice is the following snippet of logic.

If someone can gain in-expectation X dollars by committing some crime (which has negative externalities of Y>X dollars), with a probability p of getting caught, then in order to successfully prevent people from committing the crime you need to make the cost of receiving the punishment (Z) be greater than X/p, i.e. X<p∗Z.

Or in less mathy terms, the more likely it is that someone can get away with committing a crime, the harsher the punishment needs to be for that crime.

In this case, a core component of the pattern of plausible-deniable aggression that I think is present in much of Said’s writing is that it is very hard to catch someone doing it, and even harder to prosecute it successfully in the eyes of a skeptical audience. As such, in order to maintain a functional incentive landscape the punishment for being caught in passive or ambiguous aggression needs to be substantially larger than for e.g. direct aggression, as even though being straightforwardly aggressive has in some sense worse effects on culture and norms (though also less bad effects in some other ways), the probability of catching someone in ambiguous aggression is much lower.

Fucking hell, that is one of the stupidest most dangerous things I’ve ever heard. Guy solves crime by making the harshness of punishment proportional to the difficulty of passing judgement. What could go wrong?

Jesus christ, just ban the guy! Don’t write a million words about how much he gets under your skin! Rude!!!

“The left gets a new publication”

it’s right wing

it’s a substack

My goodness that’s a lot of words for completely missing the point that policy shouldn’t be informed by religious beliefs.

God, poor Zack doesn’t know how to do anything but publish instances of himself getting owned

From the first and most popular comment

Your average narcissistic personality tests assume an average person as a test-taker, and so cannot tell whether one’s overly inflated ego is justified or not.

yeehaw

My goodness this is shockingly incoherent. These people are not doing well.

Speaking purely in terms of literary value, I agree that the output is complete nonsense word salad, but it becomes intriguing precisely because Geoff is evidently finding deep meaning in it and has absorbed the concepts and now writes as if the LLM had taken over his mind. It’s very effective horror as far as I’m concerned.

??? Is there something I’m not remembering from the book, does anyone have any idea what Musk is talking about? Or is he at a stage where he looks at a cloud and sees the protocols of the elders of zion?

Knowing he’s a failson who’s alienated everyone in his family makes me very happy.

Yeah that got me as well. We barely hear anything in the book about how the Culture actually functions. Fucker’s not read it and just grabbed the first name off the list.

I saw the post and that it was in earnest but screw it I’m still taking it as a reference to how Simone would reel in and groom young female students for Jean-Paul’s benefit.

oh my god

See the bright side: chatbots are going to ruin the speedreading industry.

No may be about it, Camp of the Saints is only ever mentioned by big racists these days. Might as well be the Turner Diaries.

I live how he put The Gulag Archipelago in there along a bunch of speculative fiction.

Also it’s simply just bad to practice being cruel to a humanshaped thing.

Yeah, if you had any awareness about how stupid and unlikeable you’re coming across to everybody who crosses your path, I think you would recognise that this is probably not a good maxim to live your life by.

Russia doesn’t really do, or indeed understand, soft power

counterpoint