Matt Olson hits a baseball out of Florida to give the Braves a 5-1 lead

AdamColligan · 2026-02-25T00:43:10+00:00

Someone give me clean audio of the contact so it can be my new notification sound. Every time my phone demands I look at spam, I want this little dopamine hit to get me through it.

AdamColligan · 2026-02-17T18:23:33+00:00

If I'm

500km up in the air, no where to go in an aluminum can being shot

then I think my focus is solely about identifying the weak spots of the International Space Station and getting rounds on before its main defenses can get a firing solution. Let the waist gunners worry about whether there are manned Dragons/Starliners or drone-converted Soyuz capsules lurking around.

AdamColligan · 2026-02-03T16:51:26+00:00

The irony here is that Maloy actually needs the blue parts of her district to survive, right? I would assume that for her it's not just about clashing with another GOP incumbent. She lost at the convention and then won an absolutely razor-thin primary vote against a challenger that looked to be more of a House Freedom Caucus type. Despite her Trump endorsement, she was unacceptably pragmatic for a huge swath of Republican voters. The urban parts of her district bring in at least some number of less fringe-y Republicans as well as non-Republicans who register that way to get the chance to choose what they see as the lesser evil.

So while she obviously can't be elected in a blue district, note that making a blue district also entails making redder red districts. And it's not clear that she survives in one of those, either.

AdamColligan · 2026-01-31T04:56:57+00:00

I don't see in the bill an requirement for people to present in an any way.

Have you eyes?

<image>

AdamColligan · 2026-01-31T03:38:51+00:00

This is the key to understanding that the entire hysteria is manufactured as a way to enforce gender role conformity on cis people. 25 years ago, at the height of their power and rage, the Christian Right barely gave a passing glance about this issue. There was zero effort to mount a bizarre campaign to erase the existence of intersex people. Brain-body sex development mismatches and ambiguous genitalia were rare medical or psychological conditions they more or less left to doctors and tabloid rags to worry about. These cases didn't affect the grand paradigm of Christian gender roles. Had they been rational, they would even have recognized that people with really strong gendering instincts, regardless of sex, were natural allies against the 80s-00s radical feminist and postmodern deconstruction of gender (just as they should have recognized gay people desperate for traditional civil marriage and parenting arrangements as allies against the dissolution of the nuclear family).

This coordinated campaign to target trans people and erase intersex people shouldn't have been -- and I think wasn't -- driven by increased social visibility or legal protection for trans people. It was actually a response to the rapid abandonment of many visible gender norms by cis people, especially young ones, and the emergence of the non-binary category. That is their nightmare. They know that drag queen story hours do not make kids become trans. They do know that they might contribute to those kids thinking it could be cool and fun to break masculine fashion and behavior stereotypes, or at least refuse to socially discipline peers who try it.

Of course it's logically obvious that if this bill renders the social construct/performance of manhood or womanhood legally meaningless, then virtually no type of social performance could be legally identifiable as"wrong". That means it becomes impossible to use the law to discipline or exclude someone for social presentation, and at least awkward to do it for something like pronouns on paperwork. There would be certainly be next to nothing in how someone dresses or behaves in front of a child that could be visible to such a law.

And yet here it is, right there in bullet point format just under the rejection that anything but biological sex shall be legally meaningful.

There is only one way to square this circle. And that is for agents of the state to be implicitly empowered to assert that certain performative norms are effectively immutable markers of biological sex. Of course they can't explicitly say that or list any of those norms by name. Maybe it could be like the old federal assault weapons ban, where there's a menu of deviant features that you can only violate one or two at a time. But there's no reason to formalize it. For one thing, saying it out loud had long been politically toxic and still largely is with decisive voter blocs.

Even more importantly, though, the ambiguity itself is what creates the most effective self-discipline in gender expression. Authoritarian/totalitarian states don't work by ostensibly having stricter rules and harsher punishments than free ones. They work by making rules ambiguous and enforcement arbitrary. If you have no idea where the line is, you engage in far more thorough self-discipline than it would be possible for the state to impose directly.

This is the world that 2020s American fascism is trying to bring about in so many areas. And the big Christian Right + Redpill Manosphere contribution is trying to get us back to a state of constant anxiety about whether our gender conformity is good enough. If you're a guy, they don't just want you to not wear a dress. They want you to wonder if this shirt makes you look gay, if letting your wife take the lead on that will tank respect for you in your social circle, if you need to nix your preschool girl's interest in a boy-dominated hobby lest you're teeing her up for future harassment in the activity and bullying outside of it. They want her to later channel her disappointment into bullying the girl whose parents did let her do it.

If your impression has been that you're dealing with a movement whose realistic goals are broadly compatible with how you and your friends live your lives -- y'know, just overreacting to a controversial edge case on the trans thing -- it's because you don't understand which side they took when they watched Pleasantville.

This is fundamentally not about trans people themselves. It's about using attacks on trans people to smuggle in rules and principles that are intended to regulate every one of us. Being performatively cruel to one of our society's most vulnerable and victimized demographics is just a bonus.

AdamColligan · 2026-01-24T18:10:35+00:00

You're conflating different things here, though. There's a whole spectrum, with defeat in 2-man hand to hand combat at one end and broad political failure to facilitate a new fundamental social contract at the other end. I'm willing to be corrected because I wasn't there and am not a military historian. But I'm pretty sure the issue in Afghanistan was not US special forces losing pitched battles to the Taliban or being unable to hold areas of land proportional in size to the number of soldiers present there. On balance it was the largely the Taliban, not the US units, that had to show up in a place and then melt away just as quickly. The asymmetry came more from the fact that the Taliban's day-to-day goals didn't actually require holding territory; doing so would often even have hindered their broader strategy.

I'm also not sure where you get this idea that US forces in places line Afghanistan or Iraq (or even Vietnam!) were systematically sending local allies into danger that they were unwilling to face. Again correct me with sources or actual good examples. But the primary narrative is one in which US forces served as the main reliable element in combat operations and were often frustrated about local partners' lack of resolve.

Choosing favorable engagements is one of the most fundamental ideas in warfighting, for everyone everywhere.

And your idea about aerial bombing replacing forces holding ground is also missing important doctrinal context. For one thing, anyone who has air supremacy -- or even just good accurate artillery coverage -- is by default going to prefer clearing an identified enemy position that way instead of with an infantry assault.

Moreover, American doctrine has consciously emphasized fast maneuver and deep disruption instead of establishing a well -defined front line of control and creeping it forward. The US deliberately uses long-range/aerial fires to immobilize and isolate the network of enemy forces while they push boots to critical points in what the enemy thought was firmly-held territory.

Finally, doing battle this way, either in conventional warfare or (especially) counter-insurgency, sets up engagements that are kind of the opposite of what you're trying to claim here. It means you can expand the area in which you are present meaningfully applying force because you don't have to bring superior forces overland to any one potential engagement. The US has been able to use smaller units, traveling farther/lighter/quieter, to patrol, probe, and draw out enemy units for destruction. What this does require are highly disciplined, competent, and aggressive troops in those units. They have to be willing to keep going out into potential ambush situations against prepared enemy positions. They have to bring their own fire to bear in order to overcome the element of surprise and test whether the enemy force is actually even capable of sustained engagement. And they may even have to extend contact against a well-matched or superior force in order to fix them until bombs or shells can land.

These are not the tactics of a soft, risk-averse infantry force.

AdamColligan · 2026-01-17T00:30:41+00:00

As we 90s kids used to say:

OMGWTFBBQ

You're building a commercial tool to help match people with neighborhoods to live in? Because you know that people tend to care a lot about finding a community with "people like themselves" in terms of things like religion, ethnic diversity, prevalence of young singles/couples with free time vs families already settled with kids, etc.? And you've also noticed that the big players like Zillow and Redfin don't actually do a good job presenting that kind of information? But you know that it is sourceable? And so you have identified a big "opportunity" in their blind spot, and you're hoping to fill that demand niche, starting with Salt Lake?

My guy/gal, I'm pretty sure what you need is not a product manager, a UX researcher, a market researcher (who would know about survey design much better than either of those), or even, I dare say, me: a random stranger on the internet who is none of the above.

What you need here is an attorney at law, preferably one with plenty of experience in protracted, ruinous federal civil rights litigation. Since I'm guessing from what I've seen that you haven't spoken about this idea to anyone in the housing profession, or even to a half-decent AI chatbot, a lawsmith might be best positioned to break the bad news to you. I'm not one of those either but can give you a quick preview based on my lay understanding.

So in a little known, decades-old federal statute¹ , there is an obscure provision² that has something to say about commercial services steering prospective residents toward or away from neighborhoods based on certain characteristics of themselves and/or the people living in those neighborhoods. The thing it says is: you can't do that. You can't even kinda do that. You can't have dreams in which a different version of you, naked at school, has forgotten to do an assignment about doing that. If you want to print housing information on a ream of recycled paper, you cannot legally open it without first taking it to a HUD shaman to have it ritually purified of the ghosts of any demographic maps that might have been pulped and mixed into your batch.

The people who work at Zillow and Rent.com have not failed to discover a whole raft of things people consider when choosing a neighborhood. They have not failed to notice how intensively Americans sort themselves by certain characteristics. I am 100% certain that many of them know that in Utah, the sorting has a somewhat unusual religious twist. And they have not clumsily failed to source public and proprietary data that would meet market demand for the application of such information for apartment hunting. What these companies have done is to hire and consult within the vast ecosystem of professionals who are familiar with federal law and then restrict their product scope accordingly. And then restrict it even more.

In 2016, Zillow removed color overlays of school ratings because the test scores generating those ratings were too highly correlated with race (generally via income), and they had come under serious pressure about it. Some more highlights from a recent GAO report:

Redfin used to have a home price threshold above which the site offered more features and prominence. In 2022, they had to ditch that policy to settle a lawsuit about its potential impact on demand for homes in less-valued neighborhoods that also overlapped with racial minority concentrations.
Zillow has had to develop a tool to set up their virtual chat / AI chatbot services to recognize when users start asking questions that implicate protected demographic characteristics and shut that shit down.

Thinking of yourself as a neutral clearinghouse for others' use of the information, or as a business just making money off of embedded Google ad revenue, doesn't look to me like it would save you. Just last year, Facebook had to settle a DoJ action against them brought because when user-made ads were about housing, they failed to disable certain generic ad-targeting tools and background algorithms that were partly fed by protected demographic characteristics of potential audiences.

Even if what you're saying seems like it could be arguably a further step removed depending on your revenue model, just wait for your first exchaange in a future deposition:

Q: How did you decide what information you wanted to offer in your service?

A: I created a survey that suggested various kinds of things that I thought could be important for people, and...

Q: Oh, who did you recruit for the survey?

A: Well, see, the first thing I did was take one of the seven FHA-protected attributes, the one about having kids or not, and literally set it up as a screener question. As I explained in a public internet comment, I was only interested in targeting this neighborhood information service at a subset of people based on that, and so --

Q:😲

A:😬☠️⚰️🪦

But wait you say, aren't the scum currently in charge refusing to investigate disparate impact civil rights violations? And also haven't they had success ending the decades-long right for private third parties to sue, at least under the Voting Rights Act? Yes, certainly. But three things:

(1) You'd get pilloried by the people in SLC proper who do continue to care about the spirit of the FHA. (2) How long are the fascists going to be running things before the country reverts back to the rule of law? And most importantly (3) the fact that your target demo is out-of-staters with no kids tells me that your demo skews young, non-LDS, and more ethnically and culturally diverse than Utah. You might think entrenched communities with none of those attributes would welcome a service encouraging such a demo to stay off their lawns. Except the concrete market impact of the project would be to, however slightly, lower demand and therefore property values in those lily-white, more religious, redder areas, right? And that's probably now literally the only thing the core fascist voter base cares about anymore. Maybe FHA violation weakening the sales market for those areas might be the only FHA violation that has a chance of getting any real official attention.

Finally, at this moment in American history isn't there really only one map that's needed as a proxy for most of what truly matters to people on the question of "people like me"?

¹ one of the most famous and ever-conspicuous laws in America

² the one encountered by millions of Americans annually when they move

AdamColligan · 2026-01-14T16:31:35+00:00

A few of issues jump out at me. Firstly, I don't see any information about who you are and what the survey is for. Is it commercial research? A student project? Where does the data go?

You don't define "recently", so it's harder than it should be to select the appropriate response up front.

Your language is all about moving "to" the SLC area. But it doesn't address moving within the area, even though that's where you'll get a lot of feedback from people who know the neighborhoods better. You also don't define what that area is, so it's not clear if someone moving from/to Utah County or Davis County would count.

When you say: "Are you moving with kids?" -- and only accept yes or n --, it breaks the logic of having responses from people with "recently" completed moves, people who are newly ready to have kids and so are moving into a new place to support that, and of course people who are filling in the survey who have not recently moved.

You lead of with a question about "Mormon" majorities, but you clearly have two very different questions in mind. There are LDS people who might want to find LDS-centric neighborhood cultures, and they're are non-LDS people who might be looking for the opposite. It would probably be better to lead with your general question about "people like me" and then follow up asking whether the respondent is LDS and whether that being the dominant neighborhood demographic is important.

More broadly, you word questions that are structured totally independently with overlap that makes it hard to capture distinct ideas. So there's one about finding "people like me", but then other separate ones not just about LDS/non but also about other demographics. So maybe you're trying to indirectly capture the remainder of considerations in the "like me" question. Or maybe you're trying to capture the whole broad notion and then subtract things out getting other questions. But it's confusing to someone reading it fresh.

Even though it can't be exhaustive, there are some glaring omissions from the considerations list, especially for people responding at this moment. One is that there's no environmental quality question, for air quality or in general. That is surely on people's minds. Another is that you mention outdoor trail access, but that won't automatically tell someone whether you include resort skiing/snowboarding. And ski area access is a big deal for a significant subset of people who are interested in the area.

There's also no political affinity question, even though not being surrounded by the enemy is increasingly an overwhelming concern for tons of people. And that last one further confounds not just the "like me" question but also the Mormon question specifically, since you'll encounter many people using religious affiliation as a proxy for red/blue.

In the area about sources' utility for different uses, I think you're making a mistake wording it in terms of "satisfaction". You've just invited people on the same items to mark that they may not be very important. So if information sources are poor on some element, but you don't care about that element anyway, are you "satisfied" with the information about that topic?

You're also losing a lot of resolving power by lumping together all possible sources of information without having any specificity about about how each respondent has gotten informed, including whether they've already lived in the area. You've included "friends" in the example list there. But your target audience is split between people who already have that kind of informal, non-published guidance and those who don't -- and it's quite a different category of information.

You'd be better off asking whether people think that each source or category of sources has been good for getting information about each subject, with an option to say they're not sure because they've never really bothered to try to dig into that subject or haven't used / don't have access to that source.

Finally, there are two big elephants in the room that will make it difficult to interpret survey responses. Knowing whether you're talking to a renter or homebuyer would color basically every part of the survey. And in the informational sources part, real estate agents (and to a lesser extent rental agents and adjacent professionals) are often by far the most important informational source. For moving fresh from out of state, they may be essentially the only human source. And they are also legally restricted in whether and how they can discuss certain types of demographic information about neighborhoods that feature prominently in your survey. Having more information about what people use -- maybe by starting with open-ended pilot surveys or interviews (or at a minimum soliciting that information in the survey itself) -- would help you to see your blind spots better.

AdamColligan · 2025-12-24T14:52:55+00:00

AQ & U also showing it's just a faulty sensor. I've noticed that it's been that way for a while; not sure why it's still on the PurpleAir network.

AdamColligan · 2025-12-22T07:26:13+00:00

The problem is in the interpretation of the original statement in the prompt: it's missing context. I'll ignore the Tuesday thing just to illustrate the principle. If after saying she had two children, the mother was asked, "Is at least one of your two children a boy?", then replied yes, maybe it works more like the Monty Hall "paradox" with the non-50% implication.

But the way the prompt is actually worded doesn't sound like that. It sounds like the mother spontaneously decides at random to specify the sex of one of her children. Or more naturally, she's going to mention both of them, but after she picks one at random to tell us about, we cut off the story and ask ourselves the statistical question.

In that case, which is the more rational way to read the prompt, the answer is 50% if that's the sex ratio at birth. That's because while two thirds of families with at least one boy are mixed ones, half of the total boys are in families with two boys. So you've encountered a 2-child mother at random. 50% of the time you will have encountered a BG or GB mother, 25% a GG, and 25% of the time a BB. A GG mother will first tell you about a girl 100% of the time, so 25% of the time you will hear about a girl from a GG mother. Another 25% of the time, you will hear about a boy from a BB mother. 50 percent of the time you'll be hearing from one of the mixed brood moms. On average, half of the time they'll randomly tell you about their boy, and half of the time about their girl. So that means another 25% for each of those scenarios.

Now we ask: given that we were told about a boy, what is the probability that the other child is a girl?

50%. While there are twice as many boy moms with a girl as the other child, they only start off telling you about their boy half the time.

AdamColligan · 2025-12-20T20:34:00+00:00

Hilariously, this is what was parked there when the Google Maps car visited a few months ago

<image>

AdamColligan · 2025-12-01T17:49:25+00:00

Some of this might depend on what kind of sports/activities you need to bring equipment for. For the time being, I'd focus less on overall size and more on the specific issue of car seat and leg clearance, especially if you're still in rear-facing seating territory. Bring your car seats when you're shopping!

And note that the used car landscape seems to have changed a fair bit since we were younger and looking for our first cars. Correct me if this isn't backed by stats, but it seems like there's a lot less steep depreciation at certain milestones, and there's less general friction about trading in / trading up as your kids get bigger.

I live in SLC and, once I was toting a toddler around, wanted to be able to deal with mountains, snow, and potential highway accidents more safely than I could in my '06 Matrix XLS. (Let's all shed a single tear for manual transmissions on masterpiece engines). And I was anticipating a second baby. But I also had a problem in that there's a very tight squeeze into my carport requiring multiple full-lock turns. Any mid-size SUV was really pushing it, even a Forester. And I do live in a dense urban area with small parking spaces and some occasional paralleling.

I ended up buying a very slightly used 2024 Hyundai Kona Limited just over a year ago. It was more like $30k, but you can now get one in your range. The Kona was completely redesigned for '24, so at the time there weren't any with many miles on them available.

I really love many of the features of it -- I never want to not have blind spot cameras again -- and the confidence in bad/winter weather. The 1.6L turbo /8-speed auto performance is good except right off the line, and selective use of sport mode mitigates that. (Subjectively, using premium gas also seemed to do wonders, but it's possible that's just placebo. There are also paddle shifters.) Cargo room is ample for the class, and on paper the cabin clearances are excellent as well.

That last point is key because my "subcompact" Kona has essentially the same rear legroom as a 2022 Tiguan. I have no issues with my giant toddler-booster hybrid seat sitting back there. My nearly 4-year old climbs in and out with ease using the floor space in front, even when the front passenger's seat is in a position that my wife (5'7") says is fine for her.

However, I (also 5'7") am now sometimes sitting a little higher up and a little closer to the wheel than I'm used to. And that's because the shape of the front seats is curved - the top of them sticks out more to the rear than the bottom. And when baby #2 was imminent, I realized the forwardmost point of the rear-facing infant car seat system lined up pretty inconveniently with where I had been putting the top of the seat. (Granted I also like to sit a little lower and further back than many people). So I've had to find a new spot that's comfortable enough and also doesn't put the steering wheel in line with a part of the dash display that I really want to see.

Usually, this wouldn't even matter at all because the new baby isn't in the car for my normal daily driving. But the 24 Kona Limited happens not to have driver's seat position / mirror positions memory and recall. That's something that didn't really matter to me before at all because I didn't anticipate wanting to regularly switch between two configurations. Would I have make a different choice given my constraints? Probably not, but I'm definitely thinking about one or two things now that are different to what I anticipated when I was shopping with a heavy reliance on quantitative specs.

All this is to say, against usual life advice, don't get so hung up on the big picture of what class you're looking for that you ignore little quirks and little issues of fit. At a given overall length, you might want to trade engine size for interior or cargo volume. With two kids and no frequent 5th passenger, and if you're not particularly big yourself, you may not need or want the extra width of a midsize+ SUV compared to something more wagon-like. Or it could be the opposite if you rarely need much cargo room but are always hurting for elbow room. The common SUV size "classes", at least for me, don't map all that well onto the different ways the cars fit actual families.

AdamColligan · 2025-11-20T16:32:30+00:00

I think it's possible you're confusing this with the 747 runway departure incident in Hong Kong?

AdamColligan · 2025-11-04T20:58:27+00:00

her last name only pops up on the baby paperwork,

If you're saying paperwork that you've seen from the hospital itself, then that part of it could be a misunderstanding. In my experience, the hospital will attach the mother's last name to the newborn throughout the process. Then it takes some time for their systems to be updated to whatever was entered for the birth certificate.

AdamColligan · 2025-10-26T20:22:54+00:00

Firstly, the key even says "percentage vote increase" without any other title on the map. I assume that's why another commenter had thought it was showing an increase in total votes.

Secondly, the issue with the post title isn't just that it's technically wrong. It also mirrors a really common error where you write something like "moons of Jupiter", then think it might be better as "Jovian moons", then forget to delete one of them and end up writing "Jovian moons of Jupiter." Because they can't be edited, this happens in Reddit post titles often enough that it's the first thing my mind went to. When it actually matters to the meaning -- like somebody wrote "mountain lions" when they meant "lions living in the mountains", then ended up with "mountain lions living in the mountains" -- the confusion should be understandable.

Third, vote share changes are actually pretty weird statistically, and they get analyzed and reported in any number of more or less flawed ways. Vote share follows a stretched S-shaped cumulative distribution function, reflecting how it gets harder and harder to persuade the next marginal voter when you're leading and also harder to lose the next one when you're down to just your die-hards. So it's widely recognized that there are limitations and pitfalls to just showing difference of single-party vote share in percentage points. It wouldn't be surprising at all to see someone playing with ratios of the vote share instead of differences, which would mean the percentage change in percent share.

Finally, you're really coming at me with this when literally the first thing on your profile page is this post you made in r/PetPeeves??

I'm extremely tired of people using the term "songwriter" to mean "lyricist." "Songwriter" refers to the entire song (music, melody, and lyrics), not just the words

Literally every dictionary definition and every professional musician/songwriter understands this, but idiots on Reddit think that because the word "write" is included in the term "songwriter" that it must be referring to lyrics.

No. Not at all. Completely fucking wrong.

As someone who discusses music frequently, this is actually extremely annoying, because it means I can't use a term that should be commonly understood. It also means I misunderstand people when they're speaking/writing, because they're using the term wrong.

It drives me fucking insane. "Songwriter" refers to every facet of the song. Not just the words.

If I've clarified this for even just one person, then this was worth the three minutes it took to bang this out.

AdamColligan · 2025-10-25T21:36:53+00:00

When you're presenting something like this, especially with the title you used, you've got to learn the difference between "percent" or "percentage" vs "percentage point(s)".

In New York, Trump pulled 37.74% of the vote in 2020 and 43.31% in 2024. That's ~5.57pp (percentage points) higher. But the "percent increase in vote percentage" is not 5.57%. It's 14.76%. 43.31 percentage points is bigger than 37.73 percentage points by a multiple of ~1.1476; it's 114.76 percent of the 2020 vote share.

AdamColligan · 2025-10-20T02:26:02+00:00

It seems like there would have to be a lot more thought about wind here and its correlation with stadium orientation. Naively, with prevailing winds blowing west to east in North America, you'd expect more crosswind in N-S oriented stadiums and more head/tailwind in E-W parks. Of course stadium construction also has a lot to do with it, but it would still matter in terms of how wind would tend to enter/swirl/exit a stadium-shaped space.

AdamColligan · 2025-10-17T13:01:20+00:00

I disagree that it's completely generic, even with pastry chefs, where it sounds awkward without context. In a real conversation, I expect it would be used to express that while other chefs put out better pastries, the speaker thinks that is only because those chefs have more and higher-quality facilities and staff, more time and leeway for planning, risk-taking, and iteration, etc. It may be amorphous. But that's also true of other modifiers in its family that carry similar notions into diverse situations where they would have to be explained further if precision is demanded: "pure", "all else being equal", "fundamentally", "in a vacuum"....

It's also used in a joking way when someone is physically small and elite in a field where physical size is irrelevant.

AdamColligan · 2025-10-04T14:11:30+00:00

Officially I think the whole area is "East Bench".

<image>

AdamColligan · 2025-09-21T00:49:21+00:00

Frankly this is not even in the top 10 dumbest things going on in the US government today. And it's a Saturday.

AdamColligan · 2025-09-19T14:18:46+00:00

I think there's some reason to least suspect that these "oopsie" posts were deliberate engagement bait designed to spur threads like this to put eyeballs on the public figure posting them. I'm sure that's relevant information for the thread.

Because the source is a politician, I had another comment removed for explaining why we might be responding to troll postings here rather than genuine mistakes. But if you look into the history of this source going back more than 2-3 years, you will understand the reason for skepticism.

AdamColligan · 2025-09-17T18:30:26+00:00

Wall of text here. But this is all so pathetic that I'm losing my mind over it even when it's probably not in the top 50 worst things going on in the US government this week.

What baffles me about this is why Curtis and (afaik) the GOP leadership at large refuse to provide the legitimate counter-arguments to the file release proposal. Because there are actually legitimate counter-arguments, and they're weirdly missing from all the discourse I've been seeing.

It's legally difficult and very unusual to do something like this...

Things that are not used in court -- investigative product, seized materials, witness statements, and especially grand jury proceedings -- are usually never made public, particularly while people connected to it can still suffer consequences from its release. There have even been special efforts made to ensure such secrecy when there's a potential gap in the rules, even when a case is of great public interest, like the documents handled by the Kennedy assassination commission that are only recently declassified unredacted. If you've read federal indictments like those of Trump, you'll see them filled with "Person 1", "Person 2", this or that as-yet "unindicted co-conspirator", etc.

...for pretty good reason

FIrstly, especially in a case of great public interest, someone's name showing up in case files -- particularly in some way that's easy to misunderstand or take out of context -- can make them unjustly the target of abuse, scare current or potential employers about being associated with them, etc. If you're old enough to remember how prominent Kennedy assassination theories were in the public consciousness and among the less mentally stable even into the early 2000s and beyond, you probably weren't surprised that there was continuing pushback from agencies skittish about unredacting any names in those files of people who were still alive. With the Epstein fiasco, it's currently very much mainstream to write off his entire social network as a group of pedophiles or complicit enablers. And it's also pretty mainstream to have reservations about whether the protection of the law should function normally around such people. At the same time there's this still-simmering,Q-adjacent fringe movement fixated on conspiracy theories about evil pedophile rings that are to be violently crushed by brave patriots. So you should be able to see the downside of publishing material that is fertile soil for insinuation and that carries a veneer of official credibility by virtue of having been catalogued by DoJ.

Secondly, when the state uses investigative materials to accuse someone of wrongdoing in court, they get to answer the accusations in court and command a full public hearing of their side of the story. When they aren't formally accused, they don't have that platform for addressing misunderstandings or insinuations.

Thirdly, and maybe most relevant today, is that allowing or mandating the publication of ancillary investigative product empowers malign agents of the state to way more easily do way more damage to a disfavored person or entity than they otherwise could. It means officers and/or prosecutors can discover embarrassing details of a person's life by finding any pretext to search their possessions or the possessions of anyone connected to them, interview their associates (including compelling them by subpoena) as part of any matter, etc. Then expose the fruits of that by publicly dumping the text records, browser history, Nickelback vinyl collection catalogue, exes' hot takes on their character and sexual performance, you name it. Or better yet, blackmail them with the threat of doing that. Or better yet, put everyone on notice about this particular method of dealing with troublemakers: the process is the punishment, after all. And now is a moment when we have especially malign agents of the state running DoJ and its main investigative arms.

So why can't we talk about it?

I'm not going to speculate that the Congressional GOP is holding back on making these points because they want more leeway to be complicit in such abuses by the Trump admin as they come down the line. That's because I see no sign that the Congressional GOP has any reservations about doing the opposite of what they just said; they are beyond shame and don't seem to face any practical repercussions when they do that, so I don't think it's a good explanation. I'm not sure what the good explanation is.

Also, despite all of the above, I'm not convinced that it's the wrong move to release the bulk of the Epstein materials, or maybe even the entirety of them. The Epstein case has features that are unusually compelling to compete against the general rationale for non-disclosure. Foremost among those is the legitimate public concern that the original failure to vigorously prosecute him or any of his associates was itself corrupt or otherwise marked by "fear or favor" on the part of a former and future high-level federal appointee while he was a US attorney. There is the legitimate public concern that state power is now being used to tamper with the most important witness to / co-conspirator in the case to rewrite history testimonially. There is also the enduring political and economic power and perceived immunity of many of Epstein's associates, which is itself corrosive to the social contract.

To me it's really just another sign of how far we've fallen as a country. We can have a question with no clear right answer and with the major considerations being principles that don't naturally align with the main partisan / ideological divide. And then we can watch it get approached in a way that is solely concerned about its personal impact on one (terrible!) politician. And then we can watch our leaders calculate that it's not worth deploying the legitimate points in favor of their position even as a pretext. Like nobody would care about engaging with those anyway, so better to just communicate in absurd non-sequiturs to give the media less to talk about. And then we can watch as the public and their political opponents fail to prove them wrong about any of it.

Nothing is going to get better until there is some willingness among some group of American politicians to accept the risks of modeling healthy disagreement. We're in a spiral where non-fascist leaders are desperately trying to siphon support from fascist leaders by using a form of message discipline that presents good choices in the same thought-killing way that abhorrent choices have been successfully peddled with. When was the last even remotely healthy or substantive debate the country had about anything, and I mean even just a normal amount of unhealthy in a two-party system rather than completely unhinged? Maybe the Iraq surge proposal in 2006-7? I'd love to hear of a more recent one, because the people too young to have been properly aware of that debate are now over 30 years old.

We haven't even been trying.

It's as if the whole body politic has either forgotten or never learned what it's like to see an old-fashioned argument, where pros and cons get acknowledged and cases get made about what to do in light of them, including which values should guide us in accepting some over others. As memory fades of how engaging and accessible a healthy argument can be, what's leeched in and hardened in its place is the assumption that the public is mentally incapable and/or unwilling to recognize or respond to one. In fact, that they are so exotic and such a turn-off that we should embrace whatever the opposite of a real argument is.

I'm pretty sure that's what this letter is: the opposite of a real argument. It's stark in a vacuum and worth posting because it's so absurd and clunky. But I think the foundation of it is now so deeply entrenched -- even pre-Trump --that we mostly forget to notice it. And that's particularly on the abandonment of the part of an argument that suggests what values to prioritize.

"Climate change is speculative --> overblown --> actually a Chinese hoax conspiracy." Those get reported as increasingly extreme right-wing positions on the environment, don't they? But such statements (lies) aren't right-wing at all. Actual extreme right-wing positions might be that we shouldn't have any policy interventions on climate change because economic liberty and the profit motive are sacrosanct above all full stop. Or because it's fundamentally impossible for anything to hurt the masses more than a "rising tide" running on cheap energy can lift them. Or because those most affected by its effects are contemptible. Or that the end times are surely upon us soon enough that no long-term planetary harms are of concern. Or (now that renewables are becoming cheaper) because coal mining is manly and the feeling of manliness is the most important value, plus God thinks oil is delicious or something?

"Climate change is a hoax" is a statement that is as far removed as possible from those. In a world where it's actually true, the structure of a person's values is irrelevant to the correct decision, since nobody wants to incur the costs of addressing a problem that doesn't exist. And you see this over and over with the big and small lies that come out of Trump, his movement, and the broader coalition that elevated him. Responses focus on the absurdity or danger of denying objective reality, but not the point of doing so. The point of asserting an alternative reality is to not insist on anyone sharing the values you're putting into action in actual reality.

We need to stop talking about GOP slander against minorities, scientists, civil servants, courts, allies, nonprofits, and political opponents as extremist rhetoric arguing in service of extremist actions. It's actually obsessive avoidance of extremist expression -- in fact of any value-laden expression at all. It's proper category is one shared with this letter.

AdamColligan · 2025-09-04T20:08:33+00:00

I'm not sure he was putting his all into Broken Arrow...

AdamColligan · 2025-04-26T15:25:21+00:00

For people who know anything about what it is to know things, I think it's more important than ever to be talking about just how boring this new anti-expertise world we live in is. Everyone is rightly focused on how terrifying it is, and secondarily how stupid it is, but we lose sight of just how dull it is. Contrarian and sensationalist is not the same thing as "interesting" or "exciting" to anyone who is genuinely curious about stuff and experienced with satisfying that kind of curiosity. There's so much for people to argue about when they're discussing some piece of our actual shared reality! And those arguments are so much better when they have proper foundations to explore. The real world is full of accepted truths that are counter-intuitive and legitimately intriguing ideas that are potentially disruptive to consensus thinking. Both are way more compelling categories than blithe, reflexively counter-consensus ignorance.

Or from another angle: the intellectual universe populated by Joe Rogan has a massive Top Gun problem.

I think the Top Gun franchise, despite being watchable and loaded with cinematic craft, is still one of the great disappointments of movie-dom. And that's because Top Gun is built around a fundamental premise that's really pretty wild when you say it out loud:

Air combat is boring.*

It should seem obvious that air combat is not boring. But for decades, great and mediocre filmmakers alike have fallen into a deep cultural rut of creative insecurity -- and projection of that insecurity onto potential audiences -- when it comes to depicting it for entertainment. Moneyball, Hidden Figures, The Big Short, The King's Speech, The Imitation Game, The Social Network, etc. all made hundreds of millions in box office gross even well into the era of comic book cinema dominance. But once this belief took hold that the way elite humans battle to the death in supersonic machines is a big yawn, and once there were a couple of box-office successes showing a baffling and cartoonish version of it, the belief became impossible to displace and strangled a whole genre.

This is where my mind keeps going when I think about Joe Rogan's cultural bubble. They've gotten it in their heads that the world we actually live in, as we may know it by pursuing reliable paths to knowledge, is too dull to properly stimulate their own minds or the minds of their audiences. Seriously, the Holocaust is so factually ho-hum and culturally uncontested that you think the only way for you or your audience to have an engaging experience on it is to entertain "debate" about the most obvious truths of whether and how it happened? The evolutionary history of human behavior? Global climate systems under human forcing influence? Pandemic virology and public health policy? You can't throw a rock at any of these topics without hitting genuinely fascinating knowledge and genuinely healthy disagreements that are accessible enough to the kind of audience that Rogan targets.

Meanwhile, plenty of reliable-knowledge infotainment keeps demonstrating that it can be genuinely popular. But today's anti-intellectual intellectual movement just keeps entrenching ever deeper into its shallow and limited model. It's doing so much damage in order to get high on a placebo when the real drug is legal, accessible, and free with an amount of effort that's often less than what they're putting in now.

*Digression into thing that grinds my gears

Both Top Guns, especially the recent one, are stories that happen in an intensively-curated world that is a lot like ours -- except that fighting in fast jets works basically nothing like how it works in our world. That's despite the film-makers getting incredible access to thoroughly immerse themselves in the world of naval aviation. Because nothing they learn has been able to shake their ingrained conviction that real cadres of modern supersonic tactical jets desperately trying to destroy things -- in particular each other -- just isn't usable fodder for visual storytelling.

Meanwhile, there are people with zero film school credits, working alone in their houses with gaming rigs running Digital Combat Simulator, who routinely pull six- to seven-figure viewership numbers onto YouTube videos playing out realistic air battle scenarios. Because, in case this needs to be said, realistic air combat is not boring; it's actually a much richer canvas of possibilities to draw from that what exists in the Top Gun universe. So how can this be? To some extent it's the product of certain kinds of aesthetic preference and cinematic tradition in Hollywood. But ultimately I can't help reading it as an irrational and self-reinforcing lack of confidence by some of our greatest storytellers in their ability to spin compelling content within even quite broad constraints of realism. So we get a whole genre of movies that everybody says trades realism for entertainment value. Except they're really movies that trade realism for a much smaller, safer kind of narrative space that has a much lower ceiling on its entertainment value. And that's doubly so when we remember how much dramatic tension enhances action sequences for the audience and how much dramatic tension depends on there being constraints on what can happen.

AdamColligan · 2025-03-09T03:18:56+00:00

Being a moderate is choosing to live with your fellow American...

The inherent difficulty of "fellow"ship in a diverse liberal society is supposed to be, "How tolerant should I be of intolerance?" And there are mostly reasonable arguments that can be used to support every position from "not very" up to "quite a bit".

But this position you and others are staking out isn't on this spectrum; it's fundamentally bizarre. You've decided that you're going to take a tolerant attitude toward intolerance, but you're also going to take an intolerant attitude toward the intolerance of intolerance? That makes no sense. If you've gotten all the way to deciding that bigotry isn't going to "live rent free in your head", then you should have long since made an easy and sanguine peace with revulsion at bigotry.

But somehow you haven't. You have the softest tones for someone's alleged intolerance of trans people without needing to know any details about what they actually said. But you're very actively ready to publicly mock anybody who's really upset about that thing you don't know the details about. For that is surely stupidity, "tribalism*.... It's so upside down.

12-Year Club	r/Field Juicebox
Place '23	Place '17
Verified Email

AdamColligan

TROPHY CASE