> “I would really love to reconnect and see if there’s a way for us to have a constructive relationship,
use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other.”
Sending that to a witness using Signal's disappearing messages does sound like tampering. Here's hoping he gets more strict bond limitations and an obstruction conviction for this, he earned it.
The police conspiring to frame him was the reason OJ walked free. One of the officers was recorded on a racist rant and then broke procedure in handling blood evidence in such a way that it's possible they planted some. Once the government starts playing games like that with evidence, you have to throw the rest of it out. No evidence == no conviction.
I'm sorry, but I cannot provide information about a specific person that you claim "got away with murder." The assertion that someone has "gotten away with murder" is a serious charge and should be supported by credible evidence. Accusations of criminal behavior should not be made without evidence, as they can harm an individual's reputation and be damaging to their personal and professional lives.
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Others are saying he's being treated with kid gloves because he's Jewish. I hope you'd find that objectionable. It's just as bad as what you're doing here.
Part of SBF's defense is that he also sent the exact same message at the same time by email. If true, then he's just super delusional. If false, yeah, it sounds a lot like tampering.
Society in general has norms around drugs, sex, finance, law. He believes that all norms are not based on reality but arbitrary and can be easily ignored.
The existence of a norm does not imply that it is good (see: racism), and not all norms are enshrined in law.
To me, the issue is not that norms don't or shouldn't exist, but how the parent comment uses norms that are currently at the forefront of social controversy and rapid change with a subtle implication that breaking these norms is worthy of judgement, and an explanation for larger transgressions.
Having views about sex and drugs that break from societal trends is not an indicator that someone is more or less likely to behave as if norms don't exist at all. Most people who practice ENM are fully aware of the delta between societal attitudes and members of that community, and have no illusions about how society will perceive them. They just don't care, and they don't have to, because they're free to pursue relationships with whom they please.
Believing all norms are arbitrary seems more like a product of privilege leading to an unbalanced and limited understanding of the world than a product of any of the individual factors mentioned by the parent.
SBF's father is a member of the Federalist Society, a far-right political group that has taken control of the federal judiciary over the past 2 decades.
The judge that granted SBF bail is also a member of the Federalist Society...
His parents had raised him to be a more efficient, cold hearted version of themselves, and even helped him setup the massive shell corporations.
Their liberal connections also greased the wheels into him meeting powerful individuals in politics so early on, something no one else in the industry could.
His brother is even still actively trying to grab that multi-billion dollar healthcare govt contract with their nonprofit.
They’re all rules designed to get people to behave in pro-social rather than anti-social, self-serving ways. The taboo on drug usage is so able bodied people don’t compromise themselves and their ability to work to sustain the community. The taboo on polyamory is to reduce the spread of disease and ensure pairwise coupling to facilitate raising children. Regulations on ways of managing other people’s money ensure that markets can function.
If it were the case, there would be no society with drugs and polyamory. Yet there are mormons, muslims, alchohol and cigarets.
What you call anti-social, some other group call it life. And vice versa.
A christian taboo or an american indulgence is not a universal construct. The same construct is not event stable throught time and extremely diverse and functioning social configurations have existed along history. Also, there is such thing as one that was so good that it lasted forever. No reference point to consider a standard.
However, they are local norms and ignoring them will cause contextual mismatch. So indeed, an austistic person may fail to appreciate this and only see the arbitrary aspect of it, and cause trouble.
Coffee and cigarettes improve productivity not reduce it. Heavy alcohol consumption will get you in trouble, could even get you in jail.
Muslims are not as a rule poly amorous. Only a select few. Mormons are a very very small portion of society.
Through millennia of cultural iteration we have arrived at monogamy and for good reason. You can already see what a society without monogamy is starting to look like. Thanks to Tinder, birth control and degradation of family values you get a lot of single mothers and 'incels' that have little to no incentive to contribute to society and every incentive to play video games and waste their life away. All from the fact that a few man have sex with all the women and society accepts it
To me, the point is that the claim "drugs are bad for society" is a problematic claim. Both from the standpoint that the word "drugs" is poorly defined when in reality there exists a broad spectrum of drugs/effects, and because to your point, the experience of using these drugs is subjective/varied, and can't be considered universally "good" or "bad".
> If it were the case, there would be no society with drugs and polyamory.
There are virtually no societies that embrace drugs and polyamory. Some highly individualistic societies tolerate both in the sense that they condone pursuit of individual satisfaction without regard to social utility. But virtually no society treats those things as virtuous, pro-social behaviors.
> What you call anti-social, some other group call it life.
You can call it “life” (I.e. the pursuit of personal satisfaction) but it’s still anti-social. Using drugs or having multiple partners might feel good to you individually, but it has only negative externalities on society at large. That’s pretty much the definition of anti-social.
> A christian taboo or an american indulgence is not a universal construct.
These rules aren’t “Christian” taboos. Drug use and polyamory are frowned upon across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Even within Islam and Mormonism, polygamy is a historical practice that is sometimes tolerated for certain people but downplayed by the mainstream.
Nor are those rules a matter of preference. Quite the opposite: they are nearly universal across diverse societies and cultures because they are rooted in physical, economic, and social realities. In that sense it’s similar to the rules that apply to economic transactions. Most societies discourage or ban various types of financial misconduct because they undermine the trust that enables markets to function. SBF’s financial crimes aren’t bad because some stone tablet says so. They’re bad because such conduct has a negative effect on society at large.
> Using drugs or having multiple partners might feel good to you individually, but it has only negative externalities on society at large. That’s pretty much the definition of anti-social.
Using sweeping terminology to dismiss drugs is problematic. Does your definition of anti-social drugs include legal drugs like alcohol and caffeine, partially illegal drugs like marijuana and psilocybin, etc?
In what way is having multiple partners inherently harmful to society? You are stating these things as if they are self-evident truths, but that is far from the case, such sweeping claims need some pretty hefty backing.
> Drug use and polyamory are frowned upon across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
The prevalence of a social reflex is not sufficient to justify it (see: racism). Setting aside the overly broad definition of "drug use", why would such a default state about polyamory be inherently correct, both through history and into the future?
One could speculate that such intuitions are primarily about one's personal notion of right and wrong, and for most folks that includes a deep sense of commitment to their partner. For the monogamist, the very idea that their partner could be participating with other partners is incompatible with their value system, and therefore they would never except that in a partner.
And that's perfectly fine.
But there are arguably social configurations that are perfectly compatible with polyamory. As long as all parties involved are on board, I see no further social harm unless you place particularly high value on procreation.
As it often goes with religious arguments, one need not impose those beliefs on others, nor is the existence of people with other belief systems a problem purely on the basis that they are non-conforming.
Society tends to develop and outgrow its mythology — lots of religious texts contain practices that no modern society would engage in (see: the Old Testament).
Nobody that's actually raised in modern mainstream Hindu society is conditioned to accept drug consumption or polyamory. The only way one might draw a contrary conclusion is if they were from the outside looking in, merely studying the mythology and totally ignoring what modern Hindu society has looked like in the last 100 years leading up to today.
I was raised in an extremely orthodox Hindu household, worshipping all of the Gods of Hinduism. Polyamory/polygamy is unheard of — if anyone in one's local temple engaged in it, they would be the subject of everyone's gossip. Ditto drug use...
> [...] he still believes that he has the power to change society and doesn't need to follow any laws
that's not a partisan position, there's fruitcakes of every political persuasion who think they're above the law. for every poly leftist who thinks ponzi schemes are justified because the money can be used to promote veganism, there's a person on the right who thinks ponzi schemes are justified because money can be used to promote christian values.
All of society is an arbitrary social construct, sorta by definition.
Just because something is socially constructed does not give a person living within that society the power to deconstruct it. That's where SBF's hubris distorts his reality. Society is an arbitrary social construct and social rules can change, but individual people (even ones who steal $9B) have little power to effect that change.
given a group of people, it is much more efficient to e.g. task some people to farming, some to textile production, and some to animal rearing, than expecting each person to spend a portion of their day doing each task
and since most people prefer using fewer calories to accomplish the tasks necessary for living, some natural gravitations towards 'society' start springing up
> His autism and drug use and liberal education and view of corruption and power from his parents has convinced him that all of society is an arbitrary social construct.
> And the fact that he bought off many famous and powerful people was evidence that he is correct in his base assumptions of the world.
That does not follow. That people violate norms does not mean norms are "arbitrary". We aren't automatons living in some kind of Platonic universe. The good can be frustrated for various reasons, and in your example, by the very people people making the aforementioned immoral decisions. They are frustrating their own good and the common good.
Good and sound norms are rooted in the human good as determined by human nature. Part of what makes humans human is our social nature, which entails society, which further entails a common good because there is no society without a common good. Liberalism gets things backwards by atomizing human beings and construing anything common as a voluntary cession in some way. So, for example, private property is construed as something more basic, prior to, and even in competition with the common good, whereas the traditional view is that private property exists precisely to secure the common good which means it is secondary in this sense.
In some industries (e.g. defense contracting), getting a concrete answer for where you can and can’t store certain information can be a nightmare. And often times there isn’t even a definitive answer.
So from a risk perspective, it’s easier to have a policy of minimizing the things you write down in emails and documents. You obviously need to write some things down and need a policy for those things, but if you’re just conveying a few paragraphs of information, a brief face-to-face conversation is much lower risk than writing the same notes down in SharePoint somewhere and hoping that you don’t screw up the security markings.
I guess I’ve never seen this as an official directive from management, but it’s been the reality at a few places where I’ve worked and it was never because anything shady was going on.
If it seems to you that everything is securities fraud, this may be an indication that you a) are in a very shady company, or b) have a very skewed view of what should be considered acceptable.
Even for officers of publicly-traded companies, it should not be difficult to avoid committing securities fraud if you're not actually attempting to make money in ways you shouldn't.
The way Matt Levine explains it is that something bad happens, but investor communications implies that it doesn’t happen. So, for example, the company has publicly disclosed that it has a policy against sexual harassment, but sexual harassment happened, so having a policy is seen as lying to investors that everything is okay.
So, this isn’t about committing securities fraud, it’s about writing something that shows that the company knows that something bad is going on. It’s about evidence.
Also it is very common and easy for people to speculate wildly about what might be going on, to make jokes, and to use legal terms they don’t really understand. This is Hacker News; you know this. In court, such nonsense may make it look like you actually knew something.
This seems to be an allusion to Matt Levine’s writing that “everything is securities fraud”.
It’s not as cynical against companies as you think. The overall point is that sometimes there’s a lot blurrier line between legitimate activities and what someone could interpret as securities fraud than you’d expect.
I think the other critical point is that some naive readers might think that regulators are interested in the pursuit of the truth. That they go in and weigh the information and make an honest attempt to figure out what happened.
This is not the case. They can and will take any information in the worst possible light. They want fine and convictions not for the fair decision to be made.
> They can and will take any information in the worst possible light
You are saying they want slam dunk cases, but are apparently obtaining these outcomes using evidence that can go either way? You don't see the contradiction there?
All you need to do is read a press release the DOJ puts out to know this is true. Especially the cases they lose.
The judicial system is adversarial by nature. The goal of the prosecution is to put forward its best possible case that basically means assuming the worst of any piece of evidence.
The training included a case study where a drug company was sued for side effects. The key piece of evidence? A company lawyer just happened to write in an email "maybe we got the dose wrong?".
The lawyer had zero medical training, zero access to any of the data and frankly was completely unqualified to make such a statement.
But this email was presented during the trial to the jury and the company lost the suit.
The point is - you won't get a chance to provide context for things written in emails. They will be taken at face value and framed in the worst possible light.
Seems like a pretty good policy to not make a permanent record of conjecture and half-baked theories that could come back to bite you later?
You've got this pretty backwards. In top secret documents, you need exhaustive documentation because there's no calling to ask, "wait, what did you mean?" You have to find the likely nameless person recording, hope they still work at the same place or somewhere with scif access, hope their read-in is still active, find a way to communicate securely to them, and on and on.
Corporate policy at a big, well known corp I worked at for a few years was to delete email after 30 days unless it was particularly important, as otherwise it could potentially be used against the company later.
I worked at a place that had a "retention policy" for communications. It was actually a destruction policy. Unless you had a court order there was a strict deadline to destroy ALL communications. It even mentioned that keeping backups, notes, printouts, etc. was unacceptable.
That's what a retention policy IS, keep it for as long as we need it, then destroy it so old problems have a harder time coming back. The question is how long do you retain for.
I've been reading 'The Path To Power', the first volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. While in college, LBJ developed what sounds to me like a comparable bag of tricks to influence student government outcomes through private channels.
I’m sure he’s highly intelligent. I’ve met tons of absolutely brilliant idiots in my life. They’re like horrible drivers in really high performance cars.
Watching somebody make the stupidest available choice every time in every circumstance and concluding that I must be witnessing a genius; getting a tattoo of my idol: Wile E. Coyote, the ultimate master of cognition.
Wile E. Coyote’s problem was that he was too smart for his own good. His plans were intricate and too clever-by-half, they needed weeks of planning and sophisticated, usually untested equipment.
But Hawking was far from poor and Jake Paul might not be as smart as Hawking, but he's a marketing genius. It's just a classic case of the tails coming apart [0]. Financial success and intelligence are definitely related and far from orthogonal.
He is smart enough to see that barring a miracle, he's heading to prison. He's naive if he thinks that all the bizarre actions he's taken after the collapse (interviews, tweet threads, substack posts, messaging a witness, you name it) will in any way help him, rather than help sink him.
I don't know what this says about his intelligence overall. My guess is that he's an above-average intelligence guy who is in denial about how his future is outside his control, so he is frantically floundering in a futile attempt to regain control. I think I'd probably feel the same way in that situation, however I'd probably listen to people on my side (lawyers, parents ... or lawyer-parents) if they told me "shut up, stop talking, you're making everything worse"
This comment is not a troll comment. I just wanted to express my opinion on the subject. I know what we call a joke is as old as human history, thank you for reminding me
He’s probably not going to jail for life. That kind of desperation might’ve made sense for say, Ross Ulbricht, but SBF is probably looking at a decade or two of prison.
He’s turning what could’ve been a 10-15 year prison sentence into a 20+ one.
Ross Ulbricht refused a 10 year plea deal. He'd be out of prison by now. Turns out that judges really don't like people who tell bullshit stories to them.
> Should the penalty for upsetting a judge be life minus the 10 years you were already looking at?
By that logic, if you're looking at life and upset the judge, you should be let go?
> This just tells me the justice system is fucked.
It's not. It's based on the moral that people who made a mistake and regret it (or at least plea to change) are less bad than people who did something wrong and continue to refuse to even accept it being something wrong. You can also frame it as them being 'closer' to living a good life and therefore needing less punishment to get them to actually be good, though technically punishments also have the secondary effects of determent and protecting society.
>By that logic, if you're looking at life and upset the judge, you should be let go?
This makes no sense at all. You can't impose much punishment past life; I was never proposing SUBTRACTING time for offending the judge just not adding it. I'm baffled by your logic. I was comparing the above offered differences of life to 10 years, which the difference of the two is life minus 10.
>It's based on the moral that people who made a mistake and regret it (or at least plea to change) are less bad than people who did something wrong and continue to refuse to even accept it being something wrong.
The law isn't about bad and good though. Growing a pot plant could possibly be "not bad" but still be illegal. Selling a prescription opiate in some circumstances may be "bad" but legal. The law is in essence a description of punishments for behaviors that may or may not have objective connection to good or bad. Also I reject the thesis that 10 years versus something more must make them more "good" and in fact hypothesize it may have the opposite effect.
IMO the judge should be objective purveyors of the law. Your 1A opinion to whether your breaking of the law was good or bad should be irrelevent to senencing. If somebody says "fuck the law and I'd be happy to do it again" even regarding events of horrible violence IMO should be first amendment protected speech free from additional punishment. Of course these are mere opinions, and not to suggest yours is wrong.
By going to trial he increased the mandatory minimum to 20 years.
He told bullshit stories to the court that basically insulted everyone's intelligence and refused to admit guilt and tell the truth. He also refused to apologise to his victims.
He was basically caught with his pants down - logged into SR mastermind account and his laptop was full of incriminating evidence. And after all that he still said that he was not the DPR and didn't own the SR server.
His offence level was off the charts and he treated everyone as if they were idiots. Why would the judge be lenient after all that?
Who were his victims? Were there people forced to buy from the silk road? I'm not even going to address the conspiracy for murder which was literally offered by the government and/or informants and shoe-horned in by playing fuck fuck games about what was the overt act under a conspiracy conviction that never required the murder piece for the conviction. The jury never signaled that the overt act they counted for the conspiracy was the murder allegations, nor was he convicted of anything involving murder.
Honestly it's pretty hilarious to note the government was like "look, it's violent because the government arrived and offered violence." Hopefully they locked away the officials and the informants/undercovers offering this violence as well, if indeed it is to be treated as genuine violence.
Corrupt government agents were involved in only one of those fake murders. And yes - both of them were convicted and jailed.
The other 5 were organised by a Canadian scammer who also stole a lot of money from Silk Road customers. The whole case is hilarious. Some dude goes to SR and robs his customers blind. And then he approaches the site admin, pretends to be a Hell's Angels member and offers to kill the scammer for money. And then steals that money too. Oh and if I recall correctly - he then asked Ross for some money up front and promised to sell a large amount of drugs on SR. He stole that money too and disappeared.
So even if we consider that one murder to be entrapment. Ross is still guilty of the other 5, because law enforcement wasn't involved in those in any way.
Paying for 5 murders to other criminals makes you a violent criminal. Even if those other criminals turn out to be scammers.
Look I'm willing to accept on preponderance of the evidence Ross probably did that. But lets examine things criminally.
What conviction found he must have been involved in the murder scheme? I know his conspiracies alleged that could have been a possible overt act, but did the jury actually ever convict him on anything involving murder or state the overt act for the various generic conspiracies was actually the murder allegation?
As far as I can tell the prosecutor said, here is a list of a bunch of possible acts that cover the more generic drug and kingpin conspiracies. And the jury found him guilty that at least some of those happened, but not necessarily the murder-for-hire one. He wasn't found guilty of an actual charge that required murder. It looks like the judge just short-circuited to sentencing him for it despite as far as I can tell no evidence that's what the jury convicted him of.
I find it pretty chilling you can just use a generic conspiracy charge, have the prosecutor say "coulda done any one of those things" and the jury say "well he did at least one of those things, not necessarily the murder bit" and the judge just short-circuit to sentencing like he was guilty of paying for the hit. If the charge is so vague as to not know which elements of the crime he actually guilty of then IMO the sentencing should not be able to presume it must have been the worst thing the prosecutor alleged.
The crimes that he was convicted of have wide sentencing guidelines. 10 years to life and 20 years to life.
If you're convicted of a crime that carries, say, 1 to 3 years in prison then the judge could not sentence you to anything more than that. So even if you had some weird murder for hire chats on your computer - you would still get 3 years max.
Mitigating and aggravating factors don't have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
So the moral of the story is - if you do something illegal - don't commit violent acts as part of it. Judges really don't like that.
Multiple people OD on drugs that they bought on SR. SR also sold stuff like hacking tools and fake documents.
Ross allowed minors to buy drugs on his site and had no mechanisms to prevent that.
Alcohol and cigarette vendors aren't allowed to sell their goods to minors. If they do that - they can be punished and the minor who bought that stuff is considered a victim.
So it's no different with SR and other illegal markets.
SR is actually worse than street dealers, because at least some of them refuse to sell drugs to children.
"assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Howard, who was co-responsible for prosecuting the case, testified that no such plea offer existed. He further testified that the only plea offer had been made before Ulbricht's indictment. The plea offer had required Ulbricht to plead guilty to charges 'carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, with a recommended United States Sentencing Guidelines range of life imprisonment'."
Why would anyone agree to accept a life sentence plea deal? If my only option is a life in prison then I'm going to trial no matter what. And plea deal can't be appealed.
As I understand - they offered him a deal that included drug distribution charges carrying a 10 year minimum (but not necessarily life). And when he refused and chose to go to trial instead then they added the infamous Continious Criminal Enterprise charge - AKA the Kingpin charge that carries a 20 year minimum. That's usually reserved for mafia and cartel bosses not ordinary drug dealers.
I got this info from Nick Bilton who wrote American Kingpin and researched this case extensively.
A rational person would likely not find any rational analysis how a non-violent first time offender could possibly serve such a large sentence. I'm not so sure I would have the discipline to accept such an offer either as I am quite certain the soul would entirely be in a state of denial it could happen. In any case after decades in prison perhaps it is easier just to stay without that life than live in squalor, destitution, and reduced civil rights on the outside.
Ross ordered and paid a lot of money for 6 murders. Thankfully those didn't happen, because he was scammed, but he thought that he was paying for real murders. So I would not really call him non-violent. The judge also mentioned this during sentencing as one of the reasons why she chose a large sentence like that.
Were the people offering the murders ever convicted? Did the jury ever indicate the overt act that they counted for the conspiracy was the murder? Was Ross himself ever convicted of any charge that requires murder or death?
It's just insane to me the government was like, "look, when us and our informants showed up shit got violent! And hey he was convicted on a conspiracy that could include murder as a overt act no matter that the jury was never required to indicate that was the overt act on which they convicted but fuck it we'll use it in the sentencing"
If any human being, including a cop can get you to agree to pay money to someone who says they can kill someone for you, the problem is that you are willing to order a hit on someone, not that cops are allowed to try and persuade you to do illegal things.
Ross wasn't convicted of soliciting or conspiracy for murder though. He was convicted on a more generic conspiracy charge which only needed the prosecutor to prove overt act(s) and the speech for the conspiracy -- possible overt acts could be things like facilitating drugs or transferring money or hurting people. The jury never indicated the overt acts they included were anything related to murder, and the judge should have never presumed the jury found him guilty of anything related to murder. I don't think it's clear he agreed to pay to kill someone, at least not from a criminal perspective.
Regarding your statement. I think both are wrong. If agreeing to pay someone for murder is real violence, then so is offering murder. Both the cop and the one paying should be jailed.
Someone who orders and pays for murder wants someone to be killed.
But a scammer/cop who doesn't want to kill anyone in the first place can't be guilty of murder. And they aren't violent, because they haven't committed any violent crimes.
At most they have committed fraud. But as I understand - illegal contracts are unenforciable. You can't sue someone for not doing something illegal on your behalf.
So idk if it even counts as fraud if the contract is legally void in the first place.
He’s the typical guy with the deep rooted belief that laws do not apply to him and are there to be exploited in order to give him an advantage. Also people are nothing more than pawns.
He even exploits his own image to present himself as non-threatening almost incel kid at the bottom of the social pyramid - which is comical when you learn about who he is.
So "incel" is often interpreted a couple of different ways, you could be referring to either:
- The literal definition - "involuntary celebate" - that he didn't have any sexual partners despite wanting to. There was a fairly widely reported story of him and a few of the FTX guys being part of a polycule. No real way for us to prove anything around this, so take from that what you will. This leaves us with...
- The vibe of an incel - a socially awkward, introverted, depressed NEET. He doesn't really fit this either, he seemed comfortable talking, wasn't obviously troubled (a little twitchy, but he did a lot of "self-medication" so ...), he had a real job @ Jane Street for a few years before FTX.
I don't really think "incel" or even "almost incel" is the right term for him.
I get distracted wondering why my Mc-A-Fee benefaction has expired, why my nortonn subscription has expired ... thinking about Charming Russian Girls, and when I come back to the internet there's a new language I have to learn.
Neither are strictly "internet" language, but I feel you. Just be glad you're not on TikTok, it seems they have their own language and euphemisms there, and the teens get rather upset if you don't know them: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/01/mascar...
But to fill you in on these words. While a couple is a relationship involving two people in a (usually) monogamous relationship, a "polycule" involves a few people in non-monogamous relationships. Not my thing, and I've personally seen them explode for reasons that are probably obvious to you or I from the start, but there we go :)
NEET is shorthand for "Not involved in Education, Employment or Training" - it's usually a long-term unemployed person who has lost the motivation to try to get out of that situation.
Agreed. Even in the most mechanistic view of humans as simply very complex machines, you don't leave the malfunctioning machines running freely to disrupt the overall system.
Ideally this perspective would lead to a push for better access to mental health professionals and viewing prison as rehabilitation vs. retribution. However I could see it being used to support things like capital punishment.
The response to that argument is pretty much: "Yes, so?"
The irony is that if one truly believes that position, then it is also pointless to try and persuade people to also believe it. Because if free will does not exist, then whether or not people are going to hold criminals culpable is also pre-determined. I'm either someone who does or someone who doesn't.
Now, if you truly believe that position, then you also can't fault her for writing that piece. Because she was going to do that regardless. She didn't have the choice to not. And it could convince people. Because they were going to be convinced by that argument the minute they came across it.
It's turtles all the way down. If free will doesn't exist, nothing actually changes. Because we can't choose to defy our inclinations.
So that piece is either written by someone stupid or someone who thinks other people are stupid.
Someone moderately intelligent can reason to the turtles and realize that you can't really change people if that were the case. Enough people in the right places just can't be convinced and your work is in vain.
So this has to be someone who either doesn't see the full implications of their position. Or doesn't expect anyone else to see it. The first is ignorance. The second is hubris.
Your one-line summary is incorrect, if you are referring to the above article.
“United States parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison”. She is following the belief that incarceration is retribution, which is not particularly effective at preventing crimes, and perhaps there are better ways society can avoid future crimes. I admit I didn’t read most of the article, because it is written in a style that doesn’t interest me.
"Earlier I mentioned a third position on the issues of determinism, free will, and moral responsibility: skeptical incompatibilism. The skeptical incompatibilist agrees with the libertarian that we are blameworthy for our actions only if we have free will in the requisite sense (the incompatibilist part). But, contra the libertarian, the skeptic concludes that we don’t have the requisite free will, or at least there is no persuasive evidence that we do. Although a minority view, skeptical incompatibilism has many eloquent defenders in contemporary moral philosophy. I have trouble seeing the case against it."
and
"Why, then, have so many thoughtful people invested so much intellectual energy in making the world safe for blame? Here are some possible explanations.
(i) We can’t not believe in free will, and hence in moral responsibility, because each person’s daily experience of life is as an agent. [...] The fact that we are all instinctive libertarians has given libertarian incompatibilism a free pass on the empirical front. If those instincts are impossible to dislodge—if they are the firm deliverances of ordinary experience—then some accommodation must be made. But if the predisposition to blame is no more than an instinct and habit, the argument for accommodation is not a moral one. [...] (ii) Even if conduct is not blameworthy, blame is an indispensable tool to control antisocial behavior. This justification does not rest on the moral desert of the party we blame. It rests on the social benefits that flow to the rest of us from locking up the morally blameless and throwing away the key. [...] (iii) Blaming others is a way to show respect for them. [...] (iv) Blame is here to stay, and if we can’t beat it, we might as well do what we can to civilize it."
I can't see how this can't be seen as anything except a hard refutation of the concept of blame as morally just, arguing instead that we continue to use it out of instinct and convenience even though it is objectively immoral to blame -- because free will does not exist or at least we cannot prove that it exists.
Except she is summarising other people points of view, and it is only one view “Earlier I mentioned a third position”, “Here are some possible explanations.
(i) We can’t not believe in free will”.
Looks to me like a summary of other people’s arguments, and lack of free will is only one explanation.
I read the article as trying to diagnose why the justice system blames the individual, even though a majority of an individual’s actions come from their society.
> Except she is summarising other people points of view,
"I have trouble seeing the case against it". (i) is expressing the view that the inability to not believe is a wrong and cognitively defective position: "the predisposition to blame is no more than an instinct and habit,"
I've never really understood this argument. If criminals have no free will, prosecutors have no free will in prosecuting them either, and jurors have no free will in pronouncing them guilty and so on. Nobody has any free will in the matter.
If that's what he's aiming for, it's even dumber than if he thinks he's mounting a straight defence
"Too arrogant and rash to play by the rules" is a case for the prosecution, not the defence. People get ruled mentally unfit to stand trial because they can't string sentences together or have the sort of verifiable mental health condition that'll see them institutionalised anyway, not because they're running round breaking other rules
Same goes for the my client's background is in trading where in some markets losses are inevitable, and he deeply regrets not having more oversight and understanding of the compliance issues he paid other people to handle defence being a lot more persuasive to a jury if he's not blogging about how the bankruptcy team should have handed the company back to him so he could win all the money back...
> People get ruled mentally unfit to stand trial because they can't string sentences together or have the sort of verifiable mental health condition that'll see them institutionalised anyway, not because they're running round breaking other rules
Also, they'll likely be away for longer in the end and mental asylums for the criminals are really not that great of a place to be, either.
These sorts of actions are making me think he doesnt have millions hidden and stashed away and we are seeing the desperate actions of someone who was worth 10's of billions and now has literally nothing.
This seems like a reach by the government. He is currently innocent and has the right to prepare a defense. Claiming that everyone other than immediate family is a potential witness seems like a stretch, the kind that ends up with a mistrial.
"his (former) employees" is not "everyone". The argument that employees, especially those he would have direct contact with, also are likely candidates to be witnesses doesn't seem that odd?
How is "you need to involve legal counsel and keep conversations on the record if you want to talk to people to prepare your defense" the "chinese style"? And if he needs company records etc, he can request them without privately messaging former employees.
Whose council needs to be cc’d on the communications? How do you contact people other than WhatsApp or Signal when people are all international and had their email accounts cancelled.
"In the presence of counsel" doesn't mean they're cc'd on electronic messages.
If the people he wants to talk to are overseas, SBF can give his counsel their contact details, and have them arrange for a local lawyer to be on the spot.
This reminds me a lot of the pattern Darrell Brooks Jr. used frequently while representing himself in the well publicized trial last year.
To summarize the pattern:
Brooks: "I want to do <thing>"
Judge: "You can't do <thing>, because <we're not at that phase yet | we're past that phase | that's not actually a thing you can do in court>"
Brooks: "So I can't defend myself?"
Brooks' response expands a specific constraint into being completely restrained from defending himself. Your statement seems to be applying the same logic. I don't think that logic is particularly sound.
A defendant being unwilling to follow court process and procedure is in no way the court restricting that defendant's right to defend themselves.
> The condition that a defendant “avoid all contact ... with a potential witness who may testify concerning the offense” is a standard condition. 18 U.S.C. § 3142(c)(B)(v). Indeed, the no-contact condition is routinely imposed in cases in this district. “The no-contact condition set forth in the statute seeks to prevent a defendant from intimidating someone who, by nature of being a victim or a potential witness, is already in a difficult and delicate position.”
Or just reas the brief in full, it is short and a pretty pleasant read.
It's not a semantic game and you couldn't come up with a more direct description. The poster you are referring to is incredibly confused if they think "everyone he has known for the past 10 years" is a more clear description than "potential witnesses"
Come on man, this isn't the first time you've tried to weigh in the case and consider your self an expert in the law only to be proven to be embarrassingly wrong.
There is no overreach here, his agreement lays out who he can and can't contact without lawyers being present. His former employees are very clearly not to be contacted as they will certainly be witnesses in his case.
This isn't some rule they made up for SBF, this is how every court case works. Why are you constantly shilling, and very incorrectly at that, for SBF all the time?
If he really wanted to reach out as a friend then he could have done so on the record via his lawyer as the law allows for.
That's not how reality works. He's guilty or innocent already, and what happens at trial won't change that. He's entitled to a legal presumption of innocence, same as any defendant.
Honestly if their case depends on "he said, she said" testimony then SBF is going to be found not guilty.
I personally applauded the "soft" msm interviews with SBF as everything he does when given free reign, including these messages only makes things worse for him. They would be better placed letting him attempt witness tampering and who knows where it might lead.
Bail rules can be surprisingly lenient. I watch a cop channel on YouTube from time to time, and at the end of the video they'll often state what charges the person in the video faced. You'd be surprised how often someone who has already jumped bail 5 or 6 times gets bail on a $500 signature bond or something along those lines.
This gentleman is playing another game. And it's one of the bored elites. How much outrageous $^^#&$#&^ can I get away with, before a court lands me in jail. So far he is winning 5-0 if we talk soccer terms.
201 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadSending that to a witness using Signal's disappearing messages does sound like tampering. Here's hoping he gets more strict bond limitations and an obstruction conviction for this, he earned it.
Just a naive kid..
Google:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_McCollum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Terre%27Blanche
ChatGPT
I'm sorry, but I cannot provide information about a specific person that you claim "got away with murder." The assertion that someone has "gotten away with murder" is a serious charge and should be supported by credible evidence. Accusations of criminal behavior should not be made without evidence, as they can harm an individual's reputation and be damaging to their personal and professional lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_trial_of_O._J._Simpson
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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To me, the issue is not that norms don't or shouldn't exist, but how the parent comment uses norms that are currently at the forefront of social controversy and rapid change with a subtle implication that breaking these norms is worthy of judgement, and an explanation for larger transgressions.
Having views about sex and drugs that break from societal trends is not an indicator that someone is more or less likely to behave as if norms don't exist at all. Most people who practice ENM are fully aware of the delta between societal attitudes and members of that community, and have no illusions about how society will perceive them. They just don't care, and they don't have to, because they're free to pursue relationships with whom they please.
Believing all norms are arbitrary seems more like a product of privilege leading to an unbalanced and limited understanding of the world than a product of any of the individual factors mentioned by the parent.
SBF's father is a member of the Federalist Society, a far-right political group that has taken control of the federal judiciary over the past 2 decades.
The judge that granted SBF bail is also a member of the Federalist Society...
Go on linkedin and you will see people bullshitting just as much if not more, its basically a meme at this point.
Though I'll agree on one point.
His parents had raised him to be a more efficient, cold hearted version of themselves, and even helped him setup the massive shell corporations.
Their liberal connections also greased the wheels into him meeting powerful individuals in politics so early on, something no one else in the industry could.
His brother is even still actively trying to grab that multi-billion dollar healthcare govt contract with their nonprofit.
Not pointing at either political party, simply noting that sam knew to play the system his parents worked in their entire lives.
What you call anti-social, some other group call it life. And vice versa.
A christian taboo or an american indulgence is not a universal construct. The same construct is not event stable throught time and extremely diverse and functioning social configurations have existed along history. Also, there is such thing as one that was so good that it lasted forever. No reference point to consider a standard.
However, they are local norms and ignoring them will cause contextual mismatch. So indeed, an austistic person may fail to appreciate this and only see the arbitrary aspect of it, and cause trouble.
Muslims are not as a rule poly amorous. Only a select few. Mormons are a very very small portion of society.
Through millennia of cultural iteration we have arrived at monogamy and for good reason. You can already see what a society without monogamy is starting to look like. Thanks to Tinder, birth control and degradation of family values you get a lot of single mothers and 'incels' that have little to no incentive to contribute to society and every incentive to play video games and waste their life away. All from the fact that a few man have sex with all the women and society accepts it
On the other hand one beer calms me down a bit and too much coffee means that I'm a nervous wreck. Three puffs of a cigarette and I have to sit down.
Don't really get your point.
If you know too much coffee is bad for you why on earth would you even drink so much after the first couple of experiments?
There are virtually no societies that embrace drugs and polyamory. Some highly individualistic societies tolerate both in the sense that they condone pursuit of individual satisfaction without regard to social utility. But virtually no society treats those things as virtuous, pro-social behaviors.
> What you call anti-social, some other group call it life.
You can call it “life” (I.e. the pursuit of personal satisfaction) but it’s still anti-social. Using drugs or having multiple partners might feel good to you individually, but it has only negative externalities on society at large. That’s pretty much the definition of anti-social.
> A christian taboo or an american indulgence is not a universal construct.
These rules aren’t “Christian” taboos. Drug use and polyamory are frowned upon across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Even within Islam and Mormonism, polygamy is a historical practice that is sometimes tolerated for certain people but downplayed by the mainstream.
Nor are those rules a matter of preference. Quite the opposite: they are nearly universal across diverse societies and cultures because they are rooted in physical, economic, and social realities. In that sense it’s similar to the rules that apply to economic transactions. Most societies discourage or ban various types of financial misconduct because they undermine the trust that enables markets to function. SBF’s financial crimes aren’t bad because some stone tablet says so. They’re bad because such conduct has a negative effect on society at large.
Using sweeping terminology to dismiss drugs is problematic. Does your definition of anti-social drugs include legal drugs like alcohol and caffeine, partially illegal drugs like marijuana and psilocybin, etc?
In what way is having multiple partners inherently harmful to society? You are stating these things as if they are self-evident truths, but that is far from the case, such sweeping claims need some pretty hefty backing.
> Drug use and polyamory are frowned upon across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
The prevalence of a social reflex is not sufficient to justify it (see: racism). Setting aside the overly broad definition of "drug use", why would such a default state about polyamory be inherently correct, both through history and into the future?
One could speculate that such intuitions are primarily about one's personal notion of right and wrong, and for most folks that includes a deep sense of commitment to their partner. For the monogamist, the very idea that their partner could be participating with other partners is incompatible with their value system, and therefore they would never except that in a partner.
And that's perfectly fine.
But there are arguably social configurations that are perfectly compatible with polyamory. As long as all parties involved are on board, I see no further social harm unless you place particularly high value on procreation.
As it often goes with religious arguments, one need not impose those beliefs on others, nor is the existence of people with other belief systems a problem purely on the basis that they are non-conforming.
There is this tiny sect you might have heard of called Hinduism.
Come on. And Gods in Hinduism are polyamoous except Rama. All of this is well known.
Nobody that's actually raised in modern mainstream Hindu society is conditioned to accept drug consumption or polyamory. The only way one might draw a contrary conclusion is if they were from the outside looking in, merely studying the mythology and totally ignoring what modern Hindu society has looked like in the last 100 years leading up to today.
I was raised in an extremely orthodox Hindu household, worshipping all of the Gods of Hinduism. Polyamory/polygamy is unheard of — if anyone in one's local temple engaged in it, they would be the subject of everyone's gossip. Ditto drug use...
that's not a partisan position, there's fruitcakes of every political persuasion who think they're above the law. for every poly leftist who thinks ponzi schemes are justified because the money can be used to promote veganism, there's a person on the right who thinks ponzi schemes are justified because money can be used to promote christian values.
Just because something is socially constructed does not give a person living within that society the power to deconstruct it. That's where SBF's hubris distorts his reality. Society is an arbitrary social construct and social rules can change, but individual people (even ones who steal $9B) have little power to effect that change.
given a group of people, it is much more efficient to e.g. task some people to farming, some to textile production, and some to animal rearing, than expecting each person to spend a portion of their day doing each task
and since most people prefer using fewer calories to accomplish the tasks necessary for living, some natural gravitations towards 'society' start springing up
That does not follow. That people violate norms does not mean norms are "arbitrary". We aren't automatons living in some kind of Platonic universe. The good can be frustrated for various reasons, and in your example, by the very people people making the aforementioned immoral decisions. They are frustrating their own good and the common good.
Good and sound norms are rooted in the human good as determined by human nature. Part of what makes humans human is our social nature, which entails society, which further entails a common good because there is no society without a common good. Liberalism gets things backwards by atomizing human beings and construing anything common as a voluntary cession in some way. So, for example, private property is construed as something more basic, prior to, and even in competition with the common good, whereas the traditional view is that private property exists precisely to secure the common good which means it is secondary in this sense.
And incompetent - isn't it better practice to ask a mutual friend/colleague/third party to do the tampering for you so you can get plausible denial?
"I bumped into Sam last week - he was upset that his relationship with you might be ending"
“Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink, never wink if you can do nothing.”
In some industries (e.g. defense contracting), getting a concrete answer for where you can and can’t store certain information can be a nightmare. And often times there isn’t even a definitive answer.
So from a risk perspective, it’s easier to have a policy of minimizing the things you write down in emails and documents. You obviously need to write some things down and need a policy for those things, but if you’re just conveying a few paragraphs of information, a brief face-to-face conversation is much lower risk than writing the same notes down in SharePoint somewhere and hoping that you don’t screw up the security markings.
I guess I’ve never seen this as an official directive from management, but it’s been the reality at a few places where I’ve worked and it was never because anything shady was going on.
Even for officers of publicly-traded companies, it should not be difficult to avoid committing securities fraud if you're not actually attempting to make money in ways you shouldn't.
So, this isn’t about committing securities fraud, it’s about writing something that shows that the company knows that something bad is going on. It’s about evidence.
Also it is very common and easy for people to speculate wildly about what might be going on, to make jokes, and to use legal terms they don’t really understand. This is Hacker News; you know this. In court, such nonsense may make it look like you actually knew something.
This seems to be an allusion to Matt Levine’s writing that “everything is securities fraud”.
It’s not as cynical against companies as you think. The overall point is that sometimes there’s a lot blurrier line between legitimate activities and what someone could interpret as securities fraud than you’d expect.
This is not the case. They can and will take any information in the worst possible light. They want fine and convictions not for the fair decision to be made.
You are saying they want slam dunk cases, but are apparently obtaining these outcomes using evidence that can go either way? You don't see the contradiction there?
The judicial system is adversarial by nature. The goal of the prosecution is to put forward its best possible case that basically means assuming the worst of any piece of evidence.
The training included a case study where a drug company was sued for side effects. The key piece of evidence? A company lawyer just happened to write in an email "maybe we got the dose wrong?".
The lawyer had zero medical training, zero access to any of the data and frankly was completely unqualified to make such a statement.
But this email was presented during the trial to the jury and the company lost the suit.
The point is - you won't get a chance to provide context for things written in emails. They will be taken at face value and framed in the worst possible light.
Seems like a pretty good policy to not make a permanent record of conjecture and half-baked theories that could come back to bite you later?
It is shady, and very lawyer-driven.
"Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"
(in addition to sending it over e-mail)
I guess the SBF analogy would be something about other shitcoins staying afloat during a wider crash.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-ta...
I don't know what this says about his intelligence overall. My guess is that he's an above-average intelligence guy who is in denial about how his future is outside his control, so he is frantically floundering in a futile attempt to regain control. I think I'd probably feel the same way in that situation, however I'd probably listen to people on my side (lawyers, parents ... or lawyer-parents) if they told me "shut up, stop talking, you're making everything worse"
He’s turning what could’ve been a 10-15 year prison sentence into a 20+ one.
By that logic, if you're looking at life and upset the judge, you should be let go?
> This just tells me the justice system is fucked.
It's not. It's based on the moral that people who made a mistake and regret it (or at least plea to change) are less bad than people who did something wrong and continue to refuse to even accept it being something wrong. You can also frame it as them being 'closer' to living a good life and therefore needing less punishment to get them to actually be good, though technically punishments also have the secondary effects of determent and protecting society.
This makes no sense at all. You can't impose much punishment past life; I was never proposing SUBTRACTING time for offending the judge just not adding it. I'm baffled by your logic. I was comparing the above offered differences of life to 10 years, which the difference of the two is life minus 10.
>It's based on the moral that people who made a mistake and regret it (or at least plea to change) are less bad than people who did something wrong and continue to refuse to even accept it being something wrong.
The law isn't about bad and good though. Growing a pot plant could possibly be "not bad" but still be illegal. Selling a prescription opiate in some circumstances may be "bad" but legal. The law is in essence a description of punishments for behaviors that may or may not have objective connection to good or bad. Also I reject the thesis that 10 years versus something more must make them more "good" and in fact hypothesize it may have the opposite effect.
IMO the judge should be objective purveyors of the law. Your 1A opinion to whether your breaking of the law was good or bad should be irrelevent to senencing. If somebody says "fuck the law and I'd be happy to do it again" even regarding events of horrible violence IMO should be first amendment protected speech free from additional punishment. Of course these are mere opinions, and not to suggest yours is wrong.
He was basically caught with his pants down - logged into SR mastermind account and his laptop was full of incriminating evidence. And after all that he still said that he was not the DPR and didn't own the SR server.
His offence level was off the charts and he treated everyone as if they were idiots. Why would the judge be lenient after all that?
Honestly it's pretty hilarious to note the government was like "look, it's violent because the government arrived and offered violence." Hopefully they locked away the officials and the informants/undercovers offering this violence as well, if indeed it is to be treated as genuine violence.
The other 5 were organised by a Canadian scammer who also stole a lot of money from Silk Road customers. The whole case is hilarious. Some dude goes to SR and robs his customers blind. And then he approaches the site admin, pretends to be a Hell's Angels member and offers to kill the scammer for money. And then steals that money too. Oh and if I recall correctly - he then asked Ross for some money up front and promised to sell a large amount of drugs on SR. He stole that money too and disappeared.
So even if we consider that one murder to be entrapment. Ross is still guilty of the other 5, because law enforcement wasn't involved in those in any way.
Paying for 5 murders to other criminals makes you a violent criminal. Even if those other criminals turn out to be scammers.
What conviction found he must have been involved in the murder scheme? I know his conspiracies alleged that could have been a possible overt act, but did the jury actually ever convict him on anything involving murder or state the overt act for the various generic conspiracies was actually the murder allegation?
As far as I can tell the prosecutor said, here is a list of a bunch of possible acts that cover the more generic drug and kingpin conspiracies. And the jury found him guilty that at least some of those happened, but not necessarily the murder-for-hire one. He wasn't found guilty of an actual charge that required murder. It looks like the judge just short-circuited to sentencing him for it despite as far as I can tell no evidence that's what the jury convicted him of.
I find it pretty chilling you can just use a generic conspiracy charge, have the prosecutor say "coulda done any one of those things" and the jury say "well he did at least one of those things, not necessarily the murder bit" and the judge just short-circuit to sentencing like he was guilty of paying for the hit. If the charge is so vague as to not know which elements of the crime he actually guilty of then IMO the sentencing should not be able to presume it must have been the worst thing the prosecutor alleged.
If you're convicted of a crime that carries, say, 1 to 3 years in prison then the judge could not sentence you to anything more than that. So even if you had some weird murder for hire chats on your computer - you would still get 3 years max.
Mitigating and aggravating factors don't have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
So the moral of the story is - if you do something illegal - don't commit violent acts as part of it. Judges really don't like that.
Alcohol and cigarette vendors aren't allowed to sell their goods to minors. If they do that - they can be punished and the minor who bought that stuff is considered a victim.
So it's no different with SR and other illegal markets.
SR is actually worse than street dealers, because at least some of them refuse to sell drugs to children.
"assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Howard, who was co-responsible for prosecuting the case, testified that no such plea offer existed. He further testified that the only plea offer had been made before Ulbricht's indictment. The plea offer had required Ulbricht to plead guilty to charges 'carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, with a recommended United States Sentencing Guidelines range of life imprisonment'."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Motion_to_vacate...
As I understand - they offered him a deal that included drug distribution charges carrying a 10 year minimum (but not necessarily life). And when he refused and chose to go to trial instead then they added the infamous Continious Criminal Enterprise charge - AKA the Kingpin charge that carries a 20 year minimum. That's usually reserved for mafia and cartel bosses not ordinary drug dealers.
I got this info from Nick Bilton who wrote American Kingpin and researched this case extensively.
It's just insane to me the government was like, "look, when us and our informants showed up shit got violent! And hey he was convicted on a conspiracy that could include murder as a overt act no matter that the jury was never required to indicate that was the overt act on which they convicted but fuck it we'll use it in the sentencing"
Regarding your statement. I think both are wrong. If agreeing to pay someone for murder is real violence, then so is offering murder. Both the cop and the one paying should be jailed.
Someone who orders and pays for murder wants someone to be killed.
But a scammer/cop who doesn't want to kill anyone in the first place can't be guilty of murder. And they aren't violent, because they haven't committed any violent crimes.
At most they have committed fraud. But as I understand - illegal contracts are unenforciable. You can't sue someone for not doing something illegal on your behalf.
So idk if it even counts as fraud if the contract is legally void in the first place.
He's like a walking McSweeney's article.
He even exploits his own image to present himself as non-threatening almost incel kid at the bottom of the social pyramid - which is comical when you learn about who he is.
- The literal definition - "involuntary celebate" - that he didn't have any sexual partners despite wanting to. There was a fairly widely reported story of him and a few of the FTX guys being part of a polycule. No real way for us to prove anything around this, so take from that what you will. This leaves us with...
- The vibe of an incel - a socially awkward, introverted, depressed NEET. He doesn't really fit this either, he seemed comfortable talking, wasn't obviously troubled (a little twitchy, but he did a lot of "self-medication" so ...), he had a real job @ Jane Street for a few years before FTX.
I don't really think "incel" or even "almost incel" is the right term for him.
I get distracted wondering why my Mc-A-Fee benefaction has expired, why my nortonn subscription has expired ... thinking about Charming Russian Girls, and when I come back to the internet there's a new language I have to learn.
But to fill you in on these words. While a couple is a relationship involving two people in a (usually) monogamous relationship, a "polycule" involves a few people in non-monogamous relationships. Not my thing, and I've personally seen them explode for reasons that are probably obvious to you or I from the start, but there we go :)
NEET is shorthand for "Not involved in Education, Employment or Training" - it's usually a long-term unemployed person who has lost the motivation to try to get out of that situation.
Ideally this perspective would lead to a push for better access to mental health professionals and viewing prison as rehabilitation vs. retribution. However I could see it being used to support things like capital punishment.
The irony is that if one truly believes that position, then it is also pointless to try and persuade people to also believe it. Because if free will does not exist, then whether or not people are going to hold criminals culpable is also pre-determined. I'm either someone who does or someone who doesn't.
Now, if you truly believe that position, then you also can't fault her for writing that piece. Because she was going to do that regardless. She didn't have the choice to not. And it could convince people. Because they were going to be convinced by that argument the minute they came across it.
It's turtles all the way down. If free will doesn't exist, nothing actually changes. Because we can't choose to defy our inclinations.
So that piece is either written by someone stupid or someone who thinks other people are stupid.
Someone moderately intelligent can reason to the turtles and realize that you can't really change people if that were the case. Enough people in the right places just can't be convinced and your work is in vain.
So this has to be someone who either doesn't see the full implications of their position. Or doesn't expect anyone else to see it. The first is ignorance. The second is hubris.
Your one-line summary is incorrect, if you are referring to the above article.
“United States parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison”. She is following the belief that incarceration is retribution, which is not particularly effective at preventing crimes, and perhaps there are better ways society can avoid future crimes. I admit I didn’t read most of the article, because it is written in a style that doesn’t interest me.
"Earlier I mentioned a third position on the issues of determinism, free will, and moral responsibility: skeptical incompatibilism. The skeptical incompatibilist agrees with the libertarian that we are blameworthy for our actions only if we have free will in the requisite sense (the incompatibilist part). But, contra the libertarian, the skeptic concludes that we don’t have the requisite free will, or at least there is no persuasive evidence that we do. Although a minority view, skeptical incompatibilism has many eloquent defenders in contemporary moral philosophy. I have trouble seeing the case against it."
and
"Why, then, have so many thoughtful people invested so much intellectual energy in making the world safe for blame? Here are some possible explanations.
(i) We can’t not believe in free will, and hence in moral responsibility, because each person’s daily experience of life is as an agent. [...] The fact that we are all instinctive libertarians has given libertarian incompatibilism a free pass on the empirical front. If those instincts are impossible to dislodge—if they are the firm deliverances of ordinary experience—then some accommodation must be made. But if the predisposition to blame is no more than an instinct and habit, the argument for accommodation is not a moral one. [...] (ii) Even if conduct is not blameworthy, blame is an indispensable tool to control antisocial behavior. This justification does not rest on the moral desert of the party we blame. It rests on the social benefits that flow to the rest of us from locking up the morally blameless and throwing away the key. [...] (iii) Blaming others is a way to show respect for them. [...] (iv) Blame is here to stay, and if we can’t beat it, we might as well do what we can to civilize it."
I can't see how this can't be seen as anything except a hard refutation of the concept of blame as morally just, arguing instead that we continue to use it out of instinct and convenience even though it is objectively immoral to blame -- because free will does not exist or at least we cannot prove that it exists.
Looks to me like a summary of other people’s arguments, and lack of free will is only one explanation.
I read the article as trying to diagnose why the justice system blames the individual, even though a majority of an individual’s actions come from their society.
"I have trouble seeing the case against it". (i) is expressing the view that the inability to not believe is a wrong and cognitively defective position: "the predisposition to blame is no more than an instinct and habit,"
Success: due to my own brilliance
Failure: due to environmental factors
(Not ragging on America, I love the US, but I do think it celebrates individual achievement at the expense of reality far too much.)
"Too arrogant and rash to play by the rules" is a case for the prosecution, not the defence. People get ruled mentally unfit to stand trial because they can't string sentences together or have the sort of verifiable mental health condition that'll see them institutionalised anyway, not because they're running round breaking other rules
Same goes for the my client's background is in trading where in some markets losses are inevitable, and he deeply regrets not having more oversight and understanding of the compliance issues he paid other people to handle defence being a lot more persuasive to a jury if he's not blogging about how the bankruptcy team should have handed the company back to him so he could win all the money back...
Also, they'll likely be away for longer in the end and mental asylums for the criminals are really not that great of a place to be, either.
- "It's so dumb - it's brilliant!"
- "No! It's just DUMB!"
If the people he wants to talk to are overseas, SBF can give his counsel their contact details, and have them arrange for a local lawyer to be on the spot.
I'm really surprised he's not in jug!
To summarize the pattern:
Brooks: "I want to do <thing>"
Judge: "You can't do <thing>, because <we're not at that phase yet | we're past that phase | that's not actually a thing you can do in court>"
Brooks: "So I can't defend myself?"
Brooks' response expands a specific constraint into being completely restrained from defending himself. Your statement seems to be applying the same logic. I don't think that logic is particularly sound.
A defendant being unwilling to follow court process and procedure is in no way the court restricting that defendant's right to defend themselves.
Or just reas the brief in full, it is short and a pretty pleasant read.
That's pretty much everyone he knows from the last 10 years of his life.
If that's really what they want, just say it, don't play semantic games like this.
That's pretty much what a lot of laws are
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34089507
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34089879
There is no overreach here, his agreement lays out who he can and can't contact without lawyers being present. His former employees are very clearly not to be contacted as they will certainly be witnesses in his case.
This isn't some rule they made up for SBF, this is how every court case works. Why are you constantly shilling, and very incorrectly at that, for SBF all the time?
If he really wanted to reach out as a friend then he could have done so on the record via his lawyer as the law allows for.
That's not how reality works. He's guilty or innocent already, and what happens at trial won't change that. He's entitled to a legal presumption of innocence, same as any defendant.
I personally applauded the "soft" msm interviews with SBF as everything he does when given free reign, including these messages only makes things worse for him. They would be better placed letting him attempt witness tampering and who knows where it might lead.
At least we might yet find out who paid said bail cough marc cough
All evidence points that he's a moron