The Grey Tribe

When you said "innocent", you could have meant/referred to

journalistic ethics

whether or not he has done it, the case against Luigi is quite weak, and he will probably walk

whether or not he will be found innocent, Luigi didn't do it

#1 is just a no-brainer, but the ethical rules are different for private individuals than for journalism. You don't write in a newspaper that he "is the killer", you say alleged and accused of, unless you are damn sure.

You don't really know about #2. You can say things like "based on the evidence available", but before there has been a trial, it's all speculation. You don't know what will be entered into evidence.

Now #3 is by itself only a conspiracy theory once the trial is over. If you say #3 before the trial, then only #3 AND NOT #2 is a conspiracy theory.

There were so many people who thought others meant #3 (actual innocence) when they meant #1 or #2. There was never all that much disagreement about this. I mean, most of us weren't there, so how would I know about #3? Some people just assumed #3 in bad faith, when somebody else clearly meant #1. And even though I am not a newspaper, I think I can criticise a newspaper for not doing #1 properly, and I can err on the side of caution and say "accused" or "alleged" until there is a verdict.

I think some of the confusion is due to the way some people said "the killer" and then "okay, fine, allegedly" as if they somehow had inside information and were certain that Luigi did it but weren't allowed to tell it like it is, and other people said "Luigi is not the killer" as if they had inside information about the real killer.

I mean, if you weren't there, and all you know is what you read in the papers, you should say as much. If you're a witness, other rules apply.

But if you're not, then "allegedly" is not just a magic word you have to sprinkle in every now and then until there is a verdict, it's supposed to be an attitude, a certain measure of uncertainty and humility.

You cannot, as a journalist, say "The trial is not over but we all know he did it", unless you are really sure he did it. The point isn't just to sprinkle "allegedly" into your writing, but to mean it, or there's no point to it as all.

Snowden makes a very lonely hero: his moral position is clear but the revolution he hoped to spearhead never really happened, and total surveillance just became normalised.

I've literally never once seen anybody talk about a "male loneliness epidemic".

I've heard jokes on podcasts and pop culture and social media about how it's a dumb idea. I've seen thinkpieces on how it doesn't exist and thinkpieces on how it does exist, but it's just because men are whining about their own incompetence and we'd fix it if we really tried (“So many of these problems could be overcome if men would just go to therapy.”)

But I have genuinely never seen a single one of these apparently common sympathetic takes on how the "male loneliness epidemic" is a problem. Just a bunch of rebuttals.

In fact I'm only taking it on faith that they exist.

Now, something I find, well, vexing is the word about all these takes is that there is a common theme among them, which is that focus on male loneliness specifically must necessarily devalue loneliness felt by women.

I don't know why that would be the case, particularly.

That article has a guy who feels like he can't really date, because he's too embarrassed to ask women to go dutch and doesn't have enough money to actually relax if he's paying for a date with a woman.

Is it possible that perhaps the poor straight women tend, as a generalization, to have a different set of anxieties around paying for dates?

But we can't retract those, or add a note, an expression of concern, because these people didn't do anything wrong. They are victims. Can't just put a black mark on some guy's publication record!

Nobody is enforcing standards! Everybody is dragging their feet! Once something is published, it stays there. The only exceptions are if you sleep with a student or colleague, or if you make a sexist remark, or if you plagiarise.

And even then, you may get away with it if you plagiarise somebody who isn't important or powerful.

Nobody even gives a shit when a whole journal turns out to be bunk, or a whole publisher has zero standards.

trying to convince themselves that hrt saved them.

Because sometimes I run into people who think their life objectively sucks, and they describe a situation that looks great. I get the impression that they aren't suffering from stress because their life is stressful, and they aren't depressed because their life is depressing. I get the opinion that their life is, all in all, pretty sweet, and they are genuinely mentally suffering. I mean, they are only mentally suffering. There is no material component.

But the way they conceptualise it isn't that. They don't say "I have a sweet life but I can't enjoy it". They say "I need to get out of this suffocating soul sucking job as a taste tester for the ice cream factory".

The reverse, a person who blew up their life chasing an epiphany and now seeks validation, who wants to be convinced that this is the destination, this is the good life, this is right, they also exist.

This policy is obviously the worst of all worlds, and the guy I am thinking about uses it as a shield. According to Harvard, that's why we need affirmative action.

He doesn't spell out what the right system is in his view, but he prefers explicit racial quotas over admissions where they pretend to pick the N best applicants but they fudge the scores until the proportions are right. Richard Hanania has made that point first, and it was his main point for a while: If you tell people they can't do reverse discrimination, but if you also expect them to come up with the right proportion of minorities (or they get a complaint even if the process is completely objective and race blind), then they will have to find a way to fudge the numbers.

But you can accept that IQ is real and heritable from your parents. It's important to understand that practicing for IQ tests won't help you, but learning domain knowledge is useful. You can keep that in mind in education policy without accepting all the group difference stuff. It's useful to understand what you can teach and what you can't, and it's useful to know that "brain training" is not a thing. Brain training sold a lot for the Nintendo DS, but it's not a thing.

Also you can accept that race is socially constructed, but the physical features that make you look black or white or Asian or Greek are still determined by the DNA you inherited from your parents. As a first approximation, DNA is the blueprint for the body.

The woken are just twisting themselves into pretzels in order not to agree with the race realists, and they are saying the darndest things. And what is going on here is that the guy you are thinking about is making edgy statements combined with verifiably true statements, to make the wokes look stupid.

Unfortunately many wokes are incapable of nuance and have put everything that guy said on a bingo card, including the stuff that is verifiably true. You can see when the wokes look stupid.

Also the wokes keep calling him Zionist when they mean Jew. They should just say he's a Jew. That would be more honest. I don't know his opinions about Israel.

In a perfect world, there would be no universities that serve as filters for a country's political and journalist class, and children wouldn't ruin their spines and knees and miss their childhoods just to have a shot at participation in the Olympics, and then they don't make the cut, and the only job they can do is coach the next generation. In a perfect world, there would be no wars, Harvard would be just another university, and the Olympics would be between Amateur athletes with day jobs. In the real world, women in the military, Harvard admissions, and transgender women in the Olympics are all culture war issues.

Anyway, he seems to get a lot of mileage out of all the stuff Harvard said in court to argue for anti-Asian discrimination. (Yeah I read the post the students complained about. He won his employment case on free speech grounds, and then he was fired anyway. It's still a fucking dumb post. Like, it displays way less scholarly thought than the plagiarism dossier.

she became this because corporate entities like harry potter.

like. it literally does not matter whether the demographic of the average ya reader has affection or distaste for harry potter. the reason joanne kathleen has such massive institutional power is because she was a wealthy, privileged person with industry connections when she was first shopping the philosopher's stone around to publishers (yeah, the narrative of her being a ~working class mum rejected by publishers at every turn~ is an outright lie btw, her family member literally owned the shop she makes a big deal about writing in lol) and those industry connections saw that hp is marketable.

do you have any idea how early the movie contract came in her career? she sold the film rights to the first four books to warner bros in fucking '99. third book had barely come out, and that's only because she hit the ground running and released one book a year for the first handful of years (obscene publishing schedule btw, only possible if you have industry connections). apparently there's a quote from spielberg on why he turned down an offer to direct the films where he said marketing them would be "shooting ducks in a barrel. It's just a slam dunk. It's just like withdrawing a billion dollars and putting it into your personal bank accounts. There's no challenge." the franchise was made basically for nothing but marketability. the entire series is based around merch opportunities. literally every fucking iconic part of harry potter is a blatantly transparent grab for merch. house crests. wands. chocolate frogs and bertie botts' every flavor beans. robes. broomsticks. moving portraits and photos. owls and hogwarts letters. the deathly hallows. the entire fucking franchise is a desperate plea to BUY OUR MERCH.

doesn't matter if anyone actually likes harry potter, the series is a vehicle for harry-potter-branded pajamas and phone cases and shitty fucking polyester robes with your hogwards house branded on the breast. it's the same problem as fast fashion. it doesn't matter if you like shein or want to buy the shitty plastic crop top that'll fall apart in two washes, that thing is getting made anyway, completely regardless of what you want or like, and it'll either get put in a landfill or someone will buy it. it doesn't fucking matter if nobody but active transphobes ever gives a second thought to harry potter again, jk is still gonna rake in millions of dollars a year same as it ever fucking was because her corporate empire is gonna keep pumping out shitty plastic doodads at a faster rate than anyone can ever purchase them, and it doesn't matter, because it's still more profitable than making things that don't go to landfills!!!

I'm really sorry to be talking about this again, but someone sent me a "Skepchick" video on youtube "pushing back on the debunking of the Greenlink/Dobby's Grave story. That is, this youtuber thinks the pipeline's route was changed in response to HP fan outcry after all, and we're all overly cynical clowns for believing some randos on reddit and substack. I think this youtuber is pretending that "scorn for reddit" is a valid substitute for "actual support for your arguments".

The youtuber's arguments are:

1) You're really believing some rando on Redit? A: no, I read the argument of some two randos on Reddit, and read the planning documents they linked, and thought their arguments made sense. It doesn't look like the pipeline's intended route went through thte Dobby memorial at any point between 2012 and 2021.

2) Simon Ludlam doesn't sound like he's joking on the podcast. So you think he's lying, for clout or something? A: no, I think he shared (as the rando substack put it) "pub anecdote that’s grown in the telling". I think this was a funny but unimportant thing that happened years ago, and when Ludlam was telling the story he either got his wires crossed by accident (happens to me all the time) or exaggerated for comedic effect.

3) The pipeline DID go through Dobby's grave, according to Simon Ludlam on the podcast. Here's the quote that proves it:

My colleague Tom, who, he works in all the permitting, said we're going to have to respond to these calls. And I said well, Tom, I'm super busy. And he goes, no no, we really have to respond to this. I said well Tom, what are they on about. And he said, well, look, apparently we're gonna go through Dobby's grave. [Some back in forth in which Ludlam doesn't know who Dobby is]. You pointed out very clearly where his grave was and that the cable's gonna go directly through it. And I said, well, he's a fictitious character, in a ficitious book, the whole thing's fictitious. What are you talking about? No, he said, it's very very serious. And it was serious. It was serious. So we got back to the planners, and we discussed exactly how to reroute the cable so we wouldn't go anywhere [near] to Dobby's grave.

A: We all agree that Simon Ludlam said that on the podcast. I even believe that Ludlam pointed at Dobby's grave in the news segment (hence the phone calls). However, the Reditors and Substacker (and I) think that Simon Ludlam MADE A MISTAKE IN 2018, because the planning documents contradict him. It's really plausible that he pointed at the wrong direction, or even was pointing at the right direction from his perspective but it looked like the wrong angle from the camera's. He did not even know the memorial was there, he had no reason to be super precise when pointing at a the dunes above the beach.

===

Meanwhile, the redditors' main argument is that the cable was always intended to go under/through the north end of the beach, and it still does, so it wasn't moved. (Dobby's grave is near the south end of the beach.)

Here's a 2012 planning document, examining several possible landfall locations for the interconnector cable. It's very preliminary, doesn't even lay out a route for the cable, but it does say (pg. 43 of the pdf) "The preferred landfall to the south of Milford Haven is at the northern extent of Freshwater Bay West. If the landfall is located at the northern end of the beach the nearshore route can positioned just outside the extent of the Castle Martin Firing Range." This is the map it gives (pg. 46):

For comparison, here is where Dobby's grave is according to google maps tonight (which I've verified by comparing this trip report with google streetview traversal along the beach):

Then the BBC Wales news article & supposed HP fans calling in happened in 2018. Here's a planning document from 2019, which addresses archeological sites along the planned route. With Google Maps zoomed out for scale (pg. 13 of the pdf):

And here's a Marine Mammal Mitigation Plan from 2020 (warning: link downloads a pdf) which is less detailed but clearly shows the cable surfacing at the northern side of the beach, again with google maps for scale (pg 4 of the PDF), again with google maps comparison. It's hard to tell with the shape of the red place marker, but again I think it's clear that the planned route goes north of Dobby's grave.

One thing that becomes clear when you actually read these planning documents is how many other REAL CONCERNS the planners had to address. Just in my paragraphs above I mention noise disturbance to marine mammals for the water section and disruption to prehistoric archeological sites on land. There's also commercial traffic coming out of the Pembroke's harbor, a military firing range, and concerns about disturbed sediments from the underwater construction causing bacterial blooms the beach, and intersection with older undersea cables. It's very plausible that adjustments were made to the route as a result of these factors-- but it also seems clear that none of these adjustments moved it south as far as Dobby's grave, at least not in any of the publicly released versions of the plan. It's ALSO very plausible that HP fans called in with concerns about Dobby's grave as a result of Ludlam's TV segmant (Or this 2018 BBC article which just said "at Freshwater West beach" without being more specific). But the youtube video isn't "debunking" anything by pointing that out -- we all agree that the phone calls are plausible!! The redditors think (and I agree) that the hypothesized phone calls didn't change the route of the cable.

Here's the comment by u/GrandBasharMileTeg that, after all of this investigation, I still think is the most reasonable guess at what happened:

my partner was a TA for an intro-to-subject course in grad school. finals week rolls around and the students are required to submit this big module assignment they've had like a month to do for a decent chunk of their grade. if you've submitted everything, you'll see a summary screen with a star beside each module name showing it's been completed.

an hour before the assignment deadline, he receives an email from a student claiming they completed the assignment, but the system is not allowing them to submit. there's an image attached to the email. partner goes to open what he assumes is a screenshot of that summary page.

instead, he sees that the student has taken a photo of their laptop from about 2 feet away, with that page open. strange, but it wouldn't be the first time a college freshman has lacked the tech literacy to take a screenshot. he almost doesn't look twice at it, but he realizes something about it just feels a little bit...off. so he zooms in.

the student had CUT STARS OUT OF CONSTRUCTION PAPER and TAPED THEM TO THEIR LAPTOP SCREEN BESIDE EACH MODULE NAME. you could see where they actually had completed the first couple of modules, but the stars for all the subsequent ones were like, double the size of the first two and exactly as uneven/irregular as you'd expect if you were freehanding them with scissors.

>thread is from 13 years ago