It's also worth pointing out that this pattern is kind of common. As here, these agents are often at the very top. Almost all Organisations of Interest will be compromised at the leadership level.
It's something most grass roots activists don't feel intuitively at all.
They look for spies among their own level but it's almost always going to be the organisers, the helpers, the ones with the van, the one that can print your posters, the one with a bit of spare cash, the dude who can set up your server and the friendly friend with time to help you personally that are the spies.
Logically it makes sense for a spy to be placed as high as possible to get more information, and yet activists look for spies among the rank and file. They look for odd people to label as the spy. They expel the outsider. They suspect the ones that don't fit in. But the spy is going to be a well adjusted normal insider that they already trust, almost always!
I find it so interesting. It happens again and again. It's probably the same pattern for any group that attracts any government attention.
As I mentioned in another comment, one of the most amazing examples of this was the British Army/MI5 mole inside the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Steaknife. He was a leading member of the IRA's internal security team.
It really feels counterintuitive that someone who has got to the top would be the one to turn, but it also makes sense that they would be the one's targetted.
I have no information about this specific case, but generally speaking I think that it would be in their best interests for an intelligence agency to push their asset to the top of the org through any means in order to maximise their impact, so, at least to me, it seems plausible that many of the people at the top are informants.
They have the most to lose personally. The rank and file can slither away, but once you’re up in the organization it’s hard to pretend that you’re an innocent.
People attracted to this stuff tend to be fairly dysfunctional as well. Even in successful revolutionary movements, the early people always get purged.
It would be difficult to turn top leadership in a group because they are probably the most devoted. It's likely easier to start from the bottom. The guy that always has time to attend meetings or participate or throw in some cash (the ideal member) is going to quickly rise in the ranks. The guy with 5 kids at home and is too busy with work is not going to be an given leadership roles. The guy that only needs a fig leaf of a job is going to have plenty of time to "help" the group plan and execute tasks. He's always going to have some connect that can come through to move things forward. A fed isn't going to be the one to suggest crimes but they will certainly be there at every moment to eagerly help move it forward.
The tactics are quite effective. If you put these rats in say the US Army and pursued such vigorous prosecution you could likely lock away the legit rank and file of both military and militias.
Oh please chime in on how soldiers aren't subject to the same psychological influences of other humans, while charming us on your .mil street cred. I don't need to be a navy seal to understand this, veterans were among those charged in say the Whitmer plot.
No one is denying there are extremists in the military. There are also street gang members in the military. Saying they are a significant portion of the population is a much different argument than saying there is a fringe population where there are standing orders to expel them if found.
And yet instead militias are targeted, while disproportionately sparing say the army. It's not the pursuit of justice and equal 'protection' of law, it's a calculated targeting to induce crime to lock away unwanted people over non criminal disagreements.
If there were such methods, and if these methods were used to compromise-proof an institution, then that institution would see the hammer drop down on them from above like nothing anyone (bystanders, pundits, the world) has ever seen before. Everyone scooped up with black headbags on, rendered to black ops sites.
Because, at that point, the government has exactly one play left... to make everyone so afraid of compromise-proofing that no one bothers. This isn't unprecedented, by the way. Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts was a similar situation, and they used illegal NSA surveillance to unmask him and parallel construction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction) to prosecute.
When they have a monopoly on violence and trillion dollar budgets, you're going to lose even if you have superior tactics.
Both organizations have had reputations for being honeypots as early as 2016. There have been a number of instances of federal agents becoming embedded in the organizational structures of groups like this (see e.g. the Malheur Wildlife Standoff and the plot to assassinate Gretchen Whitmer). Groups of this scale tend to fall into one of three categories: 1) They are honeypots set up by policing and / or intelligence agencies, 2) they start off as legitimate (though potentially not-yet radicalized) organizations that are compromised by a member turning informant when the radicalization begins to alarm them, or 3) they start off as radical organizations and are compromised after a federal agency threatens the leadership with jail time or influences them into becoming informants. It's quite common for the FBI to frame this as "helping to keep people safe"; leaders in groups like this are frequently easy to manipulate with flattery.
I've been struck by how often it is really quite senior people within criminal/terrorist organisations are the ones that get turned by the various agencies.
In the UK, there was an informant for MI5 in the IRA for years codenamed Steaknife. It turned out he was the head of IRA internal security, it was his job to hunt moles. He was the perfect agent. I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.
The Scorsese movie "The Departed" is both a remake of a film made in Hong Kong ("Infernal Affairs") and a semi-realistic depiction of the Boston Winter Hill Gang led by Bulger.
These days it looks to me like Extinction Rebellion (XR) are being run by spies, since all their activities are so counter-productive in terms of making people hate environmentalism.
Right, like putting out beavers in villages and towns. The beavers dig up dams, floiding the town, town which loved green and quiet hates environmentals forever. I would donate to that sort of self defeat initiative a million every day if i were exxon mobile.
The older you get, the more you've got to lose, and a lot of people become less radical with age.
At the same time you also tend to be a higher value target for external actors compared to young, new, members of an organisation. So in the young end of it you'd prefer infiltration to recruiting informants, in part because young informants also tend to be less reliable than old, for the reasons above. If it's your agent loyalty isn't as brittle as when you've convinced someone to become a traitor.
When news of government or other external actors having gained access breaks, you typically don't want your infiltrators to become known if you can avoid it. It's different in some settings, antifascists commonly do the opposite and try to protect their informants so they can keep working if they move on to another far right group, while their infiltrators sometimes go public with what they've done.
If you get enough on them that you could probably prosecute them successfully, then you have enough on them to try to turn them. And if they're the only one at that level that you have enough on, rather than make one prosecution, it may be better to turn them.
They are the highest value targets who coordinate the group's activities. Most will have done something at some point that could land them in prison for a long time; this is how they are typically turned. The ones that haven't done anything the feds can feasibly threaten them with often get bribed, which is where things can get really messy because you end up with policing organizations essentially permitting organized crime under a series of conditions (e.g. keep things quiet and we won't bother you). There are many documented instances of this happening on the street level, and some evidence to suggest it is occurring at the national level and the international level. It can be counter-intuitive to think of these organizations being so easily compromised, but a good rule of thumb is that no organization dedicated to criminal or subversive activity is going to evade the attention of the feds, and once that attention is there, they will almost never be able to outspend them. It's comparable to a small business trying to harden their systems against a state actor.
I would go so far as to say it quite literally is a small business trying to harden their systems against a state actor, only the systems here are organizational systems.
> I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.
There's also "Jimmy the Weasel" Fratianno who turned FBI informant. In Ovid Demaris' book "The Last Mafioso: The Treacherous World of Jimmy Fratianno", he quotes Jimmy even laughs about being one, taking money from FBI and still running his rackets for a time.
The characterization of "informants" as being literal on the payroll feds is usually incorrect. They're usually genuine group members who are being manipulated by literal on the payroll feds.
And you're missing a key feedback loop. The feds typically "create" an informant by digging up dirt on someone and blackmailing them into ratting on their buddies in exchange for non-prosecution. This informant then has a huge f-ing reason to radicalize the group and see to it that they do or attempt to do something worthy of prosecution so that they can make good on their promise to the feds.
So otherwise potentially benign groups wind up getting turned into hotbeds of extremism basically because the feds demand extremists to prosecute.
This is a workflow that dates back at least as far as the war on drugs where you'd have small time traffickers would get turned into informants and then work tirelessly to push their boss's or suppliers business to the next level while collecting evidince for their handlers. It was used on racist and religious extremist groups in the 80s and 90s and then on muslim religious groups in the 00s and now you're seeing it again with right wing groups.
hence my confusion at the sudden "left" outcry over the attacks on the FBI and CIA, two organizations they have been bemoaning for my entire life, and with good reason! Those organizations are responsible for some of the absolute worst behavior associated with American history, the most shameful of shameful episodes throughout the Americas were started by the CIA and FBI.
I think the outcry is actually mostly media-oriented, because the media for the last generation has been filled with ex-Agents and funded by the Fed. The media is sad to see these organizations attacked, because the media is run by people with emotional bonds to those agencies.
>hence my confusion at the sudden "left" outcry over the attacks on the FBI and CIA, two organizations they have been bemoaning for my entire life
I have been saying it for over a decade, the western world is having a crisis of principals, not a crisis of policy. The inability to implement good policy (both public and private) is a symptom.
I'd like to hear more about this "crisis of principals, not a crisis of policy". What do you mean? Do you mean that there's a turf war between "principals"? How and maybe why is that different than 50 years ago, say, or 70, or any post-war period?
> hence my confusion at the sudden "left" outcry over the attacks on the FBI and CIA,
The attacks are premised on them being too leftist and needing to be replaced in their function by new/rebuilt organizations that are more friendly to the Right, which is the source of the center to center-left opposition to them (the Left itself is more focussed on criticizing the tactics of the center-to-center-left opposition than the regime.)
Nobody on the left disputes the fucked up history of the FBI or CIA -- but they're not being dismantled, they're being explicitly weaponized against the Left again. If Trump had said, "The FBI has a racist an unamerican history, we need to shut it down", he might find some common ground, but instead he's pointing at the occasional investigation of someone in his party or social class as evidence of their "wokeness" and firing anyone who dared participate in those investigations while directing them to investigate his political opponents. If you wanted honest FBI reform, you wouldn't let Kash or Dan Bongino within 1,000 yards of the building.
If they are trying to close in on the intelligence and police state because it's not vicious enough against folks they don't like (which includes me and a lot of folks I care about) then a "new and improved" CIA / FBI isn't a "good" thing.
I generally hate the US gov for it's history of doing objectively evil things (I pass by a former "residential school" every time I drive into town), but replacing it with something even more vicious and authoritarian doesn't improve the situation.
This whole neofascist movement is fueled by a mistaken belief that dismantling existing power structures will create a stable situation with more freedom, as opposed to the reality that different power structures will eagerly step into the vacuum.
I think that most of the smarter folks I know on the farther and farther left realize that a lot of what we see are "structural" issues, so voting (for establishment folks) stops being a real strategy at some point. In some sense, that philosophically materialist/idealist seems to be one tool for discerning the ideological differences between liberal capitalists and left anti-capitalists.
By contrast it's not surprising to me that as we go the other direction, the far right is less able to understand that these situations are structurally necessary for the operation of the systems that they support. Convincing those folks that it's not simply who is in charge is likely impossible. It will sound stupid, perhaps, but I have heard convincing arguments that the idea that systems are defined by "who is in charge of them" is fundamentally why "antisemitism" ends up being central to both the conspiracy folks and the fascists.
The fundamental confusion here may be the misconception that pro-people pro-liberty or pro-progress means anti-state. Or that the new people are anti-state in any way that means well for most people.
It seems entirely consistent that the people most alarmed about law enforcement and intelligence being handed over figures who are indicating they don’t intend to use it in a principled manner are critics who’ve seen how even less extreme more accountable people have used these roles poorly. The new team seems headed in a direction that might make poor past iterations look principled.
“Burn it all down” is good cover for people who want to selectively burn things down for their benefit (but not their things).
> It seems entirely consistent that the people most alarmed ... are critics who’ve seen how even less extreme more accountable people have used these roles poorly.
That would make sense if... there had been accountability in the past for the law enforcement and intel folks who abused their power. So far there's been no accountability ever for any of them no matter what they've done. If that continues and the only change is the targets then that will be very bad indeed, but that's not what Trump and friends are saying, and they seem to want to reduce the size of the agencies in question, which will necessarily reduce the number of targets they can acquire, or the extent to which they can persecute them -- unless of course AI makes them much more efficient in the future, say. Not that there's any guarantee that these agencies will ultimately be reduced in size. But if I take what they're saying at face value and they deliver on it, then I think we're looking at an overall improvement.
> The characterization of "informants" as being literal on the payroll feds is usually incorrect. They're usually genuine group members who are being manipulated by literal on the payroll feds.
I never implied that they were.
> a federal agency [...] influences them into becoming informants. It's quite common for the FBI to frame this as "helping to keep people safe"; leaders in groups like this are frequently easy to manipulate with flattery.
> And you're missing a key feedback loop. The feds typically "create" an informant by digging up dirt on someone and blackmailing them into ratting on their buddies in exchange for non-prosecution.
I missed no such thing. Did you even read my comment?
> compromised after a federal agency threatens the leadership with jail time
Turning leadership of an already radicalized organization is not what he means. New converts to a group who are actually informants will provoke an organization to radicalism.
When I wrote my original comment I did end up removing that as an option because I couldn't think of any instances where I had reason to believe that it had happened. I'm not saying it doesn't, but I don't see any evidence in that article to support that it does.
I feel like it's worth noting that this is not a universal dynamic. Tim McVeigh didn't need a fed to turn into the kind of person who kills 168 people. I'm sure we're all aware of the way this occasional dynamic gets turned into an excuse for any radicial behavior: "must have been a false flag, must have been talked into it." Which, to be clear, you did not say -- but we see it often.
I think that's an eternal mystery, if there was in fact an unidentified co-conspirator. Elohim City is a convenient place for conspiracies to coalesce, but there's a lack of hard evidence as opposed to "well, it would make sense."
I think he did need a fed. Watching children burned alive at Waco (he was there), after which the seiging feds proudly posed for photos on their charred ruble, really got the ball rolling on his motivation. I'm not saying the feds told him to do it, but Ruby Ridge, Waco, and feds like Lon Horiuchi getting off scott free after sniping an innocent woman holding a child really radicalized him.
It is quite funny on 4chan and similar places watching everyone accuse everyone else that protests in some way of being a fed. Which I guess is job done for the security services.
Since Chanology, it has been known by anybody paying attention and keeping score that taking 4chan into the real world is extremely cringe and must always be criticized. Whether it's organizing political protests on 4chan or anything else even remotely like that, its cringe and anybody suggesting it deserves to be flamed.
A telling example where such a ploy failed to play out and got exposed was Ruby Ridge. An independently minded off-grid man with his family, some loose social contacts with a nearby neo-nazi group. Randomly gets paid to turn a 16 inch shotgun into a 15 inch shotgun, which is a felony crime, now they blackmail him to hook up with the neo nazis and inform or take those sawing off of a shotgun type charges.
Ended up with a standoff outside their house when a dog barking at agents snooping around became a gunfight, lost his wife and newborn kid to an overly exuberant DEA sniper
I remember reading in the early 00s archived posts from the early 90s wherein people cracked jokes about the racist groups of the time being barbecue clubs for feds.
These people are typically the true believers in the Republic. They also believe they are taking down existential threats to the republic. Finally, they believe in defense in layers.
You know what they don't believe in? Playing fair.
No. I wouldn't count on new homeland security leadership appointees having a "free hand" in practice. All of them will discover that their phone, internet and location activity is known to the security agencies. All of that information is also known for their associates. Couple that with the fact that you're dealing with new appointees whose ideology is essentially based more in superiority rather than patriotism, and it points to a lot in that data trove that would be of interest to the kind of people who keep the FBI running from the shadows.
In fact, my bet is that this series of appointees will be far more easily controlled than ones appointed by some red, white and blue boy scout with a martyr complex like McCain would have been for instance. I'd wager there are probably some people in our homeland security infrastructure who actually prefer our appointed leadership be comprised of people who are more malleable.
What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret. Most of that stuff is quite visible. You worry about the ones who organize quietly.
Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.)
> What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret.
For that matter, I'd include myself in the latter group. I'm reasonably vocal here - usually in an attempt to simply share my perspective, as it's not of the prevailing position in this community.
Sure, "the gun nuts" have a different agenda than the larger community. We're gun nuts because that's important to us. I can't think of anything that I've ever said (or seen said) in that community that should be secret. Lots of things that could be easily taken out of context, sure, and a fair number of things that are just plain inappropriate - but you could say the same for any community.
> You worry about the ones who organize quietly.
Some of them, absolutely.
> Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.)
I've never heard of that channel - though, granted, I'm not really a YouTube kinda person. It looks like what I'd call "Boomer content". I don't mean that in a negative way exactly; that's the kind of thing I'd expect someone in the gun community in their mid-50s or older to watch. The younger generation (say, 20s-40s) is watching things like "The Fat Electrician".
While there's certainly more overlap than a random group of people, in discussions like these I think even the most anti-gun people recognize that the broader "I like guns because guns are fun" community isn't really the focus in terms of domestic terrorism or crazy race war stuff.
Particularly on youtube there's this huge Forgotten Weapons, Garand Thumb, DemolitionRanch etc style sphere that stays relatively apolitical, or at least just mildly right wingy.
The problem is it's difficult to have one without the other. If the cost of reducing gun violence is that hobbyists can't collect guns... that's a cost I think society can stomach.
I'm not blaming hobbyists for gun violence or anything, obviously, but these ideas are not unconnected.
We are failing specific people at specific stages of their lives by not offering them opportunity and hope for the future, resulting in gun violence and suicide. Even if you could round up all the guns, the hopelessness and violence will remain without some structural changes.
If you're a US citizen, gun control is an infringement on your civil rights and a weak topical solution for systematic flaws.
I agree with everything you said, except your last sentence.
As a parent, and as a gun owner, I'm fine with there being gun control that leads to no more school shootings. And no, you can't depend on a "good guy with a gun" (Uvalde, Parkland). I don't know what the solution is, to be honest, but other countries don't have the school shooting problem the US has.
There is no gun control that leads to no school shootings. It is simply not possible.
The best thing we can do is to address the root cause, and react as quickly as possible when there is a problem. We have police presence at basically every single public arena -- government buildings, hospitals, stadiums, malls, etc; we should have police presence at schools too, along with the training to do their jobs effectively.
The harsh reality is that school shootings make up a vanishingly small number of students who will die of gun violence, let along those that die from any cause.
[The FBI says 105 people](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...), excluding shooters, died in mass shootings in 2023, of which a subset will be students. Even if we assumed every mass shooting victim in 2023 was a student, something like 10x the number of students will die from poisoning, another 10x from suffocation, another 22x from motor vehicle collisions, etc.
I think this is a uniquely American problem because America is a unique country. No other nations have the incredible wealth, diversity, and rights of America, and looking to other countries to emulate is imo, a mistake.
> I think this is a uniquely American problem because America is a unique country. No other nations have the incredible wealth, diversity, and rights of America, and looking to other countries to emulate is imo, a mistake.
Other than the "right to bear arms", what rights do Americans have that sets them apart?
First of all, I'm not a gun control activist, and I do agree with some of your views.
However:
> I think this is a uniquely American problem because America is a unique country. No other nations have the incredible wealth, diversity, and rights of America, and looking to other countries to emulate is imo, a mistake.
- increased wealth should be correlated with a reduction in shootings,
- population diversity is not a unique feature of the USA, it is comparable, or arguably lower, than most European countries,
- same for rights: the rights of a USA citizen are comparable to the average EU citizen. Many EU countries allow the possession of guns (although most forbid taking arms out of one's home unless it's for transport, e.g., to the firing range, and most EU states vehemently forbid concealed carry). There are some differences regarding Free Speech, however, where most EU countries allow it largely, but restrict hate speech more.
It's true that shootings are a somewhat unique USA problem, but I'd look more into cultural differences than into rights and demographics.
> We know where gun violence comes from, and it's not dudes collecting vintage rifle prototypes from Yugoslavia.
I literally said "I'm not blaming gun hobbyists for violence." Thank you for starting off with a terribly bad faith reading of my comment.
> If you're a US citizen, gun control is an infringement on your civil rights
And this is what I mean by them being connected. Gun hobbyists in the US will argue for it based on their "rights", which just makes it harder to make any changes that might actually reduce gun violence.
> Even if you could round up all the guns, the ... violence will remain without some structural changes.
It's difficult for me to believe that if you remove one of the easiest ways to kill people, violence would just remain the same. Is there any evidence to support this theory? I've never seen any, but I have seen data suggesting that countries with stricter gun control laws tend to have less murders.
> gun control is an infringement on your civil rights
Because gun ownership is part of your constitution, you can easily make it seem as though those questioning it are attacking the very basis of your country. Seems like a systemic issue to me...
> the hopelessness ... will remain without some structural changes.
I don't disagree that hopelessness is the core issue here, but I think it's blatantly silly to think that if you give a hopeless population easy access to tools whose entire function is to kill, and tell them that owning that weapon (and using it when necessary...) is a fundamental part of their identity... that it won't result in more and more intense violence.
Like with many widespread societal issues, you can't just ignore the symptoms and try to cure the actual problem - and certainly nor can you do the opposite, as you say - you need to fix both.
> I literally said "I'm not blaming gun hobbyists for violence." Thank you for starting off with a terribly bad faith reading of my comment.
I agree with you, this is not the problem. No bad faith intended.
> Gun hobbyists in the US will argue for it based on their "rights"..."
No quotes on rights. If you don't care about rights or are happy to cede them, then there are all kinds of societal improvements you could make -- say, banning hate speech, lowering or eliminating a presumption of innocence, banning private firearm ownership, etc. However, this is antithetical to how the US is setup and its system of laws. The same arguments used to attack gun control can just as easily be turned on other rights, such as the freedom of speech.
> It's difficult for me to believe that if you remove one of the easiest ways to kill people, violence would just remain the same
It's difficult to run a proper experiment for many reasons. However, I would argue that the concern from voters is not about routine violence (eg gang violence localized to a specific community) but mass killings like Uvalde or Parkland. As we can see in Europe (or even in the US, in New Orleans), you can kill plenty of people with a car, a bomb, a knife, etc. Killing lots of people quickly is not an attribute unique to firearms.
> Because gun ownership is part of your constitution, you can easily make it seem as though those questioning it are attacking the very basis of your country. Seems like a systemic issue to me...
Yes, this is a systematic attack and many Americans see it this way. Governments have only ever moved one direction on gun control -- once the right is eroded, it is gone forever.
> blatantly silly to think that if you give a hopeless population easy access to tools whose entire function is to kill...
Again, the second amendment for everyone. We do not gate rights behind fees, tests, or onerous restrictions. I am interested in preserving (and expanding!) civil liberties for all, while addressing the root causes of gun violence.
Society believes it can stomach that cost because it is largely irrational, incapable of long-term or worst-case thinking, and utterly oblivious to ground-state reality.
I always feel the need to preface this statement when I make it here, so here we go: this is in no way meant as a threat or even a statement of my own political beliefs. It is my belief based on being a member of these communities for decades.
Any attempt to ban firearms in the United States would result in more death and injury than the problems it is intended to solve. The American people will not give up their arms without bloodshed.
>Any attempt to ban firearms in the United States would result in more death and injury than the problems it is intended to solve.
This is a very generous assumption. I instead assume that the problem that it intends to solve is "how does a government crank down hard on its citizens so that they become some sort of Stalinesque serfs who have no power and those which survive mindlessly obey"... in that scenario, gun prohibition isn't just a good idea but probably a necessary precondition.
For obvious reasons, even if gun control advocates are privy to that reasoning, public relations demands that they not say that part out loud.
Your argument is absurd... we have real world counter-examples. When people were complaining about the recent Iraq conflict (and Afghanistan too), the complaints were always "not enough boots on the ground". Turns out that what wins wars is men with rifles. Not tanks, battleships, or next generation fighter jets.
Worse than the logic of your argument, is the morality of it. If trained soldiers are oppressing people, then not only is it rational to retain the means to fight back against them, but it's a moral imperative. Stupidity might be forgiven, you can't will yourself to be smarter than you were born. Moral cowardice is a choice, a disgusting one.
I think the issue is less stopping gun collectors. The issue is preventing self-defense. If there were a magic weapon which can only be used to defend yourself, and not for offensive purposes, then sure! Ban guns! But in today’s world, a firearm is the most effective self-defense tool (tho owning a gun isn’t going to magically make you safer).
I grew up supporting gun control, but I think that’s because of my background. I grew up trusting the police, not only to protect me from any would-be ne'er-do-wells, but also that I wouldn’t be antagonized by the state.
If you live in a rural area, where the response time for the local sheriff is half an hour, then having a gun can be vital. Or if you live in an area where the cops simply won’t show up when called.
I don’t want to have to fully rely on the state for my personal safety, and in particular this current government.
Ah yes, paint the issue as only solvable by a "magic" item... Of course, trying to make the other side seem fundamentally silly is a primary tactic of the pro-gun crowd
> only be used to defend yourself, and not for offensive purposes, then sure!
Of course not, but the question is more the damage one can do when used for offensive purposes.
> Of course, trying to make the other side seem fundamentally silly is a primary tactic of the pro-gun crowd
I don't think "the other side" is fundamentally silly--that's just the way I write. I take "the other side" extremely seriously because, like I mentioned, I've been to pro gun control protests, and while I now disagree with some of those positions, I have genuine respect for where you're coming from.
In terms of less-lethal weapons, anyone who's serious about self defense should carry pepper spray (though pepper spray is non-lethal, rather than less-lethal). Full stop. If you want to carry a gun, too, that makes sense in some situations. But for myself and anyone who's serious about self-defense, we first of all hope to never have to use any of these tools ever. But if something did happen, I'd much much much rather use pepper spray than something that's more harmful.
> the broader "I like guns because guns are fun" community
That's the community I'm speaking of - in fact, we'd call those people "Fudds", after Elmer Fudd.
It's definitely a political position. It's just one that's prone to violence. If anything, it's the opposite; the gun community does an excellent job of policing itself. I've personally seen people displaying violent tendencies get reported and ultimately charged and convicted within that particular community.
Gen X is in their mid-fifties. Boomers are in their 70s now. But yes, it is Boomer content, and the pick of the 1911 is a weirdly hilarious tell. That's the sidearm from WWII so it's the one all the Boomers' dad's wore into Europe & the Pacific. Of course Jesus would choose the 1911 lmao
I don't carry them much, for all the reasons you might imagine: they're big, heavy, and relatively low capacity. They feel great, though.
Realistically I almost always carry a Glock 43. If I were buying a carry pistol today, I'd consider a Sig P365 or a Canik. They're the right balance of capability and convenience.
... but yeah, that particular conclusion was foregone. If nothing else, it feeds the long-running meme of .45 ACP being "God's caliber".
> Lots of things that could be easily taken out of context, sure, and a fair number of things that are just plain inappropriate - but you could say the same for any community.
What kind of ridiculous copium is this?
i'm sure the quilting community says all sorts of terrible things that could be taken out of context.
the difference is they don't have a long history of gun violence. ain't no one showed up and killed 20 elementary kids with knitting needles. no one smuggled a crochet gear to a 17 year old and saw protesters crochet'd to death.
and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat and you're doing what exactly with these guns?
Global economics has the power to kill far more people than small arms ever could. We suggest you put your money where your exceptionally large mouths are.
I understand there are arguments for it. I can even understand where they are coming from. What is interesting is many of these anti 2A sorts unknowingly speak their murderous intent out loud. They are that which they hate.
That's fair. It is highly hypocritical to call for the end of civilian gun ownership but expect civilian gun owners to save them from authoritarian goverment.
It is also hypocritical for civilian gun owners to claim they will use their 2A rights to protect themselves and other citizens from authoritarian government but fail to be vigilant enough to recognize the rise of authoritarianism.
This only works if the people that have guns are smart enough to know when to use them con(de?)structively. Unfortunately there are swathes of American gun owners that view politics like a football game that will never have any effect on them, and once it arrives on their doorstep it will be far, far too late.
> That's fair. It is highly hypocritical to call for the end of civilian gun ownership but expect civilian gun owners to save them from authoritarian goverment.
I wouldn't say hypocritical. I'd say cognitively dissonant. Not the same thing.
> It is also hypocritical for civilian gun owners to claim they will use their 2A rights to protect themselves and other citizens from authoritarian government but fail to be vigilant enough to recognize the rise of authoritarianism.
Private firearms ownership is an indirect and implicit threat of violence against tyranny. It may or may not work as such. It might only limit the degree of tyranny. Remember, armed citizens can't organize to commit violence against the state because the state has authority (or a patina of authority) and the ability to bring a great deal of force to bear on any hot spots. The state's ability to bring force to bear is limited though, but only in such a way that a huge number of citizens would have to rise up simultaneously and be patient enough to keep rising as the going gets tough. Therefore I think private firearms ownership can't stop tyranny altogether, but can moderate it. There is no hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance here.
People are not ready to take up arms over "economic policy". What they're concerned about is the flaunting of the Constitution by the Executive, and the dereliction of duty by Congress.
Personally, I’m using my guns to teach my trans friends how to shoot. The government (and their supporters) are increasingly vocal in their dehumanization and threats against trans people, and many (of my friends at least) are looking for protection.
What else would you have me do with my guns? (I’m also helping my non-trans friends get into shooting too.)
>ain't no one showed up and killed 20 elementary kids with knitting needles.
Plainly false. Though people who advocate gun control never pay attention, there have been many high-profile mass murders/attacks where people did attack with knives/swords/machetes, and these have comparable body counts.
The UK is way ahead of you too, by the way. They've started to implement knife control, including orders for people to bring in kitchen knives to have the tips blunted.
>and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat a
And that government is perceived to be on the side of the gun rights proponents. The people complaining are largely those who have, in the past, eschewed gun ownership.
The point was that knitting needles are not implements of violence, yet groups using them for the group's explicit purpose can have very bad and harmful takes. One does not need to have a weapon to be harmful. Our Dear Leader has proven that many times.
It is a good idea to stand on pro-gun rhetoric when you want all the guns on your side and not being pointed at you. You use confusing double-talk to trick them into believing you are on their side and you fight for them. In the US, there is the added benefit of poor education, which cripples critical thinking.
Also, the claim that melee weapons are somehow comparable to modern firearms is quite laughable. Where are you getting your data?
>Also, the claim that melee weapons are somehow comparable to modern firearms is quite laughable.
People laugh at all sorts of things that aren't very funny.
The body counts for most of the school shootings (and other, various, non-school shootings) that people complain about are just under double digits, or manage to roll right up into double digits. Blade attacks are perfectly capable of that many injuries and deaths within the time constraint of a typical police response. This is born by fact, where such knife attacks have managed those body counts. There are a half a dozen or more in recent years in China, and at least one in Europe that I can think of.
>You use confusing double-talk to trick them into believing you are on their side and you fight for them.
No one with any sense here thinks I "fight for them". I'm just showing that I'm not unwilling for them to exercise their own rights to self-defense. This is because a principle is at stake. If it also contrasts with the general lack of principles among those who advocate gun control somehow, that's their problem.
> i'm sure the quilting community says all sorts of terrible things that could be taken out of context.
The things said there are different in perspective from some of the things said here, just from another direction.
To be more specific, most of the time when I see someone say something like "hang 'em from the lampposts", it's in reference to LEO attempting confiscation or something. It should not be reasonably construed as a legitimate threat and is not intended as such. It's hyperbole.
People who are actually a risk are obvious based on their overall pattern of behavior.
> the difference is they don't have a long history of gun violence. ain't no one showed up and killed 20 elementary kids with knitting needles. no one smuggled a crochet gear to a 17 year old and saw protesters crochet'd to death.
Neither does the gun community.
We do have dangerous items as the center of the whole idea, though, which means the hyperbole I mentioned above is looked at much more closely than if a textile artist made the same comment. That has resulted in significant internal policing.
> and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat and you're doing what exactly with these guns?
The vast majority of us don't see things that way at all - this is exactly what "we" (i.e., the gun community) voted for.
That said, I've been an advocate for LGBT, minorities, and others at risk acquiring arms and training for decades. I'll continue to do that.
> and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat and you're doing what exactly with these guns?
It sounds like you're either advocating or wishing that gun owners "do something", something presumably violent. And that in a post ascribing desire for violence to [from context] militias and gun nuts. A bit strange, IMO.
I don't think "God, Family, and Guns" is the "militia member" or "gun nut" you're looking for. In fact, you probably won't find any of them on YouTube. YouTube's rules for firearm contents basically mean you get much more tame contents on YouTube than elsewhere. You might have to go look on Rumble, but I wouldn't know what channels there or elsewhere because I only use YouTube.
It seems you want a AI to analyze the data in general?
Otherwise you will have to do some work and read a little bit .. and then investigate to see if there is more. That is where the search tools are useful. Like in the example, finding out if that Scott guy changed his opinion on the 6. of january after Trump became president. (To see if the original statement was a lie. Not possible with ease so far)
People will speak in code, if they are planning crimes. Only some idiots speak openly of violent revolution in public messengers.
If you don't know what's there you just start from the top I suppose. That's what happened with the Snowden leaks, they were picked apart over the span of months if not years by journalists, publishing what they found was interesting.
I suppose when you have a large corpus you start with as many browse points as you can. So maybe a list of the top senders, top recipients, recipient graphs.
I'd think by day would be next. Browse subjects by day, and word clouds for each message thread? The. Try to isolate topics discussed each day, then link the topics across days.
You should be able to click in and see the thread/messages/etc.
This is, at some level, how legal discovery stuff works from what I understand.
In a dump like this, why would anyone truat that any given part of it is authentic? I could tell some great lies by embedding disinformation in a disseminated data dump like this.
Skimming a fair chunk of it by hand (and some others have run it through LLMs) it seems extremely mundane. I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible. He's self promoting like crazy, is/was a professional reporter, and 77 pages of sparsely spaced telegram chats is like 30 minutes of reading. If there was some big story awaiting in those 77 pages (or the entire leak for that matter) he'd, with 100% certainty, want to be the one breaking it.
So it's most likely just going to be an insight into a different culture/worldview, like reading e.g. /r/anarchism. In many ways this is also the same with the Clinton leaks. Unless one was just horrifically naive of how politics works, there was nothing particularly exceptional in it. The really wild stuff came from interpreting messages as having coded meanings.
77 pages of messages sounds like it's only a small percentage of communication in that group. I can imagine (also based on other comments about organizations like this being infiltrated by law enforcement) their communication networks are a lot more involved than Telegram chats or other "honeypotable" systems. Snowden revealed (or confirmed our suspicions that) the NSA has backdoor access to all major American based social media / communications, and the media broke at least twice about a major 'encrypted' chat / secure phone provider being compromised causing hundreds if not thousands of arrests worldwide.
(note: arrests, because whether the chats were recorded legally and are admissable to court is a whole different matter)
> I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible.
Read back a few sentences for the context - they aren't willing to ready 77 pages just to seek/isolate messages from one individual around a specific topic. I would expect a journalist to do this repeatedly for multiple individuals, so it makes sense to parse the data and make it queryable without having to read through hundreds/thousands of telegrams just to capture a few dozen
"Trust, but verify". In this case, none of this is admissable in court (assuming there IS anything illegal in here, I haven't finished reading beyond people selling merch) because it wasn't done by the book, but it can give enough leads for further investigation, like marking people as "person of interest", cross referencing with other known activities by the people involved, etc. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction.
> This is why this dataset is hard to wrap your head around: there's just sooo much here. It would take a ridiculous amount of time to try to manually read through it all. Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there.
Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. He then goes on to speculate that Scot Seddon's disavowal of the January 6th protests was disingenuous, and that his true feelings would be revealed in chat logs after Trump was re-elected. But:
> This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel.
So the guy complaining about conspiracy theories goes on to invent his own despite having access to potentially corroborative data that he simply can't be bothered to read.
The guy is just walking us through the process of analyzing the dataset. He’s not really making any conclusions at this point - it’s like a technical tutorial for journalists.
But nonetheless fascinating. There are must be some really good PhD thesii written (to be written?) about how someone is supposed to handle this sort of data dump with modern tooling. It is a non-trivial general problem; we have a lot of really data floating around in public (Panama papers, relatively transparent government info, dumps of less transparent info at wikileaks.org, OSINT of all shapes and sizes). Even if a body reads the whole thing they need some sort of solid mental schema going in or they'll end up in crank territory.
Although why he thinks old mate would change his position on the Jan 6 riots is a mystery (and why he cares). Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
> It's come to my attention that this dataset is rather challenging for journalists and researchers to wrap their heads around. I wrote a book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, aimed at teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze datasets just like this.
> Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
In full fairness "riots" is what its called when the rioters lose. If they win they are usually called something more positive and celebrated by the resulting new regime.
There is a solid tradition of new regimes killing off the rioters because they are unruly troublemakers. Not a guarantee, but certainly a tendency. Nobody likes rioters when you get down to brass tacks.
> Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
bullshit. the only reason you have an 8 hour work day and a semblance of worker protections is because a lot of people fought and died for them.
it's the only reason 8 year olds don't go down into the mines, or lose hands working in factories.
Jan 6th made a serious run at congressional officials; the VP of the US basically had to hide or get lynched. this could have been a thing, but didn't go all the way.
> So, I figured I'd write a series of posts publicly exploring this dataset and sharing my findings.
> ...
> At the end, I'll have a single database of Telegram messages from the whole dataset. I'll be able to query it to, for example, show me all messages from Scot Seddon sorted chronologically. This will make it simple to see what he was saying in the lead-up to January 6, immediately after January 6, and then what he's saying about Trump these days, after he was re-elected.
There are more parts to come in this series, which is very clearly stated in the post.
If I claim to have evidence that you committed a crime, and announce that I will post the evidence later, should my claims be taken seriously, or dismissed?
Even if he's right (and I'm not saying he isn't), this kind of behavior is inexcusable (though completely expected) coming from a guy who calls himself a journalist.
> > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel.
77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.
Not that it's a great method but just for fun I gave a large chunk of it to an LLM to process and then asked it for the 20 most disturbing or nefarious things in the chats and it was incredibly boring. Most interesting thing I learned from the files is how many gun toting americans also drive dodge chargers.
I would have expected nice pickup trucks or any TRD Pro trim Toyota.
I'd be curious if the LLM's own self-censorship would prevent it from reporting truly disturbing things. Maybe add one legitimately bad thing into the middle of a chat and see if it gets reported.
I'm fairly decent a prompt engineering I think, told it was for my art project of a creative writing class and I'd hidden 20 disturbing and nefarious things in the text (made sure to inject a fake murder into the text) - fake murder then a bunch of airsoft stuff, some psychological manipulation, and it oddly surfaced...some fb cookies, heh. 2mill tokens x3 runs
Have you tried querying for specific misconducts and let the LLM focus at one at a time? E.g. Find whether murders were planned or carried out, can you find any signs or plans of bomb-making, can you list all messages related to fire and arson, were any mass manipulation campaigns planned, etc, ...
I have the feeling that would probably be more effective, not sure though.
Well my first query was "is there anything bad in here" and it basically said "no, it's a bunch of weirdos talking about guns, conspiracy theories and politics but there is nothing truly bad in there" - and then I went through a bunch of prompting for a while and very quickly got bored because at least what I was looking at, was just a bunch of americans talking about politics and guns.
Depends. Most of Telegram is indeed shallow. But some of my groups are occupied by people with a competition of who can write the longest and convulted essays of deep philosophical and political issues.
The author of the blog post, Micah Lee, appears to be one of the directors of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets)[0].
DDoSecrets appears to be an anarchist/communist affiliated activist group.
Basically you've got two groups from extreme sides of the political spectrum fighting each other, the Guy Fawkes LARPers upset about Jan 6 of all things, and the seal team 6 LARPers upset about "stolen" elections and ivermectin.
TBH I wouldn't be surprised if these organizations are infested with FBI agents.
Even the small group that tried to kidnap Whitmer had a suspected 12 informants and agents (3 confirmed informants, 2 agents) in the group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
It's also worth pointing out that this pattern is kind of common. As here, these agents are often at the very top. Almost all Organisations of Interest will be compromised at the leadership level.
It's something most grass roots activists don't feel intuitively at all.
They look for spies among their own level but it's almost always going to be the organisers, the helpers, the ones with the van, the one that can print your posters, the one with a bit of spare cash, the dude who can set up your server and the friendly friend with time to help you personally that are the spies.
Logically it makes sense for a spy to be placed as high as possible to get more information, and yet activists look for spies among the rank and file. They look for odd people to label as the spy. They expel the outsider. They suspect the ones that don't fit in. But the spy is going to be a well adjusted normal insider that they already trust, almost always!
I find it so interesting. It happens again and again. It's probably the same pattern for any group that attracts any government attention.
As I mentioned in another comment, one of the most amazing examples of this was the British Army/MI5 mole inside the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Steaknife. He was a leading member of the IRA's internal security team.
It really feels counterintuitive that someone who has got to the top would be the one to turn, but it also makes sense that they would be the one's targetted.
I have no information about this specific case, but generally speaking I think that it would be in their best interests for an intelligence agency to push their asset to the top of the org through any means in order to maximise their impact, so, at least to me, it seems plausible that many of the people at the top are informants.
They have the most to lose personally. The rank and file can slither away, but once you’re up in the organization it’s hard to pretend that you’re an innocent.
People attracted to this stuff tend to be fairly dysfunctional as well. Even in successful revolutionary movements, the early people always get purged.
It would be difficult to turn top leadership in a group because they are probably the most devoted. It's likely easier to start from the bottom. The guy that always has time to attend meetings or participate or throw in some cash (the ideal member) is going to quickly rise in the ranks. The guy with 5 kids at home and is too busy with work is not going to be an given leadership roles. The guy that only needs a fig leaf of a job is going to have plenty of time to "help" the group plan and execute tasks. He's always going to have some connect that can come through to move things forward. A fed isn't going to be the one to suggest crimes but they will certainly be there at every moment to eagerly help move it forward.
The tactics are quite effective. If you put these rats in say the US Army and pursued such vigorous prosecution you could likely lock away the legit rank and file of both military and militias.
I'm sorry, are you basing that on your years of experience and significant expertise concerning the US military?
Oh please chime in on how soldiers aren't subject to the same psychological influences of other humans, while charming us on your .mil street cred. I don't need to be a navy seal to understand this, veterans were among those charged in say the Whitmer plot.
No one is denying there are extremists in the military. There are also street gang members in the military. Saying they are a significant portion of the population is a much different argument than saying there is a fringe population where there are standing orders to expel them if found.
And yet instead militias are targeted, while disproportionately sparing say the army. It's not the pursuit of justice and equal 'protection' of law, it's a calculated targeting to induce crime to lock away unwanted people over non criminal disagreements.
I've often wondered if there is research on effective ways of preventing this - of compromise-proofing an institution.
If there were such methods, and if these methods were used to compromise-proof an institution, then that institution would see the hammer drop down on them from above like nothing anyone (bystanders, pundits, the world) has ever seen before. Everyone scooped up with black headbags on, rendered to black ops sites.
Because, at that point, the government has exactly one play left... to make everyone so afraid of compromise-proofing that no one bothers. This isn't unprecedented, by the way. Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts was a similar situation, and they used illegal NSA surveillance to unmask him and parallel construction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction) to prosecute.
When they have a monopoly on violence and trillion dollar budgets, you're going to lose even if you have superior tactics.
Basically the plot of The Man Who Was Thursday
Jan 6th had loads of FBI informants as well.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn850jj44mjo
I would be less surprised if it were the other way around.
Some of those fbi agents are active participants and true believers too.
Both organizations have had reputations for being honeypots as early as 2016. There have been a number of instances of federal agents becoming embedded in the organizational structures of groups like this (see e.g. the Malheur Wildlife Standoff and the plot to assassinate Gretchen Whitmer). Groups of this scale tend to fall into one of three categories: 1) They are honeypots set up by policing and / or intelligence agencies, 2) they start off as legitimate (though potentially not-yet radicalized) organizations that are compromised by a member turning informant when the radicalization begins to alarm them, or 3) they start off as radical organizations and are compromised after a federal agency threatens the leadership with jail time or influences them into becoming informants. It's quite common for the FBI to frame this as "helping to keep people safe"; leaders in groups like this are frequently easy to manipulate with flattery.
I've been struck by how often it is really quite senior people within criminal/terrorist organisations are the ones that get turned by the various agencies.
In the UK, there was an informant for MI5 in the IRA for years codenamed Steaknife. It turned out he was the head of IRA internal security, it was his job to hunt moles. He was the perfect agent. I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.
> I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger
Aha, thank you.
The Scorsese movie "The Departed" is both a remake of a film made in Hong Kong ("Infernal Affairs") and a semi-realistic depiction of the Boston Winter Hill Gang led by Bulger.
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is another great movie (and great book) semi-related to this theme.
Thanks, I hadn't known about the connection. It's a great film.
he was informant to cover his ass, and run to attempts to play all sides.
slip the feds a little juice tidbit here or there and he gets to run his empire a few months longer. repeat over and over until the feds get smart.
>he was informant to cover his ass, and run to attempts to play all sides.
I mean, it's not as though other mafiosi turn informant because they yearn for justice...
This makes it sound like the FBI was unaware they were dealing with a mafia don. They knew and didn't care, it benefit them.
Bob Lambert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lambert_(undercover_police... was one of the people responsible for the 'McLibel' leaflet that turned into the UK's longest running libel case.
These days it looks to me like Extinction Rebellion (XR) are being run by spies, since all their activities are so counter-productive in terms of making people hate environmentalism.
I am convinced Just Stop Oil are. Everything they do simply makes people angry at the environmental movement.
XR seem to be trying to distance themselves, but it's too late, I don't think most people distinguish between them.
The Lambert case is wild. I genuinely didn't believe it when I first read about it just because it was so bizarre.
Right, like putting out beavers in villages and towns. The beavers dig up dams, floiding the town, town which loved green and quiet hates environmentals forever. I would donate to that sort of self defeat initiative a million every day if i were exxon mobile.
Anything to antagonize working class people.
The older you get, the more you've got to lose, and a lot of people become less radical with age.
At the same time you also tend to be a higher value target for external actors compared to young, new, members of an organisation. So in the young end of it you'd prefer infiltration to recruiting informants, in part because young informants also tend to be less reliable than old, for the reasons above. If it's your agent loyalty isn't as brittle as when you've convinced someone to become a traitor.
When news of government or other external actors having gained access breaks, you typically don't want your infiltrators to become known if you can avoid it. It's different in some settings, antifascists commonly do the opposite and try to protect their informants so they can keep working if they move on to another far right group, while their infiltrators sometimes go public with what they've done.
If you get enough on them that you could probably prosecute them successfully, then you have enough on them to try to turn them. And if they're the only one at that level that you have enough on, rather than make one prosecution, it may be better to turn them.
They are the highest value targets who coordinate the group's activities. Most will have done something at some point that could land them in prison for a long time; this is how they are typically turned. The ones that haven't done anything the feds can feasibly threaten them with often get bribed, which is where things can get really messy because you end up with policing organizations essentially permitting organized crime under a series of conditions (e.g. keep things quiet and we won't bother you). There are many documented instances of this happening on the street level, and some evidence to suggest it is occurring at the national level and the international level. It can be counter-intuitive to think of these organizations being so easily compromised, but a good rule of thumb is that no organization dedicated to criminal or subversive activity is going to evade the attention of the feds, and once that attention is there, they will almost never be able to outspend them. It's comparable to a small business trying to harden their systems against a state actor.
I would go so far as to say it quite literally is a small business trying to harden their systems against a state actor, only the systems here are organizational systems.
> I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.
There's also "Jimmy the Weasel" Fratianno who turned FBI informant. In Ovid Demaris' book "The Last Mafioso: The Treacherous World of Jimmy Fratianno", he quotes Jimmy even laughs about being one, taking money from FBI and still running his rackets for a time.
The characterization of "informants" as being literal on the payroll feds is usually incorrect. They're usually genuine group members who are being manipulated by literal on the payroll feds.
And you're missing a key feedback loop. The feds typically "create" an informant by digging up dirt on someone and blackmailing them into ratting on their buddies in exchange for non-prosecution. This informant then has a huge f-ing reason to radicalize the group and see to it that they do or attempt to do something worthy of prosecution so that they can make good on their promise to the feds.
So otherwise potentially benign groups wind up getting turned into hotbeds of extremism basically because the feds demand extremists to prosecute.
This is a workflow that dates back at least as far as the war on drugs where you'd have small time traffickers would get turned into informants and then work tirelessly to push their boss's or suppliers business to the next level while collecting evidince for their handlers. It was used on racist and religious extremist groups in the 80s and 90s and then on muslim religious groups in the 00s and now you're seeing it again with right wing groups.
hence my confusion at the sudden "left" outcry over the attacks on the FBI and CIA, two organizations they have been bemoaning for my entire life, and with good reason! Those organizations are responsible for some of the absolute worst behavior associated with American history, the most shameful of shameful episodes throughout the Americas were started by the CIA and FBI.
I think the outcry is actually mostly media-oriented, because the media for the last generation has been filled with ex-Agents and funded by the Fed. The media is sad to see these organizations attacked, because the media is run by people with emotional bonds to those agencies.
Good riddance to all of them!
>hence my confusion at the sudden "left" outcry over the attacks on the FBI and CIA, two organizations they have been bemoaning for my entire life
I have been saying it for over a decade, the western world is having a crisis of principals, not a crisis of policy. The inability to implement good policy (both public and private) is a symptom.
I'd like to hear more about this "crisis of principals, not a crisis of policy". What do you mean? Do you mean that there's a turf war between "principals"? How and maybe why is that different than 50 years ago, say, or 70, or any post-war period?
> hence my confusion at the sudden "left" outcry over the attacks on the FBI and CIA,
The attacks are premised on them being too leftist and needing to be replaced in their function by new/rebuilt organizations that are more friendly to the Right, which is the source of the center to center-left opposition to them (the Left itself is more focussed on criticizing the tactics of the center-to-center-left opposition than the regime.)
Nobody on the left disputes the fucked up history of the FBI or CIA -- but they're not being dismantled, they're being explicitly weaponized against the Left again. If Trump had said, "The FBI has a racist an unamerican history, we need to shut it down", he might find some common ground, but instead he's pointing at the occasional investigation of someone in his party or social class as evidence of their "wokeness" and firing anyone who dared participate in those investigations while directing them to investigate his political opponents. If you wanted honest FBI reform, you wouldn't let Kash or Dan Bongino within 1,000 yards of the building.
This is pretty close to my position.
If they are trying to close in on the intelligence and police state because it's not vicious enough against folks they don't like (which includes me and a lot of folks I care about) then a "new and improved" CIA / FBI isn't a "good" thing.
I generally hate the US gov for it's history of doing objectively evil things (I pass by a former "residential school" every time I drive into town), but replacing it with something even more vicious and authoritarian doesn't improve the situation.
This whole neofascist movement is fueled by a mistaken belief that dismantling existing power structures will create a stable situation with more freedom, as opposed to the reality that different power structures will eagerly step into the vacuum.
I think that most of the smarter folks I know on the farther and farther left realize that a lot of what we see are "structural" issues, so voting (for establishment folks) stops being a real strategy at some point. In some sense, that philosophically materialist/idealist seems to be one tool for discerning the ideological differences between liberal capitalists and left anti-capitalists.
By contrast it's not surprising to me that as we go the other direction, the far right is less able to understand that these situations are structurally necessary for the operation of the systems that they support. Convincing those folks that it's not simply who is in charge is likely impossible. It will sound stupid, perhaps, but I have heard convincing arguments that the idea that systems are defined by "who is in charge of them" is fundamentally why "antisemitism" ends up being central to both the conspiracy folks and the fascists.
The fundamental confusion here may be the misconception that pro-people pro-liberty or pro-progress means anti-state. Or that the new people are anti-state in any way that means well for most people.
It seems entirely consistent that the people most alarmed about law enforcement and intelligence being handed over figures who are indicating they don’t intend to use it in a principled manner are critics who’ve seen how even less extreme more accountable people have used these roles poorly. The new team seems headed in a direction that might make poor past iterations look principled.
“Burn it all down” is good cover for people who want to selectively burn things down for their benefit (but not their things).
> It seems entirely consistent that the people most alarmed ... are critics who’ve seen how even less extreme more accountable people have used these roles poorly.
That would make sense if... there had been accountability in the past for the law enforcement and intel folks who abused their power. So far there's been no accountability ever for any of them no matter what they've done. If that continues and the only change is the targets then that will be very bad indeed, but that's not what Trump and friends are saying, and they seem to want to reduce the size of the agencies in question, which will necessarily reduce the number of targets they can acquire, or the extent to which they can persecute them -- unless of course AI makes them much more efficient in the future, say. Not that there's any guarantee that these agencies will ultimately be reduced in size. But if I take what they're saying at face value and they deliver on it, then I think we're looking at an overall improvement.
> The characterization of "informants" as being literal on the payroll feds is usually incorrect. They're usually genuine group members who are being manipulated by literal on the payroll feds.
I never implied that they were.
> a federal agency [...] influences them into becoming informants. It's quite common for the FBI to frame this as "helping to keep people safe"; leaders in groups like this are frequently easy to manipulate with flattery.
> And you're missing a key feedback loop. The feds typically "create" an informant by digging up dirt on someone and blackmailing them into ratting on their buddies in exchange for non-prosecution.
I missed no such thing. Did you even read my comment?
> compromised after a federal agency threatens the leadership with jail time
Turning leadership of an already radicalized organization is not what he means. New converts to a group who are actually informants will provoke an organization to radicalism.
[0]https://www.npr.org/2011/08/21/139836377/the-surge-in-fbi-in...
When I wrote my original comment I did end up removing that as an option because I couldn't think of any instances where I had reason to believe that it had happened. I'm not saying it doesn't, but I don't see any evidence in that article to support that it does.
I feel like it's worth noting that this is not a universal dynamic. Tim McVeigh didn't need a fed to turn into the kind of person who kills 168 people. I'm sure we're all aware of the way this occasional dynamic gets turned into an excuse for any radicial behavior: "must have been a false flag, must have been talked into it." Which, to be clear, you did not say -- but we see it often.
Speaking of McVeigh, did they ever catch the second guy in the truck?
I think that's an eternal mystery, if there was in fact an unidentified co-conspirator. Elohim City is a convenient place for conspiracies to coalesce, but there's a lack of hard evidence as opposed to "well, it would make sense."
I think he did need a fed. Watching children burned alive at Waco (he was there), after which the seiging feds proudly posed for photos on their charred ruble, really got the ball rolling on his motivation. I'm not saying the feds told him to do it, but Ruby Ridge, Waco, and feds like Lon Horiuchi getting off scott free after sniping an innocent woman holding a child really radicalized him.
Oh, I dunno. A lot of people were aware of Ruby Ridge and Waco and most of them did not radicalize to the extent of blowing up federal buildings.
> (he was there)
That's fascinating. I read about McVeigh years ago and knew he was motivated by Waco but I had no idea he actually witnessed it. Here is a short two minute video I found on the topic: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/oklahom...
It is quite funny on 4chan and similar places watching everyone accuse everyone else that protests in some way of being a fed. Which I guess is job done for the security services.
Since Chanology, it has been known by anybody paying attention and keeping score that taking 4chan into the real world is extremely cringe and must always be criticized. Whether it's organizing political protests on 4chan or anything else even remotely like that, its cringe and anybody suggesting it deserves to be flamed.
Is this ancient lore I am unaware of?
Are you trying to make me feel old?
A telling example where such a ploy failed to play out and got exposed was Ruby Ridge. An independently minded off-grid man with his family, some loose social contacts with a nearby neo-nazi group. Randomly gets paid to turn a 16 inch shotgun into a 15 inch shotgun, which is a felony crime, now they blackmail him to hook up with the neo nazis and inform or take those sawing off of a shotgun type charges. Ended up with a standoff outside their house when a dog barking at agents snooping around became a gunfight, lost his wife and newborn kid to an overly exuberant DEA sniper
And this led eventually to the Oklahoma City bombing as Timothy mcveigh said he was motivated by this and Waco.
I think the problem is that the FBI are infested with these fools.
Efficient hiring practices?
Hasn't Enrique Tarrio admitted at least once he is an informant?
Yep. See also Al Sharpton.
Which only works in the end if the FBI itself doesn't have an issue with far-right infestation. I don't think we can say that with much confidence.
bollocks. how many got dismissed recently? they went hard against MAGA -- and lost. hundreds of agents cut.
they may not have had that bias before, but I'd bet in 6 months, when stocked full of MAGA new-hires, it's a different story.
I remember reading in the early 00s archived posts from the early 90s wherein people cracked jokes about the racist groups of the time being barbecue clubs for feds.
This is not a new thing.
That probably won't last with the recent changes with the FBI leadership.
Oh, ye of unbounded belief in fair play.
These people are typically the true believers in the Republic. They also believe they are taking down existential threats to the republic. Finally, they believe in defense in layers.
You know what they don't believe in? Playing fair.
No. I wouldn't count on new homeland security leadership appointees having a "free hand" in practice. All of them will discover that their phone, internet and location activity is known to the security agencies. All of that information is also known for their associates. Couple that with the fact that you're dealing with new appointees whose ideology is essentially based more in superiority rather than patriotism, and it points to a lot in that data trove that would be of interest to the kind of people who keep the FBI running from the shadows.
In fact, my bet is that this series of appointees will be far more easily controlled than ones appointed by some red, white and blue boy scout with a martyr complex like McCain would have been for instance. I'd wager there are probably some people in our homeland security infrastructure who actually prefer our appointed leadership be comprised of people who are more malleable.
!remindme 4 years
Or foreign influence agents. What more resource efficient way to weaken a competing state than foment rebellion and attacks from within.
Not 'just' FBI agents...
What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret. Most of that stuff is quite visible. You worry about the ones who organize quietly.
Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.)
Besides, Trump doesn't need an SA.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFgFKxa3SD1WIZWmBRGEhg
> What the louder militia members and gun nuts are up to is no secret.
For that matter, I'd include myself in the latter group. I'm reasonably vocal here - usually in an attempt to simply share my perspective, as it's not of the prevailing position in this community.
Sure, "the gun nuts" have a different agenda than the larger community. We're gun nuts because that's important to us. I can't think of anything that I've ever said (or seen said) in that community that should be secret. Lots of things that could be easily taken out of context, sure, and a fair number of things that are just plain inappropriate - but you could say the same for any community.
> You worry about the ones who organize quietly.
Some of them, absolutely.
> Here's "God, Family, and Guns", on YouTube.[1] This week, "What gun would Jesus carry?" (Answer: a 1911, the classic Army .45 automatic from 1911.)
I've never heard of that channel - though, granted, I'm not really a YouTube kinda person. It looks like what I'd call "Boomer content". I don't mean that in a negative way exactly; that's the kind of thing I'd expect someone in the gun community in their mid-50s or older to watch. The younger generation (say, 20s-40s) is watching things like "The Fat Electrician".
While there's certainly more overlap than a random group of people, in discussions like these I think even the most anti-gun people recognize that the broader "I like guns because guns are fun" community isn't really the focus in terms of domestic terrorism or crazy race war stuff.
Particularly on youtube there's this huge Forgotten Weapons, Garand Thumb, DemolitionRanch etc style sphere that stays relatively apolitical, or at least just mildly right wingy.
The problem is it's difficult to have one without the other. If the cost of reducing gun violence is that hobbyists can't collect guns... that's a cost I think society can stomach.
I'm not blaming hobbyists for gun violence or anything, obviously, but these ideas are not unconnected.
We know where gun violence comes from, and it's not dudes collecting vintage rifle prototypes from Yugoslavia.
about 2/3 of gun deaths in 2022 are suicides. Of homicides, it's mostly young black men. Suicide rates are highest for old white men.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/sites/default/files/2024-09/202...
We are failing specific people at specific stages of their lives by not offering them opportunity and hope for the future, resulting in gun violence and suicide. Even if you could round up all the guns, the hopelessness and violence will remain without some structural changes.
If you're a US citizen, gun control is an infringement on your civil rights and a weak topical solution for systematic flaws.
I agree with everything you said, except your last sentence.
As a parent, and as a gun owner, I'm fine with there being gun control that leads to no more school shootings. And no, you can't depend on a "good guy with a gun" (Uvalde, Parkland). I don't know what the solution is, to be honest, but other countries don't have the school shooting problem the US has.
There is no gun control that leads to no school shootings. It is simply not possible.
The best thing we can do is to address the root cause, and react as quickly as possible when there is a problem. We have police presence at basically every single public arena -- government buildings, hospitals, stadiums, malls, etc; we should have police presence at schools too, along with the training to do their jobs effectively.
The harsh reality is that school shootings make up a vanishingly small number of students who will die of gun violence, let along those that die from any cause.
[The FBI says 105 people](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...), excluding shooters, died in mass shootings in 2023, of which a subset will be students. Even if we assumed every mass shooting victim in 2023 was a student, something like 10x the number of students will die from poisoning, another 10x from suffocation, another 22x from motor vehicle collisions, etc.
I think this is a uniquely American problem because America is a unique country. No other nations have the incredible wealth, diversity, and rights of America, and looking to other countries to emulate is imo, a mistake.
> I think this is a uniquely American problem because America is a unique country. No other nations have the incredible wealth, diversity, and rights of America, and looking to other countries to emulate is imo, a mistake.
Other than the "right to bear arms", what rights do Americans have that sets them apart?
> There is no gun control that leads to no school shootings. It is simply not possible.
Outside the US, it is.[1]
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...
First of all, I'm not a gun control activist, and I do agree with some of your views.
However:
> I think this is a uniquely American problem because America is a unique country. No other nations have the incredible wealth, diversity, and rights of America, and looking to other countries to emulate is imo, a mistake.
- increased wealth should be correlated with a reduction in shootings,
- population diversity is not a unique feature of the USA, it is comparable, or arguably lower, than most European countries,
- same for rights: the rights of a USA citizen are comparable to the average EU citizen. Many EU countries allow the possession of guns (although most forbid taking arms out of one's home unless it's for transport, e.g., to the firing range, and most EU states vehemently forbid concealed carry). There are some differences regarding Free Speech, however, where most EU countries allow it largely, but restrict hate speech more.
It's true that shootings are a somewhat unique USA problem, but I'd look more into cultural differences than into rights and demographics.
> We know where gun violence comes from, and it's not dudes collecting vintage rifle prototypes from Yugoslavia.
I literally said "I'm not blaming gun hobbyists for violence." Thank you for starting off with a terribly bad faith reading of my comment.
> If you're a US citizen, gun control is an infringement on your civil rights
And this is what I mean by them being connected. Gun hobbyists in the US will argue for it based on their "rights", which just makes it harder to make any changes that might actually reduce gun violence.
> Even if you could round up all the guns, the ... violence will remain without some structural changes.
It's difficult for me to believe that if you remove one of the easiest ways to kill people, violence would just remain the same. Is there any evidence to support this theory? I've never seen any, but I have seen data suggesting that countries with stricter gun control laws tend to have less murders.
> gun control is an infringement on your civil rights
Because gun ownership is part of your constitution, you can easily make it seem as though those questioning it are attacking the very basis of your country. Seems like a systemic issue to me...
> the hopelessness ... will remain without some structural changes.
I don't disagree that hopelessness is the core issue here, but I think it's blatantly silly to think that if you give a hopeless population easy access to tools whose entire function is to kill, and tell them that owning that weapon (and using it when necessary...) is a fundamental part of their identity... that it won't result in more and more intense violence.
Like with many widespread societal issues, you can't just ignore the symptoms and try to cure the actual problem - and certainly nor can you do the opposite, as you say - you need to fix both.
> I literally said "I'm not blaming gun hobbyists for violence." Thank you for starting off with a terribly bad faith reading of my comment.
I agree with you, this is not the problem. No bad faith intended.
> Gun hobbyists in the US will argue for it based on their "rights"..."
No quotes on rights. If you don't care about rights or are happy to cede them, then there are all kinds of societal improvements you could make -- say, banning hate speech, lowering or eliminating a presumption of innocence, banning private firearm ownership, etc. However, this is antithetical to how the US is setup and its system of laws. The same arguments used to attack gun control can just as easily be turned on other rights, such as the freedom of speech.
> It's difficult for me to believe that if you remove one of the easiest ways to kill people, violence would just remain the same
It's difficult to run a proper experiment for many reasons. However, I would argue that the concern from voters is not about routine violence (eg gang violence localized to a specific community) but mass killings like Uvalde or Parkland. As we can see in Europe (or even in the US, in New Orleans), you can kill plenty of people with a car, a bomb, a knife, etc. Killing lots of people quickly is not an attribute unique to firearms.
> Because gun ownership is part of your constitution, you can easily make it seem as though those questioning it are attacking the very basis of your country. Seems like a systemic issue to me...
Yes, this is a systematic attack and many Americans see it this way. Governments have only ever moved one direction on gun control -- once the right is eroded, it is gone forever.
> blatantly silly to think that if you give a hopeless population easy access to tools whose entire function is to kill...
Again, the second amendment for everyone. We do not gate rights behind fees, tests, or onerous restrictions. I am interested in preserving (and expanding!) civil liberties for all, while addressing the root causes of gun violence.
I thank you for once again making my point for me. Good luck.
>that's a cost I think society can stomach.
Society believes it can stomach that cost because it is largely irrational, incapable of long-term or worst-case thinking, and utterly oblivious to ground-state reality.
Correct.
I always feel the need to preface this statement when I make it here, so here we go: this is in no way meant as a threat or even a statement of my own political beliefs. It is my belief based on being a member of these communities for decades.
Any attempt to ban firearms in the United States would result in more death and injury than the problems it is intended to solve. The American people will not give up their arms without bloodshed.
>Any attempt to ban firearms in the United States would result in more death and injury than the problems it is intended to solve.
This is a very generous assumption. I instead assume that the problem that it intends to solve is "how does a government crank down hard on its citizens so that they become some sort of Stalinesque serfs who have no power and those which survive mindlessly obey"... in that scenario, gun prohibition isn't just a good idea but probably a necessary precondition.
For obvious reasons, even if gun control advocates are privy to that reasoning, public relations demands that they not say that part out loud.
I love this argument. Your little cache of weapons isn't going to do anything against trained soldiers.
Your argument is absurd... we have real world counter-examples. When people were complaining about the recent Iraq conflict (and Afghanistan too), the complaints were always "not enough boots on the ground". Turns out that what wins wars is men with rifles. Not tanks, battleships, or next generation fighter jets.
Worse than the logic of your argument, is the morality of it. If trained soldiers are oppressing people, then not only is it rational to retain the means to fight back against them, but it's a moral imperative. Stupidity might be forgiven, you can't will yourself to be smarter than you were born. Moral cowardice is a choice, a disgusting one.
I think the issue is less stopping gun collectors. The issue is preventing self-defense. If there were a magic weapon which can only be used to defend yourself, and not for offensive purposes, then sure! Ban guns! But in today’s world, a firearm is the most effective self-defense tool (tho owning a gun isn’t going to magically make you safer).
I grew up supporting gun control, but I think that’s because of my background. I grew up trusting the police, not only to protect me from any would-be ne'er-do-wells, but also that I wouldn’t be antagonized by the state.
If you live in a rural area, where the response time for the local sheriff is half an hour, then having a gun can be vital. Or if you live in an area where the cops simply won’t show up when called.
I don’t want to have to fully rely on the state for my personal safety, and in particular this current government.
> If there were a magic weapon
Ah yes, paint the issue as only solvable by a "magic" item... Of course, trying to make the other side seem fundamentally silly is a primary tactic of the pro-gun crowd
> only be used to defend yourself, and not for offensive purposes, then sure!
Of course not, but the question is more the damage one can do when used for offensive purposes.
Anyway, here's your magic solutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_lethal_weapon
> Of course, trying to make the other side seem fundamentally silly is a primary tactic of the pro-gun crowd
I don't think "the other side" is fundamentally silly--that's just the way I write. I take "the other side" extremely seriously because, like I mentioned, I've been to pro gun control protests, and while I now disagree with some of those positions, I have genuine respect for where you're coming from.
In terms of less-lethal weapons, anyone who's serious about self defense should carry pepper spray (though pepper spray is non-lethal, rather than less-lethal). Full stop. If you want to carry a gun, too, that makes sense in some situations. But for myself and anyone who's serious about self-defense, we first of all hope to never have to use any of these tools ever. But if something did happen, I'd much much much rather use pepper spray than something that's more harmful.
The problem with _only_ having pepper spray is that it has limited efficacy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItJAeJz43ts is a trans youtuber who posts a lot of gun content who is talking here about pepper spray. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWUq-OEYpiI is Massad Ayoob talking about the efficacy of pepper spray.
If you didn't mean it like that, I apologize. It's just a very common tactic of gun people, and I'm frustrated. Thank you for the links.
Do you think most gun violence is done by law-abiding hobbyists that collect guns, or gang members in the inner cities?
> the broader "I like guns because guns are fun" community
That's the community I'm speaking of - in fact, we'd call those people "Fudds", after Elmer Fudd.
It's definitely a political position. It's just one that's prone to violence. If anything, it's the opposite; the gun community does an excellent job of policing itself. I've personally seen people displaying violent tendencies get reported and ultimately charged and convicted within that particular community.
Gen X is in their mid-fifties. Boomers are in their 70s now. But yes, it is Boomer content, and the pick of the 1911 is a weirdly hilarious tell. That's the sidearm from WWII so it's the one all the Boomers' dad's wore into Europe & the Pacific. Of course Jesus would choose the 1911 lmao
Hey now, I love my 1911s!
I don't carry them much, for all the reasons you might imagine: they're big, heavy, and relatively low capacity. They feel great, though.
Realistically I almost always carry a Glock 43. If I were buying a carry pistol today, I'd consider a Sig P365 or a Canik. They're the right balance of capability and convenience.
... but yeah, that particular conclusion was foregone. If nothing else, it feeds the long-running meme of .45 ACP being "God's caliber".
> Lots of things that could be easily taken out of context, sure, and a fair number of things that are just plain inappropriate - but you could say the same for any community.
What kind of ridiculous copium is this?
i'm sure the quilting community says all sorts of terrible things that could be taken out of context.
the difference is they don't have a long history of gun violence. ain't no one showed up and killed 20 elementary kids with knitting needles. no one smuggled a crochet gear to a 17 year old and saw protesters crochet'd to death.
and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat and you're doing what exactly with these guns?
>the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat and you're doing what exactly with these guns?
What do you suggest is done with the guns about that? You want us to kill over disagreement on economic policy?
Global economics has the power to kill far more people than small arms ever could. We suggest you put your money where your exceptionally large mouths are.
I understand there are arguments for it. I can even understand where they are coming from. What is interesting is many of these anti 2A sorts unknowingly speak their murderous intent out loud. They are that which they hate.
That's fair. It is highly hypocritical to call for the end of civilian gun ownership but expect civilian gun owners to save them from authoritarian goverment.
It is also hypocritical for civilian gun owners to claim they will use their 2A rights to protect themselves and other citizens from authoritarian government but fail to be vigilant enough to recognize the rise of authoritarianism.
This only works if the people that have guns are smart enough to know when to use them con(de?)structively. Unfortunately there are swathes of American gun owners that view politics like a football game that will never have any effect on them, and once it arrives on their doorstep it will be far, far too late.
> That's fair. It is highly hypocritical to call for the end of civilian gun ownership but expect civilian gun owners to save them from authoritarian goverment.
I wouldn't say hypocritical. I'd say cognitively dissonant. Not the same thing.
> It is also hypocritical for civilian gun owners to claim they will use their 2A rights to protect themselves and other citizens from authoritarian government but fail to be vigilant enough to recognize the rise of authoritarianism.
Private firearms ownership is an indirect and implicit threat of violence against tyranny. It may or may not work as such. It might only limit the degree of tyranny. Remember, armed citizens can't organize to commit violence against the state because the state has authority (or a patina of authority) and the ability to bring a great deal of force to bear on any hot spots. The state's ability to bring force to bear is limited though, but only in such a way that a huge number of citizens would have to rise up simultaneously and be patient enough to keep rising as the going gets tough. Therefore I think private firearms ownership can't stop tyranny altogether, but can moderate it. There is no hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance here.
People are not ready to take up arms over "economic policy". What they're concerned about is the flaunting of the Constitution by the Executive, and the dereliction of duty by Congress.
Personally, I’m using my guns to teach my trans friends how to shoot. The government (and their supporters) are increasingly vocal in their dehumanization and threats against trans people, and many (of my friends at least) are looking for protection.
What else would you have me do with my guns? (I’m also helping my non-trans friends get into shooting too.)
>ain't no one showed up and killed 20 elementary kids with knitting needles.
Plainly false. Though people who advocate gun control never pay attention, there have been many high-profile mass murders/attacks where people did attack with knives/swords/machetes, and these have comparable body counts.
The UK is way ahead of you too, by the way. They've started to implement knife control, including orders for people to bring in kitchen knives to have the tips blunted.
>and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat a
And that government is perceived to be on the side of the gun rights proponents. The people complaining are largely those who have, in the past, eschewed gun ownership.
The point was that knitting needles are not implements of violence, yet groups using them for the group's explicit purpose can have very bad and harmful takes. One does not need to have a weapon to be harmful. Our Dear Leader has proven that many times.
It is a good idea to stand on pro-gun rhetoric when you want all the guns on your side and not being pointed at you. You use confusing double-talk to trick them into believing you are on their side and you fight for them. In the US, there is the added benefit of poor education, which cripples critical thinking.
Also, the claim that melee weapons are somehow comparable to modern firearms is quite laughable. Where are you getting your data?
>Also, the claim that melee weapons are somehow comparable to modern firearms is quite laughable.
People laugh at all sorts of things that aren't very funny.
The body counts for most of the school shootings (and other, various, non-school shootings) that people complain about are just under double digits, or manage to roll right up into double digits. Blade attacks are perfectly capable of that many injuries and deaths within the time constraint of a typical police response. This is born by fact, where such knife attacks have managed those body counts. There are a half a dozen or more in recent years in China, and at least one in Europe that I can think of.
>You use confusing double-talk to trick them into believing you are on their side and you fight for them.
No one with any sense here thinks I "fight for them". I'm just showing that I'm not unwilling for them to exercise their own rights to self-defense. This is because a principle is at stake. If it also contrasts with the general lack of principles among those who advocate gun control somehow, that's their problem.
> orders for people to bring in kitchen knives to have the tips blunted
Can you link me to one of these? I googled and couldn't find anything, but am genuinely curious.
While there have been numerous calls for this to happen over the years ([1] for instance), I could not find evidence that it was implemented.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180528202625/https://www.indep...
> What kind of ridiculous copium is this?
> i'm sure the quilting community says all sorts of terrible things that could be taken out of context.
The things said there are different in perspective from some of the things said here, just from another direction.
To be more specific, most of the time when I see someone say something like "hang 'em from the lampposts", it's in reference to LEO attempting confiscation or something. It should not be reasonably construed as a legitimate threat and is not intended as such. It's hyperbole.
People who are actually a risk are obvious based on their overall pattern of behavior.
> the difference is they don't have a long history of gun violence. ain't no one showed up and killed 20 elementary kids with knitting needles. no one smuggled a crochet gear to a 17 year old and saw protesters crochet'd to death.
Neither does the gun community.
We do have dangerous items as the center of the whole idea, though, which means the hyperbole I mentioned above is looked at much more closely than if a textile artist made the same comment. That has resulted in significant internal policing.
> and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat and you're doing what exactly with these guns?
The vast majority of us don't see things that way at all - this is exactly what "we" (i.e., the gun community) voted for.
That said, I've been an advocate for LGBT, minorities, and others at risk acquiring arms and training for decades. I'll continue to do that.
> and what is your 2nd amendment right doing now? the government, and arguably global economy, is under threat and you're doing what exactly with these guns?
It sounds like you're either advocating or wishing that gun owners "do something", something presumably violent. And that in a post ascribing desire for violence to [from context] militias and gun nuts. A bit strange, IMO.
Jesus did say to buy swords, so a brand preference could be inferred.
I don't think "God, Family, and Guns" is the "militia member" or "gun nut" you're looking for. In fact, you probably won't find any of them on YouTube. YouTube's rules for firearm contents basically mean you get much more tame contents on YouTube than elsewhere. You might have to go look on Rumble, but I wouldn't know what channels there or elsewhere because I only use YouTube.
With a big dump like this, the Disney one, Clinton's emails, efc - what would you want to be able to do?
Search, in a browser?
Feed it to a local model?
If so: Wikileaks made/makes(?) all of their stuff easily browseable, "her emails" included.
You can search, but what do you search for if you don't know what's there?
"Evil plans of new world order" obviously..
It seems you want a AI to analyze the data in general?
Otherwise you will have to do some work and read a little bit .. and then investigate to see if there is more. That is where the search tools are useful. Like in the example, finding out if that Scott guy changed his opinion on the 6. of january after Trump became president. (To see if the original statement was a lie. Not possible with ease so far)
People will speak in code, if they are planning crimes. Only some idiots speak openly of violent revolution in public messengers.
If you don't know what's there you just start from the top I suppose. That's what happened with the Snowden leaks, they were picked apart over the span of months if not years by journalists, publishing what they found was interesting.
I suppose when you have a large corpus you start with as many browse points as you can. So maybe a list of the top senders, top recipients, recipient graphs.
I'd think by day would be next. Browse subjects by day, and word clouds for each message thread? The. Try to isolate topics discussed each day, then link the topics across days.
You should be able to click in and see the thread/messages/etc.
This is, at some level, how legal discovery stuff works from what I understand.
The part you're missing here is having a clue about what's sensitive in geopolitics in the first place, so you have that place to work from.
I feel like LLM agents for research across it could be interesting
To anyone who has the need to export a telegram chat: do it with JSON. Please.
Data dredgers will love you because now we don’t have to use Beautiful Soup to reconstruct it
In a dump like this, why would anyone truat that any given part of it is authentic? I could tell some great lies by embedding disinformation in a disseminated data dump like this.
Skimming a fair chunk of it by hand (and some others have run it through LLMs) it seems extremely mundane. I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible. He's self promoting like crazy, is/was a professional reporter, and 77 pages of sparsely spaced telegram chats is like 30 minutes of reading. If there was some big story awaiting in those 77 pages (or the entire leak for that matter) he'd, with 100% certainty, want to be the one breaking it.
So it's most likely just going to be an insight into a different culture/worldview, like reading e.g. /r/anarchism. In many ways this is also the same with the Clinton leaks. Unless one was just horrifically naive of how politics works, there was nothing particularly exceptional in it. The really wild stuff came from interpreting messages as having coded meanings.
77 pages of messages sounds like it's only a small percentage of communication in that group. I can imagine (also based on other comments about organizations like this being infiltrated by law enforcement) their communication networks are a lot more involved than Telegram chats or other "honeypotable" systems. Snowden revealed (or confirmed our suspicions that) the NSA has backdoor access to all major American based social media / communications, and the media broke at least twice about a major 'encrypted' chat / secure phone provider being compromised causing hundreds if not thousands of arrests worldwide.
(note: arrests, because whether the chats were recorded legally and are admissable to court is a whole different matter)
> I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible.
Read back a few sentences for the context - they aren't willing to ready 77 pages just to seek/isolate messages from one individual around a specific topic. I would expect a journalist to do this repeatedly for multiple individuals, so it makes sense to parse the data and make it queryable without having to read through hundreds/thousands of telegrams just to capture a few dozen
"Trust, but verify". In this case, none of this is admissable in court (assuming there IS anything illegal in here, I haven't finished reading beyond people selling merch) because it wasn't done by the book, but it can give enough leads for further investigation, like marking people as "person of interest", cross referencing with other known activities by the people involved, etc. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction.
It can also be disinformation by selectively editing out portions, so everything you see is authentic but the overall picture is not.
ask claude for the script, it will be done in 3 seconds.
It does seem like a job well suited to simonw's https://github.com/simonw/datasette
Great tool, could be the solution indeed
> This is why this dataset is hard to wrap your head around: there's just sooo much here. It would take a ridiculous amount of time to try to manually read through it all. Also, at a glance at least, it appears that the bulk of it is idle chatter and conspiracy nonsense, presumably with evidence of crimes sprinkled in here or there.
Not exactly hard-hitting journalism. He then goes on to speculate that Scot Seddon's disavowal of the January 6th protests was disingenuous, and that his true feelings would be revealed in chat logs after Trump was re-elected. But:
> This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel.
So the guy complaining about conspiracy theories goes on to invent his own despite having access to potentially corroborative data that he simply can't be bothered to read.
The guy is just walking us through the process of analyzing the dataset. He’s not really making any conclusions at this point - it’s like a technical tutorial for journalists.
> Not exactly hard-hitting journalism.
But nonetheless fascinating. There are must be some really good PhD thesii written (to be written?) about how someone is supposed to handle this sort of data dump with modern tooling. It is a non-trivial general problem; we have a lot of really data floating around in public (Panama papers, relatively transparent government info, dumps of less transparent info at wikileaks.org, OSINT of all shapes and sizes). Even if a body reads the whole thing they need some sort of solid mental schema going in or they'll end up in crank territory.
Although why he thinks old mate would change his position on the Jan 6 riots is a mystery (and why he cares). Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
How about a whole book?
> It's come to my attention that this dataset is rather challenging for journalists and researchers to wrap their heads around. I wrote a book, Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations, aimed at teaching journalists and researchers how to analyze datasets just like this.
I didn't even catch that on my first reading.
> Taking a stand against riots is one of those easy-win political options that costs nothing and almost everyone agrees with. Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
In full fairness "riots" is what its called when the rioters lose. If they win they are usually called something more positive and celebrated by the resulting new regime.
There is a solid tradition of new regimes killing off the rioters because they are unruly troublemakers. Not a guarantee, but certainly a tendency. Nobody likes rioters when you get down to brass tacks.
> Riots are fundamentally ineffective; I doubt anyone serious wants to be associated with rioters. I suppose stranger things happen.
bullshit. the only reason you have an 8 hour work day and a semblance of worker protections is because a lot of people fought and died for them.
it's the only reason 8 year olds don't go down into the mines, or lose hands working in factories.
Jan 6th made a serious run at congressional officials; the VP of the US basically had to hide or get lynched. this could have been a thing, but didn't go all the way.
> So, I figured I'd write a series of posts publicly exploring this dataset and sharing my findings.
> ...
> At the end, I'll have a single database of Telegram messages from the whole dataset. I'll be able to query it to, for example, show me all messages from Scot Seddon sorted chronologically. This will make it simple to see what he was saying in the lead-up to January 6, immediately after January 6, and then what he's saying about Trump these days, after he was re-elected.
There are more parts to come in this series, which is very clearly stated in the post.
If I claim to have evidence that you committed a crime, and announce that I will post the evidence later, should my claims be taken seriously, or dismissed?
Even if he's right (and I'm not saying he isn't), this kind of behavior is inexcusable (though completely expected) coming from a guy who calls himself a journalist.
> > This is much more readable – but still, I don't think I can bring myself to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now. And that's just this one export of this one Telegram channel.
77 pages isn't that much in the scheme of thing. A court case having 77 pages of evidence would be entirely normal.
And let's be honest 77 pages of telegram chats would probably take 15 or 20 minutes to read. It's not exactly Proust.
Not that it's a great method but just for fun I gave a large chunk of it to an LLM to process and then asked it for the 20 most disturbing or nefarious things in the chats and it was incredibly boring. Most interesting thing I learned from the files is how many gun toting americans also drive dodge chargers.
I would have expected nice pickup trucks or any TRD Pro trim Toyota.
I'd be curious if the LLM's own self-censorship would prevent it from reporting truly disturbing things. Maybe add one legitimately bad thing into the middle of a chat and see if it gets reported.
I'm fairly decent a prompt engineering I think, told it was for my art project of a creative writing class and I'd hidden 20 disturbing and nefarious things in the text (made sure to inject a fake murder into the text) - fake murder then a bunch of airsoft stuff, some psychological manipulation, and it oddly surfaced...some fb cookies, heh. 2mill tokens x3 runs
Have you tried querying for specific misconducts and let the LLM focus at one at a time? E.g. Find whether murders were planned or carried out, can you find any signs or plans of bomb-making, can you list all messages related to fire and arson, were any mass manipulation campaigns planned, etc, ...
I have the feeling that would probably be more effective, not sure though.
Well my first query was "is there anything bad in here" and it basically said "no, it's a bunch of weirdos talking about guns, conspiracy theories and politics but there is nothing truly bad in there" - and then I went through a bunch of prompting for a while and very quickly got bored because at least what I was looking at, was just a bunch of americans talking about politics and guns.
Depends. Most of Telegram is indeed shallow. But some of my groups are occupied by people with a competition of who can write the longest and convulted essays of deep philosophical and political issues.
The author of the blog post, Micah Lee, appears to be one of the directors of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets)[0].
DDoSecrets appears to be an anarchist/communist affiliated activist group.
Basically you've got two groups from extreme sides of the political spectrum fighting each other, the Guy Fawkes LARPers upset about Jan 6 of all things, and the seal team 6 LARPers upset about "stolen" elections and ivermectin.
[0]: https://ddosecrets.com/about