164 thoughts on “Open thread”

  1. I think Dominion should have held out for more since Faux obviously didn’t want Carlson, Ingraham, etc to be cross examined on the stand. I hope there are charges from the obstruction, and I hope the other lawsuit generates lots of headlines and I hope that shitty English billionaire decides to cut his losses and pull out.

  2. that shitty English billionaire
    Do you mean Rupert Murdoch? He was born in Australia to Australian parents, with Scottish and Irish grandparents. He’s now a naturalized citizen of the USA.
    Which is to say: for all our faults, he’s not one of ours.

  3. Which is to say: for all our faults, he’s not one of ours.
    To quote Mr Loaf, you took the words right out of my mouth.

  4. I see the Dominion settlement as a case of seriously short-term thinking by Fox. Because, after all, there is still the Smartmatic suit.
    The quotes from discovery that I have seen talk about the vote fraud claims being known to be false. Not so much about Dominion per se (although certainly it gets mentioned). So much of that is relevant to the remaining suit. And now Smartmatic knows that Fox will be desperate to settle, for all the same reasons. And they were already suing for more than Dominion. Making it a matter of Fox having to pony up more, probably a lot more, or have the whole Dominion settlement be for nothing. Oops.
    And that’s before we get to the shareholder suits. Which fault the company (and/or its executives) for doing things which left it open to the defamation suits. The judge already ruled that there is no dispute about whether they lied. And unlike the defamation suit, the shareholders don’t need to prove malice (the hardest part in a defamation suit) in order to win.

  5. …the shareholder suits. Which fault the company (and/or its executives) for doing things which left it open to the defamation suits.
    My understanding is that shareholders can’t sue the company – that would make no sense, the shareholders own the company. Rather, shareholders can sue directors on behalf of the company. The idea would be that Murdoch (or other directors) would have to reimburse the company for damages incurred.
    But lawyers here may know better…

  7. Rather, shareholders can sue directors on behalf of the company. The idea would be that Murdoch (or other directors) would have to reimburse the company for damages incurred.
    That expresses it better than I did. Although I suspect that some of the senior executives, not just the directors, would be at risk as well. In their personal capacity — i.e. judgements would come out of their personal pockets.

  8. When a case settles on the eve of trial, one reasonable inference is that the lawyers–probably on both sides–did not want to go to trial and gave their respective clients what we call “the black-bordered letter” outlining how everything in the world could go south.
    I read Dominions Motion for Summary Judgment and was not overwhelmed. With maybe one or two exceptions, it looked like Fox was providing an outlet for a liar, not doing the lying itself. Providing an platform is pretty solidly inside the 1st Amendment. IOW, I thought the liability piece against Fox was weak and subject to an adverse rendition on appeal (in which the court appeals rules in Fox’s favor as a matter of law, bringing the case to an end.)
    On the damages piece, I was even less moved. In what manner did Dominion sustain actual, monetary damage? IMO, it was some of the best advertising ever. Companies cannot have mental anguish. Dominion would have to show loss of revenue or diminished value due to a damaged reputation. Self-reveal: I had to sue a client for defamation. It was a personal pain in the ass and the trial lasted over 2 weeks. I was also suing for unpaid legal fees. I won across the board except, I got zero actual damages for defamation (I got my unpaid fees) because the jury believed that no one believed my idiot client and therefore, my reputation was not damaged. I did get an award of punitive damages on top of the fees plus an award of attorneys fees, which was nice.
    Back to Dominion: I would very much like to know how many actual jury trials the two sides’ lead counsel have had. For a case this big, you would want someone with at least 50 major jury verdicts in your corner. In fact, you’d want 2-3 lawyers with that many large verdicts each, along with your trial support team. Maybe both sides had killer lawyers who did a great risk/reward/likelihood of success analysis and determined settlement was the best option. However, if that was the case, they would have settled weeks ago at a mediation or over the phone, not at the last minute.
    No one is thinking coolly and objectively just before trial. Adrenalin levels are through the roof, you’re getting maybe 4 hours of shitty sleep a night and your list of shit you absolutely cannot let yourself forget runs five pages on your notepad. The impetus to bring it to an end and get out from under the shitstorm can be irresistible.
    Once trial starts, there is no let up: jury selection is pivotal. How many voir dires’ have the lawyers done? Do they have a clue what they are looking for in a juror? The stress of having to do jury selection, then immediately make a clear and coherent opening statement and then gut your way through a 4 or 5 week trial is immense even when you’ve done it before and know what to expect.
    If–as is the case more often than not–you have risen to “trial partner” in your mega high dollar law firm without ever having tried a case and you are about to put your professional reputation on the line in a high profile case like this, it’s almost impossible not to panic and to panic your client into a settlement. It happens all the time.
    As for Dominion’s counsel, regardless of trial experience, my educated guess is that the Dominion team had a blended hourly/contingent fee arrangement with 15-20% of any recovery on the back end. Fifteen percent of 787M is 118M cash in hand. Given the likely not-great Dominion damage model, that is a ton of money. Lead counsel’s cut would be 25-40%. If I was Dominion’s lead, my office wouldn’t see me again until 2024. If ever.
    My thoughts, worth their weight in gold.

  9. I thought the liability piece against Fox was weak and subject to an adverse rendition on appeal (in which the court appeals rules in Fox’s favor as a matter of law, bringing the case to an end.)
    My understanding is that the judge in the case had already ruled that the facts, i.e. that Fox had lied, and lied knowingly, had been established. (I believe his phrasing was “CRYSTAL clear” — emphasis in the original.) The only question for the jury involved determining malice (as legally defined).
    If I have that right, wouldn’t a successful appeal simply kick the determination of facts back to a jury? That is, the trial would happen again, just a longer one so the facts could be established by the jury, rather than the judge.
    Or are you saying that the appeals court would overrule a jury finding of malice? On what basis? Faulty jury instructions? Something else?

  10. Without looking to refresh my memory, but I believe there was at least one jurisdiction that canceled a contract or withdrew from pursuing a contract with Dominion explicitly because of the lies promulgated. I think that happened after the suit had been filed, so I don’t know if that would be able to be introduced as direct evidence of harm.

  11. Would a different team be doing their suits against OAN and Newsmax? Especially since it is difficult to imagine that those two car clown outfits can access better representation than Fox…

  13. My understanding is that the judge in the case had already ruled that the facts, i.e. that Fox had lied, and lied knowingly, had been established. (I believe his phrasing was “CRYSTAL clear” — emphasis in the original.) The only question for the jury involved determining malice (as legally defined).
    If I have that right, wouldn’t a successful appeal simply kick the determination of facts back to a jury? That is, the trial would happen again, just a longer one so the facts could be established by the jury, rather than the judge.
    Or are you saying that the appeals court would overrule a jury finding of malice? On what basis? Faulty jury instructions? Something else?
    I’m not arguing as a supporter of Fox, which I haven’t watched in years and with which I have any number of issues. From a legal standpoint, making out a case of “actual malice” by a news outlet is a very steep climb. Reporting the words of another or allowing that other to speak on Fox’s shows may not even be the acts of Fox, but rather the “witnesses”. Fox doesn’t have to believe and is not warranting the accuracy of its “witnesses” (or guests or whatever), it is just putting them up. All news outlets do the same.
    If someone from Fox stated, “the evidence is clear, the election was stolen and it was Dominion who stole the election”, knowing that such a statement was false, then there would be a case. And, if that happened, my take on the case–to that extent–would be wrong.
    I’m not much impressed by the trial court’s rulings or findings. Trial judges can be great, mediocre or awful and get it wrong all the time. The judge did not rule on actual malice, which means he did not rule that Fox knowingly lied, but if he did make such a ruling, that was likely error. A party’s state of mind is almost always a fact issue for the jury and thus not appropriate for summary judgment (big long legal exposition to follow if anyone cares about summary judgment vs jury trial).
    Even if a jury were to find malice, the appellate court would review that finding under an “no evidence” standard. I’ve won several appeals under that standard, which means both the trial judge and the jury got it wrong. Again, providing a platform is probably not defamatory per se.
    Priest, it well may be that Dominion could show some damages–but, could it show 787 million or 1.6 billion? If it could show 1M, then that is the amount the jury would be allowed to award.
    LJ–no idea about the other cases. My guess–and that’s all it is–is that law firms are getting paid–“paid” being the operative word–to put up a fight and they aren’t losing a lot of sleep over the outcome. OAN isn’t Fox.
    Again, just my thoughts.

  14. LOL..”looks like” does more heavy lifting. I’d offer that Lawrence O’Donnel gets it right here:
    I didn’t look at your link, but was O’Donnel expounding generally or analyzing Dominion’s Motion for Summary Judgment? I’m addressing the Motion that I read, not what others said about the case (and I did not follow media coverage at all–I read the MSJ out of curiosity).

  15. Priest, it well may be that Dominion could show some damages–but, could it show 787 million or 1.6 billion? If it could show 1M, then that is the amount the jury would be allowed to award.
    Irrelevant. FOX settled. End of story.

  16. bobbyp: I thought that clip was good, and brought together a lot of the relevant info for the layperson.
    McKinney’s info was interesting too. And since (as all the decent pundits acknowledge) it was far from a slam dunk for Dominion, Fox’s desire to settle was (despite what they may have been told about the likelihood of winning at appeal) no doubt motivated by wishing to put an end to the damaging flow of evidence showing that most Fox personnel knew perfectly well it was all lies, and were merely pandering to a gullible viewership. And let’s face it, since dedicated Fox viewers probably know little about what’s actually happened in this case, Murdoch et al would have wanted to keep it that way.

  17. Fox’s desire to settle was (despite what they may have been told about the likelihood of winning at appeal) no doubt motivated by wishing to put an end to the damaging flow of evidence showing that most Fox personnel knew perfectly well it was all lies, and were merely pandering to a gullible viewership.
    It seems clear that they still hold the view shown in the various emails and texts messages: That the cost to Fox of letting their audience know how bogus the election fraud claims were would be enormous. Because they are effectively signaling that they will also be willing to settle with Smartmatic for a similarly large amount. They may be wrong, but they certainly are terrified.
    I wonder if they will seek to win the shareholder suits by establishing that they really were looking at enormous losses if they ceased pandering to the rubes.

  20. Open Thread, so for anyone who is near or going to NYC, I just want to recommend the new play (just transferred from London) Prima Facie.
    I did not see it live, but because of the pandemic the National Theatre filmed some of their big hits, and I saw it at the cinema. It is a good play, about an important subject, but the performance (it is a one-hander with Jodie Comer, who won multiple awards) is absolutely astonishing. She deserves everything she won, and more. Absolutely amazing, and very highly recommended indeed.
    https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/theatre-news/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-prima-facie-on-broadway-starring-jodie-comer

  21. For anyone in or going to NYC, I just want to recommend the new play on Broadway, just transferred from London, Prima Facie.
    I didn’t see it on the stage, but because of the pandemic the National Theatre filmed some of their biggest hits, and this (being a one-hander) was particularly suitable for that treatment. I saw it at a special showing in the cinema – it is a good play, but Jodie Comer’s performance is absolutely astonishing. She won lots of awards, and deserved everything and more. I recommend it very highly, and if in the end they make the filmed version available, I highly recommend that as well.
    https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/theatre-news/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-prima-facie-on-broadway-starring-jodie-comer

  23. I thought Murdock lived in England for some reason. Isn’t he the same guy that owns English tabloids? Thanks for the correction. Is there a way to un-citizen him and deport him?

  24. Is there a way to un-citizen him and deport him?
    Pretty sure the Australians would decline to take him back. Which shows good judgement on their part.

  25. Murdoch’s nationality info is exactly as described by Pro Bono, but he does indeed own an English tabloid (the Sun), as well as a reasonably respectable although fairly rightwing broadsheet (the Times), and of course he used to own the infamous News of the World before he shut it down in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal. But then, I believe he still owns papers in Australia, and he also owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post (and perhaps others?) in the US. So, in short, he is a member of that interesting phenomenon, a citizen of Richistan, with its concommitant lack of allegiance to anything except power, money, power and more power.

  26. He tried to get into the German tabloid newspaper market too but failed due to the niche already been filled by e.g. BILD.
    (for comparision: Walmart failed miserably in Germany primarily because they outright refused to adjust to local customs* and because some of their standard operating procedures concerning their own employees were simply illegal here.)
    *to just name two examples: Germans consider greeters fake at best and generally creepy. And if there is someone bagging your groceries, a German will spontaneously not think ‘good service’ but ‘THIEF!!!’

  29. By the way, are any of the lawyers here, lurking or otherwise, able to confirm what Hartmut said on, I think, the other thread. Is it really true that there are no legal penalties in the US for companies lying in advertisements? If so, what is the US definition of fraud, which in the UK (if I correctly remember my brief period in law school) involves attempting to obtain a pecuniary advantage by deception? If there really is nothing to stop it in the US, by decision of the SCOTUS as Hartmut contended, no wonder the US is further forward in the post-truth stakes…..

  30. I would also be interested since I could be partially wrong on that. Checking again it seems that the SCOTUS decision I remembered was specifically about political ads, i.e. campaign ads have no obligation to stay anywhere near the truth because otherwise the 1st amendment would be violated.
    For mere ‘commercial speech’ some restrictions seem to be allowed but what I found was not about truth in commercial (non-political) ads but whether states have the right to outright ban certain kinds of advertisements (e.g. for casinos [=gambling] or alcohol). But the articles that came up in a quick search were not very new, so SCOTUS could have updated that by now.
    So, a competent statement by our resident lawyers would indeed be appreciated.

  31. Google has a lot of references…..e.g.:
    False advertising is an actionable civil claim under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act. A party who successfully sues for false advertising may be entitled to either damages or injunctive relief.
    To bring a claim for false advertising, the plaintiff must show:
    The defendant made false or misleading statements as to their own products (or another’s);
    Actual deception occurred, or at least a tendency to deceive a substantial portion of the intended audience;
    The deception is material in that it is likely to influence purchasing decisions;
    The advertised goods travel in interstate commerce; and
    There was a likelihood of injury to the plaintiff.
    Notably, the plaintiff does not need to show that they suffered actual injury from the defendant’s allegedly false advertising. That said, puffery, or claims a person could not reasonably rely upon, are not grounds for a false advertising claim.
    [Last updated in January of 2023 by the Wex Definitions Team]
    ********
    (No time for proper formatting but you all can ask the big G for yourselves if you want.)

  32. Ha! That makes lots of sense, and reassures me somewhat. It seemed extraordinary otherwise. Thanks, Janie.

  33. Mind you, what if the advertised goods DON’T travel in interstate commerce? After all, presumably lots of products are solely locally advertised…
    I guess I’d better check myself with the big G, as Janie suggests!

  34. claims a person could not reasonably rely upon, are not grounds for a false advertising claim.
    Which would seem to exempt anything that might be construed as political advertising. Who could reasonably rely on such?

  36. Well, well. Lachlan Murdoch withdraws from his case against Crikey, which said the Murdochs were “unindicted co-conspirators” in the January 6th matter. The ramifications of the Dominion settlement will no doubt run and run, even if most Fox viewers know nothing about it.
    As Lachlan Murdoch’s day in the witness stand in the Dominion v Fox News case drew closer, at home in Australia the News Corp co-chairman was keen to make a separate legal case against an independent news website go away.
    On Friday, just days after Fox News reached a $US787.5m settlement with Dominion in the US defamation lawsuit, Murdoch’s lawyers filed one line in Australia’s federal court to discontinue “the whole of the proceedings”.
    The whole of the proceedings was a defamation case Murdoch had brought against an Australian publication last August for daring to link him to the 6 January Capitol riots.
    After hundreds of hours spent in preliminary court battles and thousands of pages of discovery, he simply dropped his case against the Australian media company Private Media, the publisher of news website Crikey.
    This was the second time in a week Murdoch had walked away from a legal challenge, with this bill certain to be significantly less, but still likely in the millions.
    It was quite the backflip by the 50-year-old media mogul whose legal case has played out in lurid media headlines for eight months. He launched the proceedings after Crikey named the Murdoch family as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the US Capitol riot.
    Written by Crikey’s political editor Bernard Keane, the article did not name Lachlan Murdoch, but was headlined “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator”.
    Incensed by the opinion piece, as well as Crikey’s decision to publicise his legal letters in an advertisement the New York Times, Murdoch engaged top silk Sue Chrysanthou SC to represent him and filed a suit.
    Chrysanthou talked tough, arguing the publications contained “scandalous allegations of criminal conduct and conspiracy” and carried a number of “highly defamatory and false imputations about him”. Crikey argued in preliminary court hearings that the article did not suggest the Murdochs were guilty of criminal conspiracy.
    But as the months dragged on and the case blew out in complexity and length and the number of respondents grew to include the company’s editors and executives, Murdoch wanted to settle, the Guardian understands.
    Behind the scenes his lawyers made several offers to bring the case to an end as early as January. But Crikey, the little mouse that roared, refused to back down and apologise – or remove the piece – and the case was set down for a three-week trial in October.
    For Crikey the principle of freedom of speech was at stake and the publisher believed it should be free to publish a hyperbolic remark about a billionaire media proprietor without being sued. It was a brave – or foolhardy – stance because if Crikey lost it may have closed the business down.
    Private Media alleged in court that neither Lachlan nor any member of the Murdoch family had publicly repudiated claims propagated on Fox News alleging electoral fraud.
    Although technically unrelated, Murdoch’s case against Crikey was hampered by the discovery in the Dominion case, which uncovered that Lachlan and his father, Rupert Murdoch, knew that Fox News was telling lies about the US election being stolen in 2020.
    In March the case began to look rosier for Crikey as it considered the implications of those Dominion admissions.
    Crikey’s legal team jumped on the Dominion material and submitted an amended defence. Murdoch’s lawyers objected to the defence, saying it would mean extending the length of the trial and introducing irrelevant material.
    Prof David Rolph, a defamation expert at the University of Sydney’s law school, said at the time the Dominion revelations were key to Crikey’s case. “I think it would seem odd if on the one hand in the United States Dominion succeeds, and here in Australia Crikey doesn’t with its public interest defence,” Rolph said.
    On Friday Rolph said the issues involved in the two cases were different but the revelations in the US proceedings were obviously damaging, and it’s against that backdrop that the Australian case would have been litigated.
    “It’s also clear that Crikey was attempting to incorporate the US material into their defence and it would have been difficult for Lachlan to avoid getting into the box and being cross examined,” Rolph said. “Obviously withdrawing those proceedings avoids that from happening. I think that’s what it really boils down to.”
    The Dominion case had already begun to dominate proceedings. Earlier this month Crikey’s lawyers told the court that Murdoch was culpable for the violent insurrection of the US Capitol, generating the type of headlines Murdoch was trying to avoid with his original claim.
    Barrister Michael Hodge KC said that while many media sources fuelled a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump, Murdoch could still be held responsible.
    “He controls Fox Corporation,” Hodge said. “He permitted for the commercial and financial benefit of Fox Corporation this lie to be broadcast in the United States.
    “We say that gives rise to culpability where you are allowing and promoting this lie and that lie is the motivation for the insurrection.”
    Chrysanthou for Murdoch accused Crikey of including masses of material from the Dominion case in the Australian defamation lawsuit purely as part of its “Lachlan Murdoch campaign”. A key tactic employed by Chrysanthou was to claim Crikey was using her client as a way to increase subscriptions and build a fighting fund. The Guardian understands this marketing campaign particularly infuriated Lachlan.
    “They are happy to martyr themselves in this litigation to seek more money on the GoFundMe me campaign … to turn the case into something that resembles an inquiry and they don’t care if they win or lose,” Chrysanthou said.
    With the US media’s attention on Dominion, the Murdoch camp decided to drop the case before the weekend, knowing the Crikey case would be just a footnote in the coverage outside Australia.
    Murdoch’s lawyer John Churchill claimed he was ending the case so as to not enable Crikey’s “marketing campaign”.
    “Mr Murdoch remains confident that the court would ultimately find in his favour, however he does not wish to further enable Crikey’s use of the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and boost their profits,” Churchill said.
    Private Media’s CEO Will Hayward said it was a substantial victory for legitimate public interest journalism and labelled Churchill’s claim that Murdoch would have won as absurd.
    Matthew Collins KC, a barrister specialising in media law and a former Australian Bar Association president, said Murdoch was liable for most of the costs.
    “While every case is different, the costs that are recoverable by a party following a discontinuance of proceedings are typically in the range of two-thirds to three-quarters of the actual costs of the party,” he said.

    And for connoisseurs of Marina Hyde, she is in sparkling form today on the resignation of the awful Dominic Raab after the report into his bullying of officials was completed:
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/21/dominic-raab-hardman-rishi-sunak-scandal

  37. Ah, if only we had a political class where “Remember not to be a massive arse.” was a touchstone. Definitely nothing that DeSantis (not to mention Trump) has ever considered might be part of his interactions with the world.

  38. False advertising is an actionable civil claim under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act…
    There’s also the Federal Trade Commission Act which set up – surprise – the Federal Trade Commission to protect consumers from dishonest adverts, among other things.

  39. While Murdoch is not a UK citizen, his 4 decades long dominance of UK media (newspapers since 1968 and he set up Sky in 1990) and influence on UK politics (Thatcher, Major, early Blair) could easily make one think he is.

  40. Broadly speaking, there are both statutory and common law limits on commercial speech intended to induce “detrimental reliance”, which means pretty much any change in the listener’s economic position whether paying for substandard goods/services, foregoing one opportunity for another and so on. The list is almost as varied as the range of human economic interaction.
    Texas has had its Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act on the books since 1973 and it provides a ton of consumer remedies for “false, misleading and deceptive business practices, unconscionable actions and breaches of warranty”. We have additional statutes for real estate transactions, insurance sales and claims handling and many, many others which address–in one manner or another–commercial speech.
    So, for example, I cannot sell you a bottle of syrup on the promise that it will cure cancer, but I can say, “vote for me and I will find a cure for cancer.” Trolling someone for their money is different from trolling for votes.

  41. Trolling someone for their money is different from trolling for votes.
    Short story shorter: You can lie to the voters; you just can’t lie to the donors.

  42. Short story shorter: You can lie to the voters; you just can’t lie to the donors.
    WJ, I disagree with the last part. Donors who donate in exchange for a vote are guilty–along with the politician–of bribery. Of course, it goes on all the time, but the politician’s promise in exchange for favorable legislative treatment is not an legally enforceable promise; just the opposite, it’s a felony. Likewise, lying to the public is perfectly legal under many circumstances, but not legal under others.

  43. McKinney, it’s bribery to donate in exchange for a vote. But to donate because you like what the politician says he will do? IANAL, but it seems somewhat different. Enough to dodge a bribery charge? Don’t know.
    But what the politician says he will do is clearly advertising. And if you expend money based on advertising….
    (Perhaps it becomes clear why I am not a lawyer. 🙂

  44. IMO, it was some of the best advertising ever.
    Maybe. Dominion’s direct customers are city, county, and state governments. They change their voting technology infrequently. The only decision that has been prominantly reported is in Shasta County, CA where the county commissioners ordered that no machines are to be used, hand count only. At least one of commissioners there has been quoted as saying they don’t care about evidence.

  46. ral – Unless the “hand count” is carried out by, and overseen by, non-partisan, non-interested, etc., individuals and/or organizations, I predict that Shasta County elections will from now on go exactly as the Shasta County Commission wants them to.

  47. I’d say that Shasta is a microcosm for much of the rural purple US. There are extremists with a noisy plurality and just enough others who are tired of noise and scared of disruption that the extremists keep a measure of control. Then the extremists use intimidation to drive down participation so that they can remain in control despite no one wanting most of the things they actually do.

  48. I predict Shasta County is going to regret this decision.
    So far, the county recorder who has to actually conduct the elections has told the commissioners that (a) her budget is not nearly big enough to do a hand count and (b) hand counts violate California state law.

  49. Shasta is holding on. But it’s not a healthy political atmosphere and a lot of people are scared. It feels like a lot of other places from the 80s and 90s where anti government extremists have built up a public presence and attempted to take control on a local level.

  50. Shasta County’s commissioners can probably sustain having cancelled the county’s contract with Dominion. But they’ll just have to go with a different vendor. Possibly they’ll convince themselves that getting rid of Dominion was sufficient — delusions are good at redefinition like that.

  51. Today’s Grauniad, on Shasta County:
    In a seemingly long gone era – before the Trump presidency, and Covid, and the 2020 election – Doni Chamberlain would get the occasional call from a displeased reader who had taken issue with one of her columns. They would sometimes call her stupid and use profanities.
    Today, when people don’t like her pieces, Chamberlain said, they tell her she’s a communist who doesn’t deserve to live. One local conservative radio host said she should be hanged.
    Chamberlain, 66, has worked as a journalist in Shasta county, California, for nearly 30 years.
    Never before in this far northern California outpost has she witnessed such open hostility towards the press.
    She has learned to take precautions. No meeting sources in public. She livestreams rowdy events where the crowd is less than friendly and doesn’t walk to her car without scanning the street. Sometimes, restraining orders can be necessary tools.
    An American flag hangs from the railing of a bridge overlooking a river and lush green hills.
    These practices have become crucial in the last three years, she said, as she’s documented the county’s shift to the far right and the rise of an ultraconservative coalition into the area’s highest office. Shasta, Chamberlain said, is in the midst of a “perfect storm” as different hard-right factions have joined together to form a powerful political force with outside funding and publicity from fringe figures.
    The new majority, backed by militia members, anti-vaxxers, election deniers and residents who have long felt forgotten by governments in Sacramento and Washington, has fired the county health officer and done away with the region’s voting system. Politically moderate public officials have faced bullying, intimidation and threats of violence. County meetings have turned into hours-long shouting matches.
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/21/california-journalist-far-right-takover-shasta-county

  52. RIP Barry Humphries, a brilliant and complicated performer and comedian. Personally I will never forget the immortal Barry Mackenzie, his ocker creation in the early Private Eye, complete with his slang (point percy at the porcelain, one-eyed trouser snake, slipping the ferret, technicolour yawn etc), but of course his creation of total genius was the inimitable Dame Edna. An American diplomat once said to me, about Dame Edna “Oh, I don’t really like drag acts”, to which, astounded, I could only answer “Dame Edna is not a drag act!”. When he asked me what she was then, I answered “demonic possession.” And I (more or less) stand by it.

  53. So far, the county recorder who has to actually conduct the elections has told the commissioners that (a) her budget is not nearly big enough to do a hand count and (b) hand counts violate California state law.
    Another thing where the US tick completely differently from Germany.
    Over here both a) and b) would be the other way around.
    Over here every citizen can be drafted as an election helper (although usually public servants get called up first) and the hand counts are done by law in public. The idea that one could lack personnel for that or it being too expensive seem simply absurd. And if voting machines are not outright illegal, their use would meet massive protests. It’s just seen as an improper and unreliable way tp conduct elections. And it’s extremly rare, if the final results are not known by midnight.
    But of course we lack something like the GOP in Germany, even the Bavarian CSU does not come close

  54. And if voting machines are not outright illegal, their use would meet massive protests. It’s just seen as an improper and unreliable way tp conduct elections.
    Here, not only are voting machines** common, it was (until recently) common in some states to use machines which record votes at the polling place without creating any kind of paper ballot which could be audited/recounted. (Including, be it noted, if then extremely red Georgia.)
    In California, pretty much everything is, as noted, done by machine. But it is standard practice to do a hand count of (randomly selected) precincts afterwards, in order to verify the machine results. And, of course, if someone asks for a recount, that can be done by hand as well.
    As we saw in 2020, hand counts rarely deviate by more than a handful of votes from the machine counts. In random directions. And whether the hand counts are more accurate is debatable.
    P.S. I’m trying to picture the results of someone trying to set up a draft of people to do a hand count. Considering the reactions of some to being drafted for jury duty, I’m guessing there would be significant opposition.
    ** That’s both machines to mark your ballot for you, and other machines which tally both machine marked and hand marked ballots. So far, the far right seems focused on the latter.

  55. And it’s extremly rare, if the final results are not known by midnight.
    In 2022, my ballot contained on the near order of 65 items: federal officials, state officials, numerous county and city officials, people to run the university system, people to run the local school system, people to run a couple of special districts (whose boundaries don’t align with anything else), whether to retain judges at multiple levels, plus a fairly typical number of referendums and initiatives. Two languages. Probably 50-60 different ballot types. About 200,000 ballots cast in the county. All of which have to — by statute — be transported to a single secure location to be counted. Oh, and the state requires risk-limiting audits so the process is verified in several different ways from beginning to end.
    America’s dependency on machines to do most of the counting is driven by the fact that we vote on so many things.

  56. America’s dependency on machines to do most of the counting is driven by the fact that we vote on so many things.
    And that we have so many voters. In just my county (1 of 58 in California) in 2020, there were over 590,000 ballots cast (out of 700,000+ registered voters in the county — voting not being mandatory here). For, as Michael Cain notes, numerous offices from President to city councils to water district boards — most of the local district boundaries being different from and overlapping with any other kind of district, leading to multiple ballot types being needed. Plus 12 state propositions and 8 local measures somewhere in the county. And that wasn’t a particularly unusual collection of stuff to vote on.
    That’s a whole lot of counting to do. (And if you have the totals from each of dozens, or hundreds, of individual vote counters totaled using an adding machine, isn’t that machine tabulation anyway? Anyone want to bet it wouldn’t be parsed that way by some election deniers?)

  57. It occurred to me to ask, just how many ballots will have to be counted? So I am trying to go to the Shasta County web site and guess what happens when you click the “elections” link.

  58. @ral — i get the elections page…..which switches back and forth between “Special Election Results are Certified” and “Manual Tally Information” — with more links etc. Do you get something else?

  59. Hey, if Shasta County MAGAts don’t want their votes for RWNJ candidates to count, please proceed.

  62. @ral — not for me, it pops right up — both your link and if I google it myself.
    Finer points — it pops right up on Chrome, where I let scripts run. It takes a while on Firefox, where I don’t allow scripts. (Or whatever….it has been years since I made those settings.) But it comes up on both of them just fine.
    Weird.

  65. Hey, if Shasta County MAGAts don’t want their votes for RWNJ candidates to count, please proceed.
    Since the California Republican Party has made itself unelectable in statewide elections, lack of their votes changes nothing. All they really need to care about is elections for their own county offices. Where they can continue to count the votes for their fellow RWNJs locally, even if the state ignores their results for other contests.

  66. Where they can continue to count the votes for their fellow RWNJs locally, even if the state ignores their results for other contests.
    It’s all fun and games until the state starts filing felony charges for violating state election laws…
    More seriously, I wonder how much of the election process depended on Dominion services. Ballot design? Return envelope verification (since California now sends mail ballots to all registered voters)?

  67. Return envelope verification (since California now sends mail ballots to all registered voters)?
    My understanding is that ballot envelopes have their signatures verified manually. Then the external barcode is scanned (no idea if this involves so Dominion hardware, but I suspect not). This to confirm that the individual has not already voted; and to record who voted by mail, so they cannot subsequently vote in person as well.
    Then the envelopes are opened and the ballots are removed and scanned by a Dominion machine.

  68. I geth that the resistance against voting machines in the US is currently driven by MAGA people and that hand counting would probably lead to even worse fights about election outcomes (“hanging chads 2.0… ?”)- so I don’t know what the answer is here.
    But I think it’s important to note, that electronic voting is quite rare internationally. Barely any countries in Europe use it, quite a few have tested it at some point and decided it’s not transparent and / or safe enough.

  69. One thing to remember is that “electronic voting” covers a variety of possible implementations.
    For example, you can have a machine where the voter entes his votes, the machine records them electronically, and later those counts are totalled. For a while, some places in the US (I believe I mentioned Georgia) used those.
    The problem, obviously, is that there is no audit trail and no way to do a recount to verify the results. So those are pretty much all gone now.
    Or you could go all in, and have voters vote over the web. Not only no paper ballot (audit trail), but you could question the security of the transmission of the votes. (Sure, you may be comfortable doing you banking that way. But that’s only you life savings, not your vote.). And indeed the security of network transmission varies a lot, depending on which protocol is being used. Not to mention that quantum computers look likely to become powerful enough to allow breaking even the most secure current encryptions.
    Another option is to have the voter enter his vote on a machine which then generated a paper ballot. Essentially, a printer. Those printed ballots can then be counted, either manually or by being scanned, and the results tallied. (Here, this is an option, or the voter can manually mark his ballot.) Save those paper ballots, and you have an audit trail.
    Or, you can have the voters manually mark their ballots, and then have them scanned and counted. Again, an audit trail.
    As we saw in Arizona, machine counting of paper ballots is quite reliable. Safe and transparent.
    In fact, the biggest lack of transparency is that the ballot boxes at the polling stations are opaque. (There was a time, I believe, when glass sided boxes were used. But not currently.). That is mostly addressed by double custody: two people sign off that the boxes were empty at the start, and two sign off that all of the ballots were removed for counting.

  70. But I think it’s important to note, that electronic voting is quite rare internationally.
    So are ballots that include dozens of items. When lever voting machines were introduced in the US in the 1890s cities routinely required days/weeks to tabulate their election returns. The primary problem the machines were intended to solve was speed. Still is. I’m looking forward to seeing how Shasta County tries to solve it.

  71. I’m looking forward to seeing how Shasta County tries to solve it.
    I, too. Although I’d give odds that the new commissioners have given zero thought to the logistics, not to mention the cost, of implementing their intended manual counting. (The testimony of the recently fired county elections officer suggest the same.)
    But hey, it made a wonderful election slogan for them. And MAGAts, I have observed, care little about actually implementing any of their platform — except, of course, the bits about firing various non-partisan government employees.

  72. I’m looking forward to seeing how Shasta County tries to solve it.
    I see that Shasta County has now signed an $800,000 contract with a different company for various equipment, software, and training, including centralized scanners, for disabled voter access. The news stories imply the $800,000 will have to be offset by cuts in other programs, as yet unspecified.

  73. Paper ballots, counted electronically, seems the way to go to me, but hey, what do I know?
    I would wager that (The Revolution notwithstanding) the first shooting ‘civil war’ to break out will be in some place like Shasta County between two groups of “real ‘murican” thugs.

  74. two groups of “real ‘murican” thugs.
    Well, if non-reactionaries are too few (especially after a little judicious voter suppression) to be significant, elections will be between two “real ‘murican”&reg candidates. So, if you lose, who must have perpetrated the election fraud? Yup: RINOs, AKA the other guys.
    The bad news: if you try to shoot your way to a “proper” election result, i.e. “stop the steal!”&reg, the other guys will be equally heavily armed.

  76. I suppose I should not be surprised, but this dissent from Thomas, in the latest SC decision, is quite something.
    He effectively invites the state of Texas to execute Reed (who is very likely innocent of the crime he was convicted of*) to render the Court’s decision to grant his appeal moot.
    https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-442_e1p3.pdf
    Also dissenting, of course, is Alito, along with Gorsuch.
    *
    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/supreme-court-reed-goertz-death-penalty-kavanaugh.html

  77. Regarding this Supreme Court decision, I believe the aphorism is:
    “Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.”

  78. This from Texas (Via NBC News):

    The Texas Senate on Thursday passed a bill that would require the prominent display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, reigniting a debate over the role of religion in schools and parental rights. The measure, sponsored by Republican state Sen. Phil King, states that every public elementary or secondary school must “display in a conspicuous place in each classroom of the school a durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments” starting in September.

    The measure passed the Texas Senate on Thursday and is now pending in the House

  82. Good riddance to bad rubbish. ‘Nuff said.
    Yes. I wonder what his next move will be, in finding an outlet for his dark, doom-laden, nativist fantasies. Let’s hope it won’t have so wide an audience, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

  83. Going for a broad sweep. CNN fired Don Lemon. Susan Rice to leave role as White House domestic policy chief. Now if MSMBC fires Joy Reid…

  84. @nous — funny, my first thought was that Tucker just got too big for his britches and thought he was actually in charge, and the real person/people in charge had had enough of that nonsense.

  85. If only OAN would fire … um … well, I can’t name anyone on OAN. But I’m sure there’s someone I would like to be fired!

  88. But it was Carlson’s comments about Fox management, as revealed in the Dominion case, that played a role in his departure from Fox, a person familiar with the company’s thinking told The Post.
    Considering his scathingly accurate comments about Trump, as see in those emails and texts, it seems likely that he was equally accurate about Fox management. Which would certainly upset them — more so than if he was totally fantasizing, like on his show.

  89. Not sure I totally buy that explanation for TC’s ouster, but I like it anyway! Megyn Kelly says he will crush an independent venture of some kind – I hope not but it may well be true. He really is a despicable (and kind of creepy) guy.

  90. LA Times is saying that Murdoch and some of the board pushed Carlson out in part because of the Grossberg lawsuit.
    https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-04-24/tucker-carlson-is-out-at-fox-news
    My first speculation, based on who made the decision, is that there are some hard feelings, sure, but the board had to act to protect themselves from the derivative action suits. Keeping Carlson and his executive producer on payroll leaves them in jeopardy for any shareholder that comes after the board – especially with one big settlement already done and another waiting in the wings.
    Just a guess, but it fits the context.

  91. nous, that seems more likely to me, because it fits with what I consider their bloodless (i.e. not caring so much about the insults) but Machiavellian nature (caring about financial and other kinds of jeopardy).

  92. How much does firing Carlson now protect Fox, though?
    The lawsuits are all based on acts done while he was still an employee.
    IANAL, but I don’t think you get to say, “Hey, we fired him! You no longer have a case against us!”

  93. The case may still be there, but if the motivation for the suit was not so much monetary as it was ideological – shareholders upset with the election denialist business model – then the firing may undercut their motivation to sue.

  94. To get pushed out at a high level at Fox News seems mostly to require some sort of sex scandal (including major league harassment). O’Reilly was fired from the same time slot, with similar audience size, because of sex. I’m sort of expecting that we will eventually see a Carlson sex scandal. To borrow from a female friend, “Carlson is at exactly the right combination of age, income, marriage length, and arrogance for a midlife crisis involving a blond with big tits, or the male equivalent.”

  95. Yes. I wonder what his next move will be, in finding an outlet for his dark, doom-laden, nativist fantasies.
    If he could step away from the character he has played on TV, he could return to being the good journalist he used to be. He might be able to create his own mini-media empire like that of a number of other people who got kicked out of traditional media have done on Substack and other venues.

  96. To get pushed out at a high level at Fox News seems mostly to require some sort of sex scandal (including major league harassment).
    “Ms. Grossberg said in the lawsuit naming Mr. Carlson that male producers regularly used vulgarities to describe women and frequently made antisemitic jokes.”
    In a Lawsuit, Tucker Carlson Is Accused of Promoting a Hostile Work Environment: Carlson’s former head of booking, Abby Grossberg, said that male producers regularly used vulgarities to describe women and frequently made antisemitic jokes.

  97. every public elementary or secondary school must “display in a conspicuous place in each classroom of the school a durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments”
    I look forward to the lawsuit that demands the posting of
    DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW

  98. Per Charles @8:06 — um, the good journalist he used to be? Is there any actual evidence for this?
    And even if there is, who on earth do you think his audience would be?
    The millions who swallowed his lying poison for the past however many years won’t be the slightest bit interested in anything sane he might come up with to say — more likely they’d lynch him for it. And the (I hope many more) millions who despise him for helping to destroy the country are not going to need or want any “journalism” from him.

  100. Given his extensive media career, he must have something on the ball.
    Experience in a number of businesses over the years suggests that, while competence is one route to a successful corporate career, it is definitely not the only one. Which is to say, inferring that Carlson was ever a good journalist is not justifiable just based on how extensive his career may have been.

  101. Interesting factoid from Charles’ link: until 2020, Carlson was (at least nominally) a Democrat.
    Cue the conspiracy theorists claiming that he was a false flag operation, aimed at taking the Republican Party nationally down the same road that the California GOP took. Thus, in the long term, effectively destroying them.
    Totally implausible, of course. But when has that ever mattered to a conspiracy theorist?

  102. Given Clickbait’s extensive real estate development and media career, he must have something on the ball.
    *****
    So, no actual “evidence” except an assumption: “he must have…”
    I get into arguments now and again, in a friendly way, about whether Clickbait is “smart.” It requires remembering that there are many kinds of “intelligence,” and one does not imply the others.
    Someone in a BJ comment tonight wrote: “Extreme brazenness is a strategy. I mean, it’s literally Trump’s life strategy, on levels we’ve yet to even confirm.”
    If extreme brazenness combined with moral depravity is “having something on the ball,” well, okay. But it still has no bearing on whether TC could make a new career out of actual journalism. Not that I imagine he wants to … to say the very least.
    But why am I even typing this? A hook bitten, and now spat back out.

  104. Back to why did they fire him…
    Here’s a piece (linked by someone at BJ) that goes through a lot of speculations and weights pros and cons, far beyond anything I know anything about.
    But I’ve had experience (with my mom, when she was well into her 90s) of changes in decision-making that were subtle enough not to make me (or my siblings) step in and try to take over, but that in retrospect I think signaled that she had gone beyond a point where she should have been making those decisions.
    Hindsight is sharper than foresight, obviously. And yes, the Murdochs are probably far more ruthless, and definitely more self-interested, than we can imagine. But even they are only human, and who knows what inter-family processes are going on. The two-week engagement in particular was … interesting.

  106. And further to that piece, on reflection, I’d guess that the Jerry Hall-assisted article in Vanity Fair has also caused some trouble with the shareholders. After all, though it never seems to have occurred to him that there would be any significant pushback from the brutal way he ended their marriage (except a financial settlement, and he’s used to those), I would guess that the revelations about his hitherto unknown medical difficulties (seizures etc) won’t have done him any good regarding shareholder (and any other kind of) confidence in him. Followed, of course and as Janie notes, by the on-again off-again new marriage announcement.

  107. Whiplash warning: changing topic.
    My boss has been fiddling with ChatGPT — to write software of all things! But she also tried using it to draft part of a presentation. It was on a subject where she is an expert, and a couple of the apparent references (to an IETF RFC) were wrong.
    So it occurs to me to wonder, and perhaps Charles or nous or someone else who has experience can tell me, does ChatGPT have a “research mode”, as opposed to a “conversation mode”? Something that would cause it to include links to sources, such as would be found in an academic publication. Specifically, footnotes supporting various assertions.
    Such an option would make it far more useful. And, as a side benefit, make it less useful to lazy students — seems like they’d have to at least cross check that the references were things they could reasonably find, and even that they were relevant.

  108. Keep in mind that the LLMs don’t know anything. When pressed ChatGPT has given references. Often hallucinated ones. URLs that don’t exist. Names of researchers that don’t exist. Whitepapers that were never written. Giving them text as prompts triggers a cascade of text in return. And they’re flipping a lot of coins and tossing a lot of dice in the process. Given the same prompt more than once they will return some variation on the previous response or a largely different response.
    While everyone has been preoccupied with ChatGPT, some researchers at MIT have discovered a strategy that allowed an amateur Go player to beat the type of AI Go software that beat the Go world champion.

  111. RIP Harry Belafonte
    Yes indeed. I saw him in a NYC restaurant in the late 80s or early 90s, and he was still almost supernaturally beautiful. Not that that was the most important thing about him, but still worth mentioning!

  112. ChatGPT is basically an instantiation of Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
    My impression of this from outside, having not studied the code and judging by the output and commentary, is that it is a structuralist implementation of linguistics using bayesian models, trusting that the generic models and the wisdom of crowds. If it is wrong, then at least it is conventionally wrong in a way that looks familiar.
    But genres are not fixed, and all of the real thinking and innovation happens at the fringes of genre where the forms have to be broken because they do violence to the content.
    There is no conscious thought, and therefore no insight in any of the research it does. There is no critical engagement. It’s just manipulating signs to approximate the look of actual language, and that is good enough so long as one is dealing with commonplaces.
    Can anyone point to a (human written) article that argues for why ChatGPT is something more than a Chinese Room? I’d be interested in what they had to say.

  113. There is no conscious thought, and therefore no insight in any of the research it does. There is no critical engagement. It’s just manipulating signs to approximate the look of actual language, and that is good enough so long as one is dealing with commonplaces.
    FWIW (you may decide not much), and speaking as one generally very (astonishingly) ignorant of most of the code, tech, AI stuff you all talk about, this paragraph strikes me as a perfect, and meaningful, description.

  114. the wisdom of crowds
    In my experience, the “wisdom of crowds” contains an implicit assumption that each member of the crowd contributes an equal voice to the output. That is, there is no ability to skew the output simply by yelling louder or more frequently.
    And, again from what I have understood of the development of these AIs, they actually do have a strong bias towards what occurs most often in their input. Which is rather the opposite.

  115. some researchers at MIT have discovered a strategy that allowed an amateur Go player to beat the type of AI Go software that beat the Go
    world champion.
    The strategy is clearly losing against a strong and generally competent opponent. But the KataGo program is entirely self-taught, and evidently hasn’t spend enough time training itself to play against losing strategies. It gets confused…
    It seems that we should involve ourselves in the training of AI systems if we’re going to rely on them to do things that matter without going wrong.
    Incidentally, I’m as sure as can be that no such vulnerability exists in the equivalent chess program. Chess is in some ways a much simpler game.

  116. some researchers at MIT have discovered a strategy that allowed an amateur Go player to beat the type of AI Go software that beat the Go
    world champion.
    The strategy is clearly losing against a strong and generally competent opponent. But the KataGo program is entirely self-taught, and evidently hasn’t spend enough time training itself to play against losing strategies. It gets confused…
    It seems that we should involve ourselves in the training of AI systems if we’re going to rely on them to do things that matter without going wrong.
    Incidentally, I’m as sure as can be that no such vulnerability exists in the equivalent chess program. Chess is in some ways a much simpler game.

  117. Not sure where the quote is from, but (in essence) it states that “the best swordsman in France does not fear the second best swordsman in France, but an ignorant amateur.”

  118. This is an entertainingly back-and-forth thread. So back to Fox/Carlson for a moment.
    Again from a BJ commenter, this article, where religion comes into it.
    I didn’t expect to find something I have in common with Rupert Murdoch: “That stuff freaks Rupert out. He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk,” the source said.
    Who knew Tucker was aiming far beyond the presidency! Rupert’s former future bride, apparently. 😉

  119. The strategy is clearly losing against a strong and generally competent opponent.
    I saw the claim in a video on AIs that they had found a way to decidedly hack the Go software. This article indicates that they’re claiming more than they can prove.
    “While this work suggests that learning via self-play is not as robust as expected and that adversarial policies can be used to beat top Go AI systems, the results have been questioned by the machine learning and Go communities. Reddit discussions involving paper authors and KataGo developers have focused on particularities of the Tromp-Taylor scoring system used in the experiments — while the proposed agent gets its wins by “tricking KataGo into ending the game prematurely,” it is argued that this tactic would lead to devastating losses under more common Go rulesets.”
    Befuddling AI Go Systems: MIT, UC Berkeley & FAR AI’s Adversarial Policy Achieves a >99% Win Rate Against KataGo: In the new paper Adversarial Policies Beat Professional-Level Go AIs, a research team from MIT, UC Berkeley, and FAR AI employs a novel adversarial policy to attack the state-of-the-art AI Go system KataGo. The team believes theirs is the first successful end-to-end attack against an AI Go system playing at the level of a human professional.

  120. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.
    How apt. It’s from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

  121. Also, even though someone has a black belt in something, they may want to think twice before going up against a competent MMA fighter.

  122. The first attack on KataGo exploited its ignorance of the Tromp-Taylor scoring method. But later they found way to beat the program fair and square.

  125. Both those pieces (Vanity Fair, and the Independent) were good to read! It looks like the $8 I spent the other day on a year’s subscription to Vanity Fair may have been worth it for more than the one (Jerry Hall etc) article. I must check it more regularly…

  126. I’m not the most competent sword fighter in the world by any means, but I’m far less worried about a less competent sword fighter than I am about a competent one. More than that, I’m worried about a fighter with a sword that has more reach, or having to fight against two opponents with swords, or an armored opponent. Unexpected things are only a problem if they are also dangerous things, and that sort of dangerous novelty happens only rarely. A skilled opponent is almost always dangerous.
    And the MMA fighter is going to be hard pressed if faced with an opponent who can stay out of reach and is not constrained by the ring, or who can take up a defensive position that makes it hard to engage in the MMA fight game, or a person with a knife in their pocket that they can access, or a fight in a crowded space that has a lot of dangerous debris or obstacles that make going to ground a bad gamble. And I wouldn’t want to be the MMA fighter wrapped up with one opponent on the ground when that person’s buddy showed up to help out.
    Context is everything, and a real fight is contingent as hell. Treating it like a game is dangerous to your health.

  127. Not sure where the quote is from, but (in essence) it states that “the best swordsman in France does not fear the second best swordsman in France, but an ignorant amateur.”
    I’m going to push back on this. Let’s put a contemporary spin on it. The best offensive left tackle in the NFL doesn’t fear NFL defensive linemen, but does fear an ignorant amateur lining up against him. Impeccable footwork, technique, experience — there’s nothing the amateur can do that’s dumb enough to beat the pro.
    During the time when I was a lowly E-rated fencer, I do not recall ever scoring the first touch against an A-rated fencer, on purpose or by accident. I do recall a couple of times I got roped into a tournament that included A-rated fencers, when touch differential mattered, losing 5-0. Every touch was on the glove on my weapon hand. I never got close enough to do anythig.

  128. I’m far less worried about a less competent sword fighter than I am about a competent one.
    I think it may be that the critical difference is you (or I) not being in the “best swordsman in France” category. My experience is like yours: a more competent opponent is more dangerous.
    But partly that’s because I was never at the level where my responses were totally reflexive. That is, I didn’t know what every one of the possible effective moves were. So I could see what was actually coming, not just what should be coming. I expect it also helped that I spent a lot of time teaching, including rank novices. It kept me reminded that my opponent might do something totally off-the-wall — no matter how poor a choice it might effectively be.

  129. When a highly skilled martial artist says that something is reflexive, my understanding is not that it is a matter of something happening automatically, without thought or intention, like a reflexive response. It’s more a matter of having vast enough experience and awareness to recognize moments of potential in a wider array of circumstances. They are caught out less often in tricky situations and are more practiced at identifying what an opponent could do from any given position (as opposed to what they *will* do in any given moment). It doesn’t matter if you are going to do something unorthodox. They are responding to your center and your distance and your position. They know where and how far you can reach and they know how to move to control distance. The untrained novice is not going to be inscrutable to any of that trained experience.

  130. The sword fighter thing in the real world has another reason: A skilled swordsman puts priority on his own survival, a reckless amateur often will not. That will get the amateur killed but also puts a high risk on the expert confronting him. Suicidal attacks (leading to “le coup de deux veuves”) are difficult to defend against, in particular if unexpected.
    The expert will still in most cases be able to get out alive/unharmed but the risk is high enough for him to have fear.
    Btw, that’s also a standard criticism of the scoring in sport fencing where touching the opponent just a fraction of a second earlier will get one a point while in a real fight the point is to hit but without getting hit in reverse. In HEMA there is a drive to introduce a rule that one does not gain a point, if the riposte after a hit fails or at least that there has to be a certain time gap between you hitting your opponent and him hitting you.

  131. In the story, the characters are hiding in a tree carefully chosen to be relatively unattractive to search in, but the “pudding-headed clown” ordered to climb the other tree misunderstood what he’d been told.
    In the game of rock-paper-scissors, championships are held to determine which competitor is best at divining their opponents’ strategies. But however skilled they may be, they can expect to win a match no more (or less) than half the time against a genuinely random opponent.
    I don’t claim that this has anything to do with swordsmanship.

  132. Thanks for unearthing that quote from Twain’s CYIKAC! It’s been years since I last read it, but I guess it stuck. Perhaps I’ll start re-reading a day or two before the midwest-US total solar eclipse next year, just for fun.
    I’m not sure why I thought it was “swordsman in FRANCE”? Some echo of Dumas? Did Twain steal a bit from an earlier author?

  133. I’m not sure why I thought it was “swordsman in FRANCE”?
    I remembered it that way, too. At a guess, someone else cribbed it from Twain (slightly modified). And that’s where we encountered it.

  135. Btw, that’s also a standard criticism of the scoring in sport fencing where touching the opponent just a fraction of a second earlier will get one a point while in a real fight the point is to hit but without getting hit in reverse.
    When I was young enough to have fencing coaches who had lived through the transition to electric scoring, all of them said that it changed the sport drastically, in just the way you say.
    The epochal story is from 1937 at the World University Games. One of the epee competitors specialized in a running attack. During one bout he ran onto his opponent’s blade which broke, penetrated the running fencer’s chest, struck his heart and killed him. The electric scoring box awarded the point to the dying fencer, though, because he had touched his opponent more than 1/25th of a second earlier.

  136. Surely, this will not come as a surprise
    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/tucker-carlson-offered-jobs-russian-state-tv-channels-putin-ukraine-rcna81281

    Just hours after Fox News unexpectedly announced his departure, Carlson was offered work by Russian state media networks that have fiercely supported the invasion of Ukraine and echo much of his conspiratorial rhetoric.

    Good to know the poor dear won’t be left homeless, wondering where his next meal in coming from.

  137. One of the great humility encouragers for me in my FMA training was the habit in my training circle of calling out the anatomical effects of the blade strikes that we were practicing and using in sparring. Femoral, brachial, carotid… The Sayoc guys had a particularly colorful one that we would use – “blue worm” – to describe the effect of a cut across the abdominals (intestines y’all).
    Pretty good way to keep oneself from getting caught up in the sporting aspect.
    We used to joke that the point of the training was to “die less often.”
    I have no interest whatsoever in having to put any of what I learned to a real test.

  138. Good to know the poor dear won’t be left homeless, wondering where his next meal in coming from.
    He’s had offers from several digital media platforms. Or he could be independent on Substack, Rumble, etc. If he chooses to stay in some form of media, he can likely take most of his audience with him.

  139. Since we were talking about false advertising recently, a paragraph from an article at Daily Kos about Elon Musk’s latest genius moves (and no, I don’t mean the rocket):
    There’s also a small possibility Musk may be running afoul of laws against false advertising. Twitter’s informational messages falsely claimed a great number of celebrity figures are paying money for a product they, in many cases, have explicitly condemned. That’s a bit dodgy, even beyond the question of whether Musk is reanimating dead celebrities for the sake of boosting subscription numbers.
    What kind of hope is there for the human species when Elon Musk is the richest person in the world and Tucker Carlson is admired by millions?
    *****
    PS I’m bemused to say that whoever runs MIT’s Twitter account took the trouble to say that MIT hadn’t paid for a blue check (at the point in the keystone cops-like comedy when Elon started giving them out for free as his latest move in whatever game he thought he was playing). On the other hand, dead people like Jamal Khashoggi couldn’t fight back in that manner….

  140. I’m going to push back on this. Let’s put a contemporary spin on it. The best offensive left tackle in the NFL doesn’t fear NFL defensive linemen, but does fear an ignorant amateur lining up against him. Impeccable footwork, technique, experience — there’s nothing the amateur can do that’s dumb enough to beat the pro.
    You can really go a lot of places with this line of reasoning. It got me thinking of an MLB pitcher being fearful of pitching against someone who never played baseball. “Who knows what kind of pitch this inexperienced amateur will swing at? What do I do?” Meanwhile, the ball will whiz by before the batter can start swinging.

  142. Shunryū Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind — a book full of “wisdom” that was incredibly seductive to me when I was young. But I’ve realized in later years that it was a non-negligible factor in delaying for decades a process I should have been going through of pushing back against various kinds of bullying, and generally just claiming ownership over my own life.
    Oh well, as another Zen teacher said, “The path is under your feet.” It was there when I was 20, and it’s still there now. If it hadn’t been Suzuki, it probably would have been someone else.

  143. An interesting new wrinkle on the Tucker Carlson story:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/26/business/media/tucker-carlson-dominion-fox-news.html
    The day before Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation trial against Fox News was set to begin in a Delaware courthouse, the Fox board of directors and top executives made a startling discovery that helped lead to the breaking point between the network and Tucker Carlson, one of its top stars.
    Private messages sent by Mr. Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive and crude remarks that went beyond the inflammatory, often racist comments of his prime-time show and anything disclosed in the lead-up to the trial.
    Despite the fact that Fox’s trial lawyers had these messages for months, the board and some senior executives were now learning about their details for the first time, setting off a crisis at the highest level of the company, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
    The discovery added pressure on the Fox leadership as it sought to find a way to avoid a trial where Mr. Carlson — not to mention so many others at the network — would be questioned about the contents of the private messages they exchanged in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
    Two days after the board’s discovery, Fox settled that case for $787.5 million, believed to be the highest for a defamation trial.

  144. Despite the fact that Fox’s trial lawyers had these messages for months, the board and some senior executives were now learning about their details for the first time
    Why is my immediate thought: Wow, Fox has the same kind of quality lawyers that Trump does.

  145. In this piece in the Guardian, Emma Brockes, making the point that whoever succeeds TC will likely be just as bad, entertainingly talks about ranking the appalling previous Fox people (Bill O’Reilly, Glen Beck, Roger Ailes) by appallingness, but then ends with this interesting info, of which I was unaware:
    The most surprising thing to have come out since Carlson’s departure, however, is the breakdown in viewing figures. At the time of his ousting, Carlson was the highest rated cable news host in the US, pulling in more than 3 million viewers nightly. By contrast, Chris Hayes over on MSNBC attracts around 1.3 million viewers and Anderson Cooper, the most boring man on television, scores around 700,000 on CNN in that time slot.
    These are decent figures. But dig down into the details, and among viewers aged between 25 and 54 – the most attractive demographic – Carlson hovered around the 330,000 mark. This is more than his rivals, for sure, but is still a tiny number of people relative to the sheer amount of oxygen this man has taken up over the last five years.
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/27/tucker-carlson-fox-news-bill-oreilly-glenn-beck

  146. a tiny number of people relative to the sheer amount of oxygen this man has taken up over the last five years.
    Clickbait’s number isn’t tiny in a comparable way, but one of his greatest “talents” is surely the ability to suck up all the oxygen all the time.
    I haven’t sorted out what point Brockes is really making, or if there really is one. I think you could do something similar with the way attention is concentrated on certain people and attitudes and events that consume vast amounts of attention among those of us who hang around online a lot, and yet that the huge, huge majority of people have never heard of.
    IOW, it’s interesting to think about the multiplying of influence…. (Interesting “influencer” seems to be an actual “career” path these days….)

  147. Also, Carlson, in spite of his ratings, wasn’t making that much money for Fox. He had gotten too controversial for most advertisers and was stuck with ad buyers like MyPillow. He was making some money for Fox indirectly by driving cable subscriptions and as a lead-in for the programs following him.

  148. I (innumerate etc, remember) took it to mean that TC’s demographic was aging, and therefore he was longterm less attractive or necessary to Fox. But what do I know?
    However, further to the TC story, reading this (also in the Guardian) made me go Eeeek! out loud:
    The most irresponsible thing you can do these days is look away from the worst-case scenario.” So says Rick Wilson. In the week Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, Wilson’s worst-case scenario is this: a successful Carlson campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

  149. Interesting “influencer” seems to be an actual “career” path these days….
    And a very lucrative one if you’re a Kim Kardashian. She currently has 353 million Instagram followers plus 26.8m Snapchat, 75.1m Twitter, and 1.98m YouTube. Last I heard, she could make as much as $800,000 from product promotions in a single post.

  150. …a successful Carlson campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
    I’m guessing that Carlson would rather be a kingmaker than a king. But, who knows?

  151. But dig down into the details, and among viewers aged between 25 and 54 – the most attractive demographic…
    In other words, Fox News was willing (and able) to move on in an effort to attract a younger and growing demographic. Even at the possible cost of losing the elderly and shrinking demographic.
    It may not work for them. But at least they appear capable of making the effort. (Unlike the current GOP.)

  152. The digital age is an asteroid. The cable news networks, along with print journalism, are the dinosaurs.

  154. According to our favorite LLM, the cable news networks’ challenges are:
    1. Declining viewership
    2. Competition from alternative sources
    3. Fragmented audience
    4. Polarization of news
    5. Rising costs
    6. Advertiser pressure
    Audience capture/pressure can be a problem too. According to some sources, the blowback from calling the Arizona presidential vote too early scared the crap out of Fox management.

  155. In this piece in the Guardian, Emma Brockes, making the point that whoever succeeds TC will likely be just as bad, …
    Some suggestions.
    “Fox News appears confident that the network will be able to replace Carlson without much harm to the bottom line. The network has a good track record of kicking top-rated stars to the curb and proceeding to grow the audience. Rupert Murdoch almost certainly calculated that this time would be no different. But they can’t foist any old schlub into the coveted hour. The selection process will be an extremely calculated one, weighing things like star power, ratings, and appeal to blue-chip advertisers (Carlson scored an F minus in this category).”
    Who Will Replace Tucker Carlson at Fox News?: Here Are Mediaite’s Top Picks

  156. The cable news networks, along with print journalism, are the dinosaurs.
    Cable itself is a dinosaur.
    It costs too much, and is an unneeded pain when you already have an internet connection.

  157. In this piece in the Guardian, Emma Brockes, making the point that whoever succeeds TC will likely be just as bad, …
    I have submitted my application.

  158. It costs too much, and is an unneeded pain when you already have an internet connection.
    Ah, but the thing is, at least around here, the cable IS the Internet connection. And the cost to laying new fiber for just Internet means that the cable company is effectively a monopoly supplier for Internet. Unless you are OK with much smaller bandwidth using your cell phone provider.
    It does occur to me that in future we may see a public utility model adopted for Internet access. It is becoming (if it isn’t already) a necessity rather than its original luxury, or at least discretionary, status.

  159. Cable itself is a dinosaur.
    Cable as a video content aggregator, yes. It’s been just about 25 years since I was a panelist at a Cable Labs conference session about the future. One of the audience questions directed to me, after the other panelists had been all doom-and-gloom, was “But what are our strengths?” with an implied “if any” tacked on.
    So I ticked things off on my fingers. (1) For at least the next 15 years, we have the best high-speed data technology widely available. (2) At least for downloads, that data technology will get better, because DOCSIS is not standing still. (3) At the local level, we have pushed far more fiber deeper into the distribution network than anyone else, and lots of that fiber passes close to small-to-medium sized businesses. (4) We are the only video delivery medium where customers can walk into an office and pay for the next month in cash. (5) Set top boxes will be increasingly powerful computers, and described some of the research work I’d done that looked a lot like an app store.
    I finished up with something like, “If we can’t leverage all that into a successful business, we’re not trying hard enough.”

  160. Good news from the UK: the BBC chairman has resigned after the publication of a report into the circumstances of his recent appointment.
    The background is that the role is supposed to be non-partisan and independent. The guy, Richard Sharp, was already rather too close to the Conservative party – Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson in particular – but it emerged that he’d discussed his application in advance with BoJo, and, at about the same time, facilitated a million-dollar private loan to him. And he’d somehow forgotten to mention this when asked to disclose anything which might taint his appointment.
    That is “Yo, Boris, I fancy taking over at the BBC. And by the way, I may be able to help you tide over your money troubles.” Followed by “I assure the board that there’s no possible reason for suspicion of undue influence if I am appointed.”

  161. Kavanaugh investigation at the time of his Senate approval now pretty well proven to be a complete fix.
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/28/brett-kavanaugh-investigation-omissions-senate-sexual-assault-claims
    …Smith wrote to Davis in the 29 September 2018 email that he was in a class behind Kavanaugh and Ramirez (who graduated in the class of 1987) and believed Ramirez was likely mistaken in identifying Kavanaugh.
    Instead, Smith said it was a fellow classmate named Jack Maxey, who was a member of Kavanaugh’s fraternity, who allegedly had a “reputation” for exposing himself, and had once done so at a party. To back his claim, Smith also attached a photograph of Maxey exposing himself in his fraternity’s 1988 yearbook picture.
    The allegation that Ramirez was likely mistaken was included in the Senate committee’s final report even though Maxey – who was described but not named – was not attending Yale at the time of the alleged incident…
    Weirder, Jack Maxey:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy#Forensic_analysis
    …In March 2022, The Washington Post published the findings of two forensic information analysts it had retained to examine 217 gigabytes of data provided to the paper on a hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey, who represented that its contents came from the laptop. One of the analysts characterized the data as a “disaster” from a forensics standpoint…

  162. @Pro Bono — If only susceptibility to consequences were contagious… I’d start with Clarence Thomas.

  163. If only susceptibility to consequences were contagious… I’d start with Clarence Thomas.
    The current difference between the US and the UK would appear to be that, in the UK, some people (BoJo notwithstanding) still have a sense of shame. At least when caught out.
    No doubt that is yet another import that the far right is adamant about keeping out.

  164. Agsolutely no sense of shame was apparent at any time during the whole thing. Sharp hung on for weeks and months, until the report came out, and Sunak (Sharp was his old boss) should have sacked him as soon as the all the info came out.
    Susceptibility to consequences: yes, Clarence Thomas would be a good candidate. Kavanaugh too. What a farce the current SCOTUS is.

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