Magnificent Century + Faceless Sultanas: Nurbanu Sultan

The Backcountry Permit Situation

Rereading Firewatch AU again and I want to make a clarifying comment about the backcountry permit thing, since it's a such an important part of the plot from Chapter 5 - 10. I haven't seen anyone be confused about this yet fortunately, but in my opinion the distinctions in the plot get pretty in the weeds here. So this is just me walking through it.

The Forest Service IS supposed to be in the wrong about the permit. That was an actual mistake that probably cost Mumbo dearly in a roundabout way. They are also wrong to have not disclosed this to Grian or Mumbo's family.

But here's where I say that it's not a conspiracy. Grian's thoughts about the mistaken permit is that it impacted Mumbo's search process. He thinks that the Forest Service wanted to cover up their mistake, and as a result botched the search to hide it. Admitting that they made a mistake with the permit would indicate they were at fault, and they don't want to be at fault because they're the government, so they continue to search the Cloud Lake Trail like nothing happened. Grian thinks that they knew Mumbo wasn't there and kept searching it anway to make themselves look good. He thinks they purposefully searched an area Mumbo wasn't in to hide their mistake. He thinks that they should have pursued other areas, but didn't want the liability of admitting Mumbo wasn't on the trail. He and Scar both think it was unprofessional to not, somehow, explore areas that weren't even connected to the original trail because SAR should have been "able to predict that."

The non-conspiratorial reality is much simpler. The Forest Service mistakenly issued Mumbo a permit for a trail that hadn't been reopened yet because the person who issued it simply didn't know. It's pre-computer, so it's not like they had an electronic system to flag this. So when Mumbo is reported missing, they have 1) Mumbo's permit for that trail, 2) Mumbo's car at that trailhead, and 3) a witness who said they saw Mumbo on/near the trail. There is NO reason to assume Mumbo didn't go there anyway. All evidence actually points to him being there. In fact, as stated in the files Grian later stole, the SAR incident commander had determined that the damage to the trail made it more likely for Mumbo to get lost. He would have entered altered terrain where the trail was obscured, and might have taken a wrong turn since everything was no longer marked or clear. I have seen real life cases where this happened to hikers who got lost!

It's stated that the SAR did do aerial searches of some other locations around Cloud Lake, but only of official trails off the same road as Cloud Lake. Since, you know, those are the ones that officially connect and are close to where his vehicle was found. Grian himself says he never made it to Cloud Lake because he was "asked to help in other areas." So we can already see that there was search acitivity that wasn't concetrated on the the rockslide area.

When Scar asks what the Forest Service thought about Mumbo's things being found on a completely different trail, and why he was permitted for a closed trail, he's told they were "operating on information inconsistent with reality and conducting an investigation of it." They both treat this as sinister-sounding but it's pretty much just a roundabout polished governmenty way of saying "we have no clue why he was at Pinnacles either and are looking into it" lol.

When Grian confronts the District Ranger, he's mad. The District Ranger admits fault to him about the permit, but explains again that they didn't see a reason why Mumbo wouldn't be in the Cloud Lake area. Grian accuses them of purposefully blocking off the spur trail Mumbo took—essentially saying that the Forest Service knew Mumbo took that path, and quietly blocked it off without mentioning it. The District Ranger replies that the trail crews were just doing their jobs. That's the truth. Since the Cloud Lake Trail needed repairs to reopen, a trail crew worked heavily on it. Part of their job is streamlining the trail.

Unfortunately, most of the critical errors in Mumbo's case were always his own. He shouldn't have taken the unmarked trail, he should've turned around once he realized the Cloud Lake Trail was messed up. I don't mean it in a victim-blamey "he deserved his outcome due to stupidity" way. I simply mean it in the sense that we're all human and unfortunately some silly mistakes or moments of poor decision-making are final.

So basically:

Forest Service issuing the mistaken permit and not admitting it: actual mistake, they were wrong

Forest Service purposefully botching the search and focusing on an area they knew Mumbo wasn't in, to decrease their own liability: this didn't happen, Grian is wrong

Mumbo's family could probably sue them for wrongful death based on the permit thing, though. I don't know how successful it would be but in my purely amateur opinion I think there's a reasonable case to be made that Mumbo never would've been in the position to make his mistakes if he'd never stepped foot on the trail. He might've gone elsewhere and had an entirely normal trip. If only :(

@redheadarcher - { ⚙️ }

⚙️ → ❝ I was on Twitch saying the radioactive spider is a cover up. There's a lot of Spiders because they smash a lot. A lot of Spidey fanboys spam my page and crashed the site. Now I'm banned for five days. So, it must be real The Spider-Man fans control the media. ❞

i think i deserve financial compensation for having to listen to my parents (esp my dad) talk

you know those conspiracy theories that are like paul mccartney died and was replaced by a doppelganger avril lavigne died and was replaced by a doppelganger........ that’s me about dan balan

Anyone who thinks that roombas are out here creating highly accurate and detailed floor plans of your living space has never actually owned a roomba cuz those things are dumb as shit

I dunno about you guys, but if I were in PR team behind an Extremely Public Person who hasnt been seen in public for nearly 3 months and people are starting to Talk About That.....

I would simply not release a badly photoshopped image of them and their kids

IM SORRY BUT IM FR ABOUT TO START A CONSPIRACY THEORY ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF FACTORY SETTINGS

I MEAN but wouldn't that be an incredible isekai series??

a modern princess whose job is basically just being a beautiful figurehead

grows bored with her vapid role in life and withdraws from society, riddled with ennui

only to fall into a fantasy realm where princesses have real political power

as well as important responsibilities that her subjects depend upon

and at first it's a comedy of errors as she realizes that none of her training prepared her for this

but then she grows as a person and applies herself to learning how to guide and guard this kingdom

and becomes the powerful and just princess she was always meant to be

...so I guess apparently my new favorite conspiracy theory is that kate's shoujo manga just underwent a MASSIVE genre switch.

Things I look for in history books:

🟩 Green flags - probably solid 🟩

Has the book been published recently? Old books can still be useful, but it's good to have more current scholarship when you can.

The author is either a historian (usually a professor somewhere), or in a closely related field. Or if not, they clearly state that they are not a historian, and encourage you to check out more scholarly sources as well.

The author cites their sources often. Not just in the bibliography, I mean footnotes/endnotes at least a few times per page, so you can tell where specific ideas came from. (Introductions and conclusions don't need so many citations.)

They include both ancient and recent sources.

They talk about archaeology, coins and other physical items, not just book sources.

They talk about the gaps in our knowledge, and where historians disagree.

They talk about how historians' views have evolved over time. Including biases like sexism, Eurocentrism, biased source materials, and how each generation's current events influenced their views of history.

The author clearly distinguishes between what's in the historical record, versus what the author thinks or speculates. You should be able to tell what's evidence, and what's just their opinion.

(I personally like authors who are opinionated, and self-aware enough to acknowledge when they're being biased, more than those who try to be perfectly objective. The book is usually more fun that way. But that's just my personal taste.)

Extra special green flag if the author talks about scholars who disagree with their perspective and shows the reader where they can read those other viewpoints.

There's a "further reading" section where they recommend books and articles to learn more.

🟨 Yellow flags - be cautious, and check the book against more reliable ones 🟨

No citations or references, or references only listed at the end of a chapter or book.

The author is not a historian, classicist or in a related field, and does not make this clear in the text.

When you look up the book, you don't find any other historians recommending or citing it, and it's not because the book is very new.

Ancient sources like Suetonius are taken at face value, without considering those sources' bias or historical context.

You spot errors the author or editor really should've caught.

🟥 Red flags - beware of propaganda or bullshit 🟥

The author has a politically charged career (e.g. controversial radio host, politician or activist) and historical figures in the book seem to fit the same political paradigm the author uses for current events.

Most historians think the book is crap.

Historical figures portrayed as entirely heroic or villainous.

Historical peoples are portrayed as generally stupid, dirty, or uncaring.

The author romanticizes history or argues there has been a "cultural decline" since then. Author may seem weirdly angry or bitter about modern culture considering that this is supposed to be a history book.

The author treats "moral decline" or "degeneracy" as actual cultural forces that shape history. These and the previous point are often reactionary dogwhistles.

The author attributes complex problems to a single bad group of people. This, too, is often a cover for conspiracy theories, xenophobia, antisemitism, or other reactionary thinking. It can happen with both left-wing and right-wing authors. Real history is the product of many interacting forces, even random chance.

The author attempts to justify awful things like genocide, imperialism, slavery, or rape. Explaining why they happened is fine, but trying to present them as good or "not that bad" is a problem.

Stereotypes for an entire nation or culture's personality and values. While some generalizations may be unavoidable when you have limited space to explain something, groups of people should not be treated as monoliths.

The author seems to project modern politics onto much earlier eras. Sometimes, mentioning a few similarities can help illustrate a point, but the author should also point out the limits of those parallels. Assigning historical figures to modern political ideologies is usually misleading, and at worst, it can be outright propaganda.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "Big theory" books like Guns, Germs and Steel often resort to cherry-picking and making errors because it's incredibly hard for one author to understand all the relevant evidence. Others, like 1421, may attempt to overturn the historical consensus but end up misusing some very sparse or ambiguous data. Look up historians' reviews to see if there's anything in books like this, or if they've been discredited.

There are severe factual errors like Roman emperors being placed out of order, Cleopatra building the pyramids, or an army winning a battle it actually lost.

When in doubt, my favorite trick is to try to read two books on the same subject, by two authors with different views. By comparing where they agree and disagree, you can more easily overcome their biases, and get a fuller picture.

(Disclaimer - I'm not a historian or literary analyst; these are just my personal rules of thumb. But I figured they might be handy for others trying to evaluate books. Feel free to add points you think I missed or got wrong.)

“average conspiracy theory gets confirmed" factoid actualy just statistical error. average conspiracy theory is false. Supernatural conspiracy theory, which gets confirmed regularly, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

An Epic antitrust loss for Google

A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with Epic, maker of Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/technology/epic-games-google-antitrust-ruling.html

The mobile app store world is a duopoly run by Google and Apple. Both use a variety of tactics to prevent their customers from installing third party app stores, which funnels all app makers into their own app stores. Those app stores cream an eye-popping 30% off every purchase made in an app.

This is a shocking amount to charge for payment processing. The payments sector is incredibly monopolized and notorious for its price-gouging – and its standard (wildly inflated) rate is 2-5%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

Now, in theory, Epic doesn't have to sell in Google Play, the official Android app store. Unlike Apple's iOS, Android permit both sideloading (installing an app directly without using an app store) and configuring your device to use a different app store. In practice, Google uses a variety of anticompetitive tricks to prevent these app stores from springing up and to dissuade Android users from sideloading. Proving that Google's actions – like paying Activision $360m as part of "Project Hug" (no, really!) – were intended to prevent new app storesfrom springing up was a big lift for Epic. But they managed it, in large part thanks to Google's own internal communications, wherein executives admitted that this was exactly why Project Hug existed. This is part of a pattern with Big Tech antitrust: many of the charges are theoretically very hard to make stick, but because the companies put their evil plans in writing (think of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, whose top execs all conferred in a groupchat called "Wirefraud"), Big Tech keeps losing in court:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Now, I do like to dunk on Big Tech for this kind of thing, because it's objectively funny and because the companies make so many unforced errors. But in an important sense, this kind of written record is impossible to avoid. Any large institution can only make and enact policy through administrative systems, and those systems leave behind a paper-trail: memos, meeting minutes, etc. Yes, we all know that quote from The Wire: "Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?" But inevitably, any ambitious conspiracy can only exist if someone is taking notes.

What's more, any large conspiracy involving lots of parties will inevitably produce leaks. Think of this as the corollary to the idea that the moon landing can't be a hoax, because there's no way 400,000 co-conspirators could keep the secret. Big Tech's conspiracies required hundreds or even thousands of collaborators to keep their mouths shut, and eventually someone blabs:

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-moon-landing-you-d-need-400000-conspirators

This is part of a wave of antitrust cases being brought against the tech giants. As Matt Stoller writes, the guilty-on-all-counts jury verdict will leak into current and future actions. Remember, Google spent much of this year in court fighting the DoJ, who argued that the company bribed Apple not to make a competing search engine, paying tens of billions every year to keep a competitor from emerging. Now that a jury has convinced Google of doing that to prevent alternative app stores from emerging, claims that it used these pay-for-delay tactics in other sectros get a lot more credible:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

On that note: what about Apple? Epic brought a very similar case against Apple and lost. Both Apple and Epic are appealing that case to the Supreme Court, and now that Google has been convicted in a similar case, it might prompt the Supremes to weigh in and resolve the seeming inconsistencies in the interpretation of federal law.

This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades "training" judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America's antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

There's 40 years' worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we've got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

It's amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That's what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google's insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, "tying" is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary.

The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn't want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of "an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants." They've asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to "crush Google’s control over Android":

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-v-google-trial-verdict-a-win-for-all-developers

Google has sworn to appeal, surprising no one. The Times's expert says that they will have a tough time winning, given how clear the verdict was. Whatever this means for Google and Android, it means a lot for a future free from monopolies.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

i feel like one of the main tells between real conspiracies and fake ones is how much room for error you allow for. like if your theory requires your enemies to be functionally omniscient and infallible then you're probably just being paranoid

I don't understand why conspiracy weirdos always take it as given that the "bad guys" will put hints they're abusing children or killing people or whatever in innocent places. Like, why would they do that when they could just... Not do that?

Conspiracy thought can basically be summarized as "everything is connected, without exception"

Eventually, the theorist may be faced with overwhelming information that suggests they are wrong. The only response they have at that point is "You are being paid to fabricate evidence" which raises the question "by who? For what reason?"

See, for most of real history, answering that question is usually pretty easy. It's "the CIA has openly admitted to financially benefitting from spreading this form of propaganda." Or "It would be very embarrassing for the Secret Service if the public learned that an agent accidentally shot JFK."

The real world is banal and complicated and morally grey. But with conspiracy theories, there's no room for "ordinary profit motive" or "human error" because that's never a good story. Conspiracy Theories are deeply emotional things, they need to be a good story.

This is where you get this recurring motif that I call The Great Enemy. It's satanists, it's the illuminati, it's the Jews, it's the deep state, the shadow government, the CIA, the reptilian empire, it's the Ultimate Other that is responsible for everything evil in history.

When your thoughts become "all evil comes from the Great Enemy." It erodes your ability to actually discern real world human motivations. The world becomes a game between The Good Guys and The Great Enemy. Every event, every movie, every book, all become pieces in that game.

It's why so many of these deep conspiracy people talk about the world like it's a giant play, as if all politics is just a big stage show put on for them. It's because once your brain becomes steeped enough in conspiracism, you genuinely lose the ability to tell fact from fiction.

this might make me sound ignorant but is the radfem part of term not about hating men? they hate trans people, they hate men and they view both as predatory, obviously men are not their primary targets but I feel like it would be incorrect to say that they don't hate men, especially since many of them believe in gender separatism (which is bs for numerous reasons). it's wrong to bring up men every time someone talks about the transmisogyny terfs spew bc that would be derailing the conversation but can men (trans/cis/whatever) not express how they've been hurt by terfs in their own posts or conversations? apologies if ive completely misinterpreted what you were saying I just want to understand the topic better

I’m not disputing that terfs hate men. However, I think it’s an error to highlight their hatred of men as ideologically significant. Sure they talk about hating men, but their political alliances reveal that dismantling patriarchy, or a desire to oppress men, is not a concern for them, given that they support the criminalisation of sex work, the state enforcement of sex as biologically determined, and are allied with the same right wing groups (such as the Heritage Foundation in the US) that want to criminalise abortion and reinstate “traditional” white western gender norms. If you view terf political goals through the lens of hating men, then their political efforts have overwhelmingly been a massive failure. Which I don’t think is very useful analysis!

A hatred of men is also not politically useful in general, because there is no money to be made or political battles to be won hating men. Hatred of men is not a systemic issue because men are not oppressed as a social group on the basis of their manhood. There is no political or financial infrastructure built on the foundation of hating men, nor is there infrastructure dedicated to maintaining a systemic hatred of men. Hating trans people, however, is extremely financially and politically lucrative, particularly hatred of trans women/transfems, because of how transphobia and misogyny intersect with and reinforce one another. There are ample political, financial, medical, and social institutions that operate on the maintenance of patriarchy, many of which terfs share a political platform with. So terf hatred of men is clearly not that big a deal given how willing they are to ally with right wing groups and fascists, who are the last people on earth to tolerate the oppression of men as a political goal.

This is why people (myself included) take umbrage with the continued insistence that terfs hate men as a central foundation of their beliefs. It’s not incorrect to say that they hate men, but hating men is not the problem with terfs. Hatred of men is not an inherently reactionary position anymore than hating cis people is. The problem is the way terfs conceptualise gender, and the political goals that flow from that conceptualisation, which affects all trans people but primarily affect trans women/transfems. The spectre they raise about bathrooms, about sports, is always the age-old transmisogynistic conspiracy of “a man in a dress” “invading women’s spaces” because the historical legacy of transmisogyny looms large in public consciousness, and reinforced by medical/psychiatric institutions in particular, in a way that hatred and fear of trans men does not (autogynephilia exists as a mental illness but autophallophilia does not, for example. Julia Serrano talks about this in Whipping Girl if you want to read more on the subject). Terfs don’t care about trans men in men’s sports, they don’t raise the counter-spectre of trans men being mass assaulted in bathrooms by cis men who discover that they’re “really women” - these are not rhetorical moves that are interesting or useful to them, because it does not position them as victims. Trans men are hurt by their transphobic rhetoric, suffer under transphobic laws that are passed, and face transphobic discrimination from people in their lives as a result of how mainstream transphobia is (and I am speaking from significant and traumatic personal experience on this front). We are not, however, the face of the transgender boogeyman, and we are not the primary target of terfs. We are targets because we are trans, not because we are men. To be dismissive of the claim that terfs hate men is not a dismissal of the pain and violence transmascs go through, because our oppression is not founded on our manhood.

So when you see terf political efforts and terf rhetoric, their obsessive focus on trans women as arch villains who need to be destroyed, and you come to the conclusion that a hatred of men is the animating force behind terf political activity - that is a transmisogynistic conclusion, both because you are framing their transmisogyny as something that is primarily informed by a hatred of men, and because “terfs hate men” is a non-sequitur in discussions about the political and social damage that their beliefs cause. If terfs hate men, they do so as a hobby, and I don’t really give a fuck about their hobbies

new conspiracy theory where i claim 9/11 was due to pilot error