2rafa
6hr ago
Because America is too large. If you look at other nations of comparable or greater size (India, China, even Brazil) regional governors and politicians often have far more control over the local political economy than in the US. Chinese provinces vastly differ in terms of economic and social policy, for example.
I’m firmly in favor of publicly funded museums, opera, theater, art. But this stuff should be funded by states and cities, not by the federal government! There’s an extraordinary obfuscation in this kind of thing being funded federally.
All this agency dismantlement will have negative consequences in many ways. But the principle of it is fair, that this huge expansion of the federal bureaucracy occurred without the consent of the public and for no good reason other than that people involved wanted to expand their fiefdoms and preserve their sinecures.
A federation of states! Why not? Why shouldn’t it be so?
2rafa
1d ago
Millions of people can already be deported because they either have final removal orders or will be caught in the US without a visa and placed in removal proceedings. No further legislation is required to deport these people, just way more resources (realistically, the magnitude of the deportations envisioned is almost impossible without fundamentally changing the social fabric of the country).
Yeah, exactly. The bill would presumably be about both legitimizing and funding / building the infrastructure for that kind of action.
2rafa
1d ago
Yes, and at the time I argued here that that was a huge mistake. Still, the bill (while good - and again, it should have passed) didn’t really address this particular issue.
You can’t get “deport 13 million people” (or even 5 million) past the senate filibuster or quite possibly even 50 Republican senators without some kind of pathway to citizenship for at least some illegal migrants, which would be unconscionable absent extreme concessions (see below).
Personally if I was Trump I’d propose a grand gambit, in which the GOP approves a pathway to citizenship for, say, the 5 million longest-resident illegal migrants in exchange for fully restoring the pre-1965 national origins restrictions (thus limiting all future legal immigration) into law. Sadly, the left is still too smart to go for that.
2rafa
1d ago
Interesting piece, thank you for sharing it. I do think he underestimates the logistical issues involved in deporting 12m+ migrants in what are increasingly more like three and a half years, but the legal situation should be cleared or at least circumvented first. Pursuing a shock and fear based policy, as with the deportation of the Palestinian activists, will be critical here - go for the illegal immigrant Harvard grads and think tank staff who have been in the US for 20 years and live PMC lives, along with the criminals and recent crossers. The key must be to normalize the idea that all illegal immigrants will be deported sooner or later, and there is nothing that can be done to prevent it. For this reason continued large raids in sanctuary cities and states are still very important.
Birthright citizenship is still the most important aspect of any major crackdown. Increasingly I see the logic in Cernovich and others’ arguments that scaring the center-right faction on the Supreme Court (principally Roberts and ACB) is of absolute importance. Terrify them into believing that Trump will start ignoring judgments on a “you and what army” basis and there is perhaps the faintest sliver, the vaguest hope of a ruling that revokes it for children of illegal migrants.
Am I whitepilled? No, and if anything Trump’s erratic and shortsighted trade policy has every chance of cratering the GOP’s broader popularity over the next few years and damaging the interests of the country, especially coupled with other likely events. But I concede that the possibility of an unexpected, positive and meaningful shift rightward has probably increased, say from 5% to 15/20%.
2rafa
1d ago
Maxwell is identified as Jewish in Florida prison, where she is entitled to a Kosher meal that is 6x more expensive than those given to incarcerated second-class citizens. Among other perks.
That would be a result of self-identification, no? There are “messianic Jews”, Christians who keep kosher, who would be entitled to the same. Many states have already replaced kosher and halal meals in both state and federal prisons (which seem to handle catering on a state level) with vegan ones (that cost the same $2ish as regular meals in Arizona, for example). Online, the only discussion I can find that is Florida specific for federal prison meal costs suggests that (1) most of those requesting kosher meals are Muslim, as what is kosher is necessarily halal and (2) that it was roughly $4.50 a day for the kosher meal versus $3 for the regular meal, a difference of 50% rather than 600% and likely explained entirely by economies of scale.
You don’t have any actual counter arguments to any of my points. There is no logical reason for Israel to blackmail its staunchest supporters at no benefit to itself.
2rafa
2d ago
This is just going to lead either to more in person dating or more ‘biometric verification’ using a combination of ID and facial scan / FaceID type data. The latter still leaves room for trickery, but that just makes the former more likely. I understand that among zoomers dating app usage is already falling off a cliff. People have apparently moved to Instagram, which is much messier, network-based and features the ability to see pictures of someone they didn’t curate.
2rafa
2d ago
I agree. If you look at Epstein’s life he was a gambler. He followed the Sam Bankman-Fried philosophy of taking every single bet that he thought had a chance of not-failing, except he was both more intelligent and (crucially) attractive and charming.
2rafa
2d ago
All of those things either back me up, are addressed in my comment, or are irrelevant.
Taking them one by one:
Former Israeli Intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe alleges Epstein ran a honeypot for Mossad after being recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell
Epstein’s wealth, influence, connections and likely even the trafficking scheme (given his history with the seedier side of French modeling agencies) all predate his ever meeting Ghislaine Maxwell in the early 1990s, making this extremely unlikely.
Mega group is an organisation of exclusively Jewish billionaires set up to fund Jewish and pro-Israel causes
So again, this is a blackmail scheme by rich Zionist Jews to blackmail…each other…into supporting Israel?
Wexner was the only client of Epstein's mysterious hedge fund and the apparent source of his wealth
Wexner was a notorious ‘confirmed bachelor’ with no interest in women or girls until he married late in life to a woman in her late thirties to have some heirs. Epstein also never procured boys (not because there are no gay billionaires who would bite, but because he wasn’t interested in them, lending still further credence to my theory) His friends and close business associates in NYC spent the 1980s believing that Epstein was Wexner’s boyfriend, and there is every evidence he was, and that it was likely on this basis (a mentor-mentee relationship between an older and younger man that spans business and pleasure being not uncommon, historically or at the present, for gay/bi men) that Epstein was given control over Wexner’s money (skimming hundreds of millions in fees off the 1980s/90s equity booms) and then given his mansion when he moved back to the Midwest to settle down.
Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a top Mossad spy.
There is no evidence that Robert Maxwell ever met Epstein, even though they would both have been in the UK in the late 1970s. In addition, none of Maxwell’s close business partners remembered any involvement with Epstein. Lastly, Maxwell liked Ghislaine but trusted her little with his actual interests, which he left to his sons, neither of whom liked Epstein and who regarded him as a cad who had seduced their sister (as told by their friends and themselves).
Epstein's lawyer and long-time friend Alan Dershowitz is an ultra-Zionist, author of The Case for Israel, and was considered by Israel to represent them at the ICJ
Yes, indeed. So The Mossad, which has a long-standing policy of not targeting Zionist Jews, embarks on a colossal and expensive operation to blackmail its greatest supporters in America, people who support Israel for free, in order to gain unspecific blackmail material against them for no particular reason. (Why? Traditionally kompromat exists to prevent defection for selfish reasons; unless you believe Jewish in-group loyalty is so weak that even Dershowitz would sell out Israel at the drop of a hat, this is ridiculously unnecessary in this case).
“When I called Ghislaine [Maxwell] and asked why I couldn’t eat there [at a private and exclusive country club] she said, ‘It’s a Jewish country club, you’re not Jewish, they’re not going to serve you.’
Ghislaine Maxwell is not Jewish according to Jewish law.
2rafa
3d ago
Someone who will offer Israel basic support might still balk at giving considerable proportions of their property, offering support in any and all cases including Israel committing a genocide (exceeding current actions at Gaza) or nuking something, committing potentially criminal acts etc.
None of them gave the majority of their property to Israel, Mossad is broadly aligned with less extreme factions in the Knesset (certainly compared to the most extremist religious zionists), and if anything the kind of existential threat that would prompt Israel to use nukes would supercharge Jewish-American support for it in financial and political terms. Lastly, blackmailing your biggest supporters is also liable to backfire when it comes to their support, word still travels, and Mossad has a general and only occasionally and carefully violated policy of not targeting Jews to preserve broad Jewish support for Israel, and even when it does usually only committed anti-Zionist activists, not people who mostly support them.
but that he was capable of naming names and thus too inconvenient to allow to live
Naming names is only worth something to you if it gets you off the charge or at least a much reduced sentence. It was clear at that point on the strength of the reporting and with the number of victims that had come forward that he wasn’t getting out of jail alive even if he lived a long life. His own lawyers, indeed any lawyers, would have told him that. He was almost 70; there was nothing prosecutors could or would offer him that offered a realistic prospect of release given the strength of public and political pressure for his conviction on extremely serious charges.
At that point, the only motivation to spill would be revenge at no benefit to himself. If that was what Epstein wanted he could have set up a dead man’s switch, have sent an email to Wikileaks, whatever. But why? There is every chance Epstein considered many of these people his friends, and there is a great deal of evidence that he enjoyed their company, especially of people like Dershowitz, Minsky and Prince Andrew. Why would he screw them over in an act of impotent revenge to shave 10 years off a 50 year prison sentence (aged 66). Again, public sentiment and media attention was such that a real sweetheart deal was impossible (unlike in the early 2000s); he wasn’t going to be going to Club Fed or getting out in 5 years.
My intuition has always been that the Epstein scheme was far less elaborate than is often claimed online for several reasons.
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The most incriminating quote is the alleged suggestion by Acosta that Epstein “belonged to intelligence”, meaning the CIA or some allied intelligence agency doing business with the CIA (implicitly Mossad). But is that actually the case? There are countless powerful or semi-influential figures who exist in the gray area where they sell intelligence or have a business relationship with the agencies without their operation being “an intelligence operation”. My own interpretation of that quote is that it meant Epstein was powerful enough that someone brought his name up with someone senior enough to hint that the investigation should be light-touch. That might be because he was an asset, or it might be because Epstein had collaborated with intelligence on occasion or knew powerful people, which we know he did.
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All the evidence we have suggests that the scheme was primarily for Epstein’s own sexual gratification. He had a penchant for schoolgirls going back to at least his time teaching at Dalton. All of the victims were primarily victimized by him. An industrial-level scheme built around selective extortion of super rich men to whom Epstein pimped out his child prostitutes might see a dealer dabble (as most pimps do) in his own product, but they’re never the primary consumer. No drug dealer consumes the majority of their own supply.
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Maxwell’s Mossad connections are overstated. Maxwell was a rich half-Jewish British girl (her mother was a Huguenot Protestant) and dilettante whose father bought her into Oxford and who had by all accounts little ambition. Her father, as a publisher, con artist and Labour MP, used his connections to expedite arms deliveries to Israel during the critical period in the Cold War where it transferred its primary allegiance during from the Soviets to the West. This made him a hero among some in that generation at Mossad, but a purported connection with his daughter’s on-again-off-again boyfriend’s involvement in a sex-trafficking scandal thirty years later is relatively spurious; there is no good evidence Maxwell senior ever met Epstein. Epstein himself was born to an American Jewish family with zero Israeli connections whose own charitable instincts were much less Israel-centric than peers of his generation. If the Mossad was organizing a sex trafficking scheme to target American billionaires from the ground up, why not pick a substantially more loyal and equally well connected rich person?
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You don’t need to blackmail rich American Jews into supporting Israel. This, to me, is the single most obvious argument against the entire alleged scheme as a Mossad project. The absolute majority of the important alleged co-accused were Jewish. For every Clinton (who was post-office at the critical time), Trump (random real estate developer at that time) and Prince Andrew (powerless) were at least as many Blacks, Dubins, Dershowitzes and so on, if not many more. Wexner himself (the source of pretty much all Epstein’s wealth) was and is a Jew and a Zionist. If you’re Mossad, you really don’t need to blackmail these people with videos of them fucking 16 year olds to get them to support Israel; they’ll do it for free. The whole point of blackmailing someone is to get them to do something they don’t want to do.
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Epstein killing himself doesn’t mean anything. Many people would kill themselves in a similar position. That the prison was supposed to prevent suicide doesn’t change anything either; many people kill themselves while on suicide watch; he may well have paid his lawyers to smuggle something in. He was going to jail forever, had lost everything, would be in solitary confinement for the rest of his life (and/or get stabbed like Chauvin) and was never going to touch a woman ever again. Why wouldn’t he kill himself?
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The fascinating thing about Epstein isn’t his fall, it’s his rise. This is the curiosity, and it’s something that will always fascinate those who are interested in this story. He was a real life Gatsby, he truly did come out of nowhere, he parlayed seducing a student into getting a job with her father on a trading desk, parlayed that into doing business in London at the height of the first Arab oil boom with Khashoggi, parlayed that into ripping investors off in a Ponzi scheme that he escaped by tattling on everyone else, then seduced a closeted billionaire clothing tycoon into letting him manage his money, skimming off hundreds of millions plus a mansion on the upper east side and rinsing him for the best part of a billion dollars. Then he set out to become a socialite and a friend to the super rich, indulged his philia for teenage girls by funding a couple of seedier modeling agencies, and merged the two in a wide-ranging pimping operation with his brother that nevertheless had him at the center, because even the richest men in the world will be friends with you to fuck hot teenagers. Did he do a little business with intelligence on the side, when he had something to trade for his continued liberty? I’m sure of it. But that’s not the heart of the story, which is one man’s almost unimaginable audacity and determination to gain wealth and power by any means necessary.
2rafa
4d ago
It’s not the population. Public transport in Addis Ababa is literally cleaner and safer than in LA. It’s solely the rule of law and harsh (or not so harsh) treatment of the vagrant, violent underclass.
2rafa
5d ago
That’s an entirely circular issue. “We chose to cede our cities and public spaces to the underclass and mentally ill drug addicts, so now public transport is scary and unsafe” is a political choice, not an inevitability. There are many countries in which public transport is clean, safe, well-policed and used by all classes except the super rich, even where those very same people have cars or can afford to drive. Long road trips are tiring, and on public transport you can read, work, or relax instead of performing the labor of driving.
In my big city (indeed the biggest) in Europe, what most people in the middle class and above do is order groceries 1x per week online. Because the city is so dense, the truck makes like 20 stops over a couple of hours and delivery fees are therefore very cheap. I pay $5 a month for unlimited deliveries, and all the groceries are the exact same price as in the store with no additional service charges or fees.
This accounts for all heavy items like detergent and bottled water, bulky bags of potatoes etc. Then for the rest of the week I either walk to the grocery store, deli/butcher or farmer’s market on Sunday (all a maximum of ten minutes’ walk) and get fresh meat/bread/pastries if I want them. This works pretty well and I never feel overburdened.
I could buy all my groceries every day in person with little additional nuisance, because there are multiple grocery stores in the five minute walk between my subway station and home and in the four minute walk between my destination subway station and my office. In that case, like many people, I’d just buy items in smaller purchases instead of once for the week or fortnight. But I prefer planning my meals.
I have family who live out in the suburbs in New Jersey and Connecticut. Walking from the parking space to the store, around the huge and not very dense grocery store (since space in big warehouse stroad strip malls is cheap), and then back to the car likely covers a greater distance than many trips to and from (and around) the grocery store in dense cities on foot.
2rafa
5d ago
It’s been spoken about again more because of popular conservative grifter Candace Owens’ video series alleging that Brigitte Macron is mtf.
2rafa
5d ago
It's precisely one of the reasons why they are not really going anywhere and are never getting anywhere, and why the patriarchal, cattle-herding Tutsi, are, at the moment, invading a neighboring country 30x their size and winning.
That’s not patriarchy, for the same reason that 10,000 British didn’t rule over 300 million Indians or a few million Israelis didn’t hold back the combined Arab armies due to differences in patriarchal values. That’s just IQ.
2rafa
6d ago
NY style is crispy, while mass market Papa John’s / Pizza Hut are floppier, like the original Neapolitan (albeit with a heavier, thicker dough). Yes, you can add many weird toppings, but the Italians do that too (see their beloved “american” pizza with mini hot dogs and french fries on it, unironically a favorite of many Italians). Yes, you can get it with barbecue sauce as a base instead of marinara, but Italians have their own white pizzas that don’t have marinara either. Order a Pizza Hut pizza with tomato sauce and cheese for an Italian and they might call it (quite justifiably) a bad pizza, but it is pizza.
2rafa
6d ago
We make doctors get bachelors degrees that require literature and history classes for essentially class reasons.
Other peer countries (culturally and economically) don’t, though, it’s solely a peculiarity of the American college system.
2rafa
6d ago
New York pizza (by far the most popular US style I guess) and Neapolitan pizza are different, but not so much so that they’re wholly different dishes. For example, they use pretty much the same ingredients and are recognizably the same dish. Even in Italy Sicilian pizza is called ‘pizza [Siciliana]’ and is more different from Neapolitan pizza than New York pizza is.
I said this last time, but even unprompted by grand suggestions Deepseek writes like it’s 150,000 words into a 400,000 word online science fiction novel. I don’t mind it, it’s probably still better than ChatGPT which writes like HR, but it’s amusing.
Interesting, though I’d say probably not the right thread.
I’m not hugely interested in the pace of AI advancement for now. Superhuman intelligence at the point where things just get ‘solved’ will be a fun step, but for me as soon as the potential of agents became clear (which was early in the GPT 3 era) the writing was on the wall. Everything now is just efficiency, the pathway had been clear for the last couple of years, we’re just waiting for the world to realize what’s just happened.
Churchill (now increasingly an enemy of the internet dissident right, indeed the principal villain of the twentieth century according to MartyrMade, if you believe him) talking about Palestine:
I’m not sure I agree. But it must be acknowledged that while what happened to the Native Americans was a tragedy for their culture, it is only one of countless thousands of similar tragedies that litter human history and which encompass the ancestral civilizations of many of our own forebears.
Settler colonialism is the way civilization has advanced for its entire existence. The origins of European Civilization itself lie in settler colonialism, with the Basques the only pure or semi-pure remnant of the peoples who once lived in Europe. The ancestors of the Japanese, the Malays, the Indians, the Bantus in much of sub-Saharan Africa were all settler colonialists. That is who we are, it is what we are as a species, for better or worse.
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