2rafa
4hr ago
Epstein molested a few hundred girls. Rotherham was about 1400 victims, and the total across all known British Pakistani gangs is about 5000.
Pearson’s extrapolation method estimated based on the rates in Rotherham more than 350,000 victims nationwide. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who blew the whistle on the scandal said there were hundreds of thousands, up to a million victims nationwide (over the 65 year period of mass immigration from Pakistan).
2rafa
11hr ago
It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway).
Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day. Yes, what Epstein did (paying 16 year olds for sex and having them recruit their school friends for the same purpose) was cruel and wrong - and he deserved jail for it - but in the grand scheme of all sexual crimes it was far, far from the worst.
2rafa
1d ago
There is no magic breaking point at which things get so bad ideologies necessarily start changing. Maybe something happens, maybe it doesn’t, there are scenarios where Biden ran in 2016 and won, where Trump is still a TV host. Tiny things can change the trajectory. I do expect that the situation will vary between Western European countries, perhaps even significantly.
2rafa
1d ago
It isn’t just but it is mostly. We’ll see how things are under a future Democratic administration but for now the situation is still vastly preferable.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s not a great outcome but the reality is that life in eg. Southern Brazil or the nicer parts of Mexico is “fine” for the middle class. Worse, strictly, yes, but bearable.
The situation in what will become of Europe will be far worse than that.
2rafa
1d ago
Because of the character of the immigration. Latinos are largely deracinated, with little shared identity (which is why ‘Latinx’ or la raza stuff is largely the preserve of PMC white-Hispanic academics and the working class Mexican equivalent of Hoteps). Many will vote for a conservative ‘strongman’ caudillo over the left. Many consider themselves ‘white’ regardless of reality, and intermarriage rates are quite high. Many essentially share an ‘American dream’ of being an atomized consoomer with a big pick up truck, a bimbo wife and a McMansion in the suburbs. This may be suboptimal but it is not immediately catastrophic. An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America, but it can probably survive as a polity.
In Europe the same isn’t true with large scale immigration from Islamic societies that have old, deep cultural and religious identities, often with an undercurrent of resentment towards Europeans and European society and separate both particular identities (‘I’m Turkish, not German’) and universal ones (‘I’m Muslim, I’m part of the global Ummah with my brothers and sisters’) that fully supplant the previous civic identity. Intermarriage rates between those from Islamic backgrounds and the natives are so low that in most places they’re negligible (and when they happen almost always involves an indigenous usually-woman converting). Coupled with general dysfunctional migration (including from non-Islamic regions) and the extreme pace of demographic change - faster in most of Europe than the US even if America is at a more advanced stage - and you have a recipe for the complete breakdown of social order and full Lebanonization in the coming years.
Consider that in 1950 the Maronites could easily have carved out their own state. But by the mid-1970s they no longer possessed the demographic strength even though they had most of the money and the technical skills.
2rafa
1d ago
I’m a soft doomer about the US but much less so than I am about (Western) Europe.
Mass immigration has seen fit to proffer the United States a gentle decline toward a high-inequality, mid-tier country with Some Third World Characteristics but probably with semi-functioning politics and many centers of high economic and industrial development. What is coming for Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Britain, and increasingly also Spain, Ireland and Italy is much, much worse than that.
2rafa
1d ago
Jews have been bankers for far longer than modern meritocracy has existed. In any case, given the probably twenty or thirty fold increase in the number of white collar jobs created since the Industrial Revolution (on a per capita basis, let alone overall), some degree of meritocratic advancement was always inevitable. Even in 1400 someone very smart of humble birth wasn’t necessarily tied by fate to that origin - social advancement is a feature of all human society. As the total number of certain jobs increases, of course there’s space for people to move up the ladder.
But the rigorous nature of our meritocracy, combined with slower economic growth and elite overproduction, has created more perverse incentives. The only way out - the only way to protect children - is either a lottery system (structurally bad in so many ways) or some kind of hereditary structure, even if only in part.
2rafa
2d ago
This is only partially true. Excepting some URM (who are usually still in the 98th+ percentile for their demographic and so usually still would have studied very hard) and some athletes (who again are usually still 95th percentile plus academically), almost everyone who gets into Harvard in 2025 did work to tiger-mom levels. Sure, a few mega-donors’ kids with parents on the board of trustees make it in (although you’d be surprised at how many of them work very hard too), and there might be a handful of geniuses who get to international math olympiad champion status and perfect SAT and GPA without ever trying who make it too, but they’re in the small minority.
The problem with systems is that they can be gamed in a way that takes the joy, the fun, and even the intellectual work out of it for everyone else. One of the reasons new multiplayer games are a lot more fun to play than old ones is that for the first few weeks after a game is released, or while it’s in beta, the nasty people, the min-maxers, the forum theorycrafters, have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta, increasingly of course because even the developers now design to it (see World of Warcraft’s designers building raids with the expectation that players will play the most meta builds, with all the most advantageous mods/addons). Why bother experimenting, playing, using your own intelligence when someone else who gamed the system with the ‘meta’ will curbstomp you for 1/10th the effort.
The problem with meritocracy is precisely that everyone except the underclass and the generational super rich is required to participate in it. Don’t, and you will be left behind. If you are a doctor and want your children to be doctors (an ancient professional right, just as the son of a blacksmith might become one), you will probably have to work them to the bone because they will be competing with every son and daughter of every sniveling, striving pauper who harbors the same ambition for their children.
Of course it shouldn’t be so. Let us reserve 75% of medical school places for the children of doctors. Perhaps 85%, even. Of course the child of an accountant should have it easier becoming one than some random person. AI changing all this stuff aside, it’s a perverse system that forces the children of good families into torturous over-education just to maintain their own standard of living.
A big part of the reason Americans voted for Trump is because we were tired of the rotten policies of the meritocracy. I wanted an heir. Those chosen because they tried so very hard at school failed their country.
2rafa
2d ago
I increasingly agree with the suggestion that infinite easy entertainment online, constantly available, means young people are just less interested in the opposite sex overall than previous generations were at the same age.
Sure, in the abstract the average 19 year old would probably still be interested in having ‘a girlfriend’ or ‘a boyfriend’, but that’s different to going out and making it happen. And there’s a real sense in which maybe they want one a little less than their equivalents did in 1990 or 1965.
Some young man sated by porn, twitch, games, TikTok whatever might still want a girlfriend, might still take one if she fell into his lap, but he is often still going to put less effort into looking for her than his father did at his age. Maybe that’s all bullshit, but I don’t think so.
The humiliation, self-consciousness, embarrassment of seeking romantic affection that most people experience to some extent is just less desirable and more easy to defer if good alternative (in the moment, not long term obviously) entertainment sources exist.
2rafa
2d ago
Even in finance the logic is that it’s always impossible to prevent a willing employee from committing crime and leaking sensitive information, monitoring systems are just set up so that if and when it happens (1) they can trace it to source and (2) convince the regulator they did everything they could and reported it as soon as possible.
2rafa
2d ago
Even in Quant Finance where everyone is at everyone else's throat all the time
Big funds are smart enough to have 2 year noncompetes for quants though. I’m not sure if this is a California law thing or tech stupidity but there’s no way Zuck would be offering this pay if he couldn’t get these people before Summer 2027.
2rafa
2d ago
the supposed trend of people converting to Catholicism is mostly a few high-profile examples
Right, interestingly it mirrors a longstanding trend in England of edgier intellectuals (of both the right and left) who want something a little more esoteric and different converting to Catholicism, which has been a thing for a couple of hundred years.
2rafa
3d ago
Great post, you’re one of my favorite commenters here. This makes me wonder if I ever did the User Viewpoint series. I think I did (maybe @self_made_human nominated me), but I can’t remember.
2rafa
3d ago
The NYT’s house style was deliberately constructed in opposition to the British style of quoting everything.
NYT: Earthquake kills thousands
[London] Times: Earthquake “Kills Thousands”.
2rafa
4d ago
As I already said, Hoffenberg was a gullible fool who believed every word that Epstein said and later got got for astounding idiocy in his Ponzi scheme.
Four separate sources told me — on the record — that Epstein’s dealings in the arms world in the 1980s
Yes, exactly. Epstein’s dealings in the arms world of the 1980s, in which nobody in the booming arms industry of the age ever remembered him, no record of him exists, and during which he was living in a 1-bed in Manhattan begging people to give him money to invest after being fired from Bear Stearns. Those dealings.
It is astounding the extent to which claims of Epstein’s work ‘in intelligence’ ultimately trace back to Epstein himself and his own bullshit to make himself seem more interesting, influential and important than he was at that time.
2rafa
4d ago
If you read the original documents and reporting from the Palm Beach case it was almost all poor, often Hispanic girls from deprived areas of West Palm Beach.
2rafa
4d ago
I don’t think my claim was that Jews don’t blackmail Jews (which would be rather disproven by the Israeli criminal underworld and countless other examples), but that specifically blackmailing Zionist Jews who contribute large amounts of money to that cause into supporting Israel would be pointless at best and counterintuitive at worst.
Balkany was just trying to extort Steve Cohen for money (funneled via his school, as he noted), the most mundane and commonplace motive for blackmail.
There are some billionaire Jews who are unaligned with Zionism. I recall reading the Wikipedia of a Hollywood talent management owner who had no confirmed philanthropy whatsoever, but for the life of me I can’t remember his name, and there’s also Zuckerberg whose donations to Jewish causes are a pittance relative to his philanthropy.
Certainly, but Wexner’s social circle that Epstein adopted and embraced was comprised primarily of Zionists, not apolitical tech billionaires or those Hollywood types (obviously not all) who didn’t really care about the whole Israel thing.
The only confirmed blackmail case is Bill Gates.
I’m not sure that Gates is the only ‘confirmed’ victim, given that unlike the Dubins or Leon Black (the latter being what I would consider the only truly likely implicit victim of a blackmail scheme given that he directly paid Epstein a huge amount of money for nothing, something even Les Wexner didn’t knowingly do) he didn’t give him a fortune.
This is actually further evidence against the agent theory, since in this one case (where I think blackmail was quite probably involved), the money all went to Epstein directly, not to his supposed paymasters.
Despite having connections to Israel, none of Epstein’s victims were Jewish.
There’s no evidence of this. Only a handful of victims have come forward publicly out of high hundreds or thousands of teenagers. Epstein didn’t spend much time in Israel, he mainly procured girls where he lived most of the time (NYC and Palm Beach).
If Epstein’s circle was Jewish supremacist, this would explain his link to Mossad.
Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t Jewish by the standards of any hardcore Jewish chauvinist, her mother is a French Christian and she never converted. Farmer bought into a lot of dumb things - and was pursued by a lot of open WNs online, over Facebook etc - and unfortunately in grief over a lost life has made numerous flawed claims (most unrelating to Judaism, to be clear) that rendered her a notoriously unreliable witness.
You are forgetting that Wexner was linked to Mossad by way of the Mega Group, and Epstein’s connections were throughout the Mega Group.
On the contrary, I discuss this in my comment when I make direct reference to Lauder etc. Israel’s billionaire supporters supporting Israel is a completely opposite direction of travel to Israel funding Epstein‘s activities in the United States (which mainly included spending huge amounts of money). In addition, the presence of ‘they do it for free’ groups like Mega further casts doubts on the Mossad agent theory. Consider that if Israeli intelligence wants access to the elite of American politics, Hollywood, finance and so on, they don’t and didn’t need Jeffrey Epstein to facilitate it, blackmail or not.
2rafa
4d ago
He was personal friends with Bill Clinton and close to a number of top Bush donors.
2rafa
4d ago
It’s not necessarily smart to do that even if you have evidence of internal plots, because the same usual external plots / random crazies also still exist and people outside the secret service have much less experience identifying or defending against them.
2rafa
5d ago
If it was Maxwell and the lynchpin of so many online conspiracy theories, why can’t the powers that be (which surely have access to Reddit or - at worst - Ghislaine’s recovery email) just log in as her and post something?
And besides, you again ignore the entire point. In one of the most expensive intelligence operations in modern history, the most banal, easiest, entry level bulk reposting of links (which would have been botted even back then) was supposedly manually done by a middle aged ultra-rich heiress who knew many of the most powerful people in the world and who was moonlighting as a Reddit powermod and farming karma by reposting (in 99.9% of cases) uncontroversial news stories, the kind of thing any third world teen on a gig work site would have done for $3 an hour and which, in the most sensitive cases, would have been done by 22 year old junior intelligence analysts on their first job.
“Sorry, Your Royal Highness, I’m going to have to interrupt our drinks so I can repost an article about an avalanche in Spain on Reddit for 500 karma because the huge intelligence operation I work for values me not for my contacts and charisma but because I can press submit on m.reddit.com several dozen times a day, a skill nobody else you have access to can do”?
I stand by it. Epstein’s victims are victims - like Harvey Weinstein’s , to some extent - of the sexual revolution and the very negative consequences it had on many young women. My mother tells stories about half her friends at 14 years old (in the late 1970s) having 25-30 year old boyfriends who picked them up outside school. That is the way it was.
Few more than me have stood up more here to say this whole thing was a bad idea and a way for largely higher status men to maximize access to pussy (especially from previously respectable kinds of girls) without consideration for their wellbeing or that of society, but this specific case is just an illustration. Much of the most salacious theory (including Trump’s involvement) is implausible for a number of reasons. The rest is just a richer version of a sad, mundane story that occurs in countless places at countless times.
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