2rafa
25d ago
My conversations with a few in the know and my personal experience has led me to the understanding that in the US, in many cases, paying hospital bills is essentially optional. Like many modern systems, it's one that relies on the charity of good faith actors to subsidize deadbeats.
It’s optional if you’re poor or a criminal. If you have fixed, easily confiscated assets like property, a brokerage account etc then I think they can and will just go through the courts and get a lien.
2rafa
26d ago
Great question and certainly an interesting topic.
So now I ask you - what is your reason to think that (Tamil) Brahmins are high-IQ? (also I would like to ask @self_made_human and @2rafa, as they make this claim too) For Tamil Brahmins is it based on similar calculations as mine?
At some point, you have to ask yourself why half the Indians you meet at the top of every high performing PMC job belong to a tiny minority that makes up 0.15% of the Indian population. Something similar happens when you realize that in many cases it feels like a majority of PMC Africans in the West in fields like medicine, finance, big law etc are Igbos (although the outperformance is less great; there are a lot of Igbos). In both cases there are partial emigration dynamics explanations - the socialist government of Tamil Nadu after independence forcibly acted against the dominance of the Tamil Brahmins, stripped them of their caste names, removed them from positions of power, and drove many into exile, and of course for the Igbos there was the whole Biafran War thing, but those explanations are insufficient. Plenty of other tribes, after all, have faced similar circumstances without that outcome.
You also become adept at recognizing Tamil Brahmins, even if they no longer have the Iyer/Iyengar names because of anti-casteism policies in their home state. I see them everywhere now, they are impressed when I recognize them, although they can instantly recognize each other.
Quantitative data is limited; it is sometimes forgotten that the only reason we have good data on Ashkenazi Jewish outperformance and various European groups in general is that they were present and recorded in the early 20th century at the height of the scientific study of group differences; Tamil Brahmins were not (certainly in large numbers). Data is more limited. Nobels tell part of the story but, like chess competitions, far from all of it. Performance can be depressed in various ways. Clearly today when international emigration is commonplace, Tamil Brahmins outperform almost all other ethnic groups per capita in terms of leading roles like making it to the top of US corporations, senior PMC jobs, especially when accounting for legacy effects (like a corporation run by a Jewish or white gentile guy appointing his son, nephew or whatever as his successor) that they don’t have access to.
Nepotism is a poor explainer; there are so few of them and North Indian Brahmins, who are far more numerous, often look down on them for being from South India, having darker skin (lighter than all other Tamils, but certainly darker than northern Indian Brahmins) etc.
And what about for generic Brahmins? (as I mentioned, online sources just give the generic Brahmin IQ as 80. My model gives a more favourable 88IQ, but even that is not very high)
Generic Brahmins are best seen as the hereditary ancient higher segment, but remember that there are almost a hundred million of them, in some places well over 20% of the population. The best analogue is to the aristocracy in somewhere like early modern Poland where 15% of the population were technically nobles. A tiny percentage of them were actual elites, lived in palaces, had hundreds of servants, owned lots of land. Most were essentially kulaks, smallholders, people who would be considered barely above (or indeed) peasants in more restrictive European estates systems. Most Brahmins in India are rural poor, the average urban middle class person of any caste is much richer.
2rafa
26d ago
It’s a widely made argument that Epstein was an intelligence agent from the start. If he was merely a rich guy with influential friends who occasionally brokered largely made-up intelligence for fun or minor favors as a side hobby in late middle age, then a substantial part of that argument collapses, he’s just another informant, not an agent. It also challenges another argument of the agent thesis, namely the mysterious source of his wealth (which, again, has been shown relatively conclusively was Wexner). This in turn ties into things like an alleged blackmail operation (targeting…already zionist billionaires) being largely about his personal fetishes, which he occasionally invited friends to participate in, rather than an intelligence-led scheme. So yeah I’d say it’s relevant.
2rafa
27d ago
Yes there were a few very brief outages or periods of bad performance over the years, but nothing like what’s happened over the last couple of months.
2rafa
27d ago
The Motte’s Declining Audience
Several times this month I have tried to load the site and it’s been very slow, looked weird (with a kind of almost rdrama pink theme and unusual spacing) or failed to load at all.
I’d guess that this is a big reason why, after 5+ years of relative stability, the last few months have seen a huge drop off in culture war thread comments. Posting here for visibility, but this seems like something we should fix or this place is going to die pretty quickly.
His accomplice Ghislaine was the daughter of an Israeli “super spy”.
She was the daughter of a man who facilitated arms deals from the Eastern Bloc to Israel early in its history and so was held in very high regard by the old cadres of the Mossad several decades later, sure.
What would convince you that Epstein was Israeli intelligence?
The Israel connections came through Wexner, whom he met in the late 1980s in Palm Beach. Israel didn’t need Epstein to build relationships with wealthy Zionist billionaires. He used Wexner’s network to meet other billionaires and because Wexner was/is a passionate zionist, others like the Mega group / Ron Lauder.
What would convince me? Very simple. A single shred of evidence that Epstein had even the faintest connection to Israel or Israeli intelligence before he became a close associate of Les Wexner. Given that, as I have documented extensively, Epstein’s self-professed connections to the world of Annan Khashoggi in the arms market in the early 1980s were largely or entirely fabricated (by himself), I think none exists.
2rafa
29d ago
Nothing in this evidence contradicts my theory. Certainly nothing suggests that Epstein was plucked out of his high school teacher job (or perhaps placed in it, as the Barr theories suggest - even though they don’t even understand the forward passage of time) by Israeli intelligence in the mid-1970s and given a world-historical mission by the Mossad, which is what is widely alleged.
That Epstein befriended Barak in the 1990s and that his personal assistant (the “Israeli intelligence officer” in question, since most senior personal staff to Israeli leaders come through intelligence) enjoyed Epstein’s hospitality as his boss did were both widely known. I explicitly stated that Epstein had worked his way into powerful circles by the late 90s (his friendship with Prince Andrew only the most famous). He “brought some leaders together” (as I have said, much of this was braggadocio), opined on American and global politics and wrote articles for said powerful foreign friends (or had associates do so).
2rafa
29d ago
Not at all, in fact I discussed Epstein’s personal connection with Ehud Barak several times in my posts; they met in the 1990s as Epstein was rising in the world and as he was courting various world leaders. The “Israeli intelligence officer” was Barak’s personal assistant, who travelled with him. The op eds he wrote were for mainstream newspapers, it would make sense as a foreigner in the pre-chagpt era to get your rich, charismatic, native English speaking friend to write them instead of doing so yourself.
So if I’m a respectable middle class person and I don’t want to pay my deductible or whatever, I just email the hospital and say “I don’t want to pay $10,000, how about $500?” and then…they just say “yeah sure, you got us, here’s the link”?
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