2rafa
3mo ago
tl;dr: his posited comparison is that in both cases, the USG had a tradeoff between "help Israeli intel" and "prosecute pedos" and chose the former.
Only if the former case was Israeli intel, which is the point under discussion.
2rafa
3mo ago
To be fair that is a particularly grim example. There are people who travel for work in finance who mainly shuttle between 5* hotels in London, NYC, Hong Kong. There are people in marketing, media, fashion, conferences who mainly travel to luxury resorts to attend events where they mostly stand around. There are people who do go to more boring places but who travel mainly locally, 1-3 hours by plane or train from where they live. And besides, even if you’re in manufacturing going to Shenzhen every month for a few days, you can go Monday-Friday and “work” a grand total of 15 hours over the week with the rest spent travelling, in hotels watching TV, or drinking with your coworkers which, while work, is something a lot of people find more enjoyable than Excel or writing emails.
In my experience travelling for work is something naturally conscientious people struggle with and naturally lazy people love.
2rafa
3mo ago
It’s disappointing now that every time I write something interesting at work my coworkers ask if it was written by ChatGPT.
There is currently a big push by Nick Fuentes against a rising JD Vance on the accusation that the MAGA movement has been compromised and appropriated by Israeli influence.
Fuentes pushed voting for Kamala (on some kind of nebulous basis that she was anti-Israel) and the Groypers are now spamming pictures of Gavin Newsom’s blonde family compared to Vance’s “brown” family (and pictures of both men as teenagers) and declaring their intention to vote for Newsom in 2027. Amusingly, libleft Ezra Klein / Destiny fan types post the same comparisons regularly too, albeit without the overt racial angle. You might also mention the Loomer - MTG court harem bitchfight, which while vaguely related to Israel is more longstanding than that and primarily revolves around two aging whores insulting each other on social media while claiming they alone represent the true will of the leader, who should immediately stop listening to the other woman.
The whole thing has taken on an increasingly ridiculous energy, like when Vance’s supporters responded to the Newsom groypers by saying that Newsom’s wife was was actually Jewish (as far as I know she isn’t). The Groypers, in turn, said that no, because Newsom’s wife was allegedly raped by Harvey Weinstein she surely actually disliked Jews more than most, and was therefore likely basedTM.
If 2rafa were right, I think the feds would to a damn good job proving it to the entire world.
Why? This seems like a pretty random comparison. Your theory for Epstein is that his operation was an Israeli intelligence plot to gain kompromat. What does that have to do with an Israeli official getting arrested in a sex sting (with 7 other people, who have a mix of Anglo, Hispanic and South Asian names) unless you’re suggesting that the sting was also an Israeli intelligence plot (in which case why was he arrested and his arrest publicly announced)? The Israeli government obviously used diplomatic pressure for his release since a senior intelligence official under serious felony charge is highly vulnerable to interrogation, not only by the US but by anyone else who can get to him in jail or on bail. They may have traded something, they may not, but Shaun King certainly doesn’t know.
2rafa
3mo ago
If some French cyber chief were in America on a non-diplomatic visa yes I think he would be in jail.
What if the head of the French DGSE was on a recreational / personal visit to the US on a non-diplomatic visa? I have no doubt he would quickly be allowed to return to France under significant diplomatic pressure. Why? Because the leverage of going to US jail as a foreign sex predator is enough to get almost anyone to say anything, and he would know a lot of things, and everybody knows it.
It's obviously deeper than that and completely unlike the relationship of the US to any other ally.
How is this different (in fact it’s far smaller scale) than senior Saudi royals and those affiliated with the bin Ladens being allowed to leave the US immediately after 9/11 while US airspace was closed to all commercial air traffic and almost all private traffic? You will say they weren’t charged with a crime, but given the circumstances involved that is a largely circular argument.
2rafa
3mo ago
I’m not predicting a permanent or final collapse, although it’s a tail risk. But I think a lot of people will rush for the exits if only because a lot of their other assets will have plummeted in value, they may have lost a job or other additional income and need to liquidate, and if you’re one of those people you may end up selling at the trough.
2rafa
3mo ago
The big problem for now is some form of data validation. There are a lot of customer support jobs that can be 99.9% done by AI, but aren’t because of the tail risk that some combination of words will reveal the wrong customer’s information, will allow someone into the account without the right checks, etc, plus general reputational risk like the fact that countries and states are now accusing Facebook LLMs of flirting with minors or whatever. All the stuff that LLM red-teaming groups or ChatGPT jailbreak communities do, essentially. You can fire a bad employee as legal liability, but if its your LLM and the foundation model provider has a big fat liability disclaimer in its contract (which it will), you’re more fucked than you’d be if an employee had just gone rogue.
The eventual solution to this - as with self-driving cars - is to improve accuracy and consistency (by running things through multiple LLMs, including prompt security ones like those slowly coming online through Amazon bedrock and other platforms) until the risks are negligible and therefore insurance costs fall below the $50m a year a big corporation is paying for call centers.
But it will take a few more months, maybe a couple of years, sure.
2rafa
3mo ago
This is pretty normal in the third world, and in the places that are becoming it. Street sellers in Paris and Barcelona, open air markets in Brussels. In the US pretty much all are illegal migrants, maybe a few are just soli citizens but certainly very few. The clothes are sourced from others in the community, maybe a couple of whom acquire big volume discount merchandise from discount store closings, perhaps wholesale outlets etc, then sell them on.
The object is really just to make a few extra dollars a day, by ‘hourly wage’ these people are making far below even minimum wage (let alone the average unskilled wage somewhere like LA). You will notice almost all the sellers are women, maybe with a few children / teenagers, and some men incapable of hard manual labor. These are people who can’t find other employment due to lack of documentation, language or any other skills.
Their husbands, brothers or other male family members may be day laborers waiting for clients in the home depot parking lot. The rest of their income will be charity, handouts, soup kitchens, church programs etc. Their objective is just to make a tiny bit of extra money, anything is fine, since they have nothing else to do. 8 hours standing by the side of the road to make $10 vs 8 hours at home making $0 is the calculation.
In economic terms, they are prevented from starving (by family, by charity, by the state, or by some combination of the three) but their labor has no real market value. Industrial modernity has also created an extreme surplus of cheaply produced material goods (like clothing). The consequence is this kind of retail.
2rafa
3mo ago
Thus far bitcoin has largely tracked US equities with higher beta. Given that bitcoin shares an investor base with leveraged magnificent 7 etfs, with many day traders, growth funds, FAANG gamblers and venture capitalists, the expectation would be that in the next financial crisis and stock market collapse that it would suffer a great fall in value. There has never been a prolonged global financial crisis in bitcoin’s existence.
2rafa
3mo ago
Thank you, that was interesting. One thing:
Jesus would not have loudly cried and pleaded for salvation from death while on earth if he was certain he would be saved; and the passage indicates that he saved because of this plea.
Even if he knew he was going to be saved / go to heaven, he might still have loudly cried and pleaded for salvation. Firstly, because it drew attention to him, and his mission was ultimately the salvation of mankind through following him, and secondly because we plead for relief from pain even when we know it is good for us (life-saving surgery in the time before anaesthetic, for example).
Is your contention that Jesus, in mortal life, understood he was special but not that he was, in a way, God?
2rafa
3mo ago
What’s the general consensus among your kind of Christian on Jesus’ theory of mind on this? Since he knew he was divine, the Son, part of the trinity, was he not simply fulfilling his destiny, living out an inevitability of which he was fully and consciously aware the entire time, an actor in a play whose audience were mankind - for the benefit of their own salvation?
It is clearly, completely and permanently over for Canada. It’s interesting that there was a huge drama in Britain a few months ago over the possibility that certain kinds of sentencing impact reports (which were non-binding but could theoretically play on the emotions of a judge) would be granted automatically for non-whites, LGBT and women but not automatically for straight white men. The (Labour) government threatened to abolish the commission that determines this kind of thing and then forced them into repealing that guidance.
Meanwhile Canada has been officially and openly granting huge sentence reductions on the basis of race for years. The left just won another majority. Even the Canadian right is less anti-immigration than Keir Starmer. Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.
Canada and Belgium are the two western countries that are furthest gone with regards to mass immigration, and the two for which I would argue recovery is categorically impossible1, without any likely or reasonably viable routes. Both share the misfortune of having developed as multi-national states with little shared loyalty or national character, making them perhaps uniquely incapable of articulating any kind of anti-immigration position. Maybe the numbers will wane a little, but nobody already there (now getting citizenship and permanent residency by the hundreds of thousands a year) is going home.
1 it is probably also over in The Netherlands, England and Wales, Ireland and Sweden. Weird and unpredictable things will happen in France, although I think hardcore republican assimilationism is more likely than remigration. I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both. Spain and Portugal will become Latin American countries with large African diasporas. The rest is harder to predict.
2rafa
3mo ago
The kneecap thing was a hardcore Irish republican activist with a name that directly referenced the IRA telling (if insincerely) a large audience to kill their MP. He could be credibly accused of more than hate speech.
2rafa
3mo ago
Yeah, with the exception of people who get extreme leeway after long, successful careers (Nolan) or who can cast whoever they want because all actors want to work with them (Wes Anderson) I think it’s usually the studio and/or major financial backers who have the say on casting. In romance/romcoms especially the only way to make profitability even somewhat likely over the last fifteen years since the bottom fell out of the genre has been to cast famous people, whether it’s Fanning/Hemsworth/Pascal in this, Roberts and Clooney in that one a couple of years ago etc.
2rafa
3mo ago
As a franchise, it’s a single conceit. It’s like The Matrix.
There’s the original, and then the straight remake (Jurassic World), and then a collection of average (for popcorn movies) to bad to very bad spin-offs.
2rafa
3mo ago
What happened in India is just a late stage version of what is already happening in Brazil and what will happen in America, it happens whenever these kind of ethnic merger events happen. Over a long enough time, two ethnically different populations who share the same land will intermarry. Ethnic enclaves - in the Ottoman lands, in 30s Shanghai, elsewhere - can last a while, perhaps even a few centuries - but in the end shared ethnogenesis is inevitable. Even Ashkenazi Jews are the product of Levantines and Italians, after all, and today over 60% of American Jews intermarry. If two people inhabit the same soil long enough, they will breed.
This dates back the full length of human prehistory, it encompasses even Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal interaction, or those other early hominid interactions in Southeast Asia that led to the situation in Australasia and Melanesia etc.
The problem is that the Brahmins could not control their own poor. This is what I have come to believe is the foundational problem of modern India. Land reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Behavioral reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Even political reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Why did your tribe, your caste, grant them endless reservation, government employment, political power? Because you could not stand against it! I have met many extremely intelligent higher caste Indians, far more intelligent than me. This is clear by their extraordinary success in the West, especially by niche subgroups like the Tamil Brahmins, the Iyers and Iyengars and so on.
But in the homeland, they were too weak to conquer their own common people. This is the ultimate failing for any ruling class. You must save India before you can do anything else. I respect that your religion neither destroyed you nor saved you, but it is not important now.
2rafa
3mo ago
I've also heard theories this is a desperate hail mary to game the stats and have more white people committing "sex offenses" since the current stats are so stubbornly brown.
Very unlikely if you speak to anyone who has been catcalled in England.
2rafa
4mo ago
KLCC and the wealthier suburbs, like the gated communities around Putrajaya, are pretty unique. I think we discussed them before. Clearly the oil money is going to someone, but much of Malaysia is still pretty poor, and comparable with other parts of ASEAN that aren’t Singapore.
Also, even in KLCC there are pockets of low quality. Car-focused, walking very difficult, those meth / crack addicts on the pedestrian foot bridges just behind the big mall itself, still quite noticeable garbage on the street even sometimes. It’s just very clear it’s still a developing country, and of course plenty of developing countries have rich elites who like Chanel and Lamborghinis.
2rafa
4mo ago
I don’t believe that with your appearance and accent you were hooking up with large numbers of beautiful European women in Thailand or Bali or anywhere else, but it doesn’t really matter. If you did, then your post history clearly shows it brought you no fulfilment or happiness.
You hated the man you were, so you constructed the fantasy of an alpha male, a sexually successful man, to replace him. But the neuroticism, the angst, the self-doubt, the fear of a life unlived still haunts you to no lesser degree.
2rafa
4mo ago
Plenty of people in London wait for marriage, they just tend not to be natives.
2rafa
4mo ago
Most non-rustbelt cities have some kind of successful local business or industry, surely. I think this is the big advantage of medicine, sales, and to some extent IT/sysadmin work. In other industries you actually have to be in NYC, LA, SF, Texas, whatever. If you have a job title that is both necessary but that any medium sized or above business needs a couple of, you can move back to your hometown with a 90th percentile (locally) job and live a great, striving-free life.
2rafa
4mo ago
Even today, the Turkish army excludes people bottoming from the mandatory draft, but doesn't allow tops to use the same excuse. There are doctors working for the government whose job it is to look at pictures of people getting their backs blown out, while having to decide if that counts.
I wonder if AI makes this easier, although I presume there are simpler ways for the committed pacifist and/or coward to get out of it.
I remember my grandfather saying that in the US military during the war there were countless easy ways for someone smart to avoid actual front line combat, but they had to join first so as to allow the military the plausible deniability central to conscription; it is important for the fighting plebs to believe that nobody is “getting away with it” lest overall morale suffer. He hated those people, even though after a relatively minor injury he sat out much of the war.
Not really. Assuming the maximalist realistic interpretations of both events are true, there is:
Epstein was part of an Israeli kompromat operation targeting powerful people that was covered up by the US government / CIA etc.
A senior Israeli official was caught in a sting operation and avoided a lengthy jail sentence because the US government let him go home under pressure from Israel.
It is doubtful that the sting op targeting some (other than this guy) randoms in Nevada involved targeting part of the same kind of operation as that alleged to be run by Epstein, although I suppose more will be revealed.
The second is a diplomatic incident where a senior foreign official is caught and then allowed to leave (like the Harry Dunn killing case), the first is an allegation about a blackmail scheme run by someone supposedly working for the government that employed the official in the second allegation. That they both involve sex crimes doesn’t really link them together.
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