Goodguy
21hr ago
Then, once in power, if it turns out there are reasons to not release that information, just do a 180 with no explanation and brazen out the short term consequences because they don’t matter in the long run.
He's not even doing this, though. A few days ago, he got really testy with a reporter who asked him about Epstein, and earlier today he went online and wrote a whole paragraph rant about Epstein totally unprompted. He could just lay low and let the whole thing blow over, but for some reason he keeps getting openly emotional about it.
I am not convinced that Epstein was part of some deeply shady business that the public is not yet privy to. I try to be reasonable and keep an open mind about what might have happened. I appreciate your nuanced analysis. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to discuss Trump's recent reaction, because I find it fascinating:
What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files. No matter how much success we have had, securing the Border, deporting Criminals, fixing the Economy, Energy Dominance, a Safer World where Iran will not have Nuclear Weapons, it’s never enough for some people. We are about to achieve more in 6 months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years, and we have so much more to do. We are saving our Country and, MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which will continue to be our complete PRIORITY. The Left is imploding! Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 — That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more. One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
My attempts to objectively evaluate the probabilities of what might have happened are being altered in real-time by watching Trump act like a dog who just snatched a piece of meat off the table and is then sitting in the corner of the room with guilty eyes.
This is kind of hilarious to me. Trump is openly doing the complete opposite of what someone would do if he actually wanted to get over the whole Epstein business, and if he didn't actually know more than he lets on.
I understand that argument, and I think that there is a lot of sense to it. I would have said something very similar yesterday, probably. But I'm just bewildered at Trump repeatedly getting emotionally heated about this issue, out of left field, with nothing really compelling him to do it. It seems like a deep emotional reaction. It's starting to seem to me that something really bugs Trump about the Epstein matter on a personal level, beyond just journalists annoying him about it. I don't necessarily think that where there's smoke, there's always fire. But I am seeing a weird amount of smoke coming out of Trump about this lately. He's acting defensive about it beyond his usual level of getting annoyed when attacked. He's bringing it up un-prompted. Those are very common behaviors that people engage in when they are trying to hide that they did something.
Goodguy
1d ago
Tattoos are, but head-to-toe tattoos are not. Tattoos on the neck and/or head are still very rare.
Goodguy
1d ago
Head-to-toe tattoos and piercings signal massive nonconformity with social norms and a willingness to lose out on a large number of job prospects for the sake of personal expression, which naturally gets people's guards up because if someone does not conform to social norms to that extent, you have to evaluate them closely instead of just treating them as a generic person, before figuring out if they are trustworthy or not. It activates a basic "possible danger" heuristic. Massive nonconformity to social norms straddles two ends of the bell curve - it can be a sign of courage and genius, in some cases, but in probably even more cases it is a sign of things like mental illness, antisociality, narcissism, and so on. Sometimes it's both of those ends of the bell curve at the same time (I know that stretches the metaphor really far, but you know what I mean). If you meet some random person covered head-to-toe in tattoos, it is probably more likely that they are a potentially dangerous weirdo than that they are a misunderstood artist.
That said, I find some of the signalling from the right on tattoos to be very funny. Not saying that you're a right-winger, it's just that your post gives me an opportunity to mention this. About 30% of Americans have at least one tattoo. Tattoos are completely mainstream now, what isn't mainstream is full body tattoos or facial tattoos. I often see right-wingers online virtue signalling about women with tattoos. They'll see a photo of a hot woman who has tattoos and start posting stuff like "eww disgusting" or "why did she ruin her body with that". I am convinced that 99% of these guys would fuck the hot woman without any hesitation if they had a chance, tattoos or not. It's just a big virtue signalling LARP to pretend to other guys that they care more about tattoos than they actually do.
Virtue signalling on the right is an under-discussed topic, in my opinion. Highly online right-wingers virtue signal every bit as much as highly online left-wingers do.
Goodguy
8hr ago
Revisionist theories are not much worth engaging with unless they offer an explanation of what happened to Eastern Europe's Jews. For example, the 1926 USSR census records about 2.6 million Jews. The 1931 Polish census records about 3.1 million Jews. What happened to these populations? The current European population of Jews is estimated to be about 1 million total. Is there evidence for a post-war migration of such a large number of Jews to America, Israel, and so on? As far as I know, there is not. There was substantial migration, but from what I understand, not enough to explain the collapse of Europe's Jewish population size. Revisionists, to be taken seriously, should not just pick holes in mainstream theories - they should present an alternative theory that accounts for the evidence. If the European Jewish population collapsed through emigration rather than killing, let's see evidence of the emigration in quantities enough to account for the population changes. Disease, famine, and so on are not good explanations, because they do not explain why the Jewish population collapsed so much more than the populations of other affected ethnic groups.
The mods are only human. I haven't dived deep enough to evaluate the merits of your particular ban, but for what it's worth, I've been banned several times. I don't hold any grudge against the mods for that. My bans were generally in the nature of "I got emotional and I started to really lay into my political opponents in an obviously angry and uncharitable way". I do sometimes get annoyed by the fact that I feel that people on this forum often break the "Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity." rule by assuming that social conservatism is good, without actually justifying it. But I don't feel that this happens because the mods are ideologically biased. I think it happens because I think that this forum has more social conservatives posting (though not necessarily lurking or voting) than social liberals like myself, so social conservatives just create more content for mods to address than social liberals do. Certainly there are plenty of snarky posts and consensus-building posts here by conservatives that don't get modded, but I don't feel that the mods are trying to support conservatism, it's just that there are a lot of snarky and consensus-building conservative posts to go through compared to snarky and consensus-building liberal posts, so it's very easy to find examples of the former that slip through the net.
While this forum leans right, I often see posts of mine that are left of the average get upvoted by quite a bit. You might be surprised how receptive you find some people here if you argue for your political opinions plainly and calmly, laying out arguments for why they are accurate and/or beneficial, rather than with anger. I extend this appeal, also, to some of the more snarky and angry right-wingers here: please put aside the emotional fervor and try to just argue for your political opinions plainly and calmly, rather than in a perpetually angry and conspiratorial mode.
Goodguy
2d ago
"No plan survives contact with the enemy." Especially when the soldiers are untrained and inexperienced and likely to panic when gunfire starts coming back from the other side.
The idea of luring ICE agents out using fireworks and then shooting them once they are out in the open seems like good tactics to me. But it seems that the attackers would have probably done better had they delayed the plan and spent some more time on the target range first.
Goodguy
2d ago
I wonder how much of US prices' resiliency to the tariffs is caused by long-term contracts that were signed before Trump started to levy tariffs and are still in effect. I have no idea, I know very little about how international trade works.
Goodguy
5d ago
As someone who thinks that no organized religion that I am aware of is accurate to reality, I am actually glad that religious leaders did not do more against wokism. I think that this helped anti-wokism to plausibly portray itself as being rooted in reason rather than in superstitions or religious emotions. And for me, that is what I want anti-wokism to be rooted in. One of my main problems with wokism, besides what I consider to be its deleterious effects on public attitudes towards things important things like policing, is that I consider it to simply be inaccurate. This is something that would annoy me about wokism even if it had no deleterious impacts on my life in any way. So I do not want to use other things things that I consider to be untrue, like organized religion, to battle it.
With two main exceptions, I think that very few people in the West would say that it should be legal for people to be employed in jobs they can't quit. The number of people who would say that is, I think, not much larger than the number of people who would say that it should be legal to enslave people. Which is not surprising, given that being employed in a job you can't quit is basically a form of slavery.
One main exception is people's attitudes about conscription and about desertion after voluntarily joining the military. I think that these are probably an exception mainly because people even in liberal democracies are historically used to them and because fear of foreign threat is an emotionally powerful motivator.
The other main exception is prison labor. I think that one is an exception because people feel that prison labor helps to repay damage that prisoners have caused to others / to society.
Goodguy
4d ago
Superman was created by Jews, so it's not surprising if there are elements of Jewishness to him. I don't really see much that is specifically Jewish about him, though. For example, the notion of "really powerful being who is orphaned in a foreign culture and has to discover the powers he has by virtue of his birth" has as many examples in European cultures as it does in Semitic cultures. Kal-El does sound Hebrew, but that's a minor thing. What kinds of Jewish-coded characteristics do you have in mind?
The NYT might not have known this at the time of the radio news, but it turns out that the original post was written by a groyper pretending to be a Jewish woman. It's not hard to find good faith posts on social media that have the same attitude as that fake post, but I doubt that those posts tend to be disproportionately written by Jews, at least to any greater degree than just the degree to which Jews are over-represented relative to their population size in militant progressivism. But then, Jews are over-represented in basically every political movement that is not explicitly anti-Jewish, so I find the attempts to associate Jews with militant leftism specifically to be dubious.
That said, I think it's likely that the NYT would put out the same message whether the original post was written by an actual Jewish person or not.
Goodguy
4d ago
I don't know if it's true, but someone on Hacker News said that she had already decided to quit before MechaHitler came out yesterday.
Goodguy
4d ago
A little bit, but I doubt it's very significant. Granted, I don't know much about the comics, but from what little exposure I have to Superman, I've never seen any reason to think that the way Superman behaves as a journalist is particularly Jewish. If an Irish-American guy wrote a story about a space alien who comes to Boston and becomes a cop, I wouldn't view the cop as particularly Irish-coded unless he did, well, Irish-y things as a cop. But like I said, I don't know much about the comics, so I could be missing something.
I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.
Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.
Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.
I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.
All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.
Goodguy
28d ago
I feel like your statement kind of might just boil down to "things I like are freedom, things I don't like are not freedom".
From an objective point of view, we absolutely have more sexual freedom right now than people in the West did 150 years ago.
Goodguy
9d ago
He says "Pornography causes nothing but harm. Crystal meth causes nothing but harm." This is not true, but for the sake of argument let's say that it is actually true. What he does not say is that letting the government have the power to prevent people from watching pornography or doing crystal meth also, in the real world, causes harm. In practice, one cannot allow government to have the power to prevent private individuals from watching porn or consuming recreational drugs without also having downsides, such as: 1) you must then give extra tax money to government agents so that they can enforce these laws, and 2) it will probably encourage the growth of government power in ways that even you yourself might not agree with - once you empower government to snoop and to reach into people's lives to that extent, it is unlikely that government will stop at just banning porn and crystal meth.
Now, we can argue about what causes more harm, pornography/crystal meth or the government preventing people from using those things. My point is more that Smith does not even engage with this argument, even though it is a common and fairly obvious one.
Israel would have almost exactly the same national security interests and likely strategic patterns of behavior even if it had no element of racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths, though. Its strategic behavior is much more driven by its status as a small country that is populated by an ethnic group with a recent history of being genocided and that has a powerful superpower friend than it is by Jewish ethno-supremacist sentiments or Abrahamic cult myths.
A similar train of thought, by the way, is also why I don't think Israel or the US have anything much to worry about if Iran develops nuclear weapons. Iran might be a theocratic state with a lot of political influence from true believers in Islam, but I think that the chance that, if it developed nuclear weapons, its leaders would launch a nuclear strike that would get themselves annihilated... is close to zero. Hence the idea that Israel must prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons no matter what strikes me as pretty silly if evaluated from a cold objective perspective (of course in practice, it's not surprising that emotions run high if another country rhetorically calls for your country's destruction and is trying to build nukes). Realistically speaking, if Iran develops nukes relations between the two countries will probably just follow the India-Pakistan model.
I think one can argue that the modal man of 1875 was some farmer who spent his life at the mercy of his father and his local community, or some city factory worker who was at the mercy of his local political machine's boss. Also, they had actual conscription back then, the government could force you to join the army against your will (technically that's still true but in practice it's extremely extremely unlikely to actually happen). More freedom back then? I doubt it.
Goodguy
30d ago
The US participated in a massive campaign to lull Iran into thinking an attack was not going to happen immediately
I think that the campaign can't have been that massive, given that the US telegraphed the likelihood of something like this happening by starting to withdraw non-essential personnel from its Middle East embassies a few days ago.
Goodguy
30d ago
I don't see any reason to think that the India-Pakistan war earlier this year came anywhere close to a nuclear war.
Goodguy
28d ago
No, I'm just using the normal, everyday meaning of the word "freedom", the one that can be stated as "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". In that sense, we are undoubtedly sexually more free than people were 150 years ago. If you prefer a different definition of "freedom" that's fine, this is just a semantic argument after all. My point, though, is that I did not say what I said because I have some kind of progressive ideology. I said it because it's objectively true if you use the normal, most common, everyday "man in the street" kind of definition of the word "freedom".
Ever since the assassination attempt happened, I've felt that the most likely explanation is the lone wolf theory. The reason is, I figure that if it was a conspiracy by shady powerful groups, they would have made sure to find a gunman who wouldn't miss from that range. That said, I don't know much about guns, so this might be poor thinking on my part. Not sure.
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