Goodguy
2d ago
There is definitely some reason to think that Epstein was not just some "random rich lech", as @ABigGuy4U phrased it. However, here's what I do not understand about the "Epstein was doing blackmail for an intelligence agency" theory: if he was, why was his spycraft so poor? My understanding is that Ghislaine Maxwell would often approach random teenage girls in public and offer them money for supposed massages. Epstein and Maxwell would even get girls to go recruit other girls for them. If that is indeed how they operated, to me it seems like an incredibly risky way of running a blackmail operation. Surely if you have access to enormous funding there must be safer ways to procure underage girls than to approach random American girls in public locations. And if this wasn't part of the supposed blackmail operation - if Epstein was both running a blackmail operation and occasionally having sex with random American girls just for the fun of it - well, if I was the person ultimately in charge of the operation, I would either get him to stop running these risks or I would shut the whole operation down. There is just no need to pluck American teenage girls off the Florida and NYC streets for a blackmail operation. A wealthy man could surely get all of the underage girls he could possibly need for blackmail from countries where procuring them is less risky. Unless, I suppose, having sex with specifically first-world women was part of his clients' fetish. But even if that was the case, I'm sure that there are safer ways to get American girls than what Ghislaine is said to have been doing.
I noticed this too. Maybe he used good grammar and spelling when writing formal documents to his finance associates and used bad grammar with his friends and cronies. Many people who met him described him as bright and charismatic even back in his younger years before he was famous, so I figure that these emails can't possibly capture the full extent of his communication skills.
Goodguy
9d ago
Got it. I think I misunderstood what you were saying. The way you phrased it, "foreign agents", made me think that you were implying that the protesters are working alongside of or at least furthering the aims of foreign governments. Which would parallel certain accusations against Trump and his people.
Goodguy
10d ago
Insurrection while aligning with foreign agents is generally considered fine for “deserved it”.
Sounds exactly like what many people would say about the January 6, 2021 rioters.
Goodguy
10d ago
Normal people don't have time to do this shit for 20 years.
There are tens of millions of adults in the United States who are either completely unemployed or work part-time, and are not students.
I think that the Twitter poster's use of military jargon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in his argument. Here is his key claim about what the anti-ICE forces are doing:
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.
Let's break it down:
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone.
I don't know how Signal works, so I'll leave this one without comment.
Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases
I mean yeah, this is just specialization of labor, well-understood by humans for many thousands of years. Pretty much anyone who has been on a sports team or has had a job understands the idea of having different members of the organization focus on what they're good at.
24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles.
This can just mean "some people are sitting around watching the feds and telling each other online where the feds are and how many of them there are, and there are enough such people that at least some of them are active at any time of day or night".
Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery.
I don't know what a chat rotation is, but regularly deleting your data is the kind of thing that plenty of tech-savvy people would think to do, and would also recommend to others. And there is usually no shortage of tech-savvy people in large political movements in the US.
Vetting processes for new joiners.
I mean, I should hope so. You don't have to be a military professional to figure out that this is a good idea.
Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups).
Well yeah, of course sympathetic locals are going to help. That kind of goes without saying.
Home-base coordination points.
"People meet at each other's houses to discuss what is happening and plan further steps". I mean, yeah? Of course they do.
Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.
Yeah, most of them have cars. It's pretty easy for them to get around.
If you wanted to murder ICE agents and film it, you'd want to shoot them from a distance while you or someone else filmed it. You wouldn't want to get into a conversation with them while standing 1-2 feet away from them like in the video I linked. That would make it unnecessarily harder to draw your gun successfully and to escape.
Goodguy
14d ago
If he wanted to massacre ICE agents, it is very strange that he talked to them while holding a cell phone towards them as this video shows. You'd think that he would, you know, keep his distance and just shoot them.
My conclusion is that DHS' explanation is probably nonsense, as is Stephen Miller's description of the situation as "A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement".
Goodguy
15d ago
I am not saying that people voting for Trump doesn't matter. What I am doing is giving more precise figures. I don't recall having ever claimed that 1/3 of eligible voters voting for a Democrat meant that one of the Democrats' favorite policy stances was supported by half of the country.
This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence? It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no.
A large number of right-wingers also believe that the answer is no. They're just largely keeping quiet about it at the moment because right now it's their opponents who are feeling the violence of the state.
Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced.
I understand your point, but to be precise only about 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump, and that 32% includes some voters (probably not many, but some) whose reasons for voting for Trump did not include immigration.
The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here?
I don't know, but the mainstream media, the alternative media, and social media are not helping much. We are living through years and years of events that act as scissor statements and videos that get analyzed like the Zapruder film, argued endlessly about online even if the events that they capture are statistically quite rare. When Charlie Kirk was killed I pointed out that statistically speaking, assassinations are extremely rare in the US given how angry people are about politics and how many guns are in private hands. But many right-wingers in media made it seem like the killing meant that the cold civil war had gone fully hot and that it was time to prepare to deliver retribution.
Now with these ICE-perpetrated killings, something similar is happening. I am not a fan of what ICE is doing, but to get a clear picture it's probably a good idea to take into account statistics and try to figure out how frequent ICE killing someone is as a fraction of the total number of interactions between ICE and other people. Then one could compare it to how other law enforcement agencies measure up in similar situations or compare it to an ideal but realistic model of how high quality law enforcement would behave - and thus try to figure out whether ICE really are the crude violent bumpkins that their opponents often depict them as. But on social media, which after all rewards engagement more than anything else, too often the discussion is more like "this means fascism has come to America". Meanwhile some people on the other side aren't helping by celebrating the shootings, just as was also the case with the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Almost needless to say, consistent principles other than "my side should win" are rare and both sides flip-flop in their opinions of what the boundaries of proper interactions between law enforcement and "civilians" should be depending on which side currently is in charge of the law enforcement.
Goodguy
15d ago
I think that the question of whether the protests are succeeding will not really be answered until the results of this year and 2028's elections come in.
The protests are not stopping deportations. However, whether or not these shootings were justified, the optics are bad - and that may have important political consequences which might possibly stop deportations a couple of years from now.
Also, a minor note about:
The protestors (from “our” point of view) want violence and want shootings, because they perceive this as a win condition.
I agree that for the protestors this is a good strategy. If law enforcement full-out massacres a dozen or two protestors in a big shooting, this might be one of the best things that could possibly happen "for the cause" of the protestors. However, I don't think that any more than a tiny handful of protestors are actually driven by a desire to pursue this strategy. Some of the organizers might be, but even then I think it's a very rare motivation. I think most of them are genuinely just trying to interfere with ICE, to impede ICE activities. But they are in part following, because it is easier to do what has been done before, the well-worn tracks of decades of leftist tactics - and those tactics have evolved in part in order to create sympathetic media footage in which leftists have violence used against them.
Goodguy
16d ago
The system is much better at preventing Presidential assassinations than it was 100 years ago. There were some weird things about the Butler, PA assassination attempt, but how close it came to success didn't really surprise me. Trump does many more outdoor events than the typical Presidential candidate or President, and given enough exposure even the Secret Service will eventually almost inevitably slip up.
Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob. People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.
More options
Context Copy link