HereAndGone
1mo ago
Also sounds more like a stalker who followed her during periods of activity and went inactive when she was inactive? There's a lot of crazy people out there, someone obsessed with Ghislaine Maxwell who persuaded themselves into a fantasy life version of her (see the movie Single White Female for a fictional version of this) isn't the most implausible thing.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.
I think Epstein was competent (he managed to get and hold that job at Bear Stearns) but he was also greedy and couldn't stop himself from ruining a good thing by trying to profit even more out of it. His fundamental untrustworthiness meant he couldn't hold down anything honest, and he got himself entangled in his whole web of fake stories, deceit, and trying to find shortcuts to easy money.
Did he really commit suicide or was he killed? Suicide is odd. He might indeed have done so, because even if he survived all the scandal, he was looking at years in prison and once he got out, he would have nothing left. No money, no contacts, no chance of rebuilding his fortune and status. This was not a man who would be content to live a poor, obscure life. Momentary despair and seeing no other way out? That's plausible.
(Also plausible: he didn't intend for it to be successful but rather a 'cry for help' suicide, banked on the guards finding him in time and then he'd maybe be moved to better conditions or his lawyer could argue for clemency from the court due to his mental distress, but it didn't work out for him that way).
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Regarding Maxwell, I think that was two con men trying to exploit one another. As mentioned in the original post, Maxwell had few connections in the USA and his media empire was built on sand (see the pensions fund scandal) and he wanted to use Epstein's contacts to get a foothold in the US, and Epstein of course wanted to use another rich guy for whatever he could extract out of him.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I agree that Epstein was a fabulist so we can't trust any claims he might have made. I think if there was any 'intelligence gathering' it was more akin to him trying to shop gossip around to anyone who would pay for it ("hey I have all these connections with rich and important people, you might be interested in what I can find out") because he was that sort of untrustworthy little toad, and that the best/only connections he had as contacts were Mossad or somebody who knew somebody who was connected to Mossad, and they might have bought bits'n'scraps because hey, why not? this guy might turn out to be useful sometime if he ever does stumble across anything important or we can finally find a use for him (I have no doubt, for instance, that they'd be happy to gather blackmail material on the Royal Family via 'Randy Andy' just because).
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I don't think anyone should aspire to those kinds of occupations, nor romanticize or fetishize them.
And yet the work has to be done, and we don't yet have the robots to do it. All the unglamorous necessary toil to support civilisation.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
The running plot, such as it is, throughout the books is good but it's mostly "the Napoleonic Wars at sea" so unless you're absolutely fascinated by the minutiae of naval campaigns, the real interest is "ooh so this was what life was like on a ship at that time" and then it's "will Jack advance his career, will Stephen ever have a happy relationship, never mind they're best bros and we all love learning natural history".
There are just so many great lines (everyone's favourite is this one) (warning: TV Tropes link):
Stephen acquires a sloth in South America, and it immediately befriends everybody aboard. Except Jack, who for some inexplicable reason gets rebuffed- the poor thing cried when it first saw him. When he finally resorts to feeding the sloth bits of ship's biscuit soaked in rum, he soon wins its friendship but ends up turning it into an alcoholic. Thus leading to a line found nowhere else in literature: "Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
But Stephen is like me - all the nautical terms and explanations just go right over my head and don't lodge. Gluppit the prawling strangles, indeed!
Stephen: The moment you are afloat you become pragmatical and absolute, a bashaw —do this, do that, gluppit the prawling strangles, there—no longer a social being at all.
You start off reading for the "Napoleonic Wars at sea" but then you sort of forget about that and treat it like 'Stephen's Big Natural History Expedition' and 'Jack climbs the ranks' so that the great world-shaking events become background, almost, to the little dramas played out in their world.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I keep forgetting the Zoomers are now old enough to be making dubious fashion choices of their own. And Alpha are the upcoming new generation!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Please tell me it was at least (1) his ex wife and (2) this bint wasn't the reason the marriage broke down. Because otherwise, if frying pans were meeting crania, I would not blame the (ex) missus one iota for the idiocy of both (ex) husband and new squeeze.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Only one tattoo? How big? How tasteless?
It's not all tattoos, it's the "covered head to toe in badly drawn, stereotypical crap" tattoos.
And now I realise I've wandered into the minefield of deporting immigrants based on tattoos: no, that's not a gang symbol or a drug symbol, he just, er, likes nature which is why he has plant leaves tattooed on his hand! 😁
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Does anyone who isn't a full on progressive zealot disagree with you that a person tatted up that that guy is probably bad news?
Tattoos, and lots of tattoos, and prominently visible tattoos, are now socially acceptable in more and more milieus. You can even do social psychology about the prejudice!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Hey, I come from a time and place when teething remedies were "some whiskey in the milk". But when you have eight kids, the older kids are doing a lot of the work minding the younger ones. It's the first one or two need the most attention. And it was not commonplace for everyone not wealthy/high status to put their babies into an entire separate room on their own (and the people who did do that, also employed nursemaids and/or nannies to attend to them during the night):
In Edwardian times, for the wealthy and mid-tier classes, a nursery was a suite of rooms at the top of a house, including the night nursery, where the children slept, and a day nursery, where they ate and played, or a combination thereof. The nursery suite would include some bathroom facilities and possibly a small kitchen. The nurse (nanny) and nursemaid (assistant) slept in the suite too, to be within earshot of the sleeping children.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Yeah, the victim isn't 100% blameless either, he was an unmarried father-of-two (it's unclear if he was living with his partner or separated from her) and he was buying drugs from his 'friend'. But he might have been going to change his life around (he was working as a chef), it's hard to know because of course the family will always say the victim was a great guy.
He wasn't covered in tattoos and crazy looking like his drug-dealing friend, though.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Yeah, but a lot of these women grew up in shitty conditions of broken families, single mothers, drugs and petty crime in the environment. They should know better. They seem not to, and I can't figure it out.
I see the same in reporting of abuse cases, where the current girlfriend gives a character reference to the guy accused of stalking/beating his ex. I do not understand the mindset. "Oh yeah, he beat her up but he'll never do the same to me!"
Then again, there are women out there in affairs with married men convinced that any day now he'll get that divorce and marry them, or they are weeping over how he's been lying to them. Yeah, imagine that: a guy who has demonstrated he will cheerfully lie to his wife about what he's doing and is willing to cheat on her then turned around and lied to you/cheated to you, his adulterous affair partner. Whoever could have seen that coming?
HereAndGone
1mo ago
the Zoomer broccoli haircut
Is that the same one as the undercut hairstyle? Because I can't stand that, especially when partnered with the hair dye. It screams "I am a Special Snowflake, dare not to impugn my Queerness!"
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Yeah, I'm coming around to "by the time you rack up your tenth conviction for a violent crime or you have a proven track record of being a professional shop lifter, no more 'second chances' or out on bail early, you go to jail and do your full time".
There's just too many "and the guy who raped/murdered/did bad thing was found to be on early release/out on bail for a previous charge of rape/murder/doing bad thing" instances. Maybe that's because those are the ones who get reported so it's a Chinese Robber Fallacy, but you know what? I don't care if it's a fallacy. This pitbull mauled fifteen other dogs before, I'm pretty sure it's going to maul a sixteenth if given the chance.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I'm a woman myself, I don't understand it, but I've seen enough of women who do hang out with these kinds of guys and shack up with them and have kids by them.
I don't know if it's because they've grown up where all the men around are like this, or what.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I think that once something becomes socially tolerated, you get more of it.
Then (for the example of the police) standards get lowered since you can't get enough recruits the conventional way, so you relax some of the conditions: "okay, now tattoos are fine".
Then it becomes a job where only or mostly "guys with tattoos" do it. So you don't get the guys without tattoos applying anymore, and this just reinforces "yeah this is lower-status now than it was before, so guys with few other options are the workforce here".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Not just hacking, hacking hard enough to nearly sever the leg completely:
The medical evidence was that such was the ferocity of the attack that the sword cut through muscle, artery and bone. Mr Baitson was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. However, he died four days later.
...Evidence was also given at the trial by Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster.
She said that a postmortem examination indicated Mr Baitson had died of haemorrhage and shock complicated by brain damage due to lack of blood supply from an injury caused by sharp force.
What she described as a single blow from a sharp weapon like a samurai sword caused a fracture to the knee bone and sliced through the two bones below the knee, the tibia and fibula.
He was paranoid, probably high himself, and just a thug.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
It may be more relevant than I thought! Guy with scraggly beard and hair like a bird's nest versus guy who at least trims his beard and washes his hair: who looks like trouble you'd want to avoid and who looks at least semi-respectable?
One tattoo on its own is not an indicator of trashiness, but the thing is: some people can stop at one tattoo. Some people, on the other hand, seem to go "just one more. One more. One more" until they're covered in them. This guy is described as a tattoo artist which may be the excuse he gives for 'what do you do for a living?' or it may just be a self-description: "ah yeah, I make my money from doing tattoos for people, not from drug dealing".
I have to come out and admit I'm prejudiced. Not just because I think a lot of tattoos looks trashy, but also because a partner of a family member was something I moved from being neutral about, to disliking, to writing them off as a manipulative shit head. And funnily enough, they got a tattoo later in life, then went the "just one more" route, then shaved their head, then moved on to full-blown "being a manipulative shit head". So my priors on people with tattoos may well be contaminated 😁
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I think guys like this one aren't particularly benevolent to their families, they just haven't turned on them yet.
The allegation is that he and the victim were friends, and that's likely; the victim was buying drugs off him, after all. But when your friend is your dealer, he's not your friend anymore.
This is also dragging in another one of my hobbyhorses: "whaaat's the haaarm in a few druuuugs, bitta fun, should be legaaaal". Well, maybe legal drugs in this instance would indeed have kept the man from getting killed by the paranoid, possibly high, 'friend' who was claiming he owed a huge drug debt.
But the problem is the 'friend'. A junkie who was doing some minor dealing, probably dipping into his own supply, probably being leaned on by his suppliers (who are not nice people who think drugs are wonderful and everyone should have free access to them so we'll supply them) for the missing money, getting paranoid and trying in turn to lean on his customers with claims that they owed more money than they did. This was not somebody doing 'few druuuugs, bitta fuuuuun'. Drugs and guys like this don't mix well (neither does alcohol, I'll freely admit that). The drugs legalisers seem to push the idea that drugs are just harmless party fun and if legal nobody would ever have any bad outcomes.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Quite apart from the fact that this guy is plainly psycho enough/stupid enough that he can't figure out "don't walk into court on a serious charge grinning like it's a day out at the beach" in all the photos taken of him.
There's no reason there can't be life elsewhere, it's a big universe. Even intelligent life. Even intelligent life at, or above, our present level of technological advancement.
Where the big, improbable jump lies is from "aliens exist" to "aliens exist and visited/visit our planet".
I could imagine alien scientists examining specimens of humans; we do it with animals (see monitoringbirds) and with anthropologists turning up to bother the last 'undiscovered' tribes that won't immediately kill them. But that has to first get over the hurdle of "space is very big and there's no evidence they ever got here". I went through my Ancient Astronauts/von Daniken phase in my late teens/early twenties. All the 'look here is an Egyptian tomb painting of what can only be a circuit board with transistors!' is convincing - when transistors are cutting edge tech. Twenty years later, that's not convincing any more because now we've moved on and we'd expect aliens with spaceships to be even more advanced than we are, not using tech that's outdated within twenty to fifty years.
I don't believe in the advanced tech all the wishful thinking here engages in:
"We're talking about people that worked for the Pentagon, worked in a government program, where they worked in and around this technology. Whether it was through crash retrieval, or through reverse engineering, that's what we're pursuing right now."
What I'm starting to think is that UFO rumours were great propaganda during the Cold War. The USA is a global superpower but it's not the only one. Russia (and to a much lesser extent China) are there breathing down their necks. The USA had the atom bomb first, but they weren't able to remain sole possessors of the technology. Everyone is working to have the best, newest, most kaboomy big-kaboom! first.
What better way to muddy the waters than to let hints slip out about amazing new tech? Even better - Russia and China can console themselves "okay their scientists got there first but our guys are smart, too, and it's just a matter of some light spying and a lot of hard work to catch up or even pass them out", but how can they do that if the rumours about the tech are that it's not human, it comes from advanced alien civilisation that crash landed in the desert? How will you catch up then, unless you get an alien UFO of your own?
Yeah, they're not going to believe random "Joe Blow says he saw something in the sky" but if you have all the dedicated True Believers talking about secret bases? my cousin knows someone who knows someone who swears he saw bodies being carried away? here's a leaked report of a military pilot talking about the mysterious craft that shadowed them on this flight?
Now you've got them chasing shadows trying to catch something that doesn't exist in the first place. And again, if they do catch wind of anything advanced you really built using your own human scientists working hard, then that is just more bait for "and what about the stuff we're not seeing? what if they really have something even better under wraps?"
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Haven't seen the movie so can't comment, but the Aubreyiad is a great, fun series which apparently is catnip to a lot of non-cat girls as well (I'm seeing a ton of fanart for it on Tumblr even this long after the movie). O'Brien manages to pull off all the hearty naval stuff for the boys and introduce the main relationship, which is the friendship of Stephen and Jack, which draws in the girls as well. He had me laughing at bad 18th century jokes and while I remain as ignorant as Stephen about the workings of a ship, the rest of it all held my interest too.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
So you want a serf/slave class of the "inferior" brown people because such jobs are below the dignity of the "superior" white people (never mind that white people all over the world used to, and still do, such jobs). We needn't be afraid that the browns will do anything, because we should (as the superiors) ensure they have no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour until robots can do the job and hence they will be debarred from polluting our culture due to not being able to influence it, and we shouldn't encourage white people to pick up the slack by doing these low-class jobs because such jobs are only fit for low-class people and we don't want low-class white trash, that reflects poorly on our superiority.
All white people will be middle-middle to upper-middle to upper-class, doing high-status jobs for Elite Human Capital because we are so much better, and all the shitty (literally) jobs will be done by the inferior brown people until the AI-powered robots take over.
Am I right? Because I'm blessed if I can understand in any other way the points you are darkly hinting at.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Why am I (and others of an older generation) so horribly prejudiced against perfectly normal people covered head-to-toe in tattoos and piercings? Why do we cling to our outmoded beliefs that tattooing of that extent reveals low-life trashiness?
Well, cases like this, for one. Add in drugs (but of course drugs were involved) and it's a mess. Why, how can I look at the photos of this productive member of society and think to myself "that's a crazy dangerous person?"
Because he is a crazy dangerous person.
Also, while I'm at it, let me give out about the members of my own sex who hook up with crazy dangerous guys and still persuade themselves that this is the human equivalent of a velvet hippo cuddlebug pitbull who won't ever bite their own face off:
Jurors took just over four hours last month to unanimously convict Mr Scannell of the murder.
He struck Mr Baitson from behind the left knee with a sword at the Eurospar car park on Newtown Road in Cobh, Co Cork on the evening of March 15, 2024. Medical evidence revealed that such was the ferocity of the attack, the samurai sword cut through muscle, artery and bone and partially severed the leg.
... A letter from his partner, Alison Roche, was read to the court which said he was a devoted and loving father and partner.
She said her partner had battled alcohol and drug addiction issues but that everyone deserves a second chance at rehabilitation.
"Addiction is horrible," she wrote.
Mr Scannell has 11 previous convictions, one from July 2016 for assault causing harm in which he received a two year suspended sentence from Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
Paedophilia is the term that needs definition. There have been some extreme claims of 12-14 year olds being raped, but it seems in the main to be more "underage by American law" which is "not 18 yet" (in other countries, age of consent is 16, for example).
So he was operating off "all men are attracted to hot young things" and throwing parties where there would always be a supply of attractive young women to pay attention to the guests and to act as arm candy. Pimping them out? Yeah, that's the big question here. If you're at one of these parties and the attractive young woman expresses interest in being your one night stand, do you take that as "this is a sex worker operated by my host" or the general "yeah attractive young women do throw themselves at me because I'm rich/important"?
Epstein was a creep, and he was recruiting vulnerable young women to exploit, and he probably wasn't adverse to gathering intelligence/kompromat on the people he invited to those parties as blackmail material and insurance. Epstein himself probably liked them young, and the younger the better (see the rumours about him as a teacher at that private school). But was he deliberately pimping out underage girls to people who knew they weren't 18/17/16? That is the entire rationale for the scandal and the conspiracy theories and the "he didn't really commit suicide" allegations, and that is what remains to be proven.
Similar cases of accusations of child sex abuse against high profile people in the UK have been tainted by fraudsters such as Carl Beech and by an atmosphere of over-correction, where police forces swung from dismissing accusations against celebrities to taking prosecutions on the basis of flimsy accusations which later collapsed.
Things such as the following - how credible are they? Could they have happened? Were they just people trying to jump on the bandwagon like Beech did in the UK?
They should be able to find out if 12 year old French triplets flew in and flew out of Florida, but did anyone do so?
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