MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
I am a liberal - it is a way of showing goodwill to the local majority. But I'm happy to stop doing it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
There are right-wing conspiracy theories about paedophiles and left-wing conspiracy theories about paedophiles. Depape was radicalised by Qanon, which is a right-wing conspiracy theory about paedophiles, as Ms Linker correctly stated.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
But the attacker (David Depape), was, if he was even capable of holding any sort of political position at all, not even remotely right wing, at least not in any way that any right winger would identify as a bedfellow.
He was a Blue Triber who was radicalised by right-wing content online (but had no involvement with the GOP or any organised right-wing group) and went on to attack a left-wing politician. I think that counts as right-wing political violence, although not a particularly worrying kind, and definitely not something that right-wingers should be collectively punished for. If Tyler Robinson turns out to be a Red Triber who was radicalised into killing a right-wing politician by left-wing content online (but had no involvement with the Dems or any organised left-wing group), then the right are reasonably going to consider this left-wing political violence. The President has already called for collective punishment of left-wingers, as have several Motteposters. We don't know much about Robinson's motives or sanity yet, but the scenario where the only morally relevant difference between Depape and Robinson is that Robinson could shoot straight is currently very plausible.
Heck, we have right-wingers trying to claim the Crooks shooting of Trump as left-wing political violence. There is far more evidence that Depape had a right-wing political motive than there is that Crooks had any political motive at all.
Depape (who was delusional, but clearly not severely enough to be legally insane) was saner than Routh (who fired his lawyers after they suggested running an insanity defence), and Routh is getting counted as left-wing political violence.
We've had every single right wing politician "disavowing" this (i.e. January 6th) for the last 5 years,
No you haven't. You had Donald Trump doubling down on this for the last 5 years, and you made him President while drumming the right-wing politicians who disavowed it out of the GOP and calling for them to be prosecuted (which I agree hasn't happened yet)
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
de Gaulle went on to win it
Lol Gaullist propaganda. The British, Americans and Soviets won it and the British and Americans graciously allowed de Gaulle to take some of the credit in order to ensure an anti-communist government in post-war France.
I wasn't relying on the wiki article for analysis - I was using it for links to interviews with George Lucas. The claim that Lucas was inspired by those three comes from his own words. My personal view is that the dominant historical inspiration for the Galactic Republic and early Empire is Rome, including via Isaac Asimov (Coruscant is obviously Trantor, and Asimov was always explicit that his Galactic Empire was inspired by Rome).
eagerly voted excessive powers by a legislative body feeling lost and ineffective
A fairly accurate description of how Augustus and Napoleon spun the grants of extreme power post-coup, even if it isn't what actually happened. As with Augustus, Caesar and Napoleon (Hitler is a grey area) the Senate meeting we see on screen was a stage-managed ratification of a coup that had already happened. And there is no vote on-screen, and canon material consistently describes the declaration of the Empire as a proclamation, not the result of a vote.
I suggest the Wikipedia analysis, insofar as it ignores the words, is misguided.
I wasn't there, but I don't think Petain was installed "to thunderous applause" given the miserable circumstances.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
As I said, legal processes to invalidate elections involve specific election offences committed by the candidate or campaign. In the case of Georgescu, it was (assuming that the documents released by the government were genuine) an absolutely blatant campaign finance violation - a million euros was spent on paid promotion of the TikTok account while Georgescu was claiming to have received zero campaign donations.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Although Giuliani was responsible for Four Seasons Total Landscaping, which was the most visibly shambolic moment of the whole affair.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Legally, definitely not. Politically, I don't think that type of attack has ever worked to undermine the legitimacy of an election anywhere, and it has been tried a lot.
The US is one of the few countries where there is no legal process to overturn an election on grounds other than the casting and counting of the votes. But in countries where there are other grounds to overturn an election, they look like "The candidate or his designated campaign team committed one of a short list of specified offences" - most commonly exceeding spending limits or knowingly accepting illegal foreign assistance. The idea of overturning an election based on some third party being biased in a way which it is not itself illegal is batshit - particularly if it is the incumbent claiming his own government was biased against him. But in any case using a legal technicality to overturn an election makes you look like a sore loser and typically causes you to lose the rerun election in a landslide.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Or, if you prefer, the actual event I think it was based on, which was really two events: the selection of Marshal Petain as the head of an interim French government to negotiate capitulation with Hitler, and the subsequent vote to give him unlimited constitutional powers.
That particular parallel seems week given that the defining feature of the selection of Petain was that it happened to a country that had just lost a war and everyone knew that the new government was being chosen to capitulate to Hitler.
The more obvious parallel is the fall of the Roman Republic (the terminology of Republic/Empire/Senate is obviously taken from Rome). The obvious parallel to the specific scene where liberty dies to thunderous applause is Julius Caesar being declared dictator for life by the Senate. The consensus among blogging classicists seems to be that Palpatine's rise to power looks more like Augustus than Caesar, but Augustus didn't start taking on Imperial airs and graces until he had already held absolute power for several years, so there was no grand scene in the Senate marking the formal transition from Republic to Empire. There are also the inevitable parallels to the Reichstag passing the Enabling Law in 1933 - in particular the idea that the Empire is an assumption of emergency power to deal with an ongoing emergency (rather than a post-civil was assumption of absolute authority to restore peace, order and good government as was the case for both Romans).
Wikipedia's article on Palpatine gives a long list of historical dictators he might be modelled on, but clicking the links to sources shows that George Lucas was probably thinking of a combination of Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
"The left successfully manipulated the information environment such that Americans voted the wrong way" is not grounds for overturning an election. As a matter of law and public opinion, the appropriate response would be "Sucks to suck. Git gud."
The weird decision was going after the voting machines first rather than running with the plausible lies about mass postal vote fraud from day one. In general, until Eastman takes over from Giuliani and Sidney Powell in early December, Trump's effort to overturn the election was pretty shambolic - particularly given that it had clearly been pre-planned.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Mussolini was also an ex-socialist. Horseshoe theory makes accurate predictions.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Citymapper is still by far the best option in London. I only use Google Maps for planning future trips from my desk, at which it seems to do a good enough job.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
This is a misuse of the word "they". The average Gazan's life would improve immensely if Hamas and their non-Gazan enablers stopped using Gaza to fuck with Israel.
The Palestinian tragedy is that the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza are interested in improving their own lives in ways which Palestinian emigrés who are allowed to speak for "the Palestinian cause" (aka the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state) by the non-Palestinian Muslims and Leftists who fund it and support it internationally are not. When the First Intifada produced Palestinian leadership which was indigenous to the West Bank and Gaza, we got Oslo. When the Palestinian leadership is emigrés funded by foreigners, we get insane unwinnable wars.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
I’m not going to dox myself to make a point, but back when I was a politician I wrote under my real name in support of Jyllands-Posten posting the Danish cartoons, and against prosecuting David Irving for Holocaust denial. I cite Exiting the Vampire Castle more than anyone else on the Motte because I read it and agreed with it when it first came out in 2013. Real supporters of free speech exist, even if there are not many of us. I came to the Motte because I am one, and it was a rare example of (back then) a non-rightist space that hadn’t been completely taken over by wokestupid. I don’t think I have been particularly silent on this board about the destructive stupidity of wokestupid cancel culture, although I was lurking and not posting when it was at its worst.
Re. The international angle, various people in the US, most recently when explaining what Charlie Kirk was pushing back against, have talked about the climate of fear that wokestupid created in US universities and PMC workplaces. That mostly didn’t happen in the UK. The difference in attitude to mildly risky office banter was obvious when I worked in transatlantic teams. “I’ll tell HR you said that” remained the punchline of a joke in London banks throughout the Great Awokening. Some of this is cultural - the US is the only first world country which doesn’t have a social norm of “firing employees for out-of-work political speech is bad.” Some is legal - the specific way the US enforces anti-discrimination laws creates perverse incentives. But if non-leftist Americans are telling the truth about how bad things got, the practical limitation on the free speech of people who were not professional right-wing provocateurs was worse for you than it was for us. Fining people for teaching dogs the Roman salute is bad, but a lot more people want to make small donations to right-wing causes or say that there are only two sexes than teach the Roman salute to dogs. The UK courts have ruled explicitly that saying there are only two sexes is not a firing offence, and I’m not aware of a case where a British employer even tried to fire an employee over a normie-level political donation.
When I published, under my real name, a pamphlet that mentioned the word “nigger”, I was not worried about career-limiting consequences. I would not have done that in the US.
The nature of English-speaking PMC society is that some of the things I care about are produced by communities of interest which span the English-speaking world. Wokestupid cancel culture created fear, anger, hate, division, and above all retardation which broke things I care about - and not because of the specifics of what was cancelled. The backlash to wokestupid got us Brexit and the Trump tariffs, which also broke things I care about. Right-wing cancel culture will spread fear, anger, hate, division and retardation and break things I care about. And it will either provoke a backlash which brings Commie-adjacent leftists to power or succeed and empower the worst elements of the right - in either case I expect the long-term political consequences to include harmful economic policies which break things I care about.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
I'm not in America so this isn't about me - I'm mostly worried about the damage to the system from another round of purges. McCarthyism was on track to break the system if it hadn't been stopped by the Army-McCarthy hearings. Wokestupid cancel culture didn't just unjustly end a few careers - it made a whole bunch of institutions dumber. It would in fact be a good thing if America had university social science departments that could do research in the social sciences, movie studios that could make good movies, or a left-wing political party that could nominate replacement-level candidates. (And that is just the institutions where the brain damage from wokestupid looks fatal.) If it does go full retard in the way such things usually do, MAGAtarded cancel culture will also break institutions - with the most immediately obvious candidate at this early stage being the armed forces.
Wokestupid cancel culture ended up harming the American left, America as a whole, and the American-led system that delivers peace and prosperity to billions of people. If MAGA choose to play three-tits-for-a-tat (and that is what the President of the United States and most of his core supporters in the country appear to want) and no pro-establishment right faction is able to stop them Army-McCarthy style then the clapback is going to do three times as much damage to America and the system as wokestupid did. And that is scary.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
Even without the public nature of the assassination, Kirk is the most significant political figure to be actually murdered (as opposed to just being shot at) since the Days of Rage. Part of the reason why the public response is so controversial is that a lot of people, particularly on the left, don't get why the MAGA right see Charlie Kirk as a much bigger deal than two state legislators and their spouses, and the MAGA right don't get why half the country is treating this like the murder of a controversial podcast bro.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
48 hours into the new right-wing cancel culture, and already the demand for people "celebrating the murder of Charlie to Kirk" to cancel exceeds the supply. There are cancel mobs out for speech on the lines of "Of course Charlie Kirk shouldn't have been murdered but that doesn't change the fact that he was a racist/homophobe/other kind of bad person" and "I think this level of public mourning is excessive for a murdered podcast bro". And the official policy of the United States government is that "making light" of Kirk's murder is deportable - that is a much broader category of cancellable speech than "celebrating" it.
It is inherent to the nature of witch hunting that the demand for witches exceeds the supply, and accordingly that the definition of a witch is subject to scope creep. The type specimen here is 1950's anti-communism. Senator McCarthy's lawyer, an corrupt faggot by the name of Roy Cohn, sicced McCarthy on the US Army after they wouldn't give his catamite a cushy desk job. This led to the Army-McCarthy hearings and eventually blew up McCarthyism. After being driven out of public life, Cohn built a successful legal practice in NYC representing corrupt politicians, gangsters and real estate developers. One of his jobs was to negotiate the arrangement where Fred Trump paid off the mafia to ensure that there were no union problems on his construction projects. A young executive in the Trump organisation who was closely involved with the deal regards Cohn as an important mentor.
So I don't think a political movement led by Donald Trump is going to resist the natural tendency of cancel culture to spiral out of control until it starts eating its own. Based on public statements by Donald Trump and Steven Miller, I don't think they even want to.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
The pilgrims founded Massachusetts, not the US. And "wasn't Christian enough" is misleading - that's they way the pilgrims saw it, but "the wrong kind of Christian" is how a neutral observer would describe it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
Working next to a bigot who doesn't bigot in the office doesn't constitute a "hostile workplace" under EEOC rules either (although, absurdly, having a co-worker put a Gadsden Flag in their cubicle can do) - the problem is more subtle than that, and involves a combination of the inherent dangers of strong anti-discrimination laws and the spectacularly broken American civil justice system.
Fundamentally, the problem is that if a workplace discrimination lawsuit against a medium or large business gets past summary judgement, you are going to be settling it, probably for a six-figure sum of money, because the alternative is to let the plaintiff go on a fishing expedition at your expense for anything bigoted any employee anywhere in the organisation said or did in the last N years (where N is at the discretion of the judge, and can exceed the statute of limitations). And "this company knew they had racists on staff and didn't fire them" plus "one co-worker said a bad thing to me in the workplace once" is sufficient circumstantial evidence of a pattern of officially-tolerated peer-on-peer discrimination to get past summary judgement.
I don't know the mechanics of OSHA enforcement, but my guess would be a civil lawsuit over workplace safety that gets past summary judgement would require an injured employee and some plausible connection between the injury and the presence of people who shitpost ghoulishly about Charlie Kirk - that is a much less plausible outcome.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
two most recent attempts to assassinate a presidential candidate
Thomas Crooks was not a left-winger, so that assassination attempt wasn't left-wing political violence. In so far as Ryan Routh had intelligible political motivations and wasn't just insane, he was a single-issue Ukraine supporter. While that is left-coded in today's political climate, it isn't actually a left-right issue, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it left off a list of left-wing political violence.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
Was Elliot Rodger borderline retarded? His Wikipedia article says he had top grades.
In any case, you have an interesting point. I'm not quire sure I agree with you about two separate groups though. Crooks, Robinson and Rodger all seem very similar profiles to me - they all got high grades in high school with a satisfactory disciplinary record but a reputation for spergy weirdness, and then went to universities for which they were grossly overqualified. All three were employable, but none of them were on track to get a traditional "graduate job" that would keep them in their parents' social class. Lanza looks like he was on the same path until he developed schizophrenia on top of his other problems.
Holmes looks very different - notably he is the only killer on the list to have had a girlfriend. (A not-yet-transitioned MtF doesn't count). It looks like he stayed on the PMC cursus honorum despite his issues until he cracked up in grad school. Possibly more like the stereotypical disgruntled postal worker than the stereotypical school shooter.
Divorced parents and excessive video gaming appear in some but not all of the stories - my guess is that both are less common among these guys than the general population of male losers.
Luigi breaking bad makes no sense whatsoever to me.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
11d ago
Pesky fourth declension, confusing bad classicists since someone put their hand on their knee.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
11d ago
For individuals, requiring banks to offer basic accounts to anyone who isn't on a blacklist of people convicted for bank fraud would be a plausible regulation - it is definitely something that exists in the UK. The question is whether you can make a basic account which is both safe for a bank to offer to dodgy people and useful enough that dodgy people will use it rather than continuing to rely on cheque cashers and prepaid debit cards. (And in any case, a rich person whose account was downgraded to basic status would probably consider themselves debanked and complain to the press about it - as Nigel Farage did)
Given modern technology, you can set up an account that is almost impossible to overdraw with outgoing payments - the problem is overdrafts caused by reversal of incoming payments. Incoming cheques can bounce for all the usual reasons. Bouncing cheques typically bounce within a week, but in the US there is no legal limit on how late a cheque can bounce. If you protect yourself against bouncing cheques by putting a week's hold on incoming cheques (incidentally, illegal in the US although that rule could be changed) then the typical low-credit-score customer will go to their local cheque casher to avoid the hold. ACH payments and wires are reversable for alleged fraud, again with no time limit, so for a customer who is a sufficiently high fraud risk can't be banked safely at all.
For businesses, the risk of reversed incoming payments are a lot higher (particularly if you accept credit/debit cards which are subject to chargeback, but also because businesses don't get most of their income from payroll and government welfare, which are the least likely payment streams to involve NSF cheques or reversals for alleged fraud. An account which won't let you accept card payments and puts a 5-day hold on incoming personal cheques is basically useless for a business, and even if it was a business there is still a risk to the bank if the business disappears after receiving a bunch of allegedly fraudulent electronic payments. There isn't a "basic business bank account" which is actually useful for businesses and which can safely be offered to dodgy people.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
11d ago
If he was in fact dating a tranny, then the "the killer was radicalised by transactivists" theory is probably correct.
Assuming it wasn't transactivists, the whole reason why this is a dankest timeline scenario is that if Robinson was, in fact, radicalised in the online computer wargaming community, then his motives have essentially nothing to do with mainstream politics, but nobody is going to believe this because of the obvious political associations of the wargamer memes he wrote on the bullet casings. The point is that the explanation for "catch this fascist" would only be comprehensible for someone familiar with the memes of the relevant online community.
I don't know very much about the culture of online wargaming, but the tabletop wargaming culture has a number of features which means that I can imagine a very online version of it being a risk factor for radicalisation.
- Neurotypical people are under-represented
- People who think political violence is cool are over-represented
- People who imagine themselves as badass warriors despite having the physique of the typical tabletop wargamer are over-represented
- There is minimal stigma against ideas that the rest of the world sees as linked to unsavoury politics because someone has to play Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Confederacy etc.
In a world where
then obviously the winning move is to suppress your opponents speech. But this proves too much - obviously the winning move is to go full Sulla, execute your opponents, steal their stuff, keep half of it and use the other half to reward your supporters, and use the temporary lack of opposition to amend the Constitution to permanently install your preferred policies. This doesn't happen because all factions in real-world politics rely to varying degrees on the support of normies who care more about the fate of the country than about their preferred faction winning.
The more serious issue about "is speech suppression tactically wise" is that empirically movements which don't support free speech can't stick to a free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee policy, and end up suppressing their own internal debate as much as they suppress the enemy. Whether it's the Nazi Night of the Long Knives, the various Communist purges, McCarthy turning on right-aligned institutions like the army, woke cancel culture purging far more lefties (whether for heresy or just mis-speaking) than righties, political movements which start suppressing speech mostly end up turning speech suppression from a weapon against the outgroup to a weapon for resolving intra-group personal beefs. And then you have a culture of fear which gums up your own internal decision-making processes and you end up doing something self-destructively stupid like Arische Physik, Lysenkoism, or defunding the police.
Liberalism didn't just win in the debating club, it also won at Hiroshima. There might be a reason for this, and I think resistance to self-destructive purges is a big part of it.
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