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.
3d 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.
3d 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.
3d 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.
3d 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.
4d 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.
4d 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.
4d 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.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
I agree with you that the number of political debankings strictu sensu (i.e. a banking relationship is ended because the bank finds the client's political views, as opposed to the nature of the client's business, obnoxious) is probably greater than zero. But it is rare, unless you count "debankings" by Paypal. Debanking of disfavoured industries is absolutely a thing, and normally involves a combination of financial and political considerations - they are hard to separate in practice given the modest positive correlation between "chooses to make a living running an antisocial business" and "inclined to dishonesty in their financial dealings" and between "industries my staff don't want to bank" and "industries my non-evil customers don't want me to bank." Sometimes it involves improper regulatory pressure - Operation Chokepoint was very much a thing, and the Biden-era Fed unsuccessfully tried to do something similar with the fossil fuel industry.
The point I am trying to make in my posts is that if you are going to legislate about debanking, your legislation needs to get the common cases right. A law which puts a burden of proof on banks which end a client relationship is, regardless of the sponsors' intent, primarily a law about credit risk management - namely that banks have to do it upfront at the point of account opening. The main impact would be to make it harder for people who are not already rich to open business bank accounts.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Having a job is also a privilege with restrictions, and in 49 of the 50 states you have no right to keep it.
If you want to make the case that cancel culture is good when applied to resident foreigners but bad when applied to W-2 employees, then you can do so. But cancel culture is still cancel culture, even when it is entirely legal.
I think that "Be careful what you say, Big Brother is watching" is socially corrosive in all circumstances, and accordingly that people should not be cancelled for ill-chosen jokes, regardless of the details of the jokes or the cancellation.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
HoI4 is Heart of Iron 4, the Paradox Interactive grand strategy game set during the period immediately before and during WW2.
Wehraboo is a term of abuse for people who get overly enthusiastic about playing as the Nazis in wargames - it originated in tabletop wargaming culture. There are a lot of Wehraboos in HoI4 fandom, and if you want to run a HoI4 discussion board you kind of have to tolerate them, hence the fandom is considered problematic by lefties.
Antifa is a international network of orgainsed violent far-left groups. The name stands for "Anti-fascist action" and they mostly like to engage in street brawls with European soccer hooligans (organised soccer hooliganism is tied to far-right politics). They are insignificant in the US. The term is also used more loosely as a general term for violent lefties who enjoy brawling with right-wing thugs.
The chans are a set of online forums, of which the original and greatest was 4chan, with a reception for lax moderation, crass language, porn-ridden image-sharing sections, and tolerating far-right politics which more respectable online fora don't. Gamergate is widely seen as the first sign of young very online people fighting back against PC/establishment-left control of the discourse, and mostly came out of 4chan. All the chans have dedicated subforums for discussing video games.
I don't know about the history of the term Groyper but it is showing up a lot in my Twitter feed. It refers to very online right-wing antisemites.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Other than my original prediction (Robinson has no involvement with either the Democratic Party or any organised far-left group), which I still expect to hold up, I am explicitly not betting.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
And is obscure in the English-speaking world outside two contexts:
- The organised political movement known as Antifa, who use it as an anthem
- The HoI4 fandom, because it is used as theme music in the game
Given the other messages, I think the HoI4 interpretation is probably the correct one.
I have a book of left-wing political songs published by the British Liberal Democrats, and have actually been to events where liberals spent 45 minutes drunkenly singing anti-fascist songs. Bella Ciao isn't in there - we sang Bandiera Rossa for the Italians. I don't think someone who came out of general English-speaking left-wing culture would choose it as a pithy anti-fascist message to write on a cartridge.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Trump not being elected
I am increasingly coming round to the view that you can only have a healthy political culture if you have a strong centre-right party (or centre-right faction within a big-tent right-wing party - as long as it is powerful enough to keep the centre-left honest). If there is nobody for the small-c conservative normies to vote for in order to signal "actually, don't blow up the system" then someone is going to try to blow up the system. The nature of factional politics in left-wing parties means that the faction that will blow up the system (either deliberately or through naivety) will beat the faction that is committed to not doing so - the only thing that stops this happening is fear of losing elections. You see this with Trump in the US - the Democrats' instinctual response to his nomination wasn't "All hands on deck to stop the orange fascist" - it was "Now the Republicans have nominated a non-serious candidate we can engage in infighting rather then focussing on winning."
You can have healthy political cultures where the two largest parties are a centre-right and a far-right party (Poland, Czech Republic), where they are both centre-right (Ireland), or even a healthy political culture with only one strong political party - as long as it is centre-right (Japan, Singapore). The main examples of healthy political cultures with consistently left-wing governments are Sweden (1936-1973) and Israel (1945-1977). In Sweden the possibility of a coalition between the Moderates, the Liberals, and the Centre Party (all centre-right) was sufficient to keep the Social Democrats honest throughout the period, but there was no serious centre-right opposition to Mapai in Israel until 1965.
The strongest non-Trump candidate in the 2016 primary was Ted Cruz, who is not centre-right in the sense I am using here - he was definitely committed to blowing up the system, just in a different way to Trump. I suppose the GOPe gets another chance in 2020 if Trump loses in 2016, but I see a Ted Cruz-style movement conservative winning on a "Trump wasn't conventionally right-wing enough, plus his character stinks" platform or Trump running again on an "I woz robbed" platform (like he did in 2024 - he had the false allegations of election fraud teed up in 2016 too) as more likely outcomes for the hypothetical 2020 primary.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
Banks are like power and water utilities. Its not something you cut off in a modern society without very good reasons.
Plenty of people get power or water cut off for non-payment, which falls a long way short of organised crime and terrorism. Plenty of people have credit bad enough that they can only get power with a prepayment meter. The equivalent is a basic bank account which can't be overdrawn (and therefore doesn't come with a cheque book, only a debit card - with the shift to zero floor limits the number of places that debit card can't be used is now quite low). You can't run a business with a basic bank account, and you can't run a business with electricity off a prepayment meter - in both cases this is both against the rules (the social contract that says regulated businesses can't shun dirty poors only extends to consumer services, not business ones) and impractical given the lack of credit.
The vast majority of business debankings are for credit control reasons, both of the "new information means this business is no longer considered creditworthy" and of the "new information means that this business is of a type which we do not bank because we lack the special skills needed to assess its creditworthiness" types.
The level of protection the banking system offers to normies who are victims of dodgy businesses (including but by no means limited to credit card chargebacks) is only possible because the system tries to keep dodgy businesses out.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
This is too dank to believe, and I don't believe it, but it is what my Twitter feed wants me to believe, and I'm sharing it on that basis.
The combination of the messages on the cartridges is best explained by Robinson being deep into gamer culture
- The sequence of arrows is a reference to Helldivers 2
- "Ciao Bella" can be a number of things, but one of them is a HoI4 meme.
- "If you read this you are gay" is general chan culture
- "Notices, bulges what's this" is an online furry culture meme which has also spread into general chan culture
Where does this end up? If Robinson was deep into HoI4 online culture, his browser history will be full of both Wehraboo and Antifa material. And if he got into the chans or the other online cesspools where large number of gamers hang out, then they are going to find all the bad stuff. So the people who want to believe that he was a leftist will find enough evidence to believe that, the people who want to believe he was a groyper will find enough evidence to believe that, and the people (like me) who want to believe that he was just a Thomas Crooks-style very online loser who shot a politician because in the current year it is more memetically badass than shooting up a school will find enough evidence to believe that. So the assassination will become a super-scissor. And, to add insult to injury, a wholesome hobby that I and many other Motteposters enjoy a lot (namely Paradox grand strategy gaming) will become tied in the mind of normies to political violence.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
If cancel culture was limited to firing people who celebrated political assassinations
The Deputy Secretary of State, on his official X account, said that "praising, rationalizing, or making light" of Kirk's death was grounds for visa revocation, and encouraged Karens to report wrongthinkers. That goes beyond "firing people who celebrated political assassinations" - it is a much broader category of prohibited wrongthink, as well as being a threat of government action. "Making light" would cover a lot of perfectly normal behaviour.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
Wexner owned Victoria’s Secret before he met Epstein. He definitely wasn’t relying on Epstein to procure girls for him - the reverse seems more likely.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
Churchill was technically fired for plagiarism and for falsely claiming to be a Native American. The fact that affirmative action fraudsters like Churchill and Warren only get caught and fired if they become politically controversial is an indictment of the system, but his firing was clearly legally justified.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
Kirk opposed the civil rights act. Motteposters may not consider that a far-right political view, but normies do.
He was also all-in on Trump's attempt to remain in office despite losing the 2020 election. If you think (as Orwell did and you should, although most people don't) that the main danger of the far right is the same as the main danger of the far left - the threat to democracy and the rule of law - then that makes Kirk (and Trump, and most of MAGA) far-right in the way that matters. That is what I mean by Jan 6th being the ultimate scissor.
PS. If an American publisher were typesetting this post those hyphens would be rendered as em-dashes. (British style is to render parenthetic dashes as en-dashes between spaces, which is why I was so confused by the first few months of the em-dash discourse). Still not a bot.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
The other claim is that his friends in the bank intervened when some transactions were flagged (for what, no one really explains) but this only deepens the original question: even if he was guilty of sex crimes, that doesn't imply that his financial dealings weren't in order.
If Epstein was as rich as he claimed to be without any of the wackier conspiracy conspiracies being true, he got the money by embezzling from Les Wexner. If any of the wackier conspiracies were true, he had a lot of foreign income he was being dishonest about the source of.
I personally think that Epstein's finances were above board and he simply wasn't as rich as he claimed to be (his lifestyle was consistent with the amount of money he could have made scummily but legally by charging Wexner 2-and-20 without providing alpha). But if I was the Feds I would have been going over his finances with a fine-tooth comb.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
I can't say I've heard of an American movie getting grief for casting non-Americans
There was a fuss about black British actors playing characters who were ADOS blacks in American films - but it isn't clear to me if that was an actual thing or if it was just Samuel L Jackson and his sycophants.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
Listen to American music, watch American shows, go see American films - obviously you're going to play American games as well
Games is the software sub-sector where the US is least dominant (Nintendo exists, for example), so this isn't the story.
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.
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