TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Humans are basically hardwired to care about that sort of thing. For any average human, arguments between people are mostly just popularity contests, not truth-seeking exercises. Even though the Motte might be composed of people who are several standard deviations away from being "average" in that sense, it's still bothersome. If the downvotes happen on posts you also thought were not your greatest, that would be one thing, but having them happen only on posts with a particular type of political persuasion makes it start to seem like a BOO OUTGROUP button.
The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.
Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.
The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.
The Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch, personally, were warned directly by President Donald J. Trump that the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE and, if they print it, they will be sued. Mr. Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but, obviously, did not have the power to do so. The Editor of The Wall Street Journal, Emma Tucker, was told directly by Karoline Leavitt, and by President Trump, that the letter was a FAKE, but Emma Tucker didn’t want to hear that. Instead, they are going with a false, malicious, and defamatory story anyway. President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly. The Press has to learn to be truthful, and not rely on sources that probably don’t even exist. President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS, and others, and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal. It has truly turned out to be a “Disgusting and Filthy Rag” and, writing defamatory lies like this, shows their desperation to remain relevant. If there were any truth at all on the Epstein Hoax, as it pertains to President Trump, this information would have been revealed by Comey, Brennan, Crooked Hillary, and other Radical Left Lunatics years ago. It certainly would not have sat in a file waiting for “TRUMP” to have won three Elections. This is yet another example of FAKE NEWS!
It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:
Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
www.themotte.org##button.m-0.p-0.nobackground.caction.btn
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Here are my results from asking it the bordering states of Nebraska. Note that I ask this in a bit of a tricky way to check if the LLM is actually comprehending my question. Frontier models can almost always get it correct with the notable exception of the Wyoming test (they usually don't think a 'y' is a vowel in that word). But K2's performance is just pathetic, it's like 4o-mini levels of bad.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
People have often claimed that a wunderwaffe would soon massively shift the tide of the war, and they've been wrong every time in this conflict so far. Some like HIMARs have legitimately moved the needle, but it wasn't a revolution, just a needle-change that was soon adapted to (with some minor costs associated with the adaptation).
I haven't heard Perun talking about this much and he's been a pretty good barometer for the tempo of the war so far. He actually had a video out recently that went into the use of drones as anti-drone weapons, so I don't see why those couldn't be adapted to this.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
I'm not familiar with that anecdote. Is this article an accurate summary? If so, I don't see how that's really related to ambition. She couldn't forge her own path that much when she was the nominee because 1) Biden was fairly popular with Dems, and her campaign was all about not rocking the boat to hold the fractious coalition together, and 2) people wouldn't believe her anyways since she was the VP.
I don't get how here strategic choice on the campaign trail is reflective of her ambition.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Harris was out there too, it was just on more "typical politician" stuff like holding speeches on the migrant crisis. Trump's administrations have both been anomalous in how much you heard about non-presidential actors, e.g. Jared Kushner was practically a household name in Trump 1 but almost nobody heard of Mike Donilon during Biden's term, despite the latter being almost certainly more important and influential than Kushner ever was (and Kushner was quite influential!).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak.
If there's one criticism of Harris that's untrue, it would be that she's insufficiently ambitious. The VP just doesn't have a lot of formal power to do anything, and even leaks will get found out in a non-Trump administration if they're consistent. The VP is just utterly at the mercy of the head honcho, and this was doubly true in the uncertain times around Biden's dropout since plenty of people wanted to have a mini-primary.
I'm not impressed by K2 so far at all. I did a check with one of my usual questions, and it did horribly. It hallucinated that North Dakota borders Nebraska, and then claimed the vowels of North Dakota in order were o, h, a, and o. I'm also getting quite bad results on programming questions as well, things that the trio of frontier models (o3, Opus, and Gemini 2.5 pro) handle with relative ease. It's not even that cheap, only being on par with Gemini 2.5 flash in that regard.
I hear it's decent at creative writing, but that's sort of a wishy-washy benchmark. Maybe it will become the smut model of choice like R1 was for a while? That's... something at least?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Its annoying as hell to strike up a decent convo with a woman you find attractive, only to find out she doesn't do much aside from Netflix, Starbucks, Shopping at Target, and maybe Music Festivals or something, and is generally not in great financial shape to boot. Often times they advertise their mental illness diagnoses.
This struck a little too close to home for me.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Strong agree with this post.
Some young man sated by porn, twitch, games, TikTok whatever might still want a girlfriend, might still take one if she fell into his lap, but he is often still going to put less effort into looking for her than his father did at his age.
This is basically where I am in my life right now.
It's a combination of how good the expected rewards are, and how much effort would be required to attain it. I could probably get a wife if I expended an enormous amount of effort, but... why bother? I'm happy enough as it is, and living life as a single man in the modern world with all its comforts really isn't a bad deal at all. A highly-compatible girl could improve my life of course, but there are a bunch of very well known failure modes too. Not just divorce, but that kind of empty relationship where the man falls backwards into doing a greater share of the work and doesn't even really like his wife any more, but divorcing is too much of a hassle so he just stays where he's at. My dad fell into this hard.
If I were to put in a lot of effort into my life somewhere, going for a better job to earn more money would almost certainly have a far higher ROI for me.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
There's a lot of stuff that could have been done with that money. I guess in a Keynesian sense that having that extra economic 'activity' is somehow better overall, maybe. But there's no doubt that we'd both be wealthier and have a better financial future.
This is a silly strawman of what economics says. Economic activity is only useful if people are getting something they want out of it, otherwise economists would advocate for going around breaking random windows to generate "economic activity" by repairing them.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Problem 1: God isn't real.
Problem 2: Many societies have done fine enough without God, like East Asia up until a few decades ago. They had watery "spirituality" like Shintoism's ancestor worship or Confucianism's philosophy, but those are very different from God.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
There is a small but substantial fraction of Trump voters who are willing to break with him on foreign interventions and military support of foreign countries.
Strong disagree here. Foreign affairs consistently ranks as one of the issues voters are most likely to "trust their leaders" on, i.e. be sheep about. MAGA quite vehemently wanted no more interventions in the Middle East... until Trump started bombing Iran, then they switched to being more or less OK with it. He even threatened full regime change and the response from MAGA was lukewarm at worst. Much of MAGA was unequivocal in how much they wanted Trump to dump Ukraine and "not give another dollar to Zelenskyy", right up until Trump promised to arm Ukraine a few days ago, when most of MAGA flipped to saying it was OK due to the minerals deal (or something like that).
Likewise, voters DGAF about tariffs, but might be more concerned if they manifest as inflation later on.
Things like immigration and to some degree the Epstein files are less likely to evoke sheep-like responses from the right.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
I've started to read up on this whole Epstein thing, and your take in your first 3 paragraphs seems much more realistic than the crazy conspiracies. WAY too much of this whole affair is sourced from Virginia Giuffre, a serial accuser and known liar.
The question I have, though, is why Trump proceeded the way he did.
A mix of incompetence and disinterest. Trump only has an implicit, gut-feeling on his base which is good enough for him in most ways, but has limitations. That's why he messed up on H1-Bs in December, and it's why he messed up now. He probably didn't really think this whole Epstein thing was that important so he let his lieutenants (Bondi and Patel, among others) hype up promises they couldn't keep, and now its blown up in his face. He's trying to backpedal like a malfunctioning ChatGPT doing a slurry of outgroup hate that usually works -- mentioning the Steele Dossier, Hillary, Obama, Biden, Russia investigation, Comey, etc, etc. I don't think this will actually do much to dent the Trump coalition in the long term -- there will be a few defections and disillusionments, but not a critical mass since the human brain is quite adept at rationalizing away cognitive dissonance. However, it's sure been good pickings for hilarious blatant hypocrisy, e.g. example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Good post. I agree way too many people take their wishy-washy vibes, put them on a chart and then zoom off to infinity.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
I just don't think that's true. If AOC says something like "abolish ICE" and a decent chunk of the Democratic party waffles as to whether they agree, then it's reasonable to say that a decent chunk of the party is at least sympathetic to the idea, even if they don't explicitly endorse the literal statement.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
I don't get your point about "the establishment" in this particular context. Why does it matter if they have power (real or perceived) in regards to whether it's a specific or general group. Most people, even politicians, don't see themselves as "establishment". For some people, Trump as POTUS is the epitome of "establishment". For others, calling him that word is utterly ludicrous. Note that I personally think it's fine for people to attack "the establishment" -- I'm opposed to this rule in general.
And I'm not defending his post wholesale -- I agree the last bit is presumptuous and I'm fine with him being given a warning for something like that. I don't think throwing the gauntlet to someone like this is really that bad, but maybe I'm in the minority on that. I think personal attacks are far worse for productive conversations, which happen regularly and don't get punished (or even become AAQCs!) as long as it's someone with a right-wing opinion attacking someone with a left-wing opinion.
I also have some reservations with how it seems like a final warning from stuff like his previous post which didn't deserve a mod action at all.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
All you have done is clearly demonstrate that you have already made up your mind and no matter what hoops people jump through will not be sufficient.
first you lie
you would not bother to engage with and would dismiss it all out of hand
All you have done is make me update towards you also being a net-negative.
Yeesh, no thanks.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
If AOC says something and isn't broadly getting a lot of pushback from her party, that would be quite indicative that at least a major fraction of the left believed something, or at least doesn't disagree with her. This is not weakmanning.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
You're broadly correct here: the anti-immigrant right (or "racialist Right") definitely don't regularly push back against claims that legal Americans would be willing to do those types of jobs. If they did, it would undercut their position that we should do mass deportations, so they either ignore it (like Catturd and friends) or they say legal Americans would do it if the price is right. The people claiming you're strawmanning Republicans in this specific post are hard to take seriously.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
This part:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.
Is ridiculously selectively applied, e.g. basically any time people use "the establishment" as a foil they're guilty of this, but they don't get modhatted. As it stands, the rule is merely another cudgel to use against people making left-leaning arguments, although in this case I don't think an unbiased application of this rule would be particularly good either. It just makes it clunky to talk about subsets of a group that believe in specific ideas that might not be shared among the whole group.
Though I do agree the "I expect that RandomRanger will withdraw his claim" is fairly presumptuous here.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
I saw precisely one guy link to an actual "bad" comment Darwin made, and it wasn't actually bad at all in terms of debating style. The person Darwin was debating with was far worse, funnily enough.
I don't trust testimony because people just disagreed with him since he was a leftist, and then tried to work backwards to find things they claimed were "manipulative" debate tactics. If we asked a bunch of lefty /r/politics users what they thought of the average poster on this forum, and the broad consensus was "horrible", would you trust them? I wouldn't.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
I'm surprised no one compiled a list of all of the jobs or things he claimed to have experience with, but I wasn't about to spend the time going through his comment history to do it.
If you or anyone actually does have a list like this, it would be helpful. People keep handwaving that he was doing all sorts of nefarious debate tricks but nobody can actually point to any examples. Nobody has receipts, so they broadly fall back on "trust me bro".
"Engaging in good faith" seems to be synonymous with "only disagrees with me within certain bounds".
If you don't want to be fixated on vote tallies, the site shouldn't have vote tallies thrown in your face on any post over 1d old.
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