ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
Maybe it was the weather, but that night I found her very alluring.
User ID: 812
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
10hr ago
In my country, a guy raped 4 girls and sexually violated 1, and his sentence was a 9 month home detention. The guy went on to commit MORE sexual assaults against underage girls just hours after his bail. And this is not a billionaire heir or some politician's son. It's not unusual for serious offences to be sentenced lightly due to messy legal technicalities.
Regarding Epstein, Michael Tracey has multiple write ups on what the investigation was really about, and why prosecutors reached the NPA. Basically, the case carried real evidentiary and legal risks, including problems with victim credibility, the difficulty of proving the newer “trafficking” elements, and the lead detective’s own later testimony that much of the conduct did not meet his definition of prostitution or coercion. In that context, securing a state guilty plea, registration as a sex offender, and a jail term (however work-release-heavy) was not an inexplicable gift. It was a negotiated outcome in a messy, winnable-but-risky case involving a wealthy defendant with top counsel.
Look, I read a lot of mystery books in my youth, lot of Sherlock Holmes, Hardy Boys... Scooby Doo
Well, there you go. Most real life villains are a lot less smart, calculating and I suppose, more boring than Professor Moriarty. Perhaps it's narrative attractive to treat gaps, coincidences, and preferential treatment as deliberate clues pointing to a hidden master plan. Real life problems are more mundane and ironically more frustrating. Uneven institutional responses, weak or compromised witnesses, and later narrative inflation that rearranges the same facts into something tighter and more cinematic than they ever were.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
10hr ago
Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.
Secondly, There is a very large, very ordinary gray zone of questionable to even illegal wealth portfolio that does not require a "global child sex trafficking" conspiracy to explain.
His connections begin to make sense when you treat "the elites" in his orbit as ordinary human beings capable of stupidity, vanity, and bad judgment than as a cold, coordinated hivemind operating from the top floor of Evil Inc.
Both "victims" and "connections" tell us he was an ambitious smooth talker who was super duper good at attaching himself to powerful people and making them feel like they were getting something valuable. His knowledge about the architecture of modern finance was impressive, we're told. Combine his knack for sociability with above average intelligence and it's easy to see why men like Chomsky would be charmed by him.
Charisma is the ability to get someone to do what they would not otherwise do. That is a higher-base-rate explanation for things like the Wexner relationship than a sophisticated, government tolerated and Mossad-led blackmail enterprise that somehow left almost no operational footprint. At least nothing to actually.... convict any of his friends.
And this is an age where such large scale, systematic trafficking and blackmail of the kind imagined would generate multipple records, witnesses, communications, financial trails, opportunistic leaks and competing incentives among so-called participants. To me, that's a much harder sell than a disordered, opportunistic socialite who climbed socially, engaged in some illegal sexual activity with underage girls (personally), and left behind a mess that looks more chaotic than engineered.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
3d ago
It speaks to the inordinate amount of social and political capital that black people have today. There wouldn't be a shred of sympathy from either aisle if Arday was Israeli or Indian. I don't have a strong opinion on whether the dogpiling was deserved or not (okay, maybe I'm leaning towards not).
Academic misconduct is a serious issue, and this was a grown man who knew what he was doing, mental illness or not. His fate was sealed by his own choices, his widow and children will bear the brunt of his actions now.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
5d ago
I suppose that’s a fair example of personality de-glamming the package.
Look at her mannerisms and overall presentation: tightly pulled-back hair and wears a coat, the overall style broadcasts “girlboss.” A lot of men, especially conservative men, find that combination either deeply unappealing or actively off-putting. And she's basically the mascot of woke polticis, which actively celebrates those traits, treats male preference as something to be overridden or mocked, and works hard to render any criticism of them low-status and socially costly. It’s a mismatch between desirable and celebrated preferences, backed by a status hierarchy that insists the mismatch is your problem.
She's still attractive in a girl next door kind of way, but that is the only vibe that would make her appealing. She's not hot enough that her girlbossing becomes tolerable.
And it cuts both ways, just look at the many dating threads here. You see the same recurring theme vis-a-vis female attraction, the asymmetric tolerance levels for misogyny displayed by incels vs hot Chadonis.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
5d ago
Exactly, woke 1, woke 2, woke 100, doesn't matter. I don't want ANY shit sprinkle in my ribeye, zero. And I consider woke as objectively shit.
Yes, some pushback against woke has become socially permissible now than before, but zero material gains are made until you significantly dismantle female and minority associated privileges in political, social and cultural contexts. An all white, all straight gender conforming cast in Odyssey for example. Zero girlbosses in male oriented media. Media napologetically catering to the straight male gaze. Regardless of who it offends. No more diversity hiring and affirmative action (at least, not based on anything beyond income levels). No more woke pandering in academia. These are real gains, "well, more people hate it now" is just a consolation prize.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
12d ago
Well I think that once a black person has been cast, there is a lot of pressure on the show runners, directors, producers, etc. to follow certain rules about how that black person must be portrayed.
But this is downstream of the first mandate though, the non-negotiable racial inclusion. LOTR is objectively not made any better by including blacks, no matter how stellar their performances purportedly are.
As I mentioned above, while I think that there is a taboo against this kind of fan service, it's nowhere near as strong as, for example, the taboo against portraying a black character as being unintelligent.
Okay, so the grievance hierarchy places black representation above male gaze and penalises it harder. So what? Exceptions like Landman may exist (I haven't seen it, so I'll take your word for it) but the direction of the pressure is still the same. Do you think Stripes would be made today?
Sure, access to online porn may reduce the pure commercial incentive to include softcore fanservice, but it does not explain the active moralisation of female sex appeal. If this were merely demand adjusting to free alternatives, we would expect quiet reduction. What we actually get is reduction plus public scolding. Attractive female characters are not simply less common, they are frequently treated as ideologically suspect. And there's a corresponding rise in male nudity even in male media, like Thor. What is the commercial incentive here?
But this shift is especially obvious in video games. Female character designs are frequently unrealistically ugly and androgynous, look at Abby in TLOU2 vs the live action TV show. Ironic, the graphics get prettier while female models get uglier. And the stated reasons are explicitly "diversity" and "subverting the male gaze". That is not the market spontaneously deciding that gamers (majority straight male) no longer like looking at pretty women. It is a cultural and professional status hierarchy asserting itself inside studios, marketing departments, and critical institutions, independent of any commercial incentives.
That is why I brought up Black Myth Wukong. There's literally zero wank material there, but the complaints still arrived because the female designs were conventionally feminine and attractive, despite being non-sexual. Not as loud as Stellar Blade, but they were still there.
But it hardly really ends there. Forget oysters, take homosexuality.
I think it's disgusting and don't like people who engage in the practice, but I don't find it immoral and it's fine for people in my society to engage in this practice.
That statement will not be taken kindly in polite society. But it's socially permissible to shame and police straight men for liking straight male gaze oriented content, and as a result, police the content itself.
You dislike immodesty and porn in general, that's fine, but practically there really is no difference when you say "it's fine" and in the breath attempt to shame someone out of watching porn. Your words and vibes don't match, is the point.
Edit: Sorry, groggy typing. Edited many times.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
13d ago
Adding to what @haroldbkny already said, the principle is still worth defending.
I rarely watch mainstream media that features black people anymore, even when their presence is technically plausible within the setting. Not because I harbour some pathological hatred of blacks (I don't), but because experience has taught me that “plausibility” is almost entirely incidental.
Beyond a certain budget, an all white, all straight, gender conforming cast with traditional sex roles is effectively forbidden. The industry treats demographic representation and progressive tropes as non-negotiables first and a storytelling choice second. I oppose that cultural settlement on principle.
Now regarding male gaze, I'm all for flat justice, and cannon-boobs aren't exactly my first preference. Nor do I need to see hot naked women to enjoy something. But I know why that is stigmatised. This is not some aesthetic evolution that emerged "neutrally". It is the product of constant feminist cultural policing of traditionally male spaces. And the same environment that treats the male gaze as something to be ashamed of and confined to privately consumed vices like porn, simultaneously celebrates male nudity and the female gaze in those same mainstream venues, see Thor Love and Thunder.
The messaging is that male desire is low-status and must be disavowed in public, female desire (and its equivalents) is high-status and may be displayed openly.
And you as a man should internalise this hierarchy and join the choir in calling out the "weirdos" who refuse to comply. You see this specimen of man everywhere, it's obvious as hell that he doesn't actually believe this, but performs it anyway purely for social approval. I've even seen it in games like Black Myth Wukong. The female characters are not at all sexualised in costume or behaviour. But the complaint still persists merely because females in the game were facially feminine and pretty. It's transparent from the language, "have you SEEN an ACTUAL woman?" Pure status signaling through and through.
I think South Korea is still a bit equitable, they don't get as upset over male targeted goonerbait as western women do as far as I'm aware. I don't recall a domestic backlash against Stellar Blade for instance. Meanwhile in mainstream western media there's been far less female nudity in recent years, and way more male nudity, even in presumably male targeted IPs.
Edit: Relatedly. My theory is that mainstream TV, gaming, cinema, etc are a shared cultural space, a public park of sorts. If EVE is allowed in this space, where millions of normies could see her casually and frequently, it's culturally "okay" to publicly cater to the male gaze. Hence the push to stigmatise it, so you realise that designs and body standards that appeal to you are culturally taboo, you should be ashamed of liking them and only find them in porn.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
14d ago
But slow-mo replay of shower scenes in kdramas are a-okay! A man being offended by his girlfriend ogling at another dude's abs is also low-status, apparently. I'll reiterate @Botond173 that goonerbait targeting the female gaze is freely celebrated, and the expectation that men should "suffer" through it to make their girlfriends happy seems to be norm in many, many relationships. At least, in the west.
Yes, the institutional inertia is a factor
You say this like the institutional apparatus that no single President can overturn is somehow ancillary to "some politicians". It all comes down to Zionist Inc, who are "beyond" supposedly anything?
Pointing to high spending and a few costly policy choices (missile stocks, etc.) does not by itself demonstrate that the relationship is held together by a uniquely captured political class rather than by a thick combination of strategic continuity, bureaucratic path dependence, legal commitments, and mutual military utility. Those layers can absorb a good deal of friction before they actually reverse. The fact that the relationship remains costly for the US does not prove it is irrational from the standpoint of the institutions that maintain it, it only proves that the costs of reversing it are real and that the institutions have so far judged them worth bearing.
And the engine behind this is the strength of the American state apparatus itself.
I repeat, we're talking 8 decades of joint planning, co-developed systems, intelligence sharing protocols, formal MOUs, and career tracks across the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community have embedded the relationship into the operating assumptions of the national security bureaucracy. Key committees treat this continuity as the default. Legal and procedural commitments accumulate over time. Once a foreign policy relationship reaches that level of sustained institutionalisation, reversing it would require the entire state apparatus crafting a uniquely exigent response against its own characteristic habit to resist abrupt shifts. That is a much higher bar than generating noise or imposing marginal costs.
So we are supposed to believe that hundreds of millions are being spent by what is arguably the most successful lobbying operation to ever exist, and it is all for no reason at all? Because nothing can change! Yeah, I am going to trust Aipacs judgement on this, over yours.
You are free to trust AIPAC’s revealed sense of urgency more than the institutional analysis. But urgency is not the same as fragility. A lobby can be highly competent at defending a structure that is still deeply embedded, and still feel the need to spend aggressively when the political weather turns against it.
Zionists, Mossad, the CCP, competent as they are, are still run by humans. They're not the calculating hiveminds you see in Hollywood. IRL conspiracies are messy, imperfect, and boring. Internal churns happen, personalities and egos clash, some of them are rank incompetents who simply knew the right people, and some of them are greedy bastards who just want to add more zeroes to their bank account.
All of these facts sit comfortably together.
You said
Yes, it will quite obviously entirely change the US policies towards the whole of the Middle East, including Israels enemies. If you are in denial about this, I suspect you are in a minority, even among zionists.
That's some strong vocabulary, and does insinuate that by 2032-36, we would have seen the type of policy reversals that I described. That institutional inertia, i.e. the airtight legal architecture and bureaucratic path dependence, is the decisive factor in the US-Israel relationship. And anything short of overturning those thick set of constraints, even by a trifle, is frankly a consolation prize. Realistically, yes, aid packages can be delayed, conditions can be dictated, criticisms can mount, and specific arms transfers can be slowed or scrutinised. Variants of that have already happened in limited ways under Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.
Re AIPAC, consider that it is a human organisation run by humans with very human judgements that are neither perfect nor 100% rational. Yes, public opinion has turned against Israel and even American Jews by extension.
Yes, they're a fundamentally pro-Israel lobby, and obviously wish to preserve a pro-Israel public consensus for that reason alone. That by itself isn't evidence of anything.
AIPAC is headed by American Jews. They are naturally concerned by the rise of rancid antisemitism both online and IRL that doesn't care to distinguish Netanyahu from IDF/Mossad from Israel from regular Jews. And that could directly impact their immediate livelihoods. In their minds, protecting American Jews is analogous to defending Israel.
To you, this wave of antisemitism may be justified or at least excusable, because this time the Jews have truly earned it by bombing Palestinian babies. But to the group whose ethnic and cultural history is marked by the Holocaust, multiple ethnic cleansings and pogroms, and all around scapegoating, that just brings up very unpleasant memories irrespective of context. So yes, they want "their" candidates to win. But even if they don't, the US-Israel relationship would still be protected by institutional inertia.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
21d ago
Yes, it will quite obviously entirely change the US policies towards the whole of the Middle East, including Israels enemies. If you are in denial about this, I suspect you are in a minority, even among zionists.
If you believe the US-Israel relationship is built on some billion shekels, then sure that's a possibility.
But what about the extensive interoperability created from decades of joint ops? What about the co-developed missile defence systems? Multiple mid-level officials across the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community, as well as key committees (Armed Services and Foreign Affairs) have entire careers, doctrines, and planning assumptions built around the US-Israel relationship, and favour continuity. Multiple laws, MOUs, and bipartisan resolutions across 8 decades have created locked-in commitments. Changing this needs a historically rare sustained coordination across both parties to amend many, many layers of complex legal procedures over a foreign policy issue.
Are you willing to bet AOC can girlboss her way through such overwhelming institutional inertia and rewrite war plans and agreements to overturn 8 decades of sustained policymaking?
Well like any movement, they build their case gradually. See the pro-life movement.
@FtttG 's point is that these movements rarely impact foreign policy, abortion is a domestic matter. But the fact that both BLM and Palestine protests erupted across Europe, Australia and New Zealand clearly shows they were US culture war exports.
Well, never mind then. I don't think it's a claim even they seriously believe in, just like the one-state proponents, because their real audience is domestic (not the Gazans). "Queers for Palestine" is a loyalty test, it is inconsistent but the real currency is status and tribal payoff.
That is why I don't see any "gotchas" working against the Palestine movement for now. The sexual violence and homophobia should've sufficed. But a "gotcha" only works when a non-trivial number of politically neutral or moderately-aligned people are already experiencing private friction with the movement, and the side shooting the "gotcha" carries enough status and optical legitimacy to attract more supporters. Yes, it can still damage the target. Yes, it can expose the contradictions in the coalition. But it won't make the Zionist opposition more attractive. "What is a woman" works because opponents of trans ideology aren't immediately dismissible as unhinged cranks, and it turns beliefs and internal logic directly held by its proponents against them. Zionism is politically homeless in American CW.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
21d ago
My read is @FtttG was using Instagram as a byword for "reductive, zero nuance, zero context, sheltered takes from privileged people supporting the current thing out of peer pressure". Just like George Floyd 2020 and ACAB. The human mind is drawn to one-note takes with cut and right moral clarity, so naturally they get the most decibels both online and IRL.
"Every problem has an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
In 2026, some flavours of antisemitism are acceptable in common parlance when sufficiently couched in progressive speak about Palestinian suffering ("poor brown babies colonised by white (adjacent) people"). Muslim antisemitism is excusable (if not justified) for the same reasons why anti-whiteness is excusable. White antisemitism, less so, because holocaust and uncle-Adolf. However, it is inconvenient to give too much oxygen calling out these folks (real as they are) when they're attacking Jews, at risk of giving ammo to the pro-Israel narrative.
Though I am surprised that @FtttG hasn't heard of "Rainbow Hamas", since they tend to overlap with this demographic:
you're almost equally likely to encounter a well-meaning young person who's simply upset by gory war footage in her Instagram feed
They also overlap with the noble savage myths in woke academia, which insist that any retrograde practices like slavery and superstitious anti-female, anti-gay violence in indigenous cultures were amplified (if not outright imported) by white colonialists. Modern portrayals of Native Americans (see RDR2 and Yellowstone/its spinoffs) are basically Bay Area woke self-inserts wearing Native aesthetics. Even if they know this isn't true, it's simply not optically feasible to acknowledge, let alone reconcile with progressive priors ("Should I support the browns or the brown gays?"). You don't wanna steelman colonial apologists, because again, it's a decibel contest!
Regardless of if they truly believe it or not, hardcore progressive pro-Palestinians have to pretend the browns they so zealously defend won't go back to oppressing women and uncle-Adolfing all Jews and gays.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
21d ago
I don't imagine it should be a big deal since Trump is sitting President now. 2020 was a low CW flashpoint for the right, but 2024 was a rebound.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
21d ago
But MKC is "booing" the politician over the abuse allegations, not because he's an "outgroup" (he mightbe, but that's not what he's arguing). It's not nearly as incendiary as the comment you linked to, and no more incendiary than the Platner threads.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
29d ago
I'm not going to question your sexuality, but do you just want to brag about the sexual attention you're getting from gay men? Bait em, lead them on, and then switch to "oh I'm 100% straight btw"? It's coming across as performative like... you're seeking some sort of validation? Idk
The Epstein "files" are a raw doc dump of anything tangentially related to Epstein. I made a top level comment on this months ago, what I think is more likely than a "predaphile cannibal cabal" is that Trump, in typical Trump fashion, kicked the hornet's nest about the so called "client list" for years, mixed some sex scandals that Epstein was involved in with good old peasant tales of elite depravities. But Trump did not expect to see his own name mentioned so many times in this so called satanic pedo cannibal cabal, but genie is out of the battle and never going away. Yes, I have no doubt Epstein and other Jewish elites had varying levels of "Israel connection", but frankly, that's neither here nor there as far as this war goes.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1mo ago
I love TheMotte. Over the years it has quietly become my default reddit alternative for serious political and culture war discussions. I appreciate the hard work of users who consistently put out quality writeups, the moderators for keeping the place true to its founding spirit, and you for keeping the site alive. I’d be happy to chip in financially if it helps sustain the project.
That said, I think the biggest barrier to turning TheMotte into a serious reddit alternative (beyond the coding difficulties, I suppose) is precisely the high standards that make it what it is. Reddit (social media generally) rewards low effort, high engagement content. Outrage coded one liners and tribal signaling are the only things that drive content virality and user traffic. It's human nature. A top comment here on the Iran war might be a detailed, insightful commentary with citations. The reddit equivalent of the same would just be a never ending list of “Fuck Trump” with 10k upvotes.
Mottizens have their obvious leanings, but the upvote system here still rewards effort and substance over pure engagement. I may disagree with the jannies on various points, but you genuinely captured lightning in a bottle with the current crew. Assembling and maintaining a large team of like minded moderators to consistently enforce quality standards while trying to grow the community sounds like an enormous full time job. It’s impressive that it works as well as it does.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1mo ago
The US said it launched a fresh wave of strikes on over 100 targets in Iran after Tehran struck a ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz, one month after the MOU to end the conflict.
Iran said it closed the waterway until further notice and warned of a severe response to US aggression. And within hours of the US strikes, Iran said they had hit a US base in Jordan, while the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain intercepted missiles and drones from Iran.
And Israel keeps striking southern Lebanon, despite the MOU.
Setting aside the many rounds of grifts talks, there's something to be said about great power adjacent warfare in 2026. Like Afghanistan and Ukraine, Iran is looking like this distinctive category of forever conflicts. Protracted, managed stalemates where neither side is willing to commit the resources and manpower towards a decisive victory, yet neither is prepared to accept political humiliation by surrendering. In Ukraine, Russia lacks the conventional strength for total conquest, while the West supplies enough aid to prevent collapse but not enough for a full on Ukrainian breakthrough.
I actually bought the last round of 'talks'. Now I'm blackpilled, we might be lucky if we get out of this in less than 20 years.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1mo ago
IMO the polarised nature of the discourse guarantees an endless enfilade of bad takes deployed as gotchas. Gen Z seems to have way more social outcasts than their parents' generation, and almost no one knows how to discuss the phenomenon without ruffling feathers.
"This is why no one likes you!"
"Well what about Brad? Everyone likes him!"
A lot of TRP is just crude locker room talk. Some interesting pattern recognition mixed with some bullshit. You still have to observe the world for yourself and decide which parts actually align with reality. Realistically, an average man can meet the standards of his looksmatch, but he usually has to put in the legwork in the initial stages. Failing repeatedly at that breeds bitterness, which then turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy and repels potential partners. A character flaw? Maybe. At the same time, there is an undercurrent of progressive platitudes that insists that in a western style dating environment, women would claw off their fingers before dating a Trump voting man. Both things can be true. Unlikeable vibes make dating much harder, and plenty of women still date objectively shitty men.
The discourse rarely manages to hold both observations in its head at once.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1mo ago
First, it seems weird that people go so hard on clavicular when stuff like this is accepted (at least by the online left).
The online left's problem with Clavicular is that he's part of the manosphere. That is the bottom line and his surgeries are ancillary to it, at most. It's just terrible optics for progressive gender values when a neurotic out-and-out misogynist influencer faces little trouble picking up young attractive women in Miami. Acknowledging this would vindicate incels, in their mind.
Of course, F1nn is not a good trans representative, being a pornstar and all, but I do think he represents a good part of why the online trans communities seem so weird.
It is disturbing and it comes with the territory. Social reinforcement, financial incentive and ideological capture create a feedback loop where "just a little more feminisation" becomes the rational next step. Add in a heavy dose of victim complex, and toxic acceptance of the most extreme variety of "self-expression" becomes necessary to prove the concept. ""Look man, no offense, but that sounds unhinged" sounds awfully close to what the transphobes tell me all the time. How can I repeat that line while being trans myself?"
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1mo ago
Nikocado Avocado was my first thought as well. It needs to be studied how someone who began with a seemingly normal personality and approachable demeanor could descend into such a grotesque, self destructive public spectacle for... clicks? The psychological arc is fascinating and deeply disturbing.
The closest example from the pre-social media times I can think of were probably carnival sideshow performers or certain extreme vaudeville acts, people who willingly turned their bodies and personal degradation into public entertainment for money and attention. But these people were usually born with a condition that led to their unfortunate appearance, and they had no better means of putting food on the table. I can't imagine someone having access to better choices and still choosing to go down this road.
Fortunately, Nikocado secretly lost weight years ago and got back his former weight.
For one, this theory is notably light on specifics. What was the work performed? What information was obtained, and what outcomes were achieved? And why was this particular channel chosen over more conventional ones? Absent those details, it functions more as a way of making the residual awkwardness of the relationship feel intentional rather than foolish.
More options
Context Copy link