faceh
4hr ago
Anyway the difference here is that Epstein's investigation went on for a long time because the case was complex and relied on many witnesses.
Well, it was also MASSIVE in terms of the apparent number of victims and the guy was intentionally elusive. It is entirely possible, though unlikely, that I was personally acquainted with some of the girls involved. They had to scout out when his plane was at the airport and they had the trash pickup company turning over his garbage to the cops as part of the process.
The sheer number of charges they could in theory have brought should have given an appreciable chance of at least a few of them sticking. The federal indictment had like 60.
Regardless, the government lied to him and just 10 years after getting out of prison
Point of fact, he never went to prison until 2019, which is part of the oddity here.
From the wiki:
While most convicted sex offenders in Florida are sent to state prison, Epstein was instead housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Stockade, a minimum security detention facility. 113 Epstein was housed at the Stockade's previously unstaffed infirmary, after agreeing to cover the cost of security to watch him. Costs totaled around $128,000, which he covered through the Florida Science Foundation, a foundation he created shortly before reporting to jail.
It is really not clear why, in addition to the plea being lenient, he was functionally able to dictate terms to the point his life was minimally interrupted. I know of no precedent to this.
So from my perspective "I notice that I am confused." Whatever secretive talks happened to get to this point (and the fact that they're secretive isn't odd, all plea bargain discussions are kept completely secret) somehow he got virtually everything he could possibly have wanted whilst still technically eating a 'punishment.' I have to imagine the leverage on his side was substantial, far and beyond the prosecution merely having a 'weak' case.
I mean, my opinion is that prosecutors don't like going to trial as a general rule, but they are also accustomed to wielding punishments as a bludgeon to get the defendant to back down.
Or maybe he gave them a full on Saul Goodman speech and rolled Nat 20 on persuasion?
And now we have a comparable case with Diddy, too. They stuck him on two minor counts and gave him 4.5 years. Harvey Weinstein caught 16 years. R. Kelly finally went down for 30. Is that because we're now living in the post #metoo era that enforcement has ramped up, and that's why Epstein got picked up the second time?
It's not unusual for serious offences to be sentenced lightly due to messy legal technicalities.
In Florida, it is, if you're as dead to rights as Epstein looked. We're one of the few states that still executes people with regularity. We recently expanded the death penalty to certain sex crimes against children. This ABSOLUTELY would have included Epstein's charges back in the day.
"Funny" coincidence, in Palm Beach County (i.e. where all this Epstein Drama unfolded) they JUST TODAY arrested the County Clerk of Courts himself for child sexual abuse. I do NOT expect this guy to get off easy despite his prominence and connections.
Happy to place bets on or at least follow up on that outcome.
There's even another high profile case involving an obscenely wealthy defendant that happened sort of around the time the Epstein legal drama unfolded where they happily prosecuted him and secured a conviction despite many legal shenanigans and pulling in elite legal counsel. I also followed that one closely back in the day. His ass is still in prison, although he's getting released in the not-too-distant future. Hmmm.
I posit that even with a 'weak' case, not even getting to the case teed up for trial is pretty odd for Florida, and VERY odd to give him a deal that, in effect, FULLY ACCOMMODATED his ability to keep doing whatever he did to make money.
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.
They also create the exact conditions that would allow a moderately competent, highly connected conspiracy to delay detection and disruption. Just sayin'.
However I don't think the 'real story' is going to be all that cinematic, honestly. I do think money that flowed through him was probably used for some 'interesting' stuff, but his role in it all might be comparatively mundane.
Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.
Gotta be specific when there's 3 orders of magnitude of space there.
He was alleged at $600 million at the time of his death, although that surely fluctuated a lot, although much of that wasn't liquid. He worked hard to keep it from public disclosure throughout his legal process.
That's a HUGE amount to reach if you start from the bottom. I reserve some probability for a series of 'lucky' trades. A dude in New York in the '90's and early 2000s could stumble around and turn 10 million into 200 if he had some pure luck and a little bit of finagling the system.
But I find some form of massive insider trading to be the most likely way to bootstrap whatever seed money he obtained into the secretive empire he actually did create.
And yet, if he was really insider trading for decades you'd expect him to probably get even richer than he apparently was. So the part where I go out on a limb for real is the assumption that much of his wealth did not actually belong to him and was occasionally siphoned off for other purposes.
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.
Plausible, but also what one might expect people to say to slough off some blame and avoid further investigation. It is 'proven' that plenty of important people he associated with stayed quiet about whatever activity they observed, for a long time, so he sure used some method to keep things under wraps.
Its not proof that "EVERYONE WAS IN ON IT!" but it suggests some unifying factor keeping people from commenting. Similar to the Diddy situation. One guy was the nexus of a whole ton of bad behavior, and virtually nobody of import was willing to be the one to break omerta for years and years (except 50 Cent that glorious bastard). And Diddy is like an inverse Epstein in that he was CONSTANTLY seeking public attention.
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.
The thing is IT DID generate such records, there were various leaks and both victims and staffers occasionally coming forward to add details, although it was mostly about the sex trafficking stuff.
The problem being that the financial trails are the ones that we've gotten very little insight to, and have been kept particularly secret... which is where I think the meat of the actual conspiracy would be found.
And being clear, I don't believe that blackmail was the primary goal of anything he did. If intelligence agencies want Kompromat on someone, they have a bajillion other ways to get it.
My theory is that he ended up as the nexus/fall guy of some kind of slush fund for, at a guess, one or multiple state intelligence agencies. Maybe Mossad, CIA, or whatever. A 'good' way to launder and multiply such a fund would be aggressive but secretive insider trading or similar 'inside' deals. His initial appearance/rise happened right around The Iran-Contra affair. No I am not alleging a connection there, just illustrating that we have an existence proof of this sort of conspiracy. A good way to keep such deals and talks 'off the books' it to have them in person. ESPECIALLY on a plane or island you control to minimize surveillance and eavesdropping risk. If you want to convince a VIP with insider knowledge to make an in-person appearance, a good inducement is promising sexually available young women. That some of them are underage by a couple years helps to align the incentives against mentioning the meeting. Basically, get people with specialized knowledge on your plane and on your island, show them a good time, and insinuate they ought not disclose anything that was done or discussed. Pump out insider information that you can then trade on to keep the piggy bank topped off.
I agree he was indulging his own personal proclivities, but I also think that was his recruitment pipeline so as to have such girls available on short notice.
I am not convinced that he was doing everything with primary motivation of maintaining his own lifestyle at that level indefinitely. At some point, it would be easier to 'retire' to Eastern Europe or Thailand or something if you just want to molest teenage girls constantly with minimal risk.
I do not go all the way down the "satanic child sacrifice rites and adrenochrome harvesting" rabbit hole. I'm trying to avoid too large a complexity penalty.
I point as another piece of evidence to this:
Ghislaine Maxwell's ability to remain hidden for a relatively long time. It makes very little sense that she would be able to orchestrate the creation of various shell companies, buy a huge property, hire and maintain armed security, and otherwise maintain her cover without the assistance of competent third parties to act on her behalf. Suffice it to say I entirely DISBELIEVE she's enough of a mastermind to pull if off through only her own volition.
The fact that she's still alive is, to me, conditional proof (conditional on such a conspiracy existing) that things have 'moved on' and there's very little she can do to disrupt their current activities.
So in short, I think his 'secret sauce' was insider trading, funded by Gov't agencies that needed off-books ways to make and clean money, and he was a reliable and controllable asset, with proven ability to ingratiate to otherwise hard targets to extract information they used for rapid financial gains, and maintaining an image of elusive megarich eccentric playboy was in fact good cover for moving large sums of money around without raising eyebrows. Indulging his proclivities was both part of his tactics, and a good way to keep him in line, and thus 'they' stuck a thumb on the scale when lesser government agencies tried to snag him for the sex stuff.
That last part really is the most compelling for me. It remains unclear why else he'd have gotten such a sweetheart deal when he was pretty well dead to rights on various serious charges, and other wealthy dudes in the area were sent to prison despite aggressive efforts to avoid it.
But if he really just a charismatic manipulator who did it all for the love of the game, by and large, I'd still want to know that truth because holy cow that's some dedication, the psychology of such a person has to be fascinating.
faceh
19hr ago
The reallll interesting questions come from how he became a billionaire and how he got those initial connections.
Its possible that he managed to social-proof his way into elite circles and was exceptionally good at convincing rich people he had a magic touch.
It is very, VERY rare for someone to become a 'legitimate' billionaire without starting a company that takes off to success/getting early equity in a startup, or being a famed celebrity who leverages their image heavily.
He did neither of those.
Which suggests (to me) some sort of organized criminal enterprise as the last likely option. And virtually no such enterprise can operate at such levels without either intimidating, buying/bribing, or being tacitly approved by some government entity.
So I dunno, what hypotheses do we have for how he bootstrapped the connections and billions whilst leaving very, very little trail of how he did it.
This seems most plausible. However...
It did have some news coverage but not much and basically nobody cared.
I CARED.
I was in high school circa 2007, and I only really had an awareness of it because it happened right near my hometown so it was more featured in local newspapers, which I read voraciously at that age. And I mean the actual, physical paper.
And even then the coverage was rudimentary in terms of explaining what was happening. Dude was allegedly soliciting, possibly banging 16 year olds. In that neck of the woods, occasionally a socialite goes down for that.
So the story about some relatively mysterious, wealthy guy doing pervy old guy stuff wasn't the talk of the town. But me, reading virtually ALL the news about it... noticed the strange circumstances surrounding the situation, including the extremely light-handed sentencing and the odd level of privileges the guy was getting. By 2010, the guy was holding secret meetings at Harvard WHILE ON PROBATION.
And then weird dots that nobody ever actually put together but there was enough out there to put my spidey sense tingling in 2006-2008:
Note how almost all of those are under the "local news" category.
The "Original" Epstein list was A journal with the names of the girls he predated that turned up after sentencing.
From a 2006 article:
Epstein was different from most sexual abuse suspects; he was far more powerful. He counted among his friends former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, along with some of the most prominent legal, scientific and business minds in the country.
When detectives started asking questions and teenage girls started talking, a wave of legal resistance followed.
If Palm Beach police didn't know quite who Jeffrey Epstein was, they found out soon enough.
Epstein, now 53, was a quintessential man of mystery. He amassed his fortune and friends quietly, always in the background as he navigated New York high society.
All of this was open and known in 2006. It wasn't like he died in 2019 and suddenly all his connections to celebs came out. At literally NO POINT during any of this did the man himself ever make any public appearance or plea or otherwise attempt to preserve his reputation IT WAS LIKE HE DID NOT CARE if people thought he was a sexual predator. And as you can see from OP's post, apparently many a prominent person did NOT care... assuming they knew. Google was a thing and fairly popular at the time.
Compare that to the New York Times Article when he got sentenced, and how it skimps on details that were more prominent in the local stories.
Look, I read a lot of mystery books in my youth, lot of Sherlock Holmes, Hardy Boys... Scooby Doo. I could sense there was a lot to this story and also that someone(s) were very interested in keeping it tamped down. On the superficial level this fits a "rich guy escapes legal consequences" narrative alright, but there's a lot of missing pieces or pieces that do not fit. Then 10 years later he dies, Covid happens, Pizzagate, many events occur in rapid succession, oh and Ghislaine Maxwell is found hiding out in New Hampshire with armed, private security and yet still, nobody was able to effectively put together the full picture of exactly WHAT this guy's deal was, and who kept the lid on it. Not even me. Its a question I plan to ask God about should I arrive at the Pearly Gates, even if I'm denied entry I REALLY WANT TO KNOW. And if I'm denied I hopefully can go and ask the guy personally.
faceh
4d ago
It’s their fault! Every step of the way someone, anyone, could have stepped in and stopped folly.
The sign is getting dented, but I'll keep tapping it.
Someone(s) must pay a price, and be removed from having any decisionmaking authority for there to be any meaningful 'learning' at an institutional or social level.
What does that look like?
GAs that notice/monitor the manufacturing and shipping of precursors to nerve agents seeing some activity that might indicate someone in a given geographical area might be trying to make something nasty.
Or GAs monitoring military supplies notice a report that some chemicals have gone missing.
GAs monitoring social media notice that a particular guy with a background in chemistry started posting schizo content and then went dark a month ago.
So they send someone around to go check on the guy.
Imagine, if you can, how a neighborhood watch group might figure out that one of the houses in their 'hood is being used to cook meth. Then scale that up to constantly vigilant electronic entities that can track most electronic activity, monitor cameras, and (possibly) hack into personal communications.
Perhaps you believe that this is a future that people are going to be OK with? A conversation with the median voter may correct this impression.
No, I'm just making a tongue in cheek point about how an effective Guardian Angel AI should be able to help someone properly assess the risk of leaving their house on a given day, in much the way you can ask your Alexa about traffic in the area and the weather forecast (that's what I use mine for, at least!).
For instance if your GA was to say "heightened risk of extreme flooding today, 10% chance we get a flash flood while you're on the road!" are you going to:
A) Stay home.
B) Put on a life jacket to drive to work.
C) Slap a boat on the trailer and pull that around just in case.
Which level of precaution makes sense?
That's YOUR call to make, ideally, we're just assuming semi-omniscient trustworthy agents that can warn you of hazards before you encounter them.
Self-driving cars should mitigate the risk of fatal car accidents to almost nothing, at least.
faceh
7d ago
That's a tiny bit of a trick question.
Defense might be harder in individual encounters, but the defenders can still have the ultimate advantage over time and at scale.
That said, yes, I am very wary of the X-risks that can be triggered by a small group or even an individual with sufficient resources.
My solution is simply maximal decentralization of humanity's genetic footprint. Mars colonies, O'Neill cylinders, asteroid outposts, where-ever we can survive.
The AGI scenario is, if survived, basically the authoritarian that makes sure we can't kill each other or ourselves.
faceh
8d ago
I think the argument there is that for every 1 guy who would want to do a Sarin gas attack, there are 100,000 people whose GAs would be devoting their efforts to not letting their user get killed in a Sarin gas attack.
If coordination between the non-murdery agents is effective, then they should be able to detect and prevent the attack, or at least predict the risk and warn their user. "50% chance of nerve agent release on the subway today, better pack your gas mask!"
faceh
9d ago
I personally don't believe we're actually "out of interceptors" because I suspect the U.S. military has a standing policy of understating its capacity and overstating its weaknesses.
I do believe China can build them faster and may have larger stockpiles.
I don't see any way to reasonably define the party who gets their entire command structure decimated, their air defenses dogwalked, and any infrastructure they care about vaporized on demand as the 'winner' of a given conflict.
That said, I will admit that I underestimated the IRGC's sheer stubbornness in the face of such a display of dominance. Its one thing to take every reasonable effort to avoid losing face, its another to keep pissing in the enemies eye, full knowing that they'll drop missiles on you over the weekend.
There remains the issue of Iran being able to threaten their regional neighbors with cheap drone strikes on important bases and infrastructure. They seem willing to carry out such harassment indefinitely unless their ability to afford it it is completely removed or there's some kind of uprising that finally removes them from power.
This seems to be devolving towards a possible North Korea situation, except without nukes.
So the actual strategic win seems up in the air still.
If the U.S. ends up forced to swap focus over to, say, Taiwan, Iran might be able to re-entrench its position. If they prove they can outlast the onslaught, that, from a game theoretic perspective, makes it far less likely they'll ever tap out in the future.
So perhaps the question is, is this a battle of willpower, or sheer materiel?
Its always a bit funny when I have a consult with a client with a lot of unsecured debt, and they've been dodging collections for years, and I advise them they can either figure out a way to pay the debt (maybe get the amount owed reduced), wait decades for it to become noncollectable, or declare bankruptcy. There are minor asset protection strategies but the debt will not just disappear if you hide your property.
Then they want me to take on a case for them and be like "can I pay you later? Maybe on installments?"
Oh honey. You just spent a half hour explaining to me that you can't be trusted with credit.
faceh
12d ago
Yes, although in my particular specialty, getting paid is usually not that big a problem.
There's definitely a mismatch between how their their demands are and how easy they are to work with. For me, the big concern is that they're slightly more likely to file a professional complaint than average.
I'm fairly neurotic at a baseline. I've spent the better part of the last 5 years progressively addressing both the symptoms and the root causes. I also inherited it from my mother. My dad is stoic in the extreme. I'm currently playing a mix of hawaiian slack-key guitar music, some classic exotica, and Spanish New Age Flamenco music (Govi is AWESOME) because its soothing without making me sleepy.
I sympathize with the neurotics, but if they're not at least trying to be better and curb their worst tendencies... I want them far away from me. This includes some of my family members.
Aren’t most of the people that need legal assistance precisely those kinds of people that possess problems with others and the law?
YES.
And more to the point, those are the cases that by definition tend to drag the longest. So they're the 'stickiest' clients. Which means even if it starts out where only 10% of my caseload is those types, eventually, if I don't filter, those cases become 50% or more simply because they fill all my time and crowd out new clients and I slowly close out matters for the more reasonable clients.
I've adjusted my intake process to account for this and I quote a significantly higher retainer if I suspect you'll be that type of client.
If men are perceiving them in an undesired manner, that must be addressed.
This reads as fundamentally true to me.
Its also that whole thing where women get really upset if you to tell them dress modestly in public... but if a guy in public is leering at them and they don't find him attractive they will literally go on TikTok to call him out as a creep, even if he has made zero actual overtures to them. The womans' behavior must absolutely NEVER be policed regardless of its obvious effect on others, but males' behavior must be CONSTANTLY policed if it makes the women uncomfortable. Which, surprise, is a determination only women can make, so its resistant to formalized rulemaking.
"Clothing is not consent" is absolutely true... but Dave Chappelle's observation is also true. If your dress and behavior sends a particular signal, its not really fair to get mad at guys who respond to what the signal usually means.
faceh
12d ago
Unfortunately a lot of that has been pushed into walled gardens and groupchats.
Aristillus.xyz was great back in the day, I haven't be on there much lately.
Lesswrong is the classic and still active, but you have a LOT of reading to do to catch up there.
I've been banned from Reddit and have no interest in a new account so not much recommendation to make there.
Certain parts of twitter are still putting out good stuff.
I have a list of relatively reliable pro-masculinity X.com accounts that avoid the standard manosphere that are worth following, IMHO.
The Eternal September has made things rough out there. This site is one of my few regular go-tos anymore.
faceh
12d ago
I wouldn't particularly feel inclined to write on gender-war adjacent topics, even if I appreciate the ones you do put out.
Somebody has to, and no-one else will.
Well, more specifically, few people will do one focused directly on the facts and not solely to grift on gender wars discourse.
Its not something I enjoy, but I get a very deranged sense of gratification when people challenge me on it and then completely fail to bolster their arguments.
Ultimately it's not the healthiest outlet, so I try to actively spend time around the women I enjoy the company of to counterbalance it.
They tend to be softer, kinder, and more empathetic than the average man
Agreed! Nothing drops my blood pressure like being around a smiling, pleasant woman. Even irrespective of the desire for kids and the financial benefits, having a reliable companion to come home to who makes your day instantly brighter is a benefit I would pay thousands of dollars a year for.
Its a strong barbell distribution. Tons of women whose mere presence will spike your cortisol, and many who will instantly relieve even the worst stress, and not too many any between.
faceh
12d ago
And I think more directly, there are many valid reasons why one should be able to find out if one's girlfriend was previously an online prostitute, too.
But that's not a right enshrined in law, and if the law DOES enshrine the right to take down all sexually explicit materials that a person previously created, its clear where the incentives will flow.
I just happen to like women more than they do, probably, while having my fair share of criticism.
I love women. Definitely in the abstract, and plenty of individual ones as well.
My boss is a woman, the majority of the attorneys and staff in the firm are women.
My best paralegal is a dude, it does so happen.
But I'm just too tuned in as to the sort of trends you're observing and what they mean to feel completely comfortable about where this is going.
And there's been an absolute rash of female judges behaving quite badly and unbefitting of their role in the Judicial system. Its annoyingly hard to try and maintain faith in said system in light of this. Justices Barrett and Kagan testifying in congress that they feel unsafe due to the heat brought towards them and their families for doing their job doesn't help.
Oh, and I am currently running a case where my client is a neurotic woman, the opposing party is a neurotic woman, who was previously represented by a neurotic woman, and is currently represented by a neurotic woman who has a neurotic woman legal assistant. I am dragging this case forward by my fingernails and billing appropriately, but its absolutely ridiculous that this whole thing could have been resolve six months ago if the people involved were willing to sit in a room together and hash it out. But that appears to be a literal impossibility due to the personalities involved.
I keep myself sane by working on my classic muscle car and driving it on the weekends to restore my testosterone reserves.
Manual labor and technical knowhow, however, are not.
Hence why slavery was a vital institution in almost every civilization for almost all of history.
We did away with that in the not all-that-distant past.
What we're seeing is looking sort of kind of like all men below a certain attractiveness threshold becoming de-facto slaves in that they are expected to provide their labor, and pay taxes into the system, but receive a decreasing amount of the benefits and are given almost no say in the political process.
To the extent you believe in the social contract, it appears increasingly one-sided.
Historically, what happens when there's too much cheap sperm around with nothing to do?
faceh
13d ago
There's a growing list of female founders/CEOs who turned out to be completely fabricating their company's relevant numbers. Even LITERAL BILL GATES' daughter.
Elizabeth Holmes is the most well known one, I believe.
She tried to use a pregnancy as a tactic to avoid the prison sentence. I repeat, she intentionally had a kid, whilst knowing she was going to be sent behind bars for a long while.
I don't think I need to add much commentary beyond that. And no, I'm not suggesting men don't commit corporate fraud! This is about accountability.
You know, I'm old enough to remember when there was an entire feminist movement devoted to letting women post their nipples on instagram. Like, there was a point in time where women were fighting to be able to (in theory) bare their breasts online and in public.
Also Slutwalks.
Just sayin'.
Its schizophrenic to say that nudity (at least, topless nudity) isn't a big deal and shouldn't come with social Disapprobation but then make a law to criminalize posting a person's nudes online.
We've got literal Porn Stars trying to get their own content removed from the internet. I'm actually somewhat sympathetic but this ultimately creates a method for one gender to remove evidence of their past behavior from easy access, and not the other.
Objectively, he hobnobbed with some incredibly smart people, some of whom openly considered him a friend.
I consider that Bayesian evidence against him being stupid, despite his lack of credentials.
Either way, those smart people had some reason to be around him, and he probably could have gotten some advice from them to further his own goals, so this doesn't really change my read.
My model of the situation doesn't have him as the genius mastermind, anyway.
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