jake
1d ago
(Also plausible: he didn't intend for it to be successful but rather a 'cry for help' suicide, banked on the guards finding him in time and then he'd maybe be moved to better conditions or his lawyer could argue for clemency from the court due to his mental distress, but it didn't work out for him that way).
This is the (darkly) funniest possible explanation. Yeah, I can believe that completely. Will share.
manually reposting links across Reddit to farm karma
To continue her work in the giant psy-op that is reddit. This isn't a trivial affair. Reddit a bastion of progressivism and a key component in their narrative machine.
For my money, I don't view Epstein as a Mossad op. I view it as a joint operation between multiple countries' intelligence services where they each found benefit.
You continue holding the idea of these people behaving in predefined ways. They don't. You think they wouldn't use an account with their own last name. Yeah, they would. I wouldn't even say it for the tin foil "Triple bluff." No, they just don't actually think about these things. Opsec is often comically bad, it just sort of works out anyway because nobody gives a shit and people are actually really good at keeping their mouths shut. Though for what it's worth, what you are describing is in fact perfect opsec, because you've convinced yourself it couldn't possibly be her.
It was. Your priors are wrong, probability has her dead to rights.
jake
1d ago
She made the account in 2006. It has her last name but connecting that would be tenuous without knowing a lot about her. Her name also isn't the meat of the allegations. It's that a weird, politically active and well-connected account had repeated lapses in activity that could be tagged to events in the life of a similarly weird, well-connected woman, the activity halting completely when that woman was arrested.
jake
1d ago
The reddit user stopped posting after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest. From what I understand, this happened well after
It did not. maxwellhill's last post was June 30, 2020. Maxwell was arrested July 2, 2020. I would wonder if claims of harassment preceding maxwellhill's disappearance were propagated from the mods who claimed they were still active in modmail when, obviously, they weren't.
"Coincidence" has no explanatory power. "Reddit-type" is just wrong. If the account were made in 2014 it might, the account was made in 2006. This indicates a different category of person. It indicates someone very savvy in tech, which Maxwell is. The probability also isn't low. Bayes favors Ghislaine. The name is one bit of information, her lapses in activity is two, or four. It's true these examples could be cherry-picked, but the question isn't only how much the stopping coinciding with her arrest increases her probability, but how much it decreases the probability of it being someone else.
For Ghislaine herself, assuming the number of all users on reddit in 2020, which best I can tell was 600 million, the probability difference ranges from being >5 million times more likely to >150 million times more likely. The lack of probability for the others says enough. But we're not looking at everybody, we're looking at a specific subset of all people who stopped using reddit. For the definition of the power-user, the most probable explanation is an involuntary stop. That means death or incarceration. If it's incarceration, it's Ghislaine. If it's death, then we consider the probable causes for death for a user who posted every single day then abruptly and completely stopped. That's an instant death. Heart attack, blood clot, accident, manslaughter, homicide, suicide. That would narrow it to deaths on June 30 and July 1, but let's say we expand it out to a week, just because. That's 5500 people.
The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero. We can round way up and say it's exactly one person. Ghislaine, or Rando, and with two options, their probability sums to 1. What's the probability Rando would be savvy enough to register an account in 2006? Probably high, given their acumen. What's the probability vs Ghislaine they would name themselves "maxwellhill?" Let's say indeterminate. What's the probability they would show similar interests? Again, probably high. What's the probability they would also have prior lapses in activity that could be tied to specific outings? Very low.
It's not 50/50, but even if it were, it's Ghislaine. It's 90/10 her favor. We rounded up so realistically it's 99/1. Super-realistically it's 100/0, which I know you can't actually say under Bayes. Fortunately in this little area of reality, we can say. It was her.
jake
17hr ago
Would mark as "bad."
Everything following "The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero" is charity extended to my interlocutor. With sub-1% chance of death and sub-1% chance of a voluntary stop, the probability of it being Ghislaine Maxwell is already over 90%.What's the probability alone of someone incorporating a bit of personal information into their reddit username? 5%? How's it change when our options for maxwellhill are Ghislaine Maxwell and person who probably doesn't exist?
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality
Every society everywhere on Earth for all history up to the 20th century exerted sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice or else it collapsed. Religious language framed what they already knew, now we don't know and today it's framed purely religiously. Christianity has kept record of its inspired line on biotruths and their peculiarities -- non-consanguineous marriage for life with many children -- you'll see certain lifestyles were discussed from frame of their harms being known in common wisdom. The lecher or the whore were already seen as contemptible, moral lessons weren't "It's bad to be a whore," everybody knew that, so they were "Divorcing your wife makes whores of both of you."
Our connection with this common wisdom withered and died in the age of rapid modernization and individualization, so some Christians, already on the fool's errand of attempting to reconcile their faith with society, could only present their opposition in heavily religiously connoting or outright religious terms. It's bad because God says it's bad, true, but that's at the top. At the bottom is "You'll sleep around in your 20s, get married in your thirties, have one kid, maybe two if you're really lucky, not deeply love your husband, divorce him when your kids are out of the house, and every cold night in your lonely bed be unwarmed by the memories of the dalliances of your youth." It will ruin your fucking life, that's why you don't do it.
Secular society moving past these doesn't come from science. If anything the scientific paradigm should be hyperfixated on healthy, responsible human sexuality. Creatures have reproduced sexually for a billion years, mammals diverged 300 million years ago, 100 years of sexual insouciance might as well not exist on the epochal timeframe yet here we are. Looking down from a period of .0000003% of the history of our biological class and with absolute sincerity and absolute lack of any awareness these people say "Yeah sex doesn't mean anything, it can just be for fun." We feel this dissonance cognitively and viscerally, it's part of the constant psychic background radiation driving everyone crazy, we engage in behavior we know instinctively as destructive and then throw cash at our best so they target their tremendous mental faculties at justifying what we can conclude from intuition and pure reason as wrong. I can only wonder what sort of writing Scott would be putting out if he'd moved to a small Jewish community in New England and married a sensible reformed girl who wanted lots of kids. I can only wonder how much of his tremendous brainpower is sequestered in its quiet battle against a billion years of evolution screaming NO NO NO NO NO!
But it's not about science, it's about greed. It's about the money and power drawn from a destabilized society, and you bet your ass it's about top-% men being able to have sex with whichever beautiful commoners they want, using them up and discarding them. I'll use the socialist's most apt phrasing, it's history's true and greatest transfer of wealth, a self-sustaining fire consuming each new generation.
jake
16d ago
Rome is the example. It failed to exert sufficient control on male avarice and turned empire. It failed to exert sufficient control on female caprice and its birthrates collapsed. When birthrates decline in an otherwise prosperous nation the cause is always the same: multiple avenues for intrasexual competition where women attain status aside from wifehood and motherhood. This started before Caesar was born as changing laws on land ownership and divorce gave women significant privilege. Come Augustus, he attempted to correct their declining population by laws that incentivized having children, but the target was wrong and the incentives were wrong. Women aren't incentivized to become mothers through extra rights, money, or praise; they're incentivized to become mothers when that's the only thing they can do.
I'm not saying this is good, because it's not, it's terrible, unfortunately it's the truth. If women didn't work, if they couldn't go to college and it was legal to discriminate against them in employment, they would be getting married and having children as soon as they could. They wouldn't have avenues for status in what university they attended and where they worked, but only in their household, in their husband and their children. Again I am not remotely saying "WE MVST RETVRN." I'm observing the facts, women are every bit as competitive as men, and every bit as good at it in their domains of competition. Add to that the broader incentive, good alma mater, good career, husband with a better career, lots of money, of course they'll put off having kids, for the individual it follows a line of perfect reason. They are acting entirely logically, for themselves. Society suffers.
Rome's collapse wasn't even that bad though, at least not compared to Weimar Germany. There, wanton greed and profligacy triple threating with Bolshevism precipitated the Nazis. But you don't need to look at them, either, you can look right now to the American black community. Relative to America as a whole, the black community has enclaves that have all but collapsed, only holding on as ample taxpayer assistance keeps them afloat. Were the assistance citizens of Baltimore received limited to what the city could extract as taxes, it would be a wasteland. What characteristics define the American black community? Male avarice and female caprice.
But even if there were no examples, it's enough to say "This was the practice of every successful group of people in history." When the most contentious and bloodthirsty, divided by mountains and jungles, arrive at a uniform conclusion on one a given subject, it's not "just-so" to point out their practice. Uniform agreement makes it the implicit paradigm and means challengers are presumed false. They didn't agree on their gods, they didn't agree on worship, they didn't agree on how they should go about ruling themselves and what should be done with foreigners, but all of them agreed about women. Note, I also didn't use it to justify the metaphysics of "they all said the gods said so," I said they used religious framing for what they already knew.
What they didn't know was how to perfect it, which Christianity did and does for its inspired understanding of biological realities, of those biotruths. You look back from the top of history and think of the chain of progress as inevitable and so you say I'm post-hoc justifying Christianity as integral, but I'm not because I also am looking at history and I can see all the instances of what happened when it was discarded. The French tried, their streets ran red with blood, and created the pinnacle of hubris Directorate, thus Napoleon. Germany tried, thus Hitler. Russia tried, thus Stalin. China never had it, thus the worst of them all in Mao. The healthiest societies are Christian because Christianity is unique in its ability to produce the greatest share of societal buy-in. Without it, assuming Muhammad still exists, either Islam conquers Europe or we get another Attila or a European Temujin and practically all of Europe is ethnically Norman, or it's German, or it's Anglo.
The Japanese have to be mentioned. They are not as healthy as the healthiest Christian civilizations, but they have the highest buy-in, they're secular and they exert sufficient controls on avarice and caprice. I've said I think they're in the perfect position by temperament and population for the coming age of simulacra, so their low birthrates may prove ideal. This is one group, or maybe almost two given how closely related they are the Koreans, and therein the interesting quality of the Koreans having those occasionally flamboyant moments of personal instability (one presidential crisis after another; also, the DPRK). Thing is, Japan would be on the precipice of a crisis if it weren't for that coming automation, but that crisis would be less than nothing to the Weimar's comparative nothing to what might come in America. White America is holding on by its bleeding fingernails, the scenario I've posted about here twice of us making it through this turmoil specifically requires the appearance and ubiquity of the relation surrogate wife-bot.
You can't have civilization without buy-in and we've pissed it away. Buy-in is the same thing for most men, the everyman who comprises the actual society. It's not money, land, fame or praise; it's children. Us wordcels can jerk ourselves into upholding civilization from pure reason, the normies think about their kids, or the kids they will have, or the kids they wish they could have. That's what makes them care, but the family is at its hardest to obtain for at least the last thousand years, and not for actual economic reasons, not for conflict or disease or famine, but because of the profit that was made in doubling the work force and because of the insatiable lusts of the "elites." We can't unfuck this. The laws and social changes that would be required can't happen without cataclysm, because we rightly don't want to enact such laws and make such changes and would only from existential necessity. That cataclysm is what's looming. If I'm wrong about the timeframe and it would take another 50 years to develop the wifebot, we won't get that far, because given another 25 years of the status quo and America will give rise to a figure who makes Mao look like a reasonable man.
You can't have young men who have no hope for the future. It is the terminal condition for civilization. You can have rampant, gross greed in the acquisition of material wealth. If young men were all still getting married, if they had to grind hard in life, but they had a reasonable domicile and they could provide for their wife and children, that would be enough for their buy-in. They don't even have that. It's what people need to understand, especially the righties who do have superior faculties at assessing danger and keep saying "one of these days, man" while the lefties correctly mock them, just for the wrong reasons. Violence will come if this isn't addressed, but it's not from us, we're not the generations who turn violent, we still have enough buy-in. We're the gap, we are the harbingers, it's the boys being born today who will reach adulthood and see a barren wasteland waiting ahead of them and they will be ready to follow anyone who says "Get your guns, we're burning everything down."
You want evidence of the inevitable end of societies that don't control avarice and caprice. You are living in it.
jake
24d ago
I think that’s also a very good counter example to all the people who say that there are no conspiracies because they are impossible to keep secret
MKUltra showed this when a couple dozen universities across the country were dosing unknowing participants with psychoactives and it took congress investigating something else to uncover it. People are in fact so good at collectively shutting up one could wonder if a separate conspiracy had anything to do with the appearance in common wisdom of "number of participants" as a weighty variable in the success of plots.
You would better serve yourself and your arguments by affirming rather than downplaying their leftism. I'll also here not take the euphemism, socialism is communism's beachhead in capitalism.
Redistribution of wealth is communist. It cuts both ways, your list includes instances where the primary beneficiaries are corporations, the policies remain communist.
I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":
Communists, as masters of duplicitous rhetoric, have done an expectedly superb job propagandizing leftist policy objectives as "common sense" and especially as "not communist" or "not socialist." They are not considered radical today because it is the way of things, but those fears named in opposition to, e.g. compulsory education, have been justified. We can't go back, so there's not a real use in invoking either their past appraisal as radical or their current view as normal.
But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.
I would agree directionally, in very strict terms. The concept of regulation is not inherently redistributive, and even in practice I don't know that many examples are redistributive, but they do often impair the market from competition and there corporations benefit.
Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.
Strictly redistributive. Communist.
Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.
The experiment was run for decades and it failed. Communist.
Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?
Compulsory education is indeed free childcare, and it is the perfect example of the myriad failures of ideology in communism:
- That inequality in outcome can be solved through money; here school funding
- That effective systems create effective people; here that good schools make good students
- That a bureaucracy can be trusted with considerable power; here that teachers are broadly competent and judicious
- That the system will fulfill its primary objective rather than be co-opted or brought to heel by superior agents; here a minor rehashing of #2, but specifically that the school exists to educate
Compulsory education as the public school doesn't actually exist to educate. It educates incidentally, just as a little less incidentally it incorporates students into the cult of the state. Its function is redistributing wealth to the bourgeoise so they don't have to either pay for childcare, accommodate flexible hours for their laborers, or worst of all, have to deal with a 50% smaller workforce and the massive leverage the laborers would gain in negotiations. All to say, the classic example of bad actors prospering from exploiting the system, here capitalism's maybe third-worst practice.
Where I would say today communist ideology has strength is cynicism toward the bourgeoise, where it fails is not showing enough, as even with the means of production seized, the bourgeoise are not made but born, agnostic to actually being of class "bourgeoise," and a communist system will inevitably be controlled by them. The best system accounts for their chronic existence and allows them to flourish in dozens of lanes of competition with each other, while exerting just enough regulation to prevent their exploitation of the commons. Communism reduces that competition to a single lane, and for that it will necessarily and always fail.
Nothing would help the working class more than our economy returning to one where only a single parent needs to draw a salary to support their spouse and children. To that end, anything Mamdani does that increases or keeps static the supply of labor will have harms outweighing all other benefits, and that's even granting that all of his other policies achieve their stated goals.
jake
20d ago
I count 3/8 accurate predictions.
◪ Non-meaningful prediction to say Israel would respond to Oct 7
☒ "Solve the Gaza Question"
◪ Non-meaningful prediction to say anti-Zionist militias would continue fighting Zionism
☑ Iran has to would respond, but splitting hairs
☑ Israel, Iran exchange strikes
☑ Would precede (US) strikes on Iran nuclear program
☒ Initiates war between Iran and Israel
☒ US drawn into war
☒ Syrian regime fell, but not as consequence of US-Iran war
☒ Iran regime change†
†Fuentes' predictions conclude it from a US-Iran war; it might happen as a result of the instability from Israel walking all over the nation's ADS and domestic security apparatus.
The meaningful prediction is strikes on Iran's nuclear program, except it was the US and not Israel, and it didn't start a war. Trump's already joking about it, and there's this meme.
Which non-communist countries would these be?
France.
Because I think the single unifying trait you are ignoring here is communism.
Definitionally atheist communism, yes. I observed nothing about China's fall, I said the worst of them all was the nation that never had Christianity to discard. This is a fact. Weimar, and especially Rome, you can't just say "Wrong." Not here.
Sure, but I could name a bunch of other ruinous traits also easily found in most countries in decline. This argument is specifically about whether it's control of women (or lack thereof) that is a unifying thread. You mentioned automation. I could mention that and a host of other economic, technological, and tribal concerns that probably figure much more prominently in any potential societal collapse than the "mistake" of letting women have sexual agency.
What do I make of every one of your responses being a mix of snide quips and "Nuh-uh"? I would make that you have personal and significant emotional investment in my assessment being wrong.
Same, mostly. I would be happy to be wrong. I don't care about these things. I want my mental model of the world to align with with the world. I have no personal investment in the actual "why" of the fall of Rome or Weimar Germany or even the decline of America. I'm American, so it affects me and I am personally invested in it stopping, but I don't attach moral significance to any particular interpretation of the decline. If it turned out the problem was in fact women's liberation not going far enough, then that's the truth. It's what I'd want it to be, mostly, I would have an ethical problem with any attempt to empirically justify abortions, but if "sexual agency" is not just a euphemism for the freedom to make terrible decisions and can actually be quantified as beneficial, then once again, that's the truth, and I'll heed it. I dislike being incorrect, if my paradigm is wrong and my interpretation for why we're in decline is wrong, then I will change them, but you gotta show me why.
I'll go a little more on this in the next paragraph but I want to take a moment to be clear. I'd resent any implication of misogyny, and you haven't done that one bit, but for anyone else reading. I truly love women and I don't mean this as the cad. I'm a guy and there are big expectations on me but none of them will ever be as important as giving birth. The woman has immediate existential value, but in that, she is predefined. She has an easier time of it because, as with almost all of them, the only mark she'll leave on the world is her children. This is true for men but not true in the same way. It's not our bodies getting pregnant, it's not our certainty of pain and risk of injury and death. It's not that the reason we exist might be exactly what kills us. The angst and the implicit body horror must be profound, especially in this paradox of it being bound with the most wonderful and beautiful thing; the maybe singular yet perfect example of something a person can't understand in theory but only if they face it. The ideal would be that sex could just be for fun, that permanent bonding was voluntary, that pregnancies were always safe and could only occur when they were wanted. The ideal would be liberation--what we've done isn't that. What we've done is pretty God-damned far from liberation.
Rome. I may be overemphasizing in saying it was the singular cause, but I am not wrong that it was a major contributing factor. Between the work of Walter Scheidel, Mary Beard, and Kyle Harper the declining birthrate can be concluded as a ranking culprit. Scheidel has the numbers of how high the mortality rates were and how women had to have a lot of children just to keep the population static. Beard, and what I said above I return to here, talks about what it meant to be a woman in Rome, what it meant to become pregnant. Every time she was risking death, and the risk was high. 1 in 50 births overall, for an individual woman, about a 1 in 10 chance she dies during childbirth. Is there any wonder she would want things different?
Harper talks about birth rates, his work is seminal, all future study should incorporate it, as he considers disease and weather. What happens when a population with underdeveloped immune systems gets hit with plague? They die. What happened in Roman history? Plague at three key junctures, or perhaps plague that made three key junctures. Except we know stable societies not only tolerate plagues, they bounce back and flourish. Assuming it doesn't wipe them out as it did in South America, but it didn't in Rome. Unoccupied land there for the taking, the demand for laborers rising and their pay and treatment improving, the political structures weakened and allowing reforms. Renaissance followed the Black Death. Rome wasn't ended by plagues because they were that bad, Rome was already weak and plagues finished them off. What made them weak? Not enough people. Even the authors who know how many mothers died in childbirth fail to observe "Well they had the choice not to, of course they took it; thus went Rome."
I condemn Weimar Germany for their last depravities. I assign no moral condemnation to Rome. Caprice is a charged word so I can't claim I've spoken on this with clinical detachment, but I've tried, and maybe failed anyway, to use language that indicates my slant. I hate the conditions that cause these choices, not the individuals who make them.
A Roman woman who had just one child and didn't want to risk death by having a second, who could find blame in her? Of the civilizations that allow women to make that choice, yes maybe they fall, but isn't that a worthy reason? Said another way, if I'm right about how societies that don't control women -- that don't force women to have babies over and over until they have enough or die -- will inevitably collapse, those societies would be completely right to refuse that control, and noble if they did so knowing what it would cost. Today, today, what do we do about the pandemic today of bastard and layabout men? Who could say today it's worth forcing women to stay with and give a half-dozen kids to men who treat them right at first only to become monsters 5 or 10 years into marriage? It's important to say this is not the rule, it's important to say this is presented as commonplace in no small reason because fearmongering is politically useful, when most men, most people, are good, or good enough. But America alone has more than 350 million people, and a percent of a percent is an unacceptable number. What do we do? The woman can divorce him, then what? Take her kids and carry on with their life-sized baggage? Does she risk that, or does she live the only way she knows, the way society today encourages, periodically coupling, while hoping to find the love of her life, eventually. Of course she'd choose the second! When those are the choices? Shit sucks, it's that simple, it just sucks.
I want this to be the better way, not being cavalier about sex, but at least not rushing to marriage, having several relationships so you can learn, or nowadays, so men and women have enough time to learn the qualities of their partners and what's best for each before they commit to each other for life so they can make more humans. I want it to be, because for the most part, this is the better way. But I can't disregard the facts in front of me just because they would mean the world is a darker place. Whatever kind of world we live in, that is the world, it doesn't change by how we feel about it, it changes when we know the truth, because it's only from the truth that we can do something about it.
jake
1mo ago
the law firm Trump sanctioned earlier this year, only to drop all sanctions against them after they eliminated DEI policies and promised to do $40 million of pro bono work for
himWhite House initiatives.
jake
16d ago
"Now, sure, every time in the last 200 years that a nation declared itself as enlightened atheists guided by pure reason they immediately proceeded with the worst atrocities yet visited upon man, but hey, what's religion got to do with anything?"
You're better than this response, not least of all because your challenges were answered and you missed it in your haste to throw down the "tl;dr lol."
Avarice is self-evidently ruinous. Caprice was explained at the top:
When birthrates decline in an otherwise prosperous nation the cause is always the same: multiple avenues for intrasexual competition where women attain status aside from wifehood and motherhood.
Left to their own devices, the majority will choose serial fleeting satisfactions rather than the long-term happiness that comes in continuing the human race by creating more people. This is capriciousness.
I do agree my jab at the end was hyperbole, but it's because my timeframe is right. Simulacra will reach ubiquity before "Generation Supercritical" reaches the age of majority and adopts them in mass. As for you calling this doomsaying, I'm deathly serious about my concerns, I don't see the flaw and I think about this constantly. If you do, if you think you have a superior understanding, if you see how we get out of this mess of young people seeing no purpose in life, especially when automation comes for everything, I'm all ears. I want to be wrong, I would want you to be right, because then all posterity doesn't hinge on this one achievement.
jake
1mo ago
If anyone thinks we can win a cold war against China without immigrant brainpower, they are out of their minds.
Depending on the amount of espionage we could in fact and quite confidently say we would win if we blocked Chinese nationals from all US STEM.
Wet streets don't cause rain, and top-ranked schools don't cause good students. If China didn't need our schools, their nationals wouldn't be here. If those Chinese geniuses are making such great contributions, they wouldn't have been let out of the country. There is an alternative explanation, which I'll address in a moment.
There were 76 million people in the US circa 1900 and they were 88% white. The American Empire followed, and it wasn't Chinese students building it. We did have a glut of Jewish talent but if anything the peak of our Empire was smaller than it would have been as their contribution was hastening the inevitable that was American victory.
There are twice as many whites in this country now, so we can also confidently say that just given a larger population there must be far more geniuses and far more overlooked geniuses. This relates to the alternative explanation, which is China does sequester their best and brightest, but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.
Anymore, be it either true success from China or paper success, there is no reason for their nationals to be allowed continued participation in US STEM. I do agree this plan will be haphazard and amateurish, but not truly indiscriminate, as their nationals in US STEM should be indiscriminately and unceremoniously expelled to the last. But we could reach a happy medium with reciprocity: they can have, given the difference in populations, 1 student in our schools for every 5 we have in theirs.
jake
23d ago
I meant nobles by birth. Brahe was a born noble, Kelvin was elevated to the peerage for his work. As with Darwin, "Son of a wealthy man" or "Son of a merchant" or especially "Son of a wealthy merchant"/"mother's father was a wealthy merchant" is a common descriptor for many great mathematicians and scientists. There is something to be said of the requirements and traits needed to become and succeed as a merchant. Serfs these were not, but no one in this forum could be said as being of "serf stock," and few if any could be found in most active discussions of politics on the internet. I would guess most people here don't ever interact with them beyond the most basic of retail and service workers.
It's like -- there was this shooting years ago at a Madden tournament. For those surprised that football video games have esports competitions, this was also news to me. It was a small tournament, but still. I knew the games sold well and yet I never actually considered it because it took hearing about that shooting to realize all along this entirely separate and parallel ecosystem existed. Many millions of people play shooters, but there's insignificant overlap between them and the many millions playing sports games.
There's insignificant overlap between people discussing politics online at all strata and the actual "serfs." The actual "serfs" have smart phones because everybody has them, but they're not arguing about human capital. It's what you've said, class as a stick, because this is really intraclass competition in form of those of supposed status sneering. You want to see the actual low class? You already know it, everybody does. YouTube comment sections, that's the parallel ecosystem where the "serfs" roam.
Guy writes fun short story. "Source?" says one, "What did he mean by this?" says another. It's a joke, c'mon.
Was this meant to be a mean joke? Sorry man, you put in too much effort and snark, so the snark itself came off as in parody and the whole thing came off as decent satire. Well done, I did laugh, you stuck the landing.
You have an obsession with class but you shouldn't. Of the top 1,000 or so achievements of humanity you will find, well down the list of its contributors, maybe one single noble by name of Tycho Brahe. It's Shakespeare, scrutiny on his identity didn't come from a fair evaluation but noble arrogance at the impossibility of a commoner having such a way with words.
I think you approach something truthful here, but only approach. You wrote this (I hope; if it's AI consider me the sad fool), you show your intelligence, you also show how deeply you consider this topic. More than some of these respondents realize, but worse, more than you yourself realize, because I think your obsession with class fogs your mind by forcing you to write off branches in reasoning and take conclusions you otherwise wouldn't. There may be something to be said about the behaviors of large groups of people, and the way that relates with their "class," who they started around, who they are around now, who they will end their lives around. But class as Banana uses it, and as you may have fallen into, is more like a religious belief, something ineffable to which you always reason back. I can assure you the progressive metaphysical beliefs of western Brahmin are just that: without substance. You use them as though they're the map while they're just making it all up.
So why not, just for curiosity's sake, reconsider one of your conclusions? Any, you know this, your subject, your choice, but after shelving class as having explanatory power and instead as detail incidental to the territory you try to see.
jake
29d ago
The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back
I once again ask that literally anyone provides me with evidence of this. Not bootstrapped citation farming and not faked x-rays. Specific, unambiguous footage of Palestinian civilians being murdered.
https://x.com/search?q=palestinian%20civilian%20shot&src=typed_query&f=media -- you won't find it here. I've looked in darker places and found nothing there, either, but I could have missed it.
What's so galling about this claim is with the volume of media coming from Palestine and the alleged frequency of the outright murder of civilians, there should be at least one glaring example. One I would have heard by specific reference as it made the rounds among judenkritikal lefties and righties alike. Instead it's always the generic, "They're shooting kids," not "They shot this specific child, here's his body, you'll notice the distinct lack of a head."
I don't give a shit about Israel, I don't want a penny going to them if we don't get a dime back and I don't want one single American dying for that flag. I just want the truth, and being told something exists when I would have seen if it did, and when I then look for it and still can't find it, makes me quite certain the videos don't exist, because the deeds they would show haven't happened, because Israel does not indiscriminately murder civilians. They do murder civilians, many civilians, as is the nature of war in casualty of their real targets. It's just that you can't allow your enemy in war to dictate how you fight. If they use human shields thinking it will save them, you shoot the hostage then the soldier, you blow up the apartment building or hospital. If those shields know with certainty they will be killed by Israel, then it's on them to put down the ones who hold them hostage, and if they don't, they get what they deserve.
It's that old chestnut, where the white supremacy of yesteryear emerges in intersectional politics that can't help but treat whites and especially white men as the only beings on this earth with full agency. The Palestinians either have agency or they don't. If they can't see that there is truly no win condition and behave accordingly, Israel should rule them.
Mr. Trump, the first convicted felon elected president, has erased ethical boundaries and dismantled the instruments of accountability that constrained his predecessors.
Quoted to make clear the journalist behind this article interprets all of Trump's actions in maximally bad faith.
Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket
A documentary made by and about Melania was acquired by Amazon for $40MM, her cut is $28MM. Higher by percent than typical EP share in cinema, but in cinema they profit from tickets.
A business entity tied to the Trumps sits on a large stash of the $TRUMP cryptocurrency and collects fees every time the coins change hands. So far, the coin has generated at least $320 million in fees, which the Trumps share with their business partners, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm.
Extrapolation from trading volume and an assumed fee. Appears correct. As for Smith:
And the crypto people are right that TRUMP and MELANIA just make the whole space look bad
Crypto has required no assistance from Trump to look bad. Smith's scenario is plausible but an extreme reach, at the value and volume it would take tens of millions to move it 10%, and it would have to keep that value until Trump's sons could sell enough to profit the intended amount of the bribe.
I do find it interesting, because I feel a quiet dissonance about Trump having a memecoin beyond the obvious issues. It's something about the aesthetic of it all, cryptocurrency has one kind of griminess to it, while politicians have a different kind of griminess, and to me, these clash. This even despite TRUMP having its namesake as a man who controls aircraft carriers, and thus it carrying more objective value than all other cryptocurrencies combined. Cue obvious issues, in no circumstances should a President profit from alternate fiat currency, and his family shouldn't either, whatever those "ties" are exactly. But if a businessman capitalizing on crypto is the only criticism of merit in this piece, it's nothing, and ultimately, those who lose on crypto get what they deserve.
The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 accused Mr. Sun of fraud, but after Mr. Trump took over the agency put its lawsuit on hold even as it dropped other crypto investigations.
The SEC under Biden opened an investigation into Sun a year ago after he invested in the Trump-tied WLF. Not difficult to see what happened here.
The luxury jumbo jet from Qatar that has been heavily featured in the news. In what I'm sure was a total coincidence, Trump announced a big AI deal with Qatar, KSA, and UAE that's almost certainly a big net-negative for the USA according to Zvi.
Hollow. They criticize because it went to Trump.
Zvi gets lost in the weeds on deeper AI questions when it's a matter of geopolitics. The oiled Arabs are beyond desperate for diversification, if they attain economic salvation it will be through AI. Terrifically easy and critical win for US diplomacy.
Congressional Republicans spent years investigating Hunter Biden, the son of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for trading on his family name to make millions of dollars, even labeling the clan the “Biden Crime Family.” But while Hunter Biden’s cash flow was a tiny fraction of that of Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, Republicans have shown no appetite for looking into the current presidential family’s finances.
Hunter Biden is a fuckup, Trump's kids aren't. Had Trump never entered politics, his eldest sons' dealings would be unsurprising . . . but this isn't a defense, because he did enter politics, and his sons run his organization and are part of his political brand. It caps your list but reading about it makes me feel like you've made an afterthought of the point deserving this entire discussion.
Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial, and son of Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, announced a $2 billion deal in the United Arab Emirates, just a couple of weeks before his father and Mr. Trump traveled there for a presidential visit.
Sitting in front of a packed auditorium in Dubai, a founder of the Trump family cryptocurrency business made a brief but monumental announcement on Thursday. A fund backed by Abu Dhabi, he said, would be making a $2 billion business deal using the Trump firm’s digital coins.
That transaction would be a major contribution by a foreign government to President Trump’s private venture — one that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family. And it is a public and vivid illustration of the ethical conflicts swirling around Mr. Trump’s crypto firm, which has blurred the boundary between business and government.
Corruption in politics is those three principled civil libertarians who care equally about all corruption and those seven zillion witches taking turns trying to cudgel each other with hypocrite. We know this, no more state of the discourse.
There are clear lines here, and it doesn't matter if it's entirely above board. If a hypothetical business in one of those countries invested two billion in a hypothetical non-political Trump org then he would visit as quickly as possible. For it to happen with the President gives the appearance of impropriety, and for the President, appearing improper is being improper.
Except impropriety isn't a crime, and I'm not sure what crime is supposed as having been committed. Now I did just say appearance alone is a problem, and if say the Soros org gave Trump a large amount of money, even if they loudly proclaimed their opposition and continued to operate antithetically to one another, everybody would be suspicious. Even still, impropriety is not a crime. What's the result? Like we might say it's improper, it is spiritually criminal, for politicians to engage in insider trading, but it's not a crime, and how many traders now profit from the Pelosi Index? It's also only spiritually criminal to lobby for and support politicians who campaign on making a kind of business illegal or regulated into insolvency while shorting those businesses and also investing in alternatives to those businesses. The Green Industry thanks them. Corruption is the game and the rules against are now only used as weapons. I will not hear appeals to convention, against Trump, the left struck first.
A person or organization can bribe a politician. The sheriff is bribed to ignore crime, the judge the same, the city manager bribed to softball a contract. I'm not so sure a country can bribe a politician. Foreigners can, but I just covered this. People who happened to be Ukrainian were bribing the Bidens so their own wealth increased. The governing body of a country? Somewhere on that path it must veer into geopolitics and diplomacy. If an entire country makes it personally worthwhile for the President to pursue better relations, what's the crime? Their accepting of gifts? To what end? Favoring them in policy? If it harmed US companies that would be a crime. If it harmed companies in other countries? I think they should have made a better offer. The President is America, and no length of litany of "incompetence" applies to the man who gains that office. Even if in his later years he sharply deteriorates and someone else holds the pen, he still first made himself electable. I say this because these are men with a special quality of judgment, and an emissary delivering a horde of gold unto the king might make him very interested in that country indeed.
The Bidens saw only money. Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma and the US relationship with Ukraine has brought hell to that country. The real crime of the Bidens' corruption isn't the impropriety of taking money from foreigners. There is a crime, but the rote ho-hum sort, of taxpayer dollars being pilfered out of Ukraine and then funneled into private coffers. Taxpayer dollars are already pilfered into private coffers, so this isn't unusual, just elaborate. Their real crime matches whatever degree of their involvement in the greater machinations behind all those young men dead in holes from kamikaze drones.
What of the Trumps' impropriety? And while one final time it is impropriety by our standards, I'm just not sure it's corrupt. These aren't sinecures for Junior and Eric, these aren't private businessmen buying access in interest of their own wallets. These are governments, who may well have bought access to the President, but who are acting in the interest of their peoples. So it might have also been for Ukraine, sometime, someplace. In theory. But those involved aren't state department spooks running a color revolution. It's Trump walking on stage and talking about his hopes for the region and asserting et refrain their right of self-determination. We're investing, American businesses are investing, Trump's organization is investing in these countries. If economic flourish results, if Trump Tower & Resort Jeddah becomes a beloved destination, where's the grift? If his efforts at enduring peace and prosperity in The Middle East succeed, what will history care if his motivation was personal wealth?
I'm often blinded by my optimism, but I know I see better than Peter Baker here, who is blinded by hate. Or I should hope he is, because I can respect that. If that article came out of pure cynicism, I know as fact I'm right.
A bold response, Jake, "Trump is corrupt but actually that's a good thing."
jake
14d ago
I know little on autism diagnoses. I have a cousin who might be autistic, and then also one friend who is autistic, she's a former FTM who transitioned ~2011, married a man at about the same time and they're still together, moved out of the country and detransitioned a few years later. She's appreciably different from any of my other friends, especially compared to the ones who describe themselves as on the spectrum, but she and I mostly swap pictures of our dogs and I've had some burning questions, assuming you don't mind answering:
- Did you read much as a child? If so, what?
- You mention childhood hallmarks of social issues, did you have few friends? One best friend? Are you friends still? How long have you known your oldest friend?
- Are you attracted to the opposite sex? When did you first notice?
- And this one's just angled at MLP; have you ever read or watched Japanese shoujo? If yes, had you before MLP?
jake
1mo ago
You could see this playing out in modern satire, or satire in modern intrigue fiction. The BBB has sections in it, Stephen Miller's posted on this, expanding the authority of the executive in deportations. It would go, the media will care more about the Trump-Elon alliance breaking and Elon's very public tantrum than something dastardly buried in the bill, so fake a fight, and go loud and brash so it's not "insider sources" but the men themselves who force the story. Bill is passed and signed, Trump and Musk post a picture shaking hands with the caption "lol pranked" and the administration proceeds with using whatever new authority they've been granted.
But that is (probably) not how the world works, and I think @nopie has described the truth of it.
There's a fair criticism of pickiness, and not to put unspoken words in your mouth but if you're implying it, you're only implying it, that the righties wouldn't want the chainsmoker at the bar. A lot of those young men are picky, but it's turnabout from the woman being more picky. Not to cast blame here because there isn't blame, the behavior from both sexes results from society. But blaming society is also a folly, might as well blame the sun for rising, for the good it can do to change it.
You're right and you're wrong. We're in the most narrow slice between past and future where you will approach rightness. Some of these men couldn't get dates if they were born 10 years earlier, or 20, 30, 40, 50--except far enough back and then things change, because dating is a hyper-modern activity, as is equally the degree of autonomy that men and/but far more women, have in romance. Go far enough back and dating doesn't exist, it's courtship, a bit farther back and courtship lands between betrothal and marriage. Farther back and it's pure arranged marriage, and far enough back and it's men dragging women and girls away from the primitive domiciles of their slain husbands, brothers, and fathers.
That violence is so relevant. Most men never reproduced, each of us is the legacy of those few who had many wives and many children. Because those were the traits of our most ancient forefathers, this urge courses through our veins. We're happier and better as couples, but even while you are (I assume) a married man, and to cast no aspersions, I assume you still notice the beautiful waitress, or young woman at the gym or working as a paralegal. You're not blind, you appreciate it viscerally because it's biological. Or maybe you're better than me, which I probably believe myself; wiser, more mature, and you actually don't really think about it. Still you would understand generally men are like this, even the most faithful of husbands.
Most women did reproduce, but up until the 20th century, pretty much no women anywhere on Earth -- not enough to change the behavior of the sex -- had a choice in who would be the father of their children. Men ravished, women were ravished. This is our nature, it is what our environments selected. There was never environmental pressure nor enough advantage conferred for men, as a sex, to apprehend some ineffable and holistic quality of "wife and mother material" beyond the purely physical. She's young, she has wide hips and nice breasts, good enough. Equally, there has never been a reason for women to acquire the mirror of that trait, just as men didn't get to reproduce, women didn't get to choose not to.
Then very, very suddenly, for the first time in the history of our species, most women became the ones who chose. I don't like a lot of the points I could branch to from here, but what is certain is that no less than 50% of women simply lack the good judgment to make that decision, and oh boy is that rate identical for men. See I don't think the damage is autonomy itself, not dates, not those men who can't get dates. The damage comes from a beast of many facets, all of them culture, but the cruelness in its eyes is named fictive love and soulmate. Women look for it, men look for it, who gets it?
Based on divorce rates, the answer seems to be not very many.
jake
11d ago
and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
By the way, and I should have said this back at Christmas, but alas. I'd say the probability of your assessment of Ramaswamy falsely professing belief is very high now. I won't go all the way, not because I mind admitting being wrong, you can treat this as my admission of being on the wrong side of assessing him, but because it's not my place to say on this whether someone believes what they say. "He's given adequate reason to doubt him," yes. I do think one of my arguments holds up, that a more competent actor would have found a way to say it without lying, because he dropped a few poorly chosen words on an issue and got himself banished to Ohio.
Yeah, what happened in China after that? With all that American-educated Elite Human Capital™ the country must have flourished.
The quasi-westernized person of color raises hackles at the truth because his world swings upon the selective white humility he doesn't recognize as racism. Those WASP "EHCs" are sadistically racist, they're just so good at obfuscating it the person of color, only familiar with the boorish sort of racism from his countrymen, mistakes it for humility. Every measure of their ostensible praise is patronization, you cannot sing in their peculiar timbre the delights of folks of color without feeling to the marrow that infinite satisfaction in certainty of superiority at being born white. The most belligerent Xitter 1488-er can't begin to apprehend such intrinsic belief in white supremacy. I'll hold up my media literacy certificate and put on my serious hat, have you seen the movie Get Out? It's 104 minutes of literally this point. I digress. He knows the boorish racism and he conflates it with what he sees in America, not as substantive argument but as an appeal to aesthetic and a subconscious plea to mother and father WASP EHC to intervene. Unfortunately for him, though fortunately for greater discourse, the surging right no longer cares about being impugned by aesthetic.
I myself, as an enlightened centrist, never cared.
So you bring out the typical and lazy responses. "Cousin Trevor" or "Cousin Billy Bob" no, it's not the pejorative strawmen about people in very blue-collar occupations or the perpetually unemployed indolent who would have a spot at MIT if only they kept out foreigners. It's about what we know for a fact:
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All compulsory American education is weighted against white male students
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All non-vocational institutions of higher learning in the US are weighted against white male students
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All STEM employment in the US is weighted against white male applicants
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And I'll throw in a corollary #4, US corporations hire vast numbers of Indians because, chiefly, it's the closest thing to legal slavery
Nobody is saying the physics genius with a special understanding of reality is being kept out. Men of such stature are defined by their persistence in the face of adversity, they will get in, whatever it takes. What we are saying is most men don't know their calling, they choose a career and it becomes their calling. There are men who feel no calling to medicine but who would have made superb surgeons, same with civil engineers or simply as research assistants. But they've gone through #1 and they're in the process or they've finished #2 and they see #3 rushing toward them and they choose a field or employer where the hostility of modernity toward them appears least present. 70 years ago a bunch of men weren't doing nothing, "twiddling their thumbs" while they waited for Computer Science to exist. They chose among the options they had, and now there are many options.
Here's a question, how many South and East Asians now work at Microsoft? Here's another question, what's going on with Windows 11?
Fuck me, look at the output of that Elite Human Capital™!
I wonder why white guys might second-guess a job at Microsoft. Aside from knowing they'll have to make it through the gauntlet of interviews where, again, the policy is "Come up with literally any reason possible to not hire white men." In the rarity they do get hired, their reward is working with and for South Asians, Indians, who will only promote other Indians. "They should just deal with it." No, they just take low-visible-prestige jobs in small outfits and regional corporations with comparable compensation given massively lower costs of living and real estate. And some of them are unspecific geniuses, because there are more than 350 million people in this country and even at third sigma above that's quite a few. They didn't all go to Ivies, and they aren't all in STEM.
You know what else? Some of those Americans, all of them not just the geniuses, will have lost spots at universities in favor of Chinese or Indian or whatever other country's nationals, and I can provide you the exact number of acceptable instances for that to happen, the country over, totaling every student at every institution: zero.
America exists for Americans. If a Chinese national good enough on academic merit for Harvard wants to come here, renounce his citizenship, and pledge to help us root out CCP spies, by all means take him. Pay for everything, give him a pile of gold, we want him, he is elite. Objectively, for a university to take a Chinese national over an American and provide them with qualifications they take back home is a cost that will not be recouped. That is the rule, we do benefit from elite talent coming to this country as long as they stay. The experiment of taking in foreign nationals and sending them out with an American education in some hope of our later benefit has been an empiric failure. For decades almost every aspiring Mexican Technocrat got a US education, shall we check in on how we've both benefited?
(I'll let you imagine the cartel-chainsawed corpses.)
I will compliment you, though. By commenting here you prove yourself more astute than Hanania. He is a person who is notable in this sphere solely for being notable. He was relatively early on X, and that is the only compliment he could get from me, because if he fielded his ideas here first they would be trashed, because he did field them here years ago and they were trashed. I would trust him quoting you over you quoting him. The follower count is no endorsement, EHC knows this, many such cases.
I think a point you stake a claim on doesn't necessarily withstand scrutiny.
Epstein wasn't a pathological liar. He was a sociopath who lied when it suited him, that's not the same as compulsive lying. For your examples, he was lying to ingratiate himself with higher social circles. He also maintained his fortune, and as you said, he left it in the hands of professionals. That's proof that he had an honest assessment of himself, not one overblown as we would expect from other sorts of behavioral pathologies. It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.
You then stake on the idea of intelligence agencies not working with liars and conmen, that's exactly what they do. Treachery, betrayal, is considered the gravest sin. The lowest circle of the Inferno, the ice is full of traitors. What has the US done, time and again? Turned spies against their country of origin. If the US government can find a reason to trust someone who commits the gravest sin below treachery to God, no doubt with as little slack as they're given, they can find a reason to trust a guy who lied at parties and fumbled around early in his career. It's an idea from how the world should be, or an idea from how the world operates in fiction about spies. None of what you describe of his background is specifically disqualifying for his use as an asset. The question is the link, whether his connections make sense, or the impact, whether blackmail makes sense.
Israel, as a state, knows history isn't over, and they act like it. They're operating from a timeline looking to the end of the century and the next. Having the US as an enduring ally is an existential requirement, just as is keeping every country around them unstable until they have enough of a technological edge to assert permanent regional supremacy. They have reason to run a perpetual blackmail machine, including targeted those who appear to be on their side. Appearing like it isn't enough when the game is whether your country keeps existing. It could be, as @Quantumfreakonomics wonders, that for some it was a carrot, and others a stick. It could be that the stick becomes a carrot. Once they've got you on tape fucking one 17 year old, what's ten more? And on that note, you think the sorts of guys hearing about Sex Monster Island aren't aware of the power of the jews in America? They'd notice if they never saw any other jew. I'm reaching here, but you've also reached in looking for benign explanations. Like with Epstein's death, you start with the frame of suicide, so you make the explanation for why. I would ask, given what we know about his life and how often men like him skirt justice, is it probable that rather than torching literally any VIP he could draw from the list of flights, he instead just killed himself? It's not.
There is also maxwellhill. Ghislaine Maxwell had a prominent hand in the general psy-opping of the giant psy-op that is Reddit. She was, maybe still is, an intelligence asset. What was Epstein, then?
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