MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
The biggest argument in favor of EDKH, and the reason I endorse a (mild) version of it, is that it was predictive, and already existed prior to its occurring, giving the authorities every opportunity to prevent it. Almost all conspiracies are post-hoc rationalizations that look at the facts and then concoct a theory to retroactively explain the events. But EDKH predicted it ahead of time. Everyone knew that Epstein had dirt on famous and powerful people. We still don't know exactly who, you can't point to any one specific person and say for certain that they went to Epstein's island AND committed crimes while there: anyone who visited might plausibly not have known exactly the details (they might have come expecting sexy 18 year old prostitutes and been shocked and offended when offered an underage one, or Epstein might have known their temperment and offered exclusively legal and willing prostitutes to certain members.) In fact I would be shocked if there wasn't at least one person who physically went to the island and yet committed no crimes there. But there were lots who did, and some of them are probably politicians, and each has a large incentive to want him dead before he can spill the beans. And we knew this and they should have had him on extra super suicide watch as a result. He was one of the most at risk and most important prisoners in the last century. I don't care if they had to have a guard paid to literally sit outside his cell and watch him 24/7, it should have been completely and utterly impossible for him to die via any cause, even a heart attack, without immediate intervention.
The reason I believe EDKH conspiracy is because Epstein is dead, and if there wasn't a conspiracy he should be alive. Now, in a literal sense I think the most likely scenario is that Epstein physically did kill himself with some sort of deal with the powers that be regarding his legacy or heirs or something or other, and then they had the prison warden turn a blind eye. The reason I don't think this falls afoul of the Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories is exception D that scott points out in his article:
D. All else being equal, small conspiracies are likelier than big conspiracies. A cult may take over a town without the average person knowing it; it would be more surprising for them to take over a country.
I don't think this requires a lot of people to actually be in on it. Possibly as few as three: one politician, one highly ranked prison officer (not necessarily the top, but high enough to pull some strings), and Epstein himself. Politician gives the go ahead wink wink nudge to the officer, officer arranges the schedules, residence, and guard patrols, and temporarily disables a camera, and then Epstein hangs himself with no witnesses in exchange for whatever the politician promised. It's likely that it was a little more involved, there were probably a lot of politicians on his list who gave tacit approval or wink wink nudge nudge when big politician says he'll "handle it". A bunch of guards might have been suspicious about the slightly unusual orders they received. But most of them don't need to be directly involved or have any incriminating details with which to whistleblow, just conspiracy theories of their own. Even the stronger version where Epstein was literally murdered only requires one additional person: the assassin, who has obviously strong incentive not to whistleblow themselves.
This is important because Epstein had important information. I firmly believe that the real Epstein list was in his head. Any physical list is going to be something like "visitors" to the island which is suspicious but not incriminating enough to act on. Without Epstein's testimony we have no way to distinguish stupid people who wanted to have creepy but legal fun with young adult girls, sex offenders who had sex with underage girls, and national traitors who had sex with underage girls and then got blackmailed by Epstein into abusing their political power for him. They're all going to get away with it. Even if his death involved no conspiracies at all I still want everyone we can possibly verify as responsible to at minimum lose their jobs, and probably go to jail for criminal negligence. He should not have died and we knew he would anyway, before it happened, and yet it still happened. That's why you should care.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I'm generally sympathetic, but even if your utility function has a straight 0 for the welfare of bums, you still have to account for second order effects of any policies you implement on ordinary people.
Simply displacing them immediately runs into public goods dilemmas. If you don't want them in your neighborhood so you bus them a couple miles East, then they start harassing the people who live there. But then your neighbor doesn't want them in their neighborhood so they bus them a couple miles West and they're your problem again. Now you both have the same number of bums but you're both paying extra for wranglers and bus fares for no net benefit.
Massive jail terms for small misdemeanors runs into issues with non-bums who occasional have small misdemeanors. You get drunk at a bar and your asshole buddy who's supposed to be the DD bails and leaves you stranded so you try to walk home but fall asleep on the sidewalk. Or your spouse cheats on you and you find out while in public and start yelling at her. Or a bum starts assaulting you and you defend yourself but the police end up arresting both of you and both end up in trouble. Ordinary and sympathetic people get in trouble with the law way way way less often than bums, but it's not unheard of. It's not as if the laws are perfectly just and you, by being a good person, are automatically immune to ever getting in trouble with it. If you get a 5 year jail penalty for something stupid it could ruin your life, which is why small things normally carry small penalties.
If you straight up genocide the bums you run into huge PR problems, human rights violations, and again, the opportunity for this to sometimes happen to regular people.
There are sophisticated, intelligent, and probably effective solutions that people are unwilling to do, such as escalating penalties for repeat offenders (much more than whatever they do now). But then it DOES matter what the solution is, because bad solutions are bad, even for you.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
My go to strategy as a kid was to walk through the library looking for Unicorn stickers (which signaled fantasy) in the children and/or young adult section (and later the adult section when I became a teenager). And then look at the cover, read the synopsis, and pick out books that sound interesting. (I eventually picked up intuition based on the cover art too, since that's correlated with... something something target demographic and sub sub genre, but I can't really articulate any of that in words other than to avoid books which look too much like other books you've read and disliked, and try to read books that look like other books you really liked).
However this was like 20 years ago and I have no idea to what extent the woke has penetrated fantasy. And also don't know what your niece's preferred genres are. So my actual advice is 1: have her just browse through the library and pick things out, and 2: don't be afraid to go slightly over age range. A Precocious 9 year old can handle books intended for 14 year olds, they're unlikely to have anything truly inappropriate, it's mostly an issue of word complexity and character age.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
I score INTJ half the time and INTP half the time, so I'm like right on the threshold of J/P, but the INT are pretty strong.
It is obvious that it's NOT just pseudoscience (in the way that astrology is), otherwise we wouldn't see so many real correlations. Also every woman I've ever been seriously interested in beyond surface level attraction, including my wife, has been INTx.
What it isn't is some sort of scientific causal phenomenon where your brain is somehow biologically born as one of these types and they then cause you to exhibit external behaviors. It's a classification scheme. A compression algorithm. It asks you how introverted, extroverted, emotional etc etc you are in a bunch of ways and then condenses that into four letters so you can communicate more concisely without sharing your entire 50 question response with everybody you meet. I can just say "INTJ" and someone else says "INTJ" or "INTP" and I'm like "oh, we probably have a lot in common" and then we do.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
There's an important distinction between a person speaking to masses on behalf of or as a representative of their employer, and someone who merely happens to be an employee speaking their own opinions as a private individual in a context unrelated to their job, and having activists dig up their messages and threaten the company over them.
It is an imposition of government power to prevent an employer from firing an employee for their private speech, but not an authoritarian one. It is also an imposition of government power to prevent an employer from firing an employee for being the wrong race, and yet most of us would agree that is appropriate. It is worth it for the government to intervene and restrict freedoms if those restrictions create more freedoms as a result. In this case protecting the ability of people to speak and not be mindslaves to the megacorps (and the activists who cherry pick people to bring to their attention).
And in a game theoretic way the corporations will actually be better off this way! If corporations were legally prohibited from firing employees for first amendment protected speech when that speech was made outside of the workplace, then no activists would have any incentive to boycott or threaten the company for refusing to fire such individuals. They wouldn't be able to get anything out of it, and if they try to accuse the company of tolerating bad speech, because the company could simply point to the law and use that as an excuse and so their reputation wouldn't suffer and they wouldn't be forced to fire their otherwise competent and well behaved employee. Win-win for everyone except the mob.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8d ago
It's not the initial cause that rubs me the wrong way, it's the response. If someone's response to any scenario is to passive aggressively threaten to leave then I would tell them to not let the door hit them on the way out.
If, after having read a decent sampling of the overall posts here, you feel that this is a good place but one guy is kind of a jerk to you once, then argue back or just ignore him. There's no need to try to guilt trip the rest of us into apologizing on his behalf or berating him or begging you to stay. If it's actually something outrageous and bannable, report it and wait for the mods. If not, ignore it and engage with the rest of the community. Don't let yourself get One-Guyed.
If, after having read a decent sampling of the overall posts here, you feel that the overall culture is not to your taste then just leave. You don't need to threaten it, and if you're brand new then you don't need to announce it. Nobody will notice or care. Don't try to guilt people into feeling bad that they could have had one more person if we were a completely different kind of place that catered to that one person's tastes.
If, after reading one message by one person, you assume that the overall culture is not to your taste based on that one experience then either lurk more or leave if you can't be bothered to do that.
I'm all for making this an open and welcoming place that lets people come here and engage with ideas and discussions. But (and I've made similar arguments about this in regard to dating profiles) negative filters aren't automatically a bad thing. Our goal is not to maximize the total number of people, but to optimize some balance between quantity and quality. Which means when someone sees this place and decides "this isn't for me" and leaves that's actually a good thing for us because we don't want people here who don't like what we are. Within reason, of course, we're not tautologically perfect and having more people would probably be better. But I'm not going to complain if some people self-select themselves out for petty reasons, that just means they were petty people and we don't need to stoop down to cater to that in order to retain them even if it succeeded at retaining them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9d ago
Meh. If someone's so thin-skinned that their response to "you don't know the context" is a passive aggressive "sorry to disturb you I'm leaving and never coming back" instead of lurking more and/or digging through to find context, or at bare minimum shrugging off the critique and ignoring it, then they're probably not a good fit anyway.
I don't think threats to leave, from new people, or old people, or in real life, should be met with begging "no please stay." That sets a bad precedent. As a matter of principle I think you call the bluff and either they stay or they leave and it's a win-win either way.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9d ago
That's probably fine though, because the image you build in your head will be built on the implicit stereotypes that you derive from reading their words. Which means that if you subconsciously ascribe certain properties to someone here based on how you imagine they look, those properties will likely be accurate. You're essentially going Words -> Impression -> Imagined Appearance -> Impression rather than going Appearance -> Impression and biasing your perceptions (the way everybody does in real life).
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
What's the best Disney sequel movie? I've watched basically all of the classics at some point in my life, but there's a bunch of stuff like Cinderella 2 or Mulan 2 that I just assumed were cash grabs based on the popularity of the original, and never bothered watching because I didn't think they'd be worth the time and the original movie closed its story on its own without needing continuation.
Is this assumption universally true, or are there exceptions? Am I wisely saving my time and money, or have I been sleeping on the hidden gem Aladdin 2: Electric Boogaloo?
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
We are experimenting and learning and inventing. Every modern AI is a brand new prototype, mass released to the public only because of how interesting and useful they are despite their newness.
Nearly every new invention is massively overpriced compared to its long term potential unless the "invention" is a refinement of an old invention optimized specifically for its affordability. Cars used to be crazy expensive luxury goods, now they're expensive but affordable staples of modern life, much cheaper than trying to walk across the country on the Oregon Trail. The literal first refrigerator was vastly expensive as the inventor prototyped it out without a factory to stamp them out, now everyone has one. The first GPT-4 quality LLM was vastly more expensive to design than GPT-4 quality LLMs will be 10 years from now. We have no idea where AI intelligence will plateau, and we have no idea what cost it will asymptote towards over the next few decades as people discover more and more efficient methods and technologies. Current quality is merely a lower bound, and current costs are an upper bound, not the true long term potential, and probably not anywhere close.
The answer to every (non-safety) criticism of AI is that we're not there yet. But we're getting somewhere.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
How do I respond without sounding like an asshole....?
It's a combination of things which just make life easier. The positive traits, near-synonyms but not quite, are things like being kind, generous, quiet, agreeable, un-argumentative, untroublemaking. These are almost universally positive traits unless you happen to enjoy arguments and rambunctious trouble-making and think such a person would be boring. I find them to be wonderful traits, some of which I share in common.
The riskier way of putting it, and I caveat this by saying she was already this way when I met her and not beaten or threatened into this, is that I can always get my way. In more wholesome cases this is simply her being indecisive and not having strong preferences, so when we go shopping for food she wants me to choose what we're going to cook that week. Both because she wants me to like, and so that she doesn't have to make up her mind. She'll still veto things that she doesn't like or we've already had recently, but then she wants me to think of something else. When we want to play a game she wants me to decide what we're going to play. Again, when she has a preference she'll speak up, but the majority of time she's just happy if I'm happy so I can do stuff.
In more conflicting scenarios, she's is afraid of conflict and will typically end up backing down given any level of pushback on any idea. Now, she's at a level of submissiveness that's unhealthily too far, we've been working through building her self-confidence and getting her to stand up for herself, both to me and to others. But when push comes to shove I can, at any time I choose, put my foot down and win any argument simply by insisting. Calmly and rationally, I don't have to get mad and threaten, I try really hard not to take advantage of this and only do it when I genuinely think I'm right and my decision will be best for both of us. The only real example I can think of is one time she wanted to get this giant tattoo on her back and I though it looked kind of tacky and gross, and although it's her body I was going to be the one to see it the most often, more often even than her, so I said I didn't like it and she shouldn't get it. While the argument was not pleasant for either of us, she didn't get the tattoo, and I'm still confident that was the right choice for both of us. And, importantly, it's not a recurring argument that keeps coming up with her harassing me about how I won't let her do what she wants or something.
And such scenarios are incredibly rare because we rarely argue in the first place. Because she naturally inherently wants to please me and it makes her happy when I'm happy and make decisions for us. It's just convenient and simple and easy. And she's still a person with preferences, she runs around decorating the house with flowers and animal-shaped pots and dragon figurines. But the docile is about... voluntary hierarchy. I did not ever ask to be put at the top, in charge of the household. I didn't ever even ask or attempt to be there. She does not feel comfortable or safe unless someone is above her to make the important decisions when she gets to stressed out to think clearly, and I comfortably slot into that role. Once there, having a clear and mutually acceptable hierarchy clearly established leads to a lot less ambiguity or conflict that other couples seem to have as both of them jockey for top position. You can't have a Democracy with two equal citizens: someone has to break ties.
Well, "we as a culture" don't ever fully agree on anything. A hundred voices are screaming a hundred different things, and the truth is lost in the noise.
Some people are telling the truth, and some people are not. But these signals are not all received equaly. But collectively, the average socially acceptable advice given by the mainstream media and by middle aged women to their younger colleagues tends to be feminist nonsense. And then a lot of young men, seeking not to give good long term advice but instead to get an easy lay, are giving the advice that they want women who are easy and sleep with them immediately. And the women believe them and become "popular", but nobody wants to marry them and the men get bored and leave. This in turn causes them to doubt advice from men and listen more to the feminists.
The problem isn't quite as simple as men saying what they want and women spitting in their faces. The scenario is older men saying what they want, younger men saying what they want short term and pretending it's long term too, older women who've been burned by this spitting in the faces of both, and then younger women watching this exchange and then eventually following the older women, possibly after getting burned once or twice themselves.
I think a third factor is that women are no longer as much expected socially as they probably were in the past to have the kind of men-pleasing, friendly, docile personalities that a large fraction of men find sexually desirable, which explains part of men's motivation problem.
This. 100% this. I spent many years on dating platforms and saw hundreds and hundreds of young women who were just.... unlikable. Shallow, prideful, promiscuous, and just generally masculine. The number one lie that modern feminism has sold to women is that the male gender role is what defines success: money, strength, ambition, stubbornness, ruthless competitiveness, etc. Men had all of those and that was oppressive and if a woman wants to be successful she needs to have all of those. And women believe this and become strong independent faux-men and don't even try to be good women. To be clear, I think it's acceptable if a woman naturally inherently through her own preferences wants to be ambitious and strong and all that. But that doesn't make her an attractive dating partner, and more importantly we shouldn't have a nation-wide psy-op trying to brainwash young girls into becoming this because they were born too feminine or something. And we shouldn't lie to girls and tell them that masculinity is attractive. If we as a culture openly and honestly told young women what men actually want a lot of them would become more feminine on purpose because they like men and want to be attractive to men.
I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her. But now she's not in the pool anymore. This is not a generalizable solution because there aren't enough of them to go around.
Well, this can still be corrected without resorting to biological birthrights. That is, the community can encourage and educate (or pressure and threaten, if we're not mincing words) people who seem to be slacking off and not contributing in good faith. You're supposed to, of your own volition, do the best you can. But if you aren't doing that people can notice and call you out for it. And this can be done in a nice way "hey, I notice you are really good at cooking and whenever you make soup everyone loves it, why don't you do that more?" or in a mean way "You don't seem to respect others or want to contribute, because you keep ignoring the previous ten conversations we've had about this. This is not Godly behavior and you need to re-evaluate your priorities if you want to remain a member in good standing."
And sometimes this leads to conflict and drama and politics. Our one pastor ended up getting kicked out by the Elders for reasons that aren't quite clear to me because they didn't publicize all the drama, and I don't think was anything particularly scandalous in non-church terms, I think it was some combination of them not liking his preaching style and him getting worked up and yelling at people when he got angry or something (This was told to me second hand by my parents, so it's not like he was going off on people in public, but apparently it was bad enough to contribute to his removal). But my point is that there are still all the normal corrective measures of a community. When someone does wrong other people can push back. Everyone should fulfill a role to the best of their ability, and should be pressured if they're not fulfilling a useful role, and none of that requires the role be based on their gender, race, or perceived social class except indirectly as those influence their abilities and preferences. Your role is a combination of your abilities, desires, AND the needs of the community. The problem was not that it was a women or someone else's role to read poems in a corner instead of bringing chili and your father falsely slotted himself into that role in place of them, the problem was that this was not a useful role that anybody needed to fulfill.
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
I grew up in what I would consider a sane, earnest, evangelical church. Conservative-ish, but clearly more progressive than what you describe here.
We were taught about duties and obligations, but without the racism or sexism or inherent birthright class that you cannot escape from. Your role is determined by your talents. You should serve others in the best way you can based on what you're good at, because God designed each person to be unique and made them good at different things, therefore they naturally slot into different roles. The Parable of Talents was frequently taught, and metaphors were made to parts of the body, which each serve a different function but all collectively contribute to the whole. Another version of this was "Godly Gifts". Some people have the "gift of giving" which means they have a talent which allows them earn lots of money and donate to others in need (the church/missionaries, general charity, or just people who they meet who are struggling and need help). Some people have the "gift of leadership" which means they have social skills and can organize events or manage tasks. Some people have the "gift of service" meaning they are good at and/or enjoy doing tasks that help people like volunteering at soup kitchens or picking up litter or helping an old lady repair her house. Some people having "gift of caring" which usually means childcare, helping at a nursery or donating free babysitting. It's not your role as a man or a woman to do all of the things that society coded to be appropriate for your gender, it's your role as a Christian to love your neighbor as yourself, and to demonstrate that love in the best way you could based on your knowledge of yourself what the best way for you to effectively help people. If men and women statistically happen to have different talents most of the time, then most of the time the roles they filled would be largely gendered. But if you happen to be an outlier and be good at a role more typical of the other gender then that is something to be celebrated, not punished. I remember going with my Dad to help repair a fence and every single person on the repair team was male. One time we went to paint a house and everyone was male except one woman who came with her husband. 90% of the people on nursery duty during church were female, but ~10% were male, because that's the proportion of people who volunteered. When we were old enough my brothers and I were encouraged by our parents to volunteer in the nursery at least once so we could try it out and see if we liked it. We didn't, so didn't go back, but that's entirely the point. Your gender is correlated with your talent, but your talent and choice determines your role.
General duties and proscribed behaviors were similarly fair and general. Women should dress modestly and avoid tempting men into sin because everyone is supposed to dress modestly and avoid tempting others into sin, and everyone is supposed to resist that temptation as well. It happens to be the case that men are more prone to temptation and modern society normalizes women dressing less modestly to take advantage of this, but it is a shared duty and a man dressing immodestly is considered equally bad even if in practice the issue rarely came up. When the Christian summer camp I went to had issues with complaints about the teen girls wearing bikinis being immodest, and their attempts at mandating more modest female swimwear didn't quite work, they implemented a rule that everyone had to wear a T-shirt in the pool, because they didn't want to make an unfair rule that only affected the girls.
This is what social conservativism is supposed to look like. It's stupid and wasteful to force people into a mold that they don't fit. To take a man who loves taking care of children and tell them "you were born in the wrong body, you have to work instead" and take a woman who is intelligent, ambitious, and has dreams of becoming a lawyer and tell her "Careers are for men, go raise children." Just take both of them and suggest that they marry each other. They can collectively fulfill the role of creating a happy healthy family and contributing to society. The team is healthy. Why does it matter which genitals are held by the person doing each subtasks as long as the job gets done? As long as people consider themselves part of an organization (The body of Christ, or just society in general), are aware that their general role is to help that organization effectively, and make sure that they are contributing to those needs to the best of their ability, then the jobs will get done. Someone will grow the food because some people are born with the talent and/or desire to work on farms. Someone will clean the house and prepare food for the family because some people actually like those things, and some people just dislike it less than their partner. And usually that will be the wife because usually women like those things more, but if a husband and wife agree to do it differently then by all means do it differently. And if nobody genuinely wants to do it then one of you has to step up and do it anyway because it needs to get done and, if you both genuinely love each other and are being good Christians then you'll want to serve the other person.
I agree with you that conservative converts lack this. But it's not the gendered or class based norms that are missing, it's the authentic (and/or socially expected/pressured) love for others and your community. The team mentality. It's hard to devote your life to just take care of kids and not earn money if nobody else is giving you money, you'll starve. It's hard to work a bunch and leave your kids in daycare if the daycare is some faceless organization with 30 rotating and misbehaving kids rather than the local mom you know and trust from church with four kids of her own who your kids grow up with and become best friends with. It's hard to help the homeless man get back on your feet by letting him sleep on your couch for two months if he's a drug-addicted kleptomaniac who might shit under your sofa and rob you blind rather than the guy you know and trust from church who everyone vouches is hardworking but lost his job due to the economy. And then ten years later when you fall on hard times he hands you a check for $10,000 because he worked hard and got a job and is doing fine now and remembers how you helped him recover. You can't do that if everyone is always out for themselves and only interfaces through official, bureaucratic, profit-maximizing corporations. You have to have love.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
If each and every one of the twelve "normal" dudes is actually normal, middle of the bell curve in terms of criminality, then yeah it's going to be much safer, although it's still a non-negligible risk factor. Ordinary people can get violent if they're acting to protect their children from what they perceive as a threat (and rightly so in many cases). If instead they're chosen randomly from the distribution, then out of a dozen men you're going to get several on the low end of the bell curve. Given that 9% of men end up going to prison, you're likely to get one being an actual criminal who just hasn't been caught yet. Who might then act violent towards the others and get them pulled into trying to fight back in an attempt to protect themselves, the woman, and/or the child. Modify this again by noting that the subset of men who are likely to fall for a stunt like this are going to be below average in intelligence and general quality, so you're very likely to be pulling from the lower end of the bell curve repeatedly, even if not quite at the depths that prison would be.
It's still qualitatively the same risk scenario, the prison part does make it worse but it's merely an amplifier to the pre-existing risk.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
I think the "criminals" aspect of this is a red herring, and the real issue is the infidelity and "messaging multiple men" part. If she was a single mother messaging one man in prison, and he wanted to become the father of her kids, there wouldn't be an issue. If she was married and messaging a dozen non-criminal men and promising them to become the father of her kids they would end up in a similar risky situation.
The solution here which seems best suited to curtail dangerous behavior and not end up applied to ordinary good-faith actors seems to be some sort of child-protecting infidelity law. Or maybe just some sort of disclosure thing: don't tell multiple people that they can parent your kids without them knowing about each other. That way more benign cases like getting a new boyfriend while a divorce is being finalized, or consensual polyamory are not affected, while secretly cheating with a dozen people who become emotionally attached to a kid and then want to fight each other and/or kidnap the kid becomes illegal.
My understanding of the alt-right is that their typical proposed solution to the problem of racial minorities is segregated ethnostates. We divide up the U.S. and each group of people gets their own country with only their own race, and from then on they suffer the consequences of their own behavior.
Less explicitly spoken, but there's also usually an undercurrent of schadenfreude where they believe the racial minorities are uncivilized savages who will create a crime-ridden hellhole without white people to subsidize them with wellfare and policing, but this is justified on account of them doing it to themselves. They don't want to directly exterminate the minorities, but some of them do secretly hope the minorities to exterminate each other and prove their racism correct in the process. But they don't especially care about the second part, because they get their white ethnostate either way. Once the minorities are out of sight, out of mind, it doesn't matter what happens to them because the white ethnostate can live up to its glorious potential or whatever.
I don't want to steelman the neo-nazis too hard, because I haven't spoken to very many of them and I suspect that lots of them are the way you describe. But I don't think most of them would be too opposed to the above approach (especially since there's some overlap with the alt-right). Some sort of plan like "Kick Palestine out and give all the land to Israel, then force all of the Jews around the world to move to Israel and they can have their own country, then remove all financial and military support from Israel and let them fend for themselves." would be the sort of plan that, on the face of it, does not require extermination. It would still be really awful for all the people who get their lives upended, and might lead to them dying if the Islamic states gang up on them, but it's not the level of hatred and evil that "Gas the Jews" is. I could have a reasoned discussion with someone who thinks me and people who are like me are ruining society and should live in our own separate society. I would get angry and heated trying to argue with someone who wants to exterminate me and people who are like me (if I thought enough people were taking them seriously and they weren't just some isolated troll). The former implies some form of thought and logic and reason, that this person is genuinely trying to make a better society and is just confused about how to do that, the latter indicates thought-terminating hatred from them as they jump to the most simple, obvious, and evil "solution".
Sidenote: there's also the even more nuanced take, which I wouldn't even consider to be "Nazi" (since I tentatively endorse it myself and most self-described Nazis wouldn't think goes far enough), but would definitely be called Nazi by some people, is that we should investigate corporations and universities and whatnot for discriminatory practices related to Jewishness with the same lens and at the same standards that we use for racial discrimination of all other kinds (ideally not quotas, but actual influence in decision-making), and punish discrimination against Jews AND in favor of Jews symmetrically (and also punish discrimination against AND in favor of white people). I think a lot of antisemitism is driven by Jews seeming to get the same double-standard of the law and society that the other minorities get: letting you get away with discriminating in favor of them but not against them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
21d ago
I have literally never seen a classical Neo Nazi on here calling for the death of Jews. It's against the rules and they would be banned immediately.
I don't know exactly what you've seen, but my guess is you've seen some of the more nuanced moderate Nazi-like posters who dislike Jews and/or Jewish Supremecists but don't call for their death. And are strawmanning/patern-matching them to the more classical Nazis. I think there's a really important distinction, because first and foremost, the rational Nazi does not want you to die. They might dislike, want you to have less power and influence, might want you to leave, but they don't want you to die and if they saw you on the street they would not attack you. Second, the rational Nazi does not necessarily hate you, personally, if you are not yourself a supremecist. They might not even be a bigot at all, in the same way that an anti-woke person is not necessarily a racist.
Let me explain. Even though "Jew" is not technically a race, for most purposes we can consider it to be in the same general category and treat it the same way. This means that it should not be treated any differently from other races in terms of rights, restrictions, terms of discourse, etc. This means that Jewish Supremacists exist, are bad because they are bigots, and some but not all Jews are Supremacists, in the same way that Black Supremacists and White Supremacists exist, are bad because they are bigots, and are some but not all of their race. There is a huge difference between criticizing white/black/Jewish people universally (which makes you a bigot), and criticizing white/black/Jewish Supremacists (who are bigots worthy of being criticized). People tend to be okay at drawing this distinction for actual races, but when it comes to Jews the nuance vanishes, and any criticism of Jewishness in any form indicates Nazis.
It should hopefully be rather uncontroversial to state the following claims are true:
-Jews are disproportionately likely to be wealthy and/or in positions of power relative to their frequency in the general population.
-Jewish Supremacists exist in nonzero numbers who want to discriminate in favor of their own kind (just like all Supremacists do)
-Jewish Supremacists are less likely to be criticized or called out by polite society (the media, educated people, politicians) compared to other Supremacists, and get more defense when they are criticized (by accusing their critics of being Nazis)
Someone who takes these observations and extrapolates it too far might then conclude that Jewish Supremacists are more numerous and more influential than they actually are: collectively and conspiratorially controlling all of the media and institutions in order to ruin our society. While I don't think this is the world we live in, it is a coherent world state one could live in and would be bad. A century ago we DID live in a version of this world with White Supremacists pulling the strings to privilege white people, and that was bad, so it doesn't require a moral monster to conclude that a Jewish Supremacist world would also be bad for the exact same reasons. This does not require hating Jews, or you, or your family, in the same way that hating White Supremacist world does not require you hating me or my family. It only requires a somewhat distorted view of society, which rational debate and discussion should be able to solve.
Unless you yourself are a Supremacist, then criticisms of Jewish Supremacists are not actually criticisms of you. Unless you are a political or military leader of Israel, then criticisms of Israel's actions in war are not criticisms of you. Unless the critics are actually collectivizing to criticize all Jews, in which case you should counter them (or just sit back and watch the entirety of the motte come down on them for being stupid bigots). But if someone is being polite and precise but criticizing someone who happens to be Jewish, don't mistakenly collectivize for them and assume they hate you if that's not what they said.
Those people are welcome here. And you are also welcome here. Your own identity is not particularly relevant on the scales, just your arguments. You can unapologetically be who you are and admit to being Jewish, but unless that identity is somehow adding to the discussion via you providing anecdotes or something then we don't actually care. You won't be attacked for it, but you won't be protected for it either, unless someone is actually breaking the rules and calling for violence. Just say things and let your words speak for themselves.
MathWizard
Good things are good
21d ago
Did they need to? From their perspective, it doesn't matter whether conspiracy theorists suspect them or not if the authorities don't and they get away with it. Regardless of whether it truly was a conspiracy or merely negligence, clearly we live in a world where Epstein dying under the circumstances he did die under doesn't lead to heads rolling.
Uggh, everyone always debunks the strawmen and never the more nuanced and realistic takes.
The real Epstein list (people who are actually guilty, not merely visitors) was in his head. We lost it when he died. They needed to keep him alive.
Epstein very likely killed himself in a physical sense, but there's a non-zero chance he was coerced/blackmailed/bribed into doing this, and substantial chance that the powers that be deliberately turned a blind eye to allow him to do it. And there's a 100% chance that negligence was involved and someone should be punished. Why wasn't he under direct supervision 24/7? Everyone knew he had dirt on important people. Everyone knew he was going to die under mysterious circumstances. Whoever had custody of him should have been extremely paranoid and gone above and beyond to keep him alive.
Any theory made after an event occurs to retroactively explain it lacks credibility because there's lots of degrees of freedom and ability to cherry-pick random events. Almost all conspiracy theories fall afoul of this. Epstein didn't kill himself does not. This was a theory that started before he died and predicted his death and then it happened despite the fact that people knew it would happen and could have stopped it.
Yes, Epstein probably did the deed. But they let him do it, and they probably let him do it on purpose because he knew things they didn't want public. If everything he knew was written down on physical lists that people had access to there wouldn't have been a benefit to letting him die.
This investigation does literally nothing to change my mind, it was already consistent with the theory I've held for six years, and I need no epicycles to explain this.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
Again, these are correct signals that I am sending intentionally. This IS a major part of my life. I DO spend at least 25 hours a week on anime and games. If you are looking to do "all the other stuff" that isn't gaming and anime and squeeze it around then you're not my 1 in 1000 and I don't want to marry you. That just sounds like a recipe for constant conflict and strife. While some amount of compromise is important in a relationship, and you should sometimes do things the other person wants to do for their sake, the less it's necessary because you both want the same things, the better. If one person expects to go out and do things all the time and the other wants to stay home all the time then at any point in time only one of them is getting their way. So if anyone sees this and realizes that I'm not the right person for them because I'm literally not the right person for them then good, we can both save some time and try to find someone more compatible. In practice, this did turn into me getting very few hits for precisely that reason. Most women saw my profile, made this assumption about me (correctly), they thought this was a negative trait, and then they didn't want to talk to me. Mission accomplished.
Because one did want to talk to me. Instead of dating and/or marrying someone like that, I found someone with whom I get to keep doing videogames and anime and my wife will do them with me. Well, she doesn't care for anime that much, but we play lots of games together. Sometimes we're just sitting next to each other playing completely separate games and she'll giggle as the monsters die and it's adorable. And sometimes she'll want to go somewhere and do something and I'll suck it up and go because it's not very often, because she's mostly like me and genuinely wants to be at home most of the time.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
Which is weird because you would think that online dating would be the perfect environment for introverts. I never was able to work up the courage to ask out a girl in real life. I could never quite tell when it would be creepy and unwelcome and when it would be fine, so I always erred on the side of caution. But online dating everyone is there explicitly for the purpose of meeting people and can ghost you the instant they feel uncomfortable, so I didn't have to worry about that and could just be honest about being attracted to people. And can do it from the comfort of my home and not have to go outside and meet people in real life and do public social stuff with lots of people when I'm trying to have a one on one conversation.
Maybe the issue is that most of the shy introverted women get scared off by the tons of attention and unsolicited dick pics from creepy guys even online, and then the shy introverted men are left in a sea of women who have thick enough skins to stay anyway.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
There's a difference between someone sharing all of your interests, and someone who is willing to tolerate all of your interests. Even if they don't share the same hobbies, you don't want to date someone who fundamentally is unwilling to accept a part of you. If someone is going to be scared off by me liking anime, I want to scare them off instantly, not 5 dates later when they find out. Now, granted, there is some middle ground where some people might be willing to accept anime in someone who they already know is sane and not a pedophile but would screen it off on a stranger, but that still indicates some level of judgemental that I personally would rather filter out too.
And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family. When given the choice, we usually stay home and play games, where we both want to be.
Positives and negatives are subjective and high variance. And ultimately are scored from the single unique perspective of the person you end up with. They are not averaged. Your value as a romantic partner is not the average value ascribed to you by women collectively, but the value from the perception of the one person you actually end up with. So if you have niche interests and traits with high variance, where rather than everyone slightly disliking them, some people strongly dislike them and other rarer people strongly like them, then you want to filter for and find the people who like them, and then they become positive traits.
I don't think there have been any prominent "calling it" moments like this. The four most similar cases I can think of where someone is/was crying wolf about their assassination and it didn't happen, but if it had died (or do die) there would definitely be retroactive conspiracy theories are Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, And Edward Snowden. So if you're being maximally harsh you could call it 1/5. But none of these have had quite the same level of strength. Everyone believed that Epstein had dirt on prominent politicians that he had not yet spilled, which made getting rid of him quickly a priority. People hate Trump and Musk for public reasons and while killing them would remove them as an annoyance, it wouldn't keep any politicians out of jail. Assange and Snowden already leaked their secrets and assassinating them would just be petty revenge, it wouldn't unleak the secrets. Assassinating any of those four would increase the risk of a politician going to jail, not decrease it as in Epstein's case (conditional on the probability of getting caught being less than the probability of him spilling the beans). Additionally, the U.S. government has never had one of those four in custody in a way that would provide such an easy opportunity to off them. And, while I don't pay a ton of attention, nobody has been warning about the potential for assassination attempts on these four except for Trump, who has in fact been the target of attempted assassinated multiple times (though not necessarily by a conspiracy unless you count stochastic terrorism). So depending on how you categorize it we're either 1/5, 2/5, 2/2, or 1/1. Personally I'd go with 1/1, since Epstein was (as far as I know) unique in circumstance of being in a prison with known incriminating evidence on (probably multiple) politicians.
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