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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30714 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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The Virginia Giuffre suicide brought to mind an idea I've been thinking about for a while: populism works best without the people. Rob Henderson and many others have talked about how certain ideas promoted by the upper class disproportionately harm the lower class. In his book Troubled, he wrote:

Many of my peers at Yale and Stanford would work ceaselessly. But when I'd ask them about the plans they'd implemented to get into college, or start a company, or land their dream job, they'd often suggest they just got lucky rather than attribute their success to their efforts. Interestingly, it seems like many people who earn status by working hard are able to boost their status among their peers even more by saying they just got lucky. This isn't just limited to my own observations, either. A 2019 study found that people with high income and social status are the most likely to attribute success to mere luck rather than hard work.

Both luck and hard work play a role in the direction of our lives, but stressing the former at the expense of the latter doesn't help those at or near the bottom of society. If disadvantaged people come to believe that luck is the key factor that determines success, then they will be less likely to strive to improve their lives. One study tracked more than six thousand young adults in the US at the beginning of their careers over the course of two decades, and found that those who believed that life's outcomes are due to their own efforts as opposed to external factors became more successful in their careers and went on to attain higher earnings.

The problem is that people who entertain populist ideas like the above wind up shoved into the same part of the political spectrum as all these people who rave about "pedophile rings." Along with the internet personalities who won't endorse QAnon outright but pander to their QAnoner supporters with equivocating crap like "why can't they release the Epstein documents? I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, I just want TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT. Just asking qwestchins!" The populist movement winds up embracing the same mentality of helplessness Henderson is criticizing. Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*

You can only really stand up for the people by keeping them at arm's length.

*The QAnoners are convinced that happens ALL THE TIME but Epstein is the only example they can point to, which is why we're still hearing about it five years after Epstein's death and will probably keep hearing about it for decades more.

The Epstein stuff was salacious because the people involved were well-known and because the plebs love seeing the high and mighty brought low, love gossiping about the rich and famous. The reality is that while what Epstein was doing (paying teenage girls from poor families for sex; pimping put some of those girls to his friends and business associates) was obviously wicked, and while his early-2000s sentence should have been much longer than it was (and served under less generous terms), far worse happens in working class communities across the West every single day without consequence or penalty.

It’s like the ‘Bullingdon Club’, which captured the British public’s imagination in the 2010s. In truth, its members behaved no worse than countless other drinking clubs, sports teams, fraternities, other social groups of regularly drunk young men. But because they were rich, wore their fancy costumes and counted the prime minister and mayor of London among their alumni, what they did was somehow uniquely awful.

But because they were rich, wore their fancy costumes and counted the prime minister and mayor of London among their alumni, what they did was somehow uniquely awful.

It was uniquely awful, in the sense that we used to have an order in which those that wield great authority or wealth would be held to a higher standard of morality than a drunk peasant and would be obligated to use their station to set a positive example.

I'm not even an actual reactionary (far from it) but I think this one element tracks with the sense of good and has an excellent pedigree back to the ancients.

those that wield great authority or wealth would be held to a higher standard of morality

What's the deal with the people I've seen around here saying that the elite should have greater licence?

Seems like on the one hand there's the argument that they're our betters and should be exemplars of virtue, on the other hand there's the argument that they're our betters and they should be enforcers of virtue because even if they fail to embody the same virtues the rot of the masses is a worse outcome than the transgressions of the elite.

Presumably it's a reaction to the feeling that they're neither exemplars or enforcers and have allowed standards to decline at both ends of the social spectrum. That then raises the question of whether they wanted that outcome and used their power to achieve it or whether they were either powerless or too unwilling to use their power to prevent it.

"Held to a higher standard of morality" is spin. What you describe is enabling the well-connected to get their enemies selectively prosecuted for "crimes" that everyone does, and should not be crimes at all.

I would think the disparity in reaction here is because the upper class are expected to behave better than that, to rise above vice, and they often try to avoid disabusing the public about such a notion.

Consider the meme of pedophile Catholic priests: these are the people who are supposed to be your spiritual leaders, and while all humans are fallible under Christian doctine, molesting boys is a level of sin that one could otherwise not believe a holy man would stoop to.

Maybe it's some sort of hardwired primal instinct. If we gravitate towards hierarchy, we also gravitate towards expecting more out of our social betters.

Did she really commit suicide? I'm seeing "statements from the family" but nothing official. If that sounds very cynical on my part, it's because it's been "several weeks" since her Instagram post about "I only have four days to live".

Maybe she really did kill herself, but the entire thing is so murky that I'm holding off until we get something from the authorities. I'm thinking of how Ziz faked their death, including family statements that they totally did drown, and then turned up alive and well. Giuffre, whatever her past as part of Epstein's operation, seems to me to have become addicted to publicity in latter years, needing regular doses of acclaim and admiration and support as the brave victim and survivor.

She seems to have been facing a trial about breaching a restraining order, so perhaps she did kill herself, but as I said, I'm slow to believe anything without explicit sources better than "her publicist":

Western Australia state police said they received a report late yesterday local time that a 41-year-old woman, whom they did not name, died at a residence in Neergabby, a rural area on Perth's outskirts.

Police said first aid was attempted to no avail.

... Ms Giuffre, who was believed to have separated from her husband, was treated in an Australian hospital after a serious accident, her publicist said last month.

She did not answer questions about the date, location, nature or other specifics of the accident and about the accuracy of an Instagram post that appeared from Ms Giuffre in which she said she had been in a car that was hit by a school bus, and her prognosis was dire.

She was taken to a Perth hospital following the collision on 24 March.

In an emotional post on social media, she expressed that she was ready to die.

"I've gone into kidney renal failure, they've given me four days to live, transferring me to a specialist hospital in urology," she said.

"I'm ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time."

According to reports, a spokesperson for Ms Giuffre said the Instagram post was a mistake and she had meant to share the post to her private Facebook page.

She was charged with breaching a family violence restraining order in Ocean Reef, near Perth, on 2 February, Western Australia Courts said.

Ms Giuffre's case was first heard in Joondalup Magistrates' Court in northern Perth on 14 March, where she did not enter a plea.

The matter was adjourned to 11 June for a plea hearing, according to Western Australia Courts.

You reckon it's the qanoners ruining everything?

I had a different idea. See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't. Not all of them, there are some very clever people involved, but most of the qanoners I've spoken to were primarily uneducated poor people.

I think the bigger problem is that our educated and wealthy people are worthless morons. Qanoners are overwhelmingly uneducated and our Elite Human Capital are overwhelmingly cowardly, narcisstic, and just not that bright. They are so vapid and myopically self centred that they couldn't even save democracy from the proles with the most advanced propaganda machine in history. A centralised bureaucracy supported by media, education and intelligence, and how did they explain the perils of populism to the people? "uh it's right wing! Hitler was populisty! How about it's racist? Or toxic masculinity? It's very passe ok, he's eating McDonald's for fucks sake, what more do you need?!"

Populism is actually pretty simple to understand - it is the game theoretic optimal solution to a democracy for any underclass in a country where they lack (or think they lack) unifying principles or values - if you think, due to a warped media environment, that you can't rally with your neighbour over the constitution or that Jesus is lord, you can still rally around a popular figure. It's basically a coin flip between finally being heard and the stamping boot, so if you already have the stamping boot in your face it's a no brainer.

And the gamble paid off! But what the populists didn't expect was that our Elite Human Capital are so self centred they'll actually defend Epstein Island out of solidarity or something. They even mock the idea of government transparency! Like they either think government transparency is a bad thing, or are just too dim to understand that they are participating in a meme that can directly harm the concept, as that kind of negative association is part of how perverse incentives kick off in the first place.

If only there was some simple fix, like listening to the working class occasionally. Then again avoiding them as much as possible, still sneering at them at every opportunity, but pretending you do care about them has worked out great so far!

overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college

All the ones I know are educated, e.g. school teachers at districts requiring MAs and midlevel financial analysts e.g. writing mining reports for a Tier II bank.

That's fascinating, @greyenlightenment said similar, but aside from one retired teacher and a group of finance guys who I can never be sure are serious most of the qanoners I know are actually closer to fringe class than working - like my cousin who'd be a drug dealer if it didn't require so much effort and discipline. Could it be geographical? What state do you live in, if you don't mind me asking? And same question for you grey?

And the gamble paid off! But what the populists didn't expect was that our Elite Human Capital are so self centred they'll actually defend Epstein Island out of solidarity or something.

Who's "defend[ing] Epstein Island?" Can you give some examples of defenses?

I had a different idea. See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't. Not all of them, there are some very clever people involved, but most of the qanoners I've spoken to were primarily uneducated poor people.

interesting analysis, although I disagree about them being poor. I think they are representative of the 'low-status upper/middle class'. These are people who may have decent incomes and jobs, like involving contracting , HVAC installation, and small business, but they do not have much cultural capital or influence individually ,unlike journalists or academics. Their impact is felt at the voting booth other other collective action, like putting Trump in office due to high turnout in swing states or memetic warfare online, but they do not write Substakc or think pieces. Their social media accounts have few followers. Individually, they are unimpressive and not elite human capital , but collectively work as a singular driving force.

These are people who may have decent incomes and jobs, like involving contracting , HVAC installation, and small business,

HVAC installers do not get paid well(and are not particular fans of Trump, either), techs get paid well- and they don't believe Qanon(although those of them whose wives stay home as opposed to being nurses or teachers are married to people who do). Small business owners(you know that 'contractor' is literally just a construction business owner, right?) likewise do not believe in Qanon, although they are fans of Trump and often believe in other conspiracy theories(often centering around insider trading to control republicans).

They are so vapid and myopically self centred that they couldn't even save democracy from the proles with the most advanced propaganda machine in history. A centralised bureaucracy supported by media, education and intelligence, and how did they explain the perils of populism to the people? (…)

This is the difference between a conspiracy and organic ideological affiliation. The bureaucracy, the media, and the educational system are in lockstep under the mainstream-woke banner, yes; but they don't think of themselves as following centralized directives. Every individual in the chain is acting according to his own conscience. Such a system is capable of coordinating like an astonishingly huge conspiracy so long as everyone's goals are aligned, but it cannot switch gears just because some clever people somewhere in the blob have realized it would be in their long-term interest. Nobody regards themself as taking marching orders, and if someone tries to give them orders that go against their own judgment they'll be ignored.

Such a system is capable of coordinating like an astonishingly huge conspiracy so long as everyone's goals are aligned, but it cannot switch gears just because some clever people somewhere in the blob have realized it would be in their long-term interest.

Pretty much everything about the response to Covid in the West seems to directly contradict this.

I'm not sure what to think or say about the rest of your comment, but this part stood out to me:

See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't.

Anyone can afford to go to college. Anyone. It's just not that expensive. Yes, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be, and yes, the ROI is not as obvious or inevitable (though it was never inevitable) as it once was. But "working class" people buy more expensive things all the time--houses, boats, cars--and those things continue to cost money (beyond loan interest--there's also upkeep). A wisely-curated program of education will in almost any economy be a better long term investment than any of those things.

What is not really plausibly "affordable" about education is failing. Every semester, without fail, I have at least one student who never shows up for class. Then, at the end of the semester, they tell me how they are running out of money and can I please pass them or else they will have to take the class again and they can't afford it...

The people who "can't afford" college are the people who lack the intellect and/or conscientiousness to learn at a higher level. College costs way too much to go there when there is not a reasonable expectation of success.

I think the bigger problem is that our educated and wealthy people are worthless morons.

I think this is almost always false. Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling. That is a different problem than being morons. Indeed, I think most normies are pretty smart, within a baseline context of human flourishing--they're just that much more susceptible to focusing on sending the right signals rather than identifying substantially veridical facts.

Anyone can afford to go to college. Anyone. It's just not that expensive. Yes, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be, and yes, the ROI is not as obvious or inevitable (though it was never inevitable) as it once was. But "working class" people buy more expensive things all the time--houses, boats, cars--and those things continue to cost money (beyond loan interest--there's also upkeep). A wisely-curated program of education will in almost any economy be a better long term investment than any of those things.

Yes, after accounting for scholarships and other programs, affordability is typically not the problem. The student loan debt is cheap compared to private debt like credit cards or car payments.

meanwhile, plenty of lower-middle-class people go into debt for frivolities as you describe.

Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling.

yeah, it's status-seeking behavior, they are not morons. They are optimizing for status and an upper-middle class lifestyle.

I felt your objections were, for most part, addressed by that paragraph. Maybe to change the wording a bit to make the meaning I got from it clearer: A lot of people shouldn't go to college even if they could afford it.

When everyone has a college degree no one does. I think we've already passed the threshold for too many degree holders being paid too much money to do menial wrist and finger labour. Too many people who are actually smart need to spend too much time to distinguish themselves from the average brained but highly industrious. And to that end, too few smart people engage in lower class labour where their big brains could be used for a lot more good than in many other cases.

The education inflation is hitting every part of our lives. How western societies are setting themselves up isn't sustainable. And even if it were, it's so wasteful it shouldn't be done anyway.

I think this is almost always false. Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling. That is a different problem than being morons. Indeed, I think most normies are pretty smart, within a baseline context of human flourishing--they're just that much more susceptible to focusing on sending the right signals rather than identifying substantially veridical facts.

I think this entire paragraph is just a key example of how smart people can excuse anything they do with big words and fancy concepts. If your elite class torpedoes your society because it can't resist the temptation to conform and virtue signal to ides they personally find novel then they are ultimately no better than a high time preference, low IQ person that 'fails' the marshmallow test throughout their life.

At some point the elite of the world is no longer owed any leeway or respect on the grounds that they just aren't doing enough work that justifies it.

The education inflation is hitting every part of our lives. How western societies are setting themselves up isn't sustainable. And even if it were, it's so wasteful it shouldn't be done anyway.

Yes, but when you've outsourced your industrial base to other countries because it's cheaper and more convenient to let them pollute their environments and exploit their workers so you can then buy the finished product, you need something to occupy your excess labour force. And that means "more education" because governments think that everyone getting a degree means they will all get good, high-paying jobs and businesses are constantly calling for "we need better educated workers" and all of this means that the economy will (magically) grow once every worker has at least a bachelor's degree (because studies show the college-educated get better jobs and earn more over their lifetimes, so naturally a degree is the magic panacea). So now to have any hope of a reasonable life, you need a good job, and to get a good job, you need the piece of paper.

Developing [rare earth] mining and processing capabilities requires "a long-term effort," meaning the United States will "be on the back foot for the foreseeable future," concluded a recent report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.

Policymakers should have seen this coming, analysts said.

"I hate to be the person who says this," said Ms Klinger, "but I remember saying over a decade ago, if we should have a rare supply chain crisis, it would be entirely avoidable".

So how did the world get to this point?

The answer is very simple, according to Ian Lange, associate professor of mineral economics at the Colorado School of Mines: it wasn't that profitable.

"I would have said, it was a conscious decision to get rid of a low-value industry," he told RTÉ News.

It's also heavily polluting.

According to a study published by the Harvard International Review in 2021, for every tonne of rare earth produced, the mining process "yields 13kg of dust, 9,600-12,000 cubic metres of waste gas, 75 cubic metres of wastewater, and one ton of radioactive residue".

For many years, it made sense for the US, Europe and others to outsource to China, which ultimately, through state subsidies, weaker labour and environmental regulations, R&D investment as well as sheer industrial scale could - as in other manufacturing sectors - simply do it cheaper.

you need something to occupy your excess labour force.

Note also that the education-managerial complex itself exists as a type of universal basic job to occupy that excess labor force, and it also serves to keep what would normally be the labor force warehoused and suppressed.

When everyone has a college degree no one does. I think we've already passed the threshold for too many degree holders being paid too much money to do menial wrist and finger labour.

the data does not bear this out. the college wage premium remains persistently high despite more degrees. They are paid a lot because evidently employers see the value. Companies are obsessed with profit, so they would not spend more on labor, which is among the biggest expenses, unless necessary.

I think the data does bear this out. (15% unemployment and 35% underemployment (rising to 41%in recent years) means we have too many degree holders. And you know profit often isn't the only motive these days, ESG demands environmental and social engineering too.

But like Hani said to Nara, this is a distraction. If the elite ran society well we would not have populism or Donald Trump because they would have ameliorated enough of the concerns of the working class before they snapped and it was too late to do anything. It's not like they were demanding the impossible - they weren't even demanding anything substantial - bread and circuses worked for Rome and it works for America too. But our elites didn't make the bread and circuses for the people, they didn't even make it for everyone - instead they made it for themselves. They can't claim they didn't anticipate the issue, they very loudly did, but they handled it so incompetently that they may as well have not bothered.

And yes it is not deliberate and it's all stochastic or distributed or whatever - like you said in your reply to Nara, it's status games. And sure, on an individual level, if the only thing that concerns you is you, status seeking is a very smart idea. But if you want the prestige attached to running society, if you want to be respected for the way your achievements improve the country, they have to actually improve the country, not just line your own pockets. You have to actually be a better person if you want people to think you are a better person than them.

I can't remember how old you are, but I'm pretty sure you are old enough to be familiar with the way humans can very easily deceive themselves into thinking they are doing good when they are actually only helping themselves. I think that self deception is the core of the current zeitgeist. It's like the unifying principle of the west these days is 'you don't point out my fuck ups and I won't point out yours'. This is a much much larger problem for the elites than the proles, because without competence to back it up status is like running in mid-air like wile e coyote.

Companies are not infallible. Wanting to make money is not equivalent to always making rational and correct decisions that make you money. Nor does it grant companies omnipotence to shape institutions to best and most cost effectively deliver them what they want.

college wage premium remains persistently high despite more degrees

The persistent college wage premium may be skewed by selection bias in who pursues degrees. College graduates often have traits like higher cognitive ability, discipline, that correlate with better earnings, independent of their education. For non-professional or unlicensed fields, we lack solid comparisons of non-degreed groups with similar traits. Without these, it’s tough to confirm if the wage premium stems from the degree itself or from the preexisting human capital of those who go to college.

I think the thing that annoys me the most about Elite Human Capital is that they are the one class of people that pretends they don’t even belong to it. If you talk to them they’ll all try to act as though they aren’t a member of the elite, they aren’t that wealthy. An aristocracy that owns it would be somewhat more tolerable instead of them all pretending to be middle class

To be fair, the reason aristocrats/ECH don't own it is because we've just come out of a century where it was pretty dangerous to be an aristocrat and to owns that. I've said before but both of my parents were actually physically accosted at various points - one had a brick thrown at them, the other was spat on and nearly beaten. When I was growing up in the 90s, pre-woke, being white was fine but being upper-class painted a target on your back. You were expected to accept being the butt of every joke and take blame for everything wrong with the country while everything you owned was siphoned away by socialist tax policy.

One of the odd ironies of the last couple of decades for me is that while the level of identity-based abuse I'm subject to has risen, in a way it's a lot easier to deal with because there are so many more people to share it. There are a lot more white people than aristocrats! I think this is why people have started to be more open about considering themselves EHC - they have successfully diverted the inverse snobbery of the intellectual population onto ethnic and sexual identities rather than class ones.

What’s funny is that people aren’t upset about “millionaires” anymore. It’s billionaires that people continue to get angry about. I guess when everyone’s boomer parent is technically a millionaire it kinda loses its edge

Inflation comes for us all in the end.

Many of the elite human capital types are nominally middle class or even below, but are elite through degrees and reach, like low-paid journalists/interns or ppl with lots of twitter followers despite not having much money.

Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*

Por que no los dos? It's true that most of the victims were offered money to step on a plane, not forcibly kidnapped. But they were also psychologically manipulated and placed in a strange circumstance way outside anything the expected or had ever experienced. Being teenagers, maybe they thought they could handle it but then the reality was very different than they expected.

People seem to draw this really weird dichotomy where you have to choose between "Epstein was not a good guy" and "the girls were prostitutes." Where the reason Epstein was a bad guy was because the girls were prostitutes.

There's a certain type of girl who, through a weird touchy uncle, a demeaning mother, an absent or hostile father, or just lack of moral guidance anywhere, will end up selling herself for cash. Moving from childhood to the blossom of sexual maturity is in the best of situations a disorienting hormonal surge of conflicting desires. Throw in peer pressure, an amoral upbringing, or the sense that as long as it's secret, anything is permitted (hi, Japan) and you have a recipe for this. Epstein having wads of money and an effective scout in Maxwell (and then girls who would, for even more money, gull their peers into a taste of the glamorous life (TM) didn't hurt.)

A guy I once knew once described Japanese girls as "all whores." I think that's a shittily uncharitable way to view the world. But at the same time I'm often surprised at the amount of prostitution here, from the casual, French-art-film level day hooker to organized crime brothels to high-end callgirls. To say nothing of snackbars (hostess bars) or cabarets, burlesques, etc. My point is that without Epstein these girls may have become prostitutes on their own, but you can't be sure. Zig instead of zag.

I feel bad for Giuffre. She made wrong choices from day 1 (she was a street urchin before she even met Epstein), but one would hope anyone could turn it around, especially with a payout from Maxwell and basically everyone affirming her as a heroine.

Yeah, the daughters of impoverished single mothers living in Hispanic-majority neighborhoods are probably going to get taken advantage of in their teens regardless, and high rates of prostitution can just be expected.

People focus on Epstein because they love hearing about aristocrats- the good, the bad, and the ugly. If the IBEW was arranging underaged mistresses for their members it might be a scandal but it wouldn’t be a front page news story(…Rotherham). This is elites, so it is.

Just a followup: Giuffre was reporting that a bus hit her going 110 kph. The driver disputed that, as did the parents of the kids on the bus. The Western Ozzie police reported it as a minor crash with no injuries. The driver also said he didn't even see Giuffre in the car, but an elderly woman.

Now these sources are all probably less-than-perfect. But this is weird. And then she offs herself? After saying in 2019 that she was not suicidal? My tinfoil hat is right here, but I hate putting it on, it's really stupid-looking.

These are the same reasons I'm sceptical. She posted on Instagram that due to the severity of her injuries in the crash she only had four days to live. Well that wasn't true for a start.

She may indeed have committed suicide, and if so I'm sorry for her, but it could be another fake story. Or she may have intended a 'cry for help' attempt that would have seen her back in hospital, and back in the news headlines, but unluckily for her it really worked (or the person she expected to turn up and find her and call the ambulance arrived too late or something).

I can't work out an angle where she might've been "suicided" as she had already spilled many sacks of beans. Possibly she was covering for her husband's abuse? There was a record there apparently of him beating on her. At the same time he was the one who took out a restraining order on her. None of it makes sense. I suppose nonsensical murders and suicides regularly occur, but I followed the Epstein story fairly closely, read her depositions, even tried to read her poorly written (but interesting) book online (most of it.)

She and Maria Farmer both seemed mildly unreliable. Farmer (also in terrible health) is a bit too loud on the wealthy Jewish angle and prone to bizarre accusations ("Ghislaine gave me cancer!") to get much airtime (unlike her perfectly respectable sister Annie) but Giuffre was more interesting as she had been, for all I could see, a very willing sex slave (if such a thing exists) or at least was aware she was living a much more glamorous life than the one she had left. Apparently Maxwell and Epstein even wanted her to have a kid for them? That's slave, yes, but it's Number One Slave. Millions all over the world have far worse fates.

I'm not saying any of it was wholesome, but it seemed like squalid amoral people doing squalid amoral things, just instead of a trailer park they were on private jets and private islands and a lot cleaner. There's a passage in Giuffre's book where she complains about how healthily Epstein ate and how she herself just wanted a burger most of the time. It's fascinating from a class divide perspective.

And then she saw an out, and eventually realized she could parlay all her terrible self-interested choices into a narrative of victimhood and heroism, and that's the card she played, to apparently grand results--on the surface.

What's sad about this--what's even sadder than all the other sad parts--is that Giuffre apparently never stopped making bad choices. But who knows.

I was thinking more "faked her own death" or even "did a 'cry for help' effort not meant to be serious, but unluckily for her it did turn out to work" rather than "she was offed by Hillary Clinton" type affair.

If she really is dead by suicide, that is a sad end to a sad and squalid story.

Either there is no super-powerful deep state or they're ok with Trump. If there was a super-powerful deep state that disliked Trump, Trump would have been killed years ago. I mean actually killed, not just a couple of close calls.

I think you're ascribing a level of competence not in evidence.

He would have at least been preluded from running . I think the deep state didn't want to risk an uprising if that happened.

My assumption is that a super competent deep state could kill Trump and make it look like a natural death, but maybe that has more to do with thriller novels than with reality.

We live in a society where even approaching young adult women is fraught with risk. 'Inappropriate' comments can ruin careers. Consensual relationships in the workplace are a recipe for disaster if the woman regrets it later on. Even degenerate fictional stories on obscure corners of the web feel some need to say that all involved are 18 or higher.

But billionaires get open license for underage pussy because they're rich? No, they should face the same crushing punishments inflicted on ordinary people who have sex with underage women, regardless of whatever ameliorating circumstances there are. 'But she consented' is not an excuse when some drunk guy hooks up with a drunk girl on a university campus.

Take their money away, ruin their lives, send them to prison, ruin their reputation. Rules should be applied fairly or not at all. If you think the rule is dumb or should be adjusted, even more reason for it to be applied to elites as well.

Furthermore, Epstein committing 'suicide' in the anti-suicide ward while the cameras were conveniently switched off is clear proof of some kind of paedophile-sex ring deeply embedded in the US government. The Q people were directionally correct.

they should face the same crushing punishments inflicted on ordinary people who have sex with underage women, regardless of whatever ameliorating circumstances there are.

??? These billionaires lost in the court of public opinion, which seems to be the biggest part of the punishment for statutory.

Rules should be applied fairly or not at all.

Look I'm not here to argue at the object level but in general this strikes me as a bad idea. Obviously different social strata should have different rules. Every society I'm aware of has recognized this up until fairly recently. In the vast majority of cases I think it's good that rich people can use the legal system to get off scott-free.

Restricting everyone to behavior suitable for the lowest is literally reducing freedom to the lowest common denominator and this attitude is a huge part of why we can't have nice things. Quod licet iovi non licet bovi.

Anyway, in practice, I have much more to fear from the state than does an inebriated homeless schizo because I have resources to purloin.

I actually suspect that the vast majority of ordinary adults who have sex with minors get away with it. There are probably thousands of such encounters happening every day. There are millions of guys, after all, who do not sit around pondering the risks of having sex with women who might turn out to be slightly underage. They just see someone who looks hot, fuck them, and if they worry about the consequences it's only afterward. Women also sometimes lie about their ages. You might have had sex with a minor and not even be aware of it. I am pretty sure that the majority of the time, no legal consequences ensue from such encounters.

I don't disagree with what you wrote but I think it'd be much more simple to just say that this is pretty much something only the working class and the underclass engages in anymore.

I bought a house from a homeflipper who had bought it from a convicted pedophile. This was explained to me by my neighbors, who cheerfully explained that his story of 'oh I had a 17 year old girlfriend at 22' was obviously false because nobody would've cared.

Anyways they beat him up and forced him to sell after somebody found out the truth, I don't know how, that he'd molested a ten year old.

Middle and upper class have more money to spend on means such as gifts, concealment, etc. More opportunities too as the same resources grant greater agency. The only defecit is in motive as they potentially have more to lose.

But billionaires get open license for underage pussy because they're rich? No, they should face the same crushing punishments inflicted on ordinary people who have sex with underage women, regardless of whatever ameliorating circumstances there are.

Absolutely. There's really no excuse for it. Billionaires can afford to employ a 'fixer' to get them whatever they desire (presuming what they desire isn't something explicitly underage). It's not difficult to do a background check to confirm all the girls are 18+, check them for discretion, make them sign NDA's etc.

I will agree that finding and employing a trustworthy fixer is something that would likely take time and effort though.

Furthermore, Epstein committing 'suicide' in the anti-suicide ward while the cameras were conveniently switched off is clear proof of some kind of paedophile-sex ring deeply embedded in the US government. The Q people were directionally correct.

It was blatant. As soon as cameras malfunction in a prison a tech is called out. High priority camera feeds are constantly monitored by people in a prison's control room on a monitor wall. A camera that is used for suicide watches malfunctioning is not something that can happen unnoticed. If a camera or NVR (recording server) malfunctions, a large blatantly clear alert pops up on the security management system. Most systems, especially those in prisons, have a redundant recording server so there are two copies of the video feeds.

I don't know how they got all the prison guards to shut up about it though. It would have been an expensive and high risk operation to shut so many mouths.

I also don't know if it was a paedophile ring, but Epstein clearly knew something that someone powerful didn't want getting out and that someone tied up loose ends. It must have been very important to them to make such a blatant move that clearly erodes so many peoples' trust in the justice system.

Edit: I should have said I don't know if it was THE paedophile ring and the client list directly that got him silenced or the information that he gained by leveraging that kompromat.

It would have been an expensive and high risk operation to shut so many mouths.

Prison guards don't make very much and the people in a position to want them to shut up are literal billionaires with government connections. They are also unlikely to think that squealing is a good idea when they just took a bribe to shut up about a murder.

Furthermore, Epstein committing 'suicide' in the anti-suicide ward while the cameras were conveniently switched off is clear proof of some kind of paedophile-sex ring deeply embedded in the US government. The Q people were directionally correct.

Unless Epstein himself bribed the guards.

I'm with @RandomRanger's objection below - it's not quite clear to me what sort of offer he could make to the guards to incentivise all of this, and why they wouldn't have been caught. I think the better explanation would be somewhat more satisfying - Epstein did kill himself, but this was facilitated by "friends in high places" whose interest in his death aligned with his own. The friends would have coordinated a time with him some way or another, either bribed or pressured the guards to remove all eyes, and taken any necessary steps to ensure that this isn't investigated too thoroughly afterwards.

(Alternatively, for colour, you could even imagine an offer: kill yourself in a relatively comfortable way now, or get a slow agonising death from some particularly nasty poison we will slip you later.)

(Alternatively, for colour, you could even imagine an offer: kill yourself in a relatively comfortable way now, or get a slow agonising death from some particularly nasty poison we will slip you later.)

You don't even need the threat. The fate of a high-profile sex offender with no gang protection in the general population of an American prison is likely to be far more painful than anything the Deep State could engineer.

Well, the guards did get caught, just not fully.

How does he get money to the prison guards as a prisoner?

If he did bribe a guard, presumably it would've emerged. Lots of people were very interested in this case! A guard-level conspiracy should be easy to uncover compared to a 'friends in high places' level conspiracy. Instead we got the 'oh he killed himself somehow' story peddled as the official party line which favours 'friends in high places'.

Did you read the link?

Yes. It doesn't really address this.

It also explains why this plot wasn't uncovered: because there are like, three people that would have to know about it, not even including Epstein's lawyers. Epstein could have just made up a sob-story and convinced a correctional officer to look the other way himself, or promised the officer his lawyers would pay them after the fact, and then didn't, because arranging that would be more complicated and time consuming.

What kind of sob story gets you to erase video evidence and bring down a huge shitstorm on yourself with a high profile prisoner? 'Bro I'll totally pay you after you've done this insanely illegal thing'?

What kind of sob story gets you to erase video evidence and bring down a huge shitstorm on yourself with a high profile prisoner? 'Bro I'll totally pay you after you've done this insanely illegal thing'?

Do you know any prison guards? When they're offered money for bringing in cigarettes, alcohol, etc, the money is paid up front and the guard is simply not hired anymore if they don't follow through.

They also don't have particularly prestigious jobs and most of them know that they never will. Large payments to people being paid not very much to do a job which isn't socially esteemed have a way of changing their attitudes. Hell, in-kind payments can do it.

bring down a huge shitstorm on yourself with a high profile prisoner

None of those guards’ lives were ruined.

Is it "insanely illegal"? Remember that in the suicide hypothesis, sabotaging the monitoring isn't murder conspiracy with its fuckoff-huge sentence. They skated with no time, and even if they'd gotten caught red-handed my wild guess is that they'd have served under 2 years.

I am not sure that I see the similarity between "the people on the top got lucky" and QAnon.

Mostly everybody has a story which explains why they are not on the top, and "the people at the top just got lucky" is one such story, while "the people at the top are all lizardmen, and they won't allow humans to join" is another.

The other thing to consider in "hard work" vs "getting lucky" is that being a hard worker is not 100% a choice, but also subject to genetics and nurture, e.g. governed by luck at least in part.

Hard work is necessary, but luck also is a part of it. "I work hard and my dad's a plumber" versus "I work hard and my dad is a partner in KPMG", you tell me who you think is going to get further in life.

JD Vance is a legitimate "I came from poor stock, worked hard, and made it" success story, and look at the shit he gets for his political allegiance. Kamala Harris ran in part on "I grew up in a middle-class family" (where middle-class is supposed to mean "upper working class/lower middle class", i.e. 'just like one of you schlubs') but she is the daughter of university professors. I don't know if anyone has done a comparison between "is Vance more privileged than Harris because he's a white male and she's a biracial female, versus his family were poor and he grew up between Kentucky and Ohio and her mother only divorced once and she grew up between California and Canada". It'd be an intriguing problem to do a privilege walk between them!

I think the word privilege is mostly used by wokes. For them, recognized sources of privilege are ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and being able-bodied1. Social class is not part of it.2 Fighting for the rights of some straight white cis-men would be giving aid and comfort to the enemy, after all. Also, this makes determining the privilege level of random strangers so much more convenient -- just check their skin color and their gender, and if the person is openly LGBT or in a wheelchair. No need to delve to deep into their childhood or finances. The good news is that a poor white guy can still be an Ally, just as a rich white guy. But for cultural and economic reasons most Allies end up being well-off whites (it is much easier to support BLM when you live in a gated community and are a lawyer than when you live in a flat downtown and are a small time store owner). And the label the SJ left uses for (mostly poor, mostly white) folks who are not on board with their platform is, or course, "deplorables".

Personally, I think that economic inequality is likely the most significant inequality within Western societies, and most of the difficulties certain ethnicities encounter are downstream of them being economically disadvantaged. But I also believe that there are a lot of other inequalities, and that crucially that it is not useful to simply sum them up -- that there is no single scalar score which describes privilege in a useful way. Being white is advantageous in some ways. Being male can be an advantage in some situations. Being female can also be an advantage. Being beautiful, young, or hot can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the situation. It very much depends on individual situations, specific cultural contexts (being gay is orders of magnitude less of a deal if you are living in a student dorm in a coastal city than if you are living in a rural house with your religious parents, for example).

Regarding Vance, part of the process of swearing fealty to Trump is that you deny that he lost the 2020 election, and in my mind, this is a severe moral failing which can not be excused by having had a difficult path in life -- not unless your defense is "I would literally starve unless I took a job in the White House".3

1 Terms and conditions apply. Being on the spectrum might gain you a iota of sympathy, but will not protect you from accusations of toxic masculinity, for example.

2 Yes, the pdf you linked uses economic observables. So technically poor white people get awarded points. I am just arguing that this is not how people actually move up on the totem pole of victimhood in the real world.

3 I suppose that SJ also has plenty of shibboleths, but mostly they require people not to voice certain ideas (e.g. HBD), and don't require them to loudly proclaim that the sky is green like Trump does.

part of the process of swearing fealty to Trump is that you deny that he lost the 2020 election

Given the people who turned on a dime from "election denialism about the 2020 election should be made a crime!" to "Trump stole the 2024 election!" reusing all the tropes they said beforehand were fake, conspiracy theory, etc. (the voting machines being rigged, fake ballots and the rest of it), this shocks me less and less every time I see it trotted out.

Indeed, I'm half-inclined to start to come around to "hey, maybe the 2020 election was rigged!" 😀

My experience in woke circles is that poor people of color get bonus points on the oppression checklist, while poor white people don’t.

Unless the woke speaker is obviously cornered or trying to recruit a poor white person, in which case they briefly revert to doctrinaire Leninism for as long as it takes to keep up the charade in front of their new “ally.”

There was a blog post somewhere about how a lot of poor people, black and white, are intuitively suspicious of philosophizing and big words, essentially, so I don’t know how successful overall this is as a tactic, or if wokeism dropped it at some point.

But I have seen the tactic in operation before.

but Epstein is the only example they can point to

The Dutroux Affair? The Finders Cult? The Emperor’s Club VIP Elliot Spitzer scandal? The McMartin preschool case? The DC Madam scandal and her subsequent suspicious suicide? I forget the name but there was also an incident during the Troubles where MI5 was using child abuse blackmail to force Northern Irish politicians into taking a more hardline unionist stance.

I forget the name but there was also an incident during the Troubles where MI5 was using child abuse blackmail to force Northern Irish politicians into taking a more hardline unionist stance.

Kincora Boys' Home scandal.

On the flip side of this, there was a case where the police and pretty much everyone else went overboard believing the allegations of a fabulist/con artist about alleged child sexual abuse by prominent people and politicians, and ended up with egg on their faces. This was in the wake of the Jimmy Saville case, where there had pretty much been a cover-up, so the reaction swung too much in the opposite direction - make a claim about a public figure, nobody would dare question it because that would be victim-blaming.

The first fallout from the legitimate Operation Yewtree was the likes of Cliff Richard, who got a publicised police raid on his home and eventually nothing went forward. He successfully sued both the police and the BBC over this.

The next was Operation Midland, where the fake accusations were swallowed whole and investigated, including allegations that Edward Heath, a former British Prime Minister and who had died in 2005, was part of a paedophile ring. Heath was either gay or asexual, never married, was never linked with a female partner, and so was someone who was ripe for those kind of accusations. Conveniently, being dead, he couldn't face the accuser or deny the accusations. Beech, or "Nick" as his journalist dupe nicknamed him, created a series of stories about lurid scandals accusing prominent public figures of child sex abuse and murder. He also took advantage of accusations by a former Labour politician, social worker, and head of a child welfare charity, Chris Fay, to weave those into his stories:

In the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal in 2012, police were facing mounting pressure to investigate any and all cases of child abuse, particularly of a historic nature, reported by victims either directly to officers, or through interviews with journalists. Growing national public outcry over the possibility of there being more VIP serial abusers concealing their actions, and political campaigns demanding greater action to investigate cases of historic abuse, greatly affected the need for police to step up their efforts.

In 2014, journalist Mark Conrad came across an online blog containing allegations of a potential case of historic abuse, created by Carl Beech ...Conrad posted his inquiries into the blog and its allegations in a story for the investigative journalism website Exaro, providing Beech with the pseudonym of "Nick" to conceal his identity, as is common practice for protecting victims of abuse from their abusers. Conrad's story was picked up by detectives in the Metropolitan Police, who made requests to see his source, and agreed to allow the journalist to attend their initial meeting with Beech upon Conrad arranging for him to come forward. In these meetings, Beech gave full, detailed accounts of the abuse he claimed he had been subjected to at various locations, including the Elm Guest House, the Dolphin Square apartment block in Pimlico, the Carlton Club, and various other locations in the Home Counties.

Most concerning for detectives were Beech's claims that he, alongside a number of other child victims of the group, had been witness to three murders – Beech claimed that two children were killed for sexual pleasure, while a third was eliminated to intimidate the other abuse victims – in which he supplied the names of two individuals whom he stated had been murdered by the group: Vishal Mehrotra, whose abduction and the subsequent murder in the early 1980s remained unsolved, and Martin Allen, whose disappearance was documented in the late 1970s. Metropolitan Police deemed Beech's accounts "credible and true", though what he told them turned out to be entirely false.

In November 2014, the Metropolitan Police announced a large-scale investigation, codenamed Operation Midland, into Beech's claims."

Many public figures were dragged through the mud as a result of over-eager credulity of dubious claims. So it really goes from one extreme to the other. Blanket denial, or blanket belief.

Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money

Examples?

I mean, they were hookers. Definitionally they did it for money.

That doesn't mean it's OK to convince 15 year old girls to enter prostitution(which is what Epstein did- there's no evidence or allegations that he made any threats or kidnapped anyone or whatever).

I seem to remember that Epstein and/or Maxwell were also accused of taking away at least one girl's passport to trap her. Which is more than just prostitution.

Some victims said Maxwell would make threats like that on the island or at one of their ranches, but compared to the tactics used by even run of the mill pimps they were rudimentary and limited at best.

That doesn't mean it's OK to convince 15 year old girls to enter prostitution(which is what Epstein did

That's trafficking. They were minors.

There's also very clear evidence of favorable government treatment (i.e. his case in Florida).

That's a lot different than him throwing a party with adult prostitutes.

Why the equivocation?

Yes I just said that. Epstein was bad. But there’s no evidence of him being bad in a specific way that it’s often framed as.

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