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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34953 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Via information from Twitter's Archives, Elon has released what he calls "THE TWITTER FILES" part one, via journalist Matt Taibbi.

And uh...

it's nothing?

So we learn the following events that I highlight because they seem important to me. If you believe I have omitted an important fact from the thread, feel free to point it out.

  1. There were ways for VIPs to report tweets to twitter staff in a way the average person couldn't. As an aside, all of the tweets in that image were nude images of Hunter Biden - not anything about the laptop story, or corruption exactly, just nudes of Hunter Biden, which are arguably prevented by any policy on revenge porn.

  2. Both the Biden Campaign and the Trump White House used these lines of communication. It is notable that only one of Biden and Trump was President in October 2020, and it was not Biden.

  3. It was biased to Dems because more dems work at Twitter. I'm kinda missing the causation here but sure.

  4. It seems like different teams at Twitter were not on the same page about their policy.

  5. Matt Taibbi sees no evidence of any government or intelligence agency having spoken to Twitter directly about the laptop story in any fashion.

  6. Twitter internally argued some more about whether this was good or bad

  7. Ro Khanna reached out to Twitter to tell them that they shouldn't be supressing speech.

  8. Twitter asked the opinions of 9 Republican and 3 Democratic House Staffers

  9. The house Dems thought there should be more moderation, said "The first amendment isn't absolute"

  10. Dorsey often intervened on high profile suspensions

Uh, this story contains the following actions from Democratic party officials who were either in office or affiliated with the government in some fashion at the time:

  1. Ro Khanna, house rep, said they should not censor the story

  2. Some Democratic staffers said that there should be more moderation in an informal bitching session

Nevertheless, Elon and others are treating this like it was some sort of horrid crime by the Biden administration, which was not in office, and when it had exactly the same capabilities as the Trump administration, actually in office had with Twitter?

And Taibbi confirmed that the federal government, FBI, CIA, etc., did at no time, for any purpose, contact Twitter directly regarding the laptop story, or tell them what to do about it?

I'm struggling to see how this is anything other than a complete repudiation of everything that was being said about the deep state colluding with Twitter to censor the news story. It seems that mid-high level staff at Twitter made a decision that about half of the company disagreed with, and they argued about it the whole time, and nobody in the Government ever told them to censor the laptop story?

Social networks are biased. News at 11.

Elon should turn the tables on Section 230 and use it against the the left, and then get it overturned or amended, and then resell the site , so he solves online censorship against conservatives at almost no cost . That would be a 4d chess move.

The emails make it clear the management at Twitter reflexively did not want the Hunter story to spread, and they either deluded themselves or made up the "hacked materials" excuse as a pretext to suppressing the story. In the end, the suppression likely became way bigger of a story than the story itself, to the point that even Democratic lawmakers were contacting Twitter to tell them what a boneheaded move that was.

When this story first came out, I was skeptical about the laptop in part because Rudy Guiliani was the source but since then I don't have any doubts that this was really Hunter Biden's laptop and emails. I still don't know how this was supposed to be such a smoking gun. Hunter is obviously a fuck up, and I think it's obvious that he only got executive positions because of who his father is, but the attempts to stretch this up the chain haven't really delivered so far, even an another two years after.

Tony Bobulinski personally confirming that Joe was offered to be cut in on (at least one of) the deals wasn’t enough for you? This story is from just a few days after the last linked post in your comment, btw, and it wasn’t hard to find either.

I don't think I was aware of that but no, that moves the needle very slightly but isn't enough. It seems plausible that "big guy" is indeed Joe Biden but the deal details he outlines are somewhat vague and it doesn't seem to have been consummated. I'm not exactly clear on what the accusation is here, is the idea that Joe Biden was exploiting his political position for monetary gain? We already know from the tax returns he released that him and his wife made $17 million in a year primarily just from public speaking and book deals. Is the idea that he made even more from influence peddling? That seems plausible, but an unconsummated deal vaguely outlined in an email is weak evidence.

Bobulinski was one of the people who received the email, so presumably he knows. And “moves the needle” with respect to what? All you said in the linked post was that no one had successfully “run things up the chain,” which seems like you’re saying no one had shown Joe to be directly involved. If that was all you were asserting, then this seems like pretty good evidence that he was.

Yes, the accusation is that a Biden was influence peddling. And the fact that Biden made a lot of money elsewhere says nothing at all about whether he’d want more. Rich people do bad things all the time to get more money, especially politicians. (E.g. the Clintons were making even more money pre-2016 and AFAIK it’s pretty widely agreed that they were influence-peddling too.)

Trying to influence-peddle and not succeeding is still intending to influence-peddle, and it’s still being directly involved with Hunter’s stuff. It’s perfectly strong evidence of that. I’m not trying to convict Joe Biden of a crime here, but his intentions and complicity are entirely relevant to his character and motives.

All you said in the linked post was that no one had successfully “run things up the chain,” which seems like you’re saying no one had shown Joe to be directly involved. If that was all you were asserting, then this seems like pretty good evidence that he was.

@Folamh3 helpfully pointed me to this recent Washington Post article about the CEFC deal:

James Gilliar, a business associate summarizing the allocation of the equity in Oneida Holdings LLC., in the email, wrote how four partners would get 20 percent each, except for Jim Biden, who would get 10 percent. He added a question: “10 held by H for the big guy?” One of the recipients of the mail, Anthony Bobulinski, has said that the “big guy” referred to Joe Biden and that “H” referred to Hunter. Bobulinski was a guest of Trump at one of the 2020 presidential debates.

But Gilliar told the Wall Street Journal in 2020: “I would like to clear up any speculation that former Vice President Biden was involved with the 2017 discussions about our potential business structure. I am unaware of any involvement at anytime of the former vice president. The activity in question never delivered any project revenue.”

Three days after the email was sent, a draft agreement setting up Oneida was circulated. It shows each partner would receive 20 percent, including Jim Biden. No mention is made of Joe Biden. The company agreement signed on May 22, 2017, had the same allocation. Oneida was to hold 50 percent of another corporate entity called SinoHawk. Neither Gilliar nor James Biden responded to requests for comment.

The Wall Street Journal said that it had reviewed corporate records and found no role for Joe Biden. The Washington Post, in an extensive report on the CEFC dealings, also did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC. The Biden campaign at the time denied he had any role.

So one guy involved in the deal claims that there was 10% of the CEFC venture set aside for Joe Biden, but another guy involved in the deal denies that, a draft agreement doesn't mention Joe Biden, the final agreement doesn't mention Joe Biden, and both WSJ and WaPo examined CEFC and saw no involvement or benefit to Joe Biden. The weight of the evidence here seems very one-sided to me, and it seems reasonable to conclude that Bobulinski is either lying or exaggerating. Do you disagree?

Yes, I do. “10 held by H for the big guy” literally means Hunter would be receiving 10% on behalf of whoever the “big guy” is. That entails that the “big guy” wouldn’t be getting it directly, so even if Joe were the “big guy,” that means he wouldn’t appear in the contract. So his not appearing in it is exactly what you would expect if he were being cut in after the fashion described in the email. That reduces Giliar’s statement to mere he-said-she-said, in which case Bobulinski is no less intrinsically credible than him. And in fact, Hunter getting 20% (10% more than Jim Biden) in the contract directly supports Bobulinski’s hypothesis (10% for him, just like Jim, then another 10% for Joe).

Would you still find Bobulinski's claim to be credible if he had a falling out with Hunter or was chasing a moment in the media spotlight?

Would you find his claim credible if neither of those were true? Are they even?

More comments

If this is the first time you heard the name Bobulinkski then the suppression worked on you. I heard about him, and his testimony, before the 2020 election, but I had to go looking in alternate sources to hear about it.

Seems likely that Bobulinski is either lying or exaggerating. See my comments above. And I don't know what you mean by "suppression" here.

I still don't know how this was supposed to be such a smoking gun.

Lee Smith's analysis may be informative:

These included communications regarding a deal with a Chinese energy company that earned Hunter $5 million, and his work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that paid him $83,333 per month to sit on its board. His father later boasted in public that he’d threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless the central government in Kyiv fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma.

...

Maxey says he also saw information on the laptop that has direct implications for U.S. national security. According to Maxey, this material includes documents relating to Pentagon cyber programs and others regarding former FBI Director Louis Freeh. According to a previously released email on Hunter’s laptop, Freeh worked with him to help a Romanian tycoon evade bribery charges. In April 2016, according to an earlier trove of emails, Freeh deposited $100,000 in a trust fund for two of Joe Biden’s grandchildren.

...

While [Joe] Biden said he never spoke with his son about his business abroad, a voicemail from another recently released laptop cache shows the president was being less than forthright. He knew about his son’s business with the Chinese energy firm and one of its top officials, Patrick Ho. After The New York Times published a softball article in December 2018 about Hunter’s work with Ho and other businessmen tied to the Chinese Communist Party, Biden left a message for his son saying, “I think you’re clear.”

Of course Hunter was clear: The FBI was watching over him. The bureau knew what he was doing because it had obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant in 2017 on Ho, who Hunter called the “spy chief of China.”

...

Reports like the ones the Treasury Department is now withholding formed the basis of a September 2020 Senate Republican investigation by Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa that documented Hunter Biden’s business with foreign officials and companies. It included his relationship with Burisma in Ukraine; the Chinese energy company, which also gave money to the president’s brother Jim and his wife, Sara; and Elena Baturina, the widow of a former mayor of Moscow, from whom Hunter received $3.5 million.

The Washington Post also reports that Hunter organised various trade deals with 10% of his fee earmarked for "the big guy", said to be referring to Joe Biden.

I don't know how damning this information is, but it seems at least as damning as Trump's various scandals (Trump University etc.). If Joe Biden was bribed by a Romanian tycoon in order to make criminal charges against him go away, I think he could conceivably be brought up on charges of corruption and perverting the course of justice.

Thanks for that link. I was intrigued by the passage "Freeh worked with [Hunter] to help a Romanian tycoon evade bribery charges". It links to a NY post story with more details. Describing Louis Freeh as "former FBI Director" seems a bit misleading in this context, because at the time that he talked to Hunter he was a partner in a law firm, not a government official. It's (unfortunately) common for government officials to cash in on the contacts they made to pivot into a lucrative private practice, and in my ideal world that wouldn't happen. But I read the email between Freeh and Hunter as just a referral in the form of "hey I have a client that could use legal representation with criminal charges he's facing", and I don't see anything wrong with that. The fact that Freeh gave $100k to Biden's grandkids shows just how much these people can rake in the cash, but referral fees are neither illegal nor necessarily unethical (I once referred a client to another attorney that was probably worth $1000 and the attorney sent me a $20 amazon gift card which was kind of funny).

It's obvious Freeh made a "donation" in 2017 hoping he could convince Joe Biden to get him more client referrals. That's definitely slimey, but I don't see where you claim that Joe Biden was "bribed" by a Romanian tycoon to make charges go away. The follow-up NYpost story says there was no evidence Joe Biden ever followed up with Freeh (probably because Joe Biden was planning to be president rather than a consultant or whatever).

The Washington Post also reports that Hunter organised various trade deals with 10% of his fee earmarked for "the big guy", said to be referring to Joe Biden.

I'm confused, did you read your own link?

James Gilliar, a business associate summarizing the allocation of the equity in Oneida Holdings LLC., in the email, wrote how four partners would get 20 percent each, except for Jim Biden, who would get 10 percent. He added a question: “10 held by H for the big guy?” One of the recipients of the mail, Anthony Bobulinski, has said that the “big guy” referred to Joe Biden and that “H” referred to Hunter. Bobulinski was a guest of Trump at one of the 2020 presidential debates.

But Gilliar told the Wall Street Journal in 2020: “I would like to clear up any speculation that former Vice President Biden was involved with the 2017 discussions about our potential business structure. I am unaware of any involvement at anytime of the former vice president. The activity in question never delivered any project revenue.”

Three days after the email was sent, a draft agreement setting up Oneida was circulated. It shows each partner would receive 20 percent, including Jim Biden. No mention is made of Joe Biden. The company agreement signed on May 22, 2017, had the same allocation. Oneida was to hold 50 percent of another corporate entity called SinoHawk. Neither Gilliar nor James Biden responded to requests for comment.

The Wall Street Journal said that it had reviewed corporate records and found no role for Joe Biden. The Washington Post, in an extensive report on the CEFC dealings, also did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC. The Biden campaign at the time denied he had any role.

So one guy involved in the deal claims that there was 10% of the CEFC venture set aside for Joe Biden, but another guy involved in the deal denies that, a draft agreement doesn't mention Joe Biden, the final agreement doesn't mention Joe Biden, and both WSJ and WaPo examined CEFC and saw no involvement or benefit to Joe Biden. The weight of the evidence here seems very one-sided to me.

I don't see where you claim that Joe Biden was "bribed" by a Romanian tycoon to make charges go away.

The fact that the tycoon in question made a $100k donation to Biden's family after the fact looks suspiciously like a bribe to me, even if it's technically on the level. Point taken that Smith was being a little misleading in his characterisation.

I'm aware that Joe Biden wasn't mentioned in the final agreement. I remember reading an article at some point in the last year or two which claimed that Joe Biden's 10% would come from Hunter's share "under the table", but I haven't been able to track the article in question down.

The fact that the tycoon in question made a $100k donation to Biden's family after the fact looks suspiciously like a bribe to me, even if it's technically on the level.

Maybe I'm missing something, but where is this mentioned? The $100k "donation" came from Freeh. I didn't see anything about the Romanian tycoon giving money.

Now I feel embarrassed, you're dead right, I misread that passage.

Nothing to be embarrassed about, it happens :)

the attempts to stretch this up the chain haven't really delivered so far, even an another two years after.

You're not wrong, but I'd feel a lot more confident in the lack of such a chain if there was a horde of serious journalists attacking the matter as ferociously as possible instead of insisting that there's absolutely nothing to see and no evidence of any problems at all, so they're not going to treat it as a real story.

Really though, I actually do think having a fuck-up, crackhead failson extracting millions in graft from various sketchy dealings around the world should be disqualifying for a Presidential candidate. Obviously, I'm not going to get my wish there (and the last thing that Trump enthusiasts would want is to apply that principle consistently), but I think it's entirely fair to demand that the democratically elected most powerful person in the world not have first-order family ties to a comical level of corruption.

Your first point is fair, and I don't really disagree with your second point. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be even a whiff of nepotistic graft anywhere near the highest position of the land, but that's never going to happen. Given how far we are from that reality, I sort of understand the general lack of interest on the topic.

You're right that there isn't anything substantially new here. Yes it proves that Twitter wrongfully censored a true news story, but we already knew that. What these revelations do show is that the previous Twitter administration was incompetent (which makes Elon look better by comparison).

they were malicious, not just incompetent

I'm struggling to see how this is anything other than a complete repudiation of everything that was being said about the deep state colluding with Twitter to censor the news story.

You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them, and they're getting it. The things that matter in this country have been reduced in choice, there are two political parties, there's two mobile phones and one desktop computer, there are a handful of social media companies, there's one email provider, but if you want a coffee you can get it any way you want because of the illusion of choice.

It seems that mid-high level staff at Twitter made a decision that about half of the company disagreed with, and they argued about it the whole time, and nobody in the Government ever told them to censor the laptop story?

It seems that Twitter worked actively for the Biden campaign by spiking a damaging story before the election, and they got their way when Biden won. Elon Musk spent $44 billion to show you clearly how the illusion of choice works, and you're choosing to say there's nothing to see. Extraordinary.

We already knew that Twitter censored the story and suspended The Post’s account. So before any of this info we had it narrowed down to three most likely possibilities: 1. Twitter censored it on their own initiative, 2. They censored it at the direct request of the Biden campaign, 3. They censored it at the behest of the federal gov’t (FBI, whatever)

Option 1, Twitter doing it on their own initiative seems by far the least explosive of those options. So these leaks just confirm it as the least interesting of the possibilities we had. I don’t see how any illusion of choice is relevant here, choice between what?

I don’t see how any illusion of choice is relevant here, choice between what?

The reference is to the George Carlin bit about how concentrated power makes people think they have choice by offering different coffee and bagel flavors, but not anything meaningful. I don't really know how the analogy is supposed to map though, I think @KMC might have jumbled their understanding of it.

The illusion is more that these things are independent and unrelated. OP fell for it when he says there was no proof, no conspiracy, no There there.

But yes, the money quote is the first sentence.

Thinking that's the best of the three possibilities is backward, IMO. If major communications networks are being strong-armed by the CIA, well, we can cut them a bit of slack. They're working as propagandists pro-bono, and you can't stop that without buying the company (maybe).

Which is why the media has taken the Musk acquisition of Twitter with such equanimity.

https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1585838262173675520

On 5., I think you’re misinterpreting the tweet. Pretty sure he’s saying he’s seen no evidence of foreign government involvement in disseminating the laptop. As in, contrary to the “general” warning given by the feds prior to the laptop dropping. Not that there was no USG involvement in suppressing it.

I don't think FBI falsely telling a major social network that incoming story about Hunter Biden is foreign disinformation (which they very well knew isn't since they had the laptop in their custody) and asking to suppress it, and the social network suppressing it under excuse of "hacked material", which they freshly invented to protect their partisan interests, and which they had zero proof of, and which they never consistently followed, immediately before election in which Biden has been the candidate - is nothing. I think it's a collusion between partisans in law enforcement and partisans in social media to hide information from the public and thus influence the election - which was done to maintain plausible deniability (not using the words "New York Post laptop story" but talking in generics while perfectly knowing which exactly story is about to drop) - and which, according to poll data, worked.

I'm struggling to see how this is anything other than a complete repudiation of everything that was being said about the deep state colluding with Twitter to censor the news story

Very simple. Everything that was being said about the deep state colluding with Twitter to censor the news story is actually true, that's how. The government knew that the laptop exists and is genuine. They literally had it. They warned Twitter that some big story is about to drop soon (I don't remember the exact wording but you can find it), and as we learn now (not sure if Taibbi mentioned it) Hunter was specifically mentioned. They did not say "censor the laptop story" - they didn't need to. It was enough for them to say "we want you to be cautious - there would be some foreign disinformation dropping soon", knowing the laptop story is the one that is going to be dropping soon, and then, after it dropped, come out and say "this looks exactly like the foreign disinformation!". Twitter guys aren't idiots, they made their conclusions and knew what is required from them.

Another store that turned out completely true is that DNC told them who/what to ban and they routinely did. Yes, Trump admin did too, albeit more rare and reluctantly - somehow incomprehensibly, you understand it as an excuse. It's like you learned that a person robbed a bank, but also robbed a grocery store - and you think since he's not just a bank robber but also grocery store robber it's somehow better!

It's not an FBI agent demanding they take down the story or risk arrest, so in that sense it's not a 'bombshell', but the 'room temperature' here started with public statements that social media would face increased regulation if they didn't clamp down on misinformation, and a bunch of former and a few not-so-former intel people saying the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” by the 19th. Having them also say it privately by the 16th is unsurprising, but it's also kinda scandalous even if not unconstitutional in any enforceable way.

That Taibbi didn't find direct contact specifically about the laptop story is pleasantly surprising -- as is the Dem congressional staffer with any interest in the First Amendment -- but it's not the only thing required for there to be a scandal, here, if a lesser one. I mean, that's especially the case given that it's already known that Twitter Safety people were meeting directly with the Biden team in non-e-mail approaches, but even if all of those things were never intimidating anything about this specific story or threats of future regulation, you still have other problems:

Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.

During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected "hack-and-leak operations" by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October. I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.

That's genuinely less bad than if the Biden administration called them up and said 'fuck the NYPost in particular', but it's still at a particularly ugly nexus of federal power and speech that's largely gone unexplored because no one with standing could challenge it. And the defense that this was the Trump ODNI, DHS, and FBI doesn't reduce the scandal very severely, for the same reason that Peter Strzok being part of the Trump FBI doesn't make Strzok's behavior less bad.

((And there's separate mini-scandals, here: the DNC was pointing at a RealJamesWoods tweet that... it's blurry as hell, and I don't really want to look at any politician's junk for very long, so I assume it's a dick? But it's also the man smoking crack. Note that the Twitter declaration above emphasizes the lack of coordination as a defense against electioneering claims. Yes, the media exception probably matters more, and yes, the RNC and DNC have long been political 'fixers', but even assuming every such removal was perfectly legitimate, it's still the DNC e-mailing Twitter and telling them to remove a private citizen's commentary on a matter of political interest. Not illegal! The DNC isn't a government! Probably not even unprecedented, given past cozy relationships to newspapers. But come on; people were raising concerns when federal campaigns said maybe Palin's involuntary biographer shouldn't rent the house nextdoor and stare at her backyard all the time.))

There's some 'charitable' explanations, here -- the FBI had a Hunter laptop well before the NYPost story and probably before the meeting warning about it, so maybe their concerns about hacks related to it were 'really' making sure none of their people leaked, for example -- but this is a pretty severe issue even if not The Worst Case.

Biden administration

You mean campaign?

Not every specific instance would break down that way, but I think it would be worse if it were someone who got hired into the early Biden admin in 2021, or worked as part of the team for that, even if not on the Biden campaign team during the 2020 election season. And, in turn, it would be even worse were anyone who held office or a Hill job at the time. Partly that's just the more direct ties to government force, but it also just feels closer to power than politics.

Now, as you point out, the Biden administration as a whole wasn't in office before the election, and it's not clear a lot of individuals who could have made those calls had other personal offices. So it's not likely, and without any specific evidence needs to be treated as purely imaginary. But it's the hypothetical a lot of people are motioning around when they say that the reveal here wasn't that bad.

What's odd is that Mark Zuckerberg has gone on the record saying he was contacted by the FBI about the laptop story being Russian Misinformation.

This is not true. What Zuckerberg said is that the FBI contacted him with a generalized warning about a potential "Russian propaganda dump" before the Hunter laptop story came out. Rogan asked him if the FBI specifically say they needed to be on guard for that story and Zuckerberg says "No, I don't remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern".

That's fair. I wasn't intending to fog their statement and your interpretation is reasonable. The overall claim is still a bit vague, and there's no indication the FBI told Zuckerberg to do anything nor does he say if the FBI said anything about the veracity of this upcoming dump. After the Rogan interview, FBI said as much and Meta also said "“The FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference — nothing specific about Hunter Biden".

While it's Twitter and probably a separate meeting:

Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.

During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected "hack-and-leak operations" by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October. I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.

Still not about the specific story or about the laptop specifically, but specific about Hunter Biden.

((I'd be interested to know if Meta genuinely got different levels of specificity, or if it's legalisms.))

And Taibbi confirmed that the federal government, FBI, CIA, etc., did at no time, for any purpose, contact Twitter directly regarding the laptop story, or tell them what to do about it?

That's not accurate. He said he did not see anything like this in this subset of emails. He has no way of knowing anything that happened outside of these emails. This is like saying, "He confirmed God doesn't exist and has never existed," because there is no mention of God in these emails.

Let me put it like this.

A small Russian troll farm was enough to put a permanent asterisk on the Trump presidency as illegitimate.

Also, lets not forgot that Twitter taking down the article, banning all sharing of it, banning the NYPost and the White House Press account, essentially said "Anyone sharing this document is spreading Russian disinformation". "Good People^tm" were not supposed to traffic in it. On the debate stage, when asked about it, Joe Biden just said the whole story was Russian lies, and that was that. No follow up, no pressing him on it, nothing.

How many votes do you think that moved? Not just memory holing the story, but lighting up the Virtue Signal that if anyone tries to inform you of it, you should ignore and hate them.

If a small Russian troll farm with a small, though measurable, success at going viral counts as delegitimizing an election, Twitter's actions easily meet that goal post.

And this change in the story matters. Before people were somehow claiming it was an honest mistake. Just an oopsy. Now it seems nakedly obvious it wasn't. Activist at Twitter were on Team Biden, and their decisions were biased to the core. It was not a mistake, and especially not an honest one. We are finally allowed to claim, without being told we aren't being "charitable", that these are partisan liars who were out to swing an election. I don't need there to be explicit collusion where the FBI specifically told them to memory hole the story. The receipts we currently have are enough to damn them forever more in my eyes, and put just as much of an asterisk on the Biden election as there was on the Trump election.

Activist at Twitter were on Team Biden, and their decisions were biased to the core.

Wait just a moment. From what Taibbi said, the key role was played by Vijaya Gadde. What's the proof she's a Biden supporter?

https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=vijaya+gadde

It's not that hard. Straight (D).

I looked at her donations. Being straight D is weak evidence she's a Biden supporter (she donated to Harris). It seems possible that this is why, but very weak overall.

If that were my first conclusion, I'd not beclown myself with it in public.

It seems that mid-high level staff at Twitter made a decision that about half of the company disagreed with, and they argued about it the whole time, and nobody in the Government ever told them to censor the laptop story?

Through any of these communications. Ah-hah!

I don't think we need to get conspiratorial though. The absence of any direct communications does mostly confirm that the decision to censor the story based off the "Hacked Info" policy was kinda-sorta just made up by Twitter employees. We find out in the string of posts that previous implementation of the Hacked Info policy required authorities to say some content was h4x0r3d in order for Twitter to remove it. Had this occurred, and we had Twitter employees citing a statement from the WH as reason for censoring it, we'd have a much stronger case to say it was the result of government pressure with Twitter laundering a false statement.

It sounds like Twitter staff made the decision to censor the laptop story and suspend the NYPOST based on personal political leanings. This was in direct contradiction to company policy. I believe "not 2016 again" was mentioned by at least one exec in these communications. I'd be more willing to cite the thing if it was in a dang news article or substack.

"The first amendment isn't absolute" bit is a conspicuous wink wink, nudge nudge vote of approval. I agree it doesn't exude the air pressure. To characterize it as a coordinated campaign of governmental interference or conspiracy would not be accurate. One thing I thought about after seeing was the Moldbuggian Cathedral essence of it all. When you look at the event as a whole it's pretty convincing. It all worked swimmingly.

Truthful October Surprise smear campaign targeting favored party candidate gets censored by employees of the largest politically relevant social media platform in the world. No direction between between favored party and party loyalists required. My recollection is the "Hunter Biden laptop story = Russian hackers" narrative went on for some weeks as the premier explanation and deflection. The media cover for a Biden win was total, complete, and impressive. So impressive that Ro Khanna thought it was too impressive and not a good look.

Maybe that theory of decentralized coordination can't ever be disproven as a convenient explanation, or we can accept this result as a logical, realistic end in a string in decisions. Of course the Twitter staff wanted to, and then did, successfully censor the story! Why wouldn't they?

EDIT: Tangential, but I checked out of curiosity. NYPost was suspended on the 14th of October. The account was reinstated 2 weeks later on the 30th and Twitter made this announcement.

Had this occurred, and we had Twitter employees citing a statement from the WH as reason for censoring it, we'd have a much stronger case to say it was the result of government pressure with Twitter laundering a false statement.

By "WH" do you mean the Trump White House?

"WH" is a personal nickname I have for what can broadly be described as the Deep State. It stands for "Werm Hat."

Okay, that part is a lie. This could not be possible. The WH today could have possibly have strong armed Twitter so long as they had a time machine. Not a good or accurate sentence, yeah.

This is essentially why I think the 2020 election probably was "stolen" from Trump and there really isn't anything to be done about it.

There were too many people with motive and opportunity to break or bend the rules, and they don't need to be centrally coordinated or even explicitly communicate with each other. They all just need to be on the same team and know they're fighting against fascism. The cheating is going to be opportunistic, contextual, usually bending rather than breaking the rules. There isn't going to be a clear pattern or smoking gun, because this process exploits the local knowledge of motivated individuals in positions of responsibility who know what they can get away with in each circumstance.

Thia incident at Twitter is the kind of thing I expect to be happening everywhere, and most of the time it goes unimpeded or unnoticed. This also applies to the midterms and all elections going forward for the foreseeable future, because they learned their lesson in 2016. There is nothing that can realistically be done about this.

Chinese protests are a top story in Western news media. I don't think they're entirely organic. Some are likely intelligence agency ops.

Here's the first thing that made me think something was off: https://twitter.com/quanyi_li2/status/1596784472740937728

First, some of the signage doesn't look right. They use traditional characters instead of simplified. They also sometimes use pinyin, seemingly unable to recall the "qi" in "Urumqi," the biggest city in Xinjiang, even as they were protesting on Urumqi road. Mainlanders wouldn't do this. This is beyond mere misspelt Tea Party protest signs, I'd say it's akin to protesting against Biden with an English-language sign with Cyrillic characters accidentally slipped in. It's a clear signal of "not from around here."

Second, the protests don't make much sense if your goal is to reach other Chinese folks in China. You can't share such protests on social media, and news agencies won't cover them. However, contrary to popular narratives, demonstrations are allowed in China. You can't call for the downfall of the national government, but you can plea for the national government to come in and fix local issues. You can also take to the streets because you're really worked up about foreigners insulting China.

So, the intended audience is probably Western news media and consumers of such media.

Third, advocating against the national government and leaders is punished, and everyone knows it. It's unlikely that Chinese citizens would take such a risk when it's so easy to put on a demonstration that falls short of impugning the national government. I think it's likely that these were non-citizens, perhaps Taiwanese, or perhaps expats, that aren't risking their livelihoods. The use of traditional characters makes this more likely, only Hong Kong and Taiwan use them. Western media are unlikely to take note of such things, or to take note of Taiwanese accents.

This aligns with what we've seen before in intelligence ops.

We've seen evidence that intelligence agencies have helped along color revolutions in the past, including protest leaders in Hong Kong meeting with at least one state department official. Much of this is actually done in the open, with the National Endowment for Democracy sending money directly to dissident groups.

Note that an intelligence op doesn't mean that everyone involved works for the intelligence agency, or that they even know that the agency is involved. Every country has its collection of folks who would like to see the government fall. Intelligence operatives identify and befriend these folks, nurture their revolutionary sentiments, and help to remove hurdles in their way. It's the same tactic used to get a group of right-wing men to agree to kidnap the governor of Michigan, except that no one stops the plot from continuing to move forward.

I saw a twitter post of some fellow holding Friedman equations. Freedman, free man... This is possibly the most convoluted way to express a point. How many Chinese are going to see the equation, process it and appreciate the pun in a foreign language? I know China has a heavy emphasis on STEM but this is too much. Looks very much like something you'd do to attract foreign attention rather than sway the domestic audience.

https://twitter.com/nathanlawkc/status/1596842009364500481?

Possible. But it's just as likely that it's a false flag by the PRC as something Western instigated.

Maybe slightly more likely. Western intelligence agencies aren't hiring Iowa teenagers to make these signs; they have plenty of people capable of writing Chinese, and they know that the mainland uses simplified. This isn't exactly obscure stuff, and they're not idiots.

The protestors' behavior even fits better; participants in a false flag operation know they won't be punished, while absolutely anyone living in China (including Taiwanese and expats) knows that calling for national downfall will lead to a... bad time, regardless of any sweet talking by Western operatives, who can't do much to protect you anyway.

I'd rank "organic protest by idiots" as most likely, false flag as a bit less likely, and a Western operation as the least likely.

Why the hell would a dictatorial régime do a false-flag revolution? They risk making people believe that protesting the government actually won't get you killed, so lots of normal people will join the false protests... Turning them into real protests. The number 1 rule for a dictator is to prevent the creation of common knowledge about how many people don't like you. Any appearance of large scale protests is incredibly dangerous to this end.

The false flag here is the signs clearly not being written by literate mainlanders. CCP propaganda organs can take those photos and circulate it through domestic media to prove that any protests are just some Western operation as opposed to organic expressions of dissatisfaction with the regime.

I think what he's saying is that the pictures are produced by the Prc then debunked, feeding a narrative that the (real) protests are fake.

Here's the first thing that made me think something was off: https://twitter.com/quanyi_li2/status/1596784472740937728

If I saw an American holding a misspelled sign at a protest, the last thing I would think is that it must be a China. If there's any conspiracy, it'd be more likely that it is a domestic operation that is meant to make the protesters look stupid/uneducated. (I seem to recall, but I may be wrong, that some people holding up signs like "keep your government hands off my medicare" while protesting Obama were actually Democrats, but that was a long time ago, so I may be misremembering).

Don't get me wrong there are plenty of protests in China but a REAL Chinese protest tend to demand local official to step down and national government to intervene. They almost never call for a regime change. Even rarer to call the party leader to step down.

But the policies they are protesting are coming from the top. And even if they weren't, its not like people don't protest the feds when other levels of government are more responsible for the situation. The trucker protest in Canada was generally against covid restrictions, most of which were put in place by provincial governments, and a border vaccine mandate put in place by the US. But they still protested the Canadian federal government.

Those two things simply do not address the problem at hand. Demanding national leader to step down is a western thing because then they can vote in a new leader. It does not work in China. Strong sign of foreign funded operation.

I don't think I've actually seen many protests demanding federal leaders resign, because in the west we CAN vote in a new leader. So if you were protesting in China, it seems like demanding a resignation of the leader would be the only real option, since voting ain't going to do it. I guess in parliamentary systems, since the leader isn't directly elected, calls for leaders to step down are a bit more common, especially since elections are irregular.

the central government has extremely high approval ratings and it's usually the local ones that people have issues with.

But the issue with zero COVID seems to come from the central government. Changing local leadership isn't going to solve things.

Also the police stood aside keeping watch instead of clamping down immediately shows 制度自信. These people are lucky if only the police is investigating i know for a fact that Shanghai facial recognition software is extremely good.

You'd think if this was a foreign operation that the police wouldn't be twiddling their thumbs. "Nah, we only suppress domestic, organic protests. We'll happily allow the CIA to undermine our country, though."

I think this is more evidence in favour of the protests being encouraged, at some level, by the CCP. Maybe as an excuse to change policy. Maybe to expose dissidents (and CIA networks). Maybe to frame anti-lockdown protestors the same way the western governments have. As outsiders we look at these people and think 'heroes'. But in the west, the average person has looked at anti-lockdown protestors as loons. Maybe the average Chinese person looks at these protestors like they are retarded rednecks endangering the lives of everyone around them. Because China is much more, uh, collective than the west (especially America).

They use traditional characters instead of simplified. They also sometimes use pinyin, seemingly unable to recall the "qi" in "Urumqi," the biggest city in Xinjiang, even as they were protesting on Urumqi road. Mainlanders wouldn't do this. This is beyond mere misspelt Tea Party protest signs, I'd say it's akin to protesting against Biden with an English-language sign with Cyrillic characters accidentally slipped in. It's a clear signal of "not from around here."

Would any minorities in China do this? Minorities tend to be more likely to protest, since the majority tends to be well represented.

Didn't China pretty effectively dismantle CIA networks in their country a couple years back? Some conspiracy theories attributed it to Hillary's email server being compromised.

I could see the protests being any combination domestic and foreign, with the CCP leveraging them like politicians in any part of the world would. Could have been organic, and the CIA swooped in to fan the flames, and the CCP is tolerating it in order to gain intelligence on who is all involved and what their motivations are, and also trying to paint the protests as being astroturfed. Every team is in the game.

Hold on.

You say we’ve seen intelligence agencies fund and maybe even coordinate opposition in HK. And this is supposed to imply that the West is smuggling fake agitators into enemy territory to stage protests? And despite this devious, nigh-suicidal deployment of eager actors, they didn’t bother hiring you to proofread their signs?

It would be easier to fake the whole thing in Hollywood. Or in the offices of mainstream media. Or by seeding a bunch of pictures on Twitter.

I did not imply that people were being smuggled in.

Note that an intelligence op doesn't mean that everyone involved works for the intelligence agency, or that they even know that the agency is involved. Every country has its collection of folks who would like to see the government fall. Intelligence operatives identify and befriend these folks, nurture their revolutionary sentiments, and help to remove hurdles in their way. It's the same tactic used to get a group of right-wing men to agree to kidnap the governor of Michigan, except that no one stops the plot from continuing to move forward.

I think it's likely that these were non-citizens, perhaps Taiwanese, or perhaps expats, that aren't risking their livelihoods.

Motte, meet Bailey...

I think it's likely that these were non-citizens, perhaps Taiwanese, or perhaps expats, that aren't risking their livelihoods. The use of traditional characters makes this more likely, only Hong Kong and Taiwan use them.

Doesn't that seem just ridiculously dangerous for the people involved? Rather than risking their livelihoods or reputations, it seems as though they are risking their lives. Massacres of local citizens can't escape notice locally, "disappearings" of foreign nationals who aren't even supposed to be there can be concealed because they weren't even supposed to be there. Local citizens have few rights, foreign nationals have none.

I don't think China disappears foreigners. Other than a couple of unfortunate Canadians, I believe that China treats foreigners well. I've visited China a few times and all levels of law enforcement treated me well. Other than their extreme apathy and lack of will to let me register my residence one time. They were too disinterested to even track me the way they are supposed to track where foreigners stay.

I'm going to say that China is safe for visiting white westerners. Your punishment for violating their laws and norms is being kicked out and banned from re-entry.

Yup! But if foreigners infiltrate the country in secret, so that no one other than the CIA knows you're there, and you get disappeared, who does anything about it? What's being proposed here is that the protestors claiming they are locals aren't locals, they get arrested and their identities can't be verified, what happens to them then? The diplomats can't claim them without revealing they've been astroturfing anti gov protests, not an option. If they die, what can anyone say? He wasn't even there.

Other than a couple of unfortunate Canadians, I believe that China treats foreigners well. I've visited China a few times and all levels of law enforcement treated me well.

Were you publicly protesting Xi Jinping's policies? Seem a bit apples and oranges if not...

Unless you're unlucky enough to be targeted for retaliation in response to something like America arresting Huawei executives, I think foreigners are treated better than Chinese citizens in this respect. You'll probably be kicked out, not have your ability to travel or do business in your home country restricted, and certainly not massacred. No one is being massacred over this, not even citizens.

Unless you're an actual spy, then you'll be at least imprisoned.

Information controls are designed to prevent ideas spreading to Chinese citizens that the government believes to be dangerous. Kicking you out achieves that goal without causing diplomatic headaches.

From what I can tell China has a total of about 30 Americans in its prisons, and the State Department considers one of those to be wrongfully detained. It's hard to find resources on Chinese citizens imprisoned in America, all I found was this that says we had "no more than 400" in the mid-2000s.

If your idea of China is that you'll be whisked away to the gulag on the slightest suspicion, I think you need to update. Cultural Revolution China is not present-day China. Present-day China is also not Stalin's Russia. They aren't free to call for the downfall of the national government or its leaders, but the typical treatment I've seen for verboten speech starts with a police visit where they try to convince you to stop. For whatever reason I'm having a hard time digging up the articles I'd read on the topic. Search is polluted with recent results, and restricting my search to before 2020 yields 6 results on Google for "china speech visit from police".

My model of china isn't citizens being whisked away to Gulag. Rather my model is, if the US/Taiwan/etc infiltrate large numbers of Taiwanese or other foreign nationals into the Prc to pretend they are prc citizens, that rather precludes diplomatic intercession on their behalf. If the Prc disappears them, the USA can't intercede without admitting that they were there protesting to begin with.

There are lots of times foreign citizenship can be a protective shield, but not where you're standing up to pretend to be a local protestor. When they round up the "local protestors" no one will notice people who aren't supposed to be there not being there afterward. Too many risks, not enough reward. These protests will be as meaningless in China as they were on Long island.

too many risks, not enough reward

You could say the same for, uh, flooding Chinese cities with planted agitators. What’s the point, the expected impact? Where is COINTELPRO getting all these fake Chinese eager to piss off the PRC?

Edit: I realize this is the same point you were making.

See my last paragraph, I'm explicitly not arguing that the protestors are planted. The young radical Muslim who sets off a fake bomb the FBI gave him isn't planted. It's far easier to network and influence locals that already have a negative view of the government than to import actors.

There are about 400,000 Taiwanese nationals living in China.

Exactly, I'd actually find the full Alex Jones "These are actually filmed in downtown Pawnee, Indiana" type takes more logical than "They launched a huge infiltration operation while cheesing out on learning how to spell."

I wish western intelligence services were strong enough to incite anti-lockdown revolts in China, but you're making them sound way cooler than they actually are.

Why would western intelligence services decide, in 2022, to ignite the exact sort of protests they spent much of 2020, 2021 and 2022 trying to stop? Especially when it's already known that such protests have an awful habit of spreading across borders with copycat protesting, such as when the freedom convoy in Canada had copycats as far flung as Europe and New Zealand.

Why would western intelligence services decide, in 2022, to ignite the exact sort of protests they spent much of 2020, 2021 and 2022 trying to stop?

Because they have more than one priority at once? Western rivalry with, and distrust of, the Chinese Party-State is longstanding public knowledge. And when you have a big objective like that, any tool to hand looks attractive.

Are there any lockdowns left to protest in the West?

No, but trucker convoys do get used for non-lockdown related libertarian protests. A set of libertarian protest tactics used in China would presumably spread.

Ya especially with Europe's energy crisis coming, economic downturn, and the existing European precedent of the yellow vests and dutch farmer protests... anything anti-lockdown, but ultimately anti-government has the risk of pouring over into general international anti-technocrat class war...

but then the CIAs never been that smart with who they fund and what they choose to enable... they Ignored the Berlin wall protests and were actively shocked when communism fell at the same time they were pouring millions into funding Bin Laden to fight the soviets...

Why would western intelligence services decide, in 2022, to ignite the exact sort of protests they spent much of 2020, 2021 and 2022 trying to stop?

I'm skeptical of the idea that the CIA is behind these protests, but this a poor argument against it. The CIA is very much in the habit of sponsoring the same people abroad that other parts of the US government fight at home. Whether it is "moderate" Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Syria, or drug traffickers in South and Central America...or reach way back into the Disney vault and remember when it was the choice between supporting Mussolini and allowing communists a chance to flourish that directed Anglo-American foreign policy.

The very fact that the USA is trying to quash these protests at home makes it more logical that they would try to force them abroad. If the deep state genuinely thought that lockdown/covid policies were good, then they would want to undermine China by preventing China from implementing them.

So, summing up your evidence: 1) one of the protest signs - one filtered through social media to look like that - is written weirdly. . 2) ... the protests don't make sense because "demonstrations are allowed, and you can plea for the national government to fix issues, but the news agencies won't cover them". Maybe they're doing that? 3) "protesting against the national government is punished". Yeah, it is in iran too, yet protests happened there. Protests happen a lot, including in countries they're illegal in. The long duration of covid measures is making people more willing to protest! Not to say that protests are human nature or anything, social phenomena like this are (somewhat) historically contingent and depend on a history of protests people learn about, but it's plausible they are protests.

This isn't enough to prove intelligence involvement. From the twitter thread:

Don't get me wrong there are plenty of protests in China but a REAL Chinese protest tend to demand local official to step down and national government to intervene. They almost never call for a regime change. Even rarer to call the party leader to step down.

The covid measures are by the national government, though. And most protestors aren't calling for regime change! I can believe western media is playing up 'regime change' as a component of the protest - but even they acknowledge it's a small fraction of protestors. From cnn:

As numbers swelled at demonstrations in multiple major cities over the weekend, so too have the range of grievances voiced – with some calling for greater democracy and freedom. Among the thousands of protesters, hundreds have even called for the removal of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who for nearly three years has overseen a strategy of mass-testing, brute-force lockdowns, enforced quarantine and digital tracking that has come at a devastating human and economic cost.

Videos showed Urumqi residents marching to a government building and chanting for the end of lockdown on Friday. The following morning, the local government said it would lift the lockdown in stages – but did not provide a clear time frame or address the protests.

Some china watchers on twitter have also claimed media / twitter randoms were mistranslating vocal protests, swapping covid slogans for anti-regime/pro-democracy slogans, which is plausible. But all of that undermines her argument - if most of the protestors are just protesting covid, then your reasons 2 and 3 and her thread aren't relevant! And in the context of large protests about covid, a subset of them making more extreme claims becomes more plausible. From her thread again:

Those two things simply do not address the problem at hand. Demanding national leader to step down is a western thing because then they can vote in a new leader. It does not work in China. Strong sign of foreign funded operation.

the central government has extremely high approval ratings and it's usually the local ones that people have issues with. There are also foreigners in there chanting down with CCP in the video, they refer to the Communist Party as the "CCP" even though they're in China 🤭

This just sounds like the china-lover equivalent of 'americans would never vote biden because he is a communist subverter so TRUMP WON ' or 'america would never vote trump so RUSSIAN HACK ELECTION BOTS', tbh.

It's like the 'half of this board are feds' / 'half the twitter people who disagree with me are bots' claims (which was even less plausible pre gpt3, yet was about as common) - intelligence agencies exist and do things, but they don't do everything. Even if the CIA were involved in this, that involvement is very complex - even if the CIA ran 'protest-covid-china.cn', where the protestors downloaded pngs for their signs how much of a causal role in the protests does that actually have, might the protestors have used other signs otherwise?

You claim "I don't think they're entirely organic. Some are likely intelligence agency ops". Well, if 5% of the protests are 'ops' and 95% are 'organic', then how does that matter? Russia funds a bunch of leftist media organizations in the US that have a strong following on twitter (hence the 'russian state-affiliated media' tag). Does that make communism russian? Not at all.

This isn't to say US intelligence are 'the good guys' or would never do such a thing, not at all - this is much 'worse': In 2010, a new decade was dawning, and Chinese officials were furious. The CIA, they had discovered, had systematically penetrated their government over the course of years, with U.S. assets embedded in the military, the CCP, the intelligence apparatus, and elsewhere. The anger radiated upward to “the highest levels of the Chinese government,” recalled a former senior counterintelligence executive. ... Within the CIA, China’s seething, retaliatory response wasn’t entirely surprising, said a former senior agency official. “We often had a conversation internally, on how U.S. policymakers would react to the degree of penetration CIA had of China”—that is, how angry U.S. officials would have been if they discovered, as the Chinese did, that a global adversary had so thoroughly infiltrated their ranks.. But spies existing doesn't mean they're responsible for the car that just drove past your house.

The covid measures are by the national government, though. And most protestors aren't calling for regime change! I can believe western media is playing up 'regime change' as a component of the protest - but even they acknowledge it's a small fraction of protestors.

I'd argue that it is hard to underestimate significance of even small fraction of protesters demanding Xi Jinping or CCP being replaced. This NEVER happens in China, never. There was a precedent to this in form of famous bannerman protest in Beijing calling for end of Covid restrictions and calling for free elections as the National Congress of CCP was in sitting. This was immediately suppressed and censored and the bannerman AKA Bridge Man was promptly disappeared - probably with his larger network of friends and family also severely punished up to three generations. But his message still spread out in various forms including Apple Airdrop campaign, for which Apple caved in to CCP. That is the reason why you normally never see these things in China, and yet here we are.

Again, even if it is a small portion of the crowd demanding a change it cannot be compared to the Western protests. This is huge shift in sentiment of the population. If you actually have vocal voices willing to take such an incredible risk, there are bound to be much more people silently sympathizing but scared to voice their opinion.

Any time anything like this happens in China or Ukraine or whatever, it's always "foreign operatives" or whatever. The locals never have any agency of course.

From this video in Beijing (亮马桥 area), we can see：

  • first ~10 seconds: the first person (with masked) with the microphone is asking the crowd to be careful as there a foreign anti-Chinese forces among them (“现在，在我们群众当中，有境外反华势力，在我们周围“）

  • People start yelling "we are all Chinese people / citizens" (“我们都是中国人”）

  • at the 0:24 mark, a second person (shorter, no mask, glasses) now has the mic, who asks: "Are Marx and Engels the foreign forces you speak of? ... (crowd repeats) Is it Lenin?" (“请问，你说的境外势力是马克思和恩格斯吗？是列宁吗？”）

  • 0:33 mark: the first speaker responds (without the mic, with his hands up) that he will forever love his country and its people.

  • 0:40 mark: the first person continues that he also thinks the current policies have issues ("我也觉得现在的政策有问题，我真的觉得有问题“）before getting cutoff by the crowd for trying to change the topic ("不要转移话题“）

  • 0:51: "Question: was the fire in Xinjiang started by foreign forces?" (the fire in Wulumuqi that killed people) (“请问新疆的火是境外势力放的吗？”)

  • 0:56: "Was the bus in Guizhou crashed by foreign forces?" (”贵州的大巴是境外势力推翻的吗？” )

  • 1:01: person in white jacket takes the mic and asks in the most Beijing accent: "everyone, was I called here by foreign forces?" ("大家我是境外势力叫来的吗？“ ) - crowd: "no!!"

  • 1:05: "we can't even go onto foreign websites, how could we be foreign forces? How can foreign forces communicate with us?" ("我们连网都上不了国外的，我们哪儿来的境外势力？境外势力怎么跟我们沟通？“

  • 1:13: glasses guy takes the mic again: "we only have domestic forces that prevent us from gathering" (“我们只有境内势力不让我们聚集”)

Anyway you get the gist. The glasses guy was later interviewed by Japanese television, and his whole emphasis is "I could be the next Xinjiang fire or Guizhou bus crash".

First, some of the signage doesn't look right. They use traditional characters instead of simplified. They also sometimes use pinyin, seemingly unable to recall the "qi" in "Urumqi," the biggest city in Xinjiang, even as they were protesting on Urumqi road. Mainlanders wouldn't do this. This is beyond mere misspelt Tea Party protest signs, I'd say it's akin to protesting against Biden with an English-language sign with Cyrillic characters accidentally slipped in. It's a clear signal of "not from around here."

This seems cherry-picked. If you look at the videos from the 2am Wulumuqi protest, there weren't much signage at all. Most of the protests after have been using the blank A4 paper. You see that in the video I linked above.

Second, the protests don't make much sense if your goal is to reach other Chinese folks in China. You can't share such protests on social media, and news agencies won't cover them. However, contrary to popular narratives, demonstrations are allowed in China. You can't call for the downfall of the national government, but you can plea for the national government to come in and fix local issues. You can also take to the streets because you're really worked up about foreigners insulting China.

Just because they know censorship exists doesn't mean they never protest. Plus most of the protest isn't calling for the downfall of the government (tho some exists).

If you listen to the slogans, they aren't calling for the downfall of the government. They are saying stuff like 不要核酸要吃饭 不要封控要自由 (Don't wanna nucleic test I want to eat, don't want lockdowns want freedom).

(And yes I was at an anti-Japanese march in Shanghai a long time ago. It seemed ironic to be yelling anti-Japanese slogans as you walk near the Japanese Consulate, and then drinking your Kirin beverage (but that's just me))

Third, advocating against the national government and leaders is punished, and everyone knows it. It's unlikely that Chinese citizens would take such a risk when it's so easy to put on a demonstration that falls short of impugning the national government. I think it's likely that these were non-citizens, perhaps Taiwanese, or perhaps expats, that aren't risking their livelihoods. The use of traditional characters makes this more likely, only Hong Kong and Taiwan use them. Western media are unlikely to take note of such things, or to take note of Taiwanese accents.

In a country of 1.3 billion or whatever the number, there are weird shit that happens all the time. I can tell you with confidence that the 2am protest in Shanghai was majority local Chinese, mostly young people. This was in the former french concession (trendy place to live) so there were some foreigners there (I may or may not have been there), but all expat groups and group chats on wechat etc have been warned not to participate in these, precisely because you dont wanna be a random white guy photographed in the crowd and then used as "see, this is foreign forces!". And you don't wanna be deported and all that.

And by the way the twitter account you linked is ... questionable.

Any time anything like this happens in China or Ukraine or whatever, it's always "foreign operatives" or whatever. The locals never have any agency of course.

I observed this as well. I follow Daryl Cooper and he goes on and on how everything that happened in Russia since downfall of Soviet Union has imprint of USA. Russian economy was ruined by US corporations, their peaceful attempts such as Partnership for Peace was dashed by the likes of Allbright and Kissinger and their pawns like Václav Havel or Lech Wałęsa. Expansion of NATO basically forced Russia into hot wars, they had no other choice. Even recent analysis like Nordstream 2 pipeline explosion - Cooper's theory is that Biden was blackmailed by intelligence community to blow up the pipeline - because there is no possible explanation for why Putin or anybody else would ever do it, there is quite a remarkable absence of imagination regarding Putin and his convoluted gang of goons, given what convoluted stories Cooper can create when it comes to US actions. And my speculation is that even if Putin actually ordered it a new narrative would be created how it is ultimately just result of America's shady plays behind the curtain.

There is never any agency of 7.7 billion people in the World, everything that ever happens is orchestrated by this one nation of 300 million. It seems like a sort of strange and perverse version of American exceptionalism - yes we are the most powerful nation that ever was and we are behind everything, only we are the bad guys. Which is BTW a strangely common thread with the wokes, only they see immense power of Western White Males everywhere in the world throughout whole history. It is quite a weird fetish.

Also for everybody else, I follow The China Show podcast of two expats who lived in China for over a decade and who have a lot of contacts still in there. They covered the topic extensively during last episode, it is worth a watch.

I've always found it strange that typos or linguistically confused protest signs are considered evidence of CIA interference when that seems like one of the easier things for them to get right. Maybe it's hard to wrangle up a translator for obscure languages, but there's no shortage of people who know Chinese and you could even anonymously outsource the task to language learning sites and forums full of native speakers happy to correct you for free. It's easy to overestimate the literacy of the average person, but the typical protest sign is much closer to the level of yahoo answers than motte posts, with mistakes that to us seem glaringly obvious or impossibly absurd. This is even more pronounced in Chinese these days because hardly anyone hand writes characters anymore, using either pinyin inputs or one of the various autocomplete methods.

That actually seems like a relevant variable- if reports that tech censorship ramped up in China as unrest came into the picture are true, then the average chinaman being functionally inscripturate means we should expect to see a few protest signs written with Taiwanese characters or whatever- after all, Taiwanese writing apps are presumably not any more blocked than they had been.

And my understanding is that the ability to actually write in Chinese characters unassisted is like knowing Latin- it’s the product of the Chinese version of an expensive classical education, not something that stem lords or average joes would get(or indeed seek out), so the people protesting(who are almost definitionally not the elites who would know these things) are dependent on apps to produce Chinese characters.

The issue is that 乌鲁木齐 - the "qi" character (the last one) is very much a character you learn to write in like, 2nd grade if not first.

At the same time, this photo feels very cherry-picked to me. I didn't notice any such written signs in any videos.

I think the first question should be "Who is purporting this to be authentic?" The tweet you posted is just a debunking of the photo but it makes no reference to the source. Did the person who posted the tweet take this picture herself? Did it appear in Western media? I did a reverse image search and the only places I can find this on the web are from CCP apologists using this photo as evidence of CIA or MI6 or whatever involvement, which isn't a good sign.

Well guys, it turns out we are ruled by satanic pedophiles. While the Epstein saga really cemented this as true, the most convincing thing I saw was some pieces in John Podesta's art collection. The worst stuff is from Kim Noble. You'll know we're undergoing a regime change when these people are rounded up and disposed of. Until that time, nothing has changed.

This is an interesting topic because it is one that can't be discussed with cool heads. Most people completely shut down, others more partial to Alex Jones style talk completely buy in. There's not a lot of fence-sitters when it comes to this question. What are we supposed to do if it becomes undeniable though?

Some in here might make the case that this p_do s_tan stuff including Epstein is a mutual blackmail ring that keeps elites from defecting against each other. I could buy that. But I'm not sure I could buy the case that this state of affairs is better than a less stable one without it.

  • -19

Wait, I thought everyone learned about this during pizza gate? James Alfentis instagram (comet pizza and ping pong owner) at that time was similarly sketchy.

Also, Tony Podesta is the art collector brother.

I don't think anywhere near "everyone" learned about this during Pizzagate. The mainstream takeaway was something more like "wow, Republicans are so crazy these days that a guy shot up a pizza joint because he thought it was a pedo ring", or at least that's how people I know seem to remember it.

I think a lot of the mainstream was dimly aware that the outgroup had dug up the owners' weird taste in art, but dismissed it as a slander that ought to be buried because yes our elites will sometimes do embarrassing things but dammit they're our elites and it's not the outgroup's station to attack them over it.

(Also, artsy elites being into weird shit for the sake of being into weird shit is known and considered normal among a very large sector of society. I imagine the colour would drain from your face if you heard some stories about the stuff students openly get up to at liberal arts colleges.)

I'm a bit worried that excessive detail will constitute an opsec issue, but for example a former student told me of something like "lesbian theatre play with a masturbation sequence (optional audience participation)".

That's not entirely wrong with "The Vagina Monologues", but there's a bit more to it.

Yeah, they got me with that line too.

Sure normies thought that, but I'd have thought the online set (ie folks here) to have researched this at least enough to have found that out.

That’s how I remember it, more or less.

To be fair, it's actually my main impression too, just with an "also that pizza owner guy is fucking weird" bolted on.

As a pedophile, if they were really pedophiles (or at least the only kind I've ever interacted with), they:

A. would have hired more sexually attractive children. (I'm not insulting the kids' appearance overall per se; they are cute as children, but they don't have the explicitly sexual appeal of the types of nymphets (yes, including some as young as the girls featured who can indeed have "that look") that tend to be posted on boards where pedos congregate. It's not just because they're not in particularly sexualized outfits either.)

B. would have put the kids in the bondage fetish gear also at least. When you have a MILFy office worker fetish photoshoot, is it the desk chair in the tiny pencil skirt or the woman?

C. wouldn't have put anything about "child porn" in the picture. Most pedos who make non-nude erotic photography of children are quite worried about crossing a line and getting in trouble, and when that line is based on vague criteria like "Whether the visual depiction suggests sexual coyness or a willingness to engage in sexual activity." and "Whether the setting of the visual depiction is sexually suggestive", the last thing you want to do is be like "Yep, this is child porn!" It's always modeling, simply modeling.

I know lust for children, and nothing about a teddy bear in bondage by itself suggests a lust for children to me (maybe a lust for stuffed animals, which is a thing).

Now perhaps that's just how specifically Satanic pedophilia works (but I don't know as doesn't Satan in many if not most interpretations (not necessarily mine) probably like lust, sexy poses, tiny bikinis on young girls, etc.?) in which case I want nothing to do with it. Praise PedoJesus!

As a pedo, what is your expert opinion on this song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ArOQF4kadHA

Is he genuinely being 'satirical', just trying to own the cons or sarcastically expressing a genuine desire for pedophilia? Or does the homosexuality throw a spanner in the works?

I get really creeped out by the guy's eyes and face. Even 10 seconds of looking at him is too long.

Definitely just trying to own the cons (though that doesn't mean he couldn't be a pedo/hebe/ephebo as some do unfortunately lean left and homosexuals tend to be more likely to experience youth-directed chronophilias on average, just that the video isn't much evidence either way). His ears look decently symmetrical though.

I keep wanting to write a post about the difference between honest paedophiles and the "we're coming for your kids to own the cons, hail Satan" cruelty- & dominance-motivated trend that's so popular on the left now. I feel really bad for all the people being tarred by association with that stuff.

Sounds like you could do a better job explaining it to conservatives, as long as you don't start explaining the mechanics of closing German hell portals.

I think this is it. Child sexual abuse is a problem, but what would be a way worse problem is if pedophilia/sexualizing children becomes normalized among segments of the population to own the cons.

I think there's a general trend that people don't actually know how their professed enemies behave, despite the fact that they think they know, and they don't want to actually find out. Pedophiles have this problem the worst because anyone who wants to investigate pedos with even the tiniest air of neutrality and doesn't already assume they should be condemned with no exceptions are instantly speculated to be pedophiles themselves.

I think in the case of pedophiles people know. They just want to pretend they don't because of what's similarly lurking inside of them.

Your leading evidence for “rule” is a Twitter thread skewering a gross, tasteless photo shoot.

Had you ever heard of Balenciaga before they decidedly to cut themselves with that edge? I know I hadn’t; I needed to google it when someone made a joke about buying stock. What makes them a ruling class?

Years ago, when I was first reading Wheel of Time, I caught how many of the villain names were suspiciously Christian. Be’lal, Asmodean, Sammael, Shay’tan. And that expensive new series was pretty woke. Are you going to take that as evidence for your Satanist conspiracy?

Balenciaga is a huge luxury brand. Most better airports have some shops, the flagships in major cities have big lines waiting to go inside. Although around for a century, their primary innovation you're sure to have seen imitations of was sneakers with overly wide bottoms: https://balenciaga.dam.kering.com/m/30e12220cb4b44c9/Medium-544351W2GA19100_F.jpg?v=3

Over the past decade, short atmospheric art films have been huge in the luxury industry. They did one with the Simpsons: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PZHESOq-Gkw

Why are we talking about child sex trafficking when they should already be serving a lifetime sentence for making those shoes? Priorities, people.

Bronze Age Pervert and his associated tribe love the word n*****. Amongst other things, it means that any engaged member cannot cash out their ingroup following for mainstream success. Much can be forgiven, but the sacred cows remain sacred. Yet their fondness for hate crimes is constitutively distinct from performing said hate crimes IRL. It’s an affectation, albeit an expensive one, and it help keep the clique weird and interesting and marginal.

If you’re a cool staffer in DC, pedophilia memes are a great way to distinguish between the back and front of house, like the cultural demarcation between chefs and waiters. If you’re a center left dem policy wonk, you spend most days providing obedient assistance to a public official who wields real power. But you are free from the scrutiny pointed at your boss, by and large, and you can engage in taboo violations that would utterly outrage your enemies and discomfort your boss’s base. Those taboo violations aren’t necessarily child abuse, just child abuse memes; art, fashion, jokes. You might get in trouble whenever the peasants kick up a stir, but that’s just proof that you are a debonair cosmopolitan with refined taste.

It’s quite possible that this encourages or facilitates the evils it’s poking fun at. But I’m not sure this explains more of Epstein et. al. than the simpler Mossad blackmail thesis. Powerful people are great targets to exploit, and so there are lots of people who would like favors. On the other side staffers direct a lot of attention towards deniability and message control. Bill Clinton had tons of affairs and is likely a rapist, but he’s known for one event, which occurred in the middle of his presidency. Who cares if John Podesta buys sketchy art, or Hunter Biden smokes crack? Maybe these pedo memers are terrible people, but morality is a pretty weak indicator of job competence; compare LBJ to Jimmy Carter. These days, it all boils down to sides. ‘MAGA’ was a meme aimed straight at the liberal icons, insinuating that things were at least better before the First Black President, or maybe the before all liberalism downstream of the Civil Rights act. This is a heresy, and so we get Trump derangement syndrome. Protecting Children is a similar idol to the right, and so this too triggers an auto-immune type disorder that appeals to the craziest and most engaged audience, sucking up all the oxygen from normie-type political concerns.

‘MAGA’ was a meme aimed straight at the liberal icons, insinuating that things were at least better before the First Black President, or maybe the before all liberalism downstream of the Civil Rights act.

Two can play the interpretation game: MAGA was a meme aimed straight at the progressive left’s icons, insinuating that things were at least better before the smooth-talking radical with plot armor, or maybe before all the socialist economics bundled together with anti-racist legislation as a moral cover.

Or, in the spirit of this subthread and as argued by this account at some point, "maga" means witch in Latin, thus serving just yet another small proof about the fact that Donald Trump is the Antichrist.

It's an interesting angle, but the owners of the abuse art (e.g. Podestas) would be best described as at the top, as opposed to staffers. Ditto for the spirit cooking type events, this is not staffers LARPing in their time off, it's their bosses. Furthermore, the memes in the Balenciaga ads were done by designers who work for themselves for their customers. The choices made there were for the benefit of the client.

That being said, I have no explanation for why elites would engage in this behaviour and then advertise it in these escape-room style random puzzle piece ways.

The Podestas are very much not the top, they don't hold the office. They are campaign managers and chiefs of staff and fund raisers not office holders. They're at/near the tip top of that totem pole, but office holders are on a whole other totem pole.

They are campaign managers and chiefs of staff and fund raisers not office holders. They're at/near the tip top of that totem pole, but office holders are on a whole other totem pole.

Why do you have to hold office to be "the top"? We're not exactly short on "grey eminences".

Because the President's Chief of staff is like a butler, they may manage all the other servants or manage the president's schedule like an executive secretary, but the buck stops with the President.

Putin gave the presidency over to Medvedev before declaring himself Dictator For Life, or whatever his position is, but no one pretended the buck stops with Medvedev. American officials openly admit to lying to Trump about the numbers of troops in the Middle East, because they didn't want him giving orders to pull them. This "butler" model seems completely false.

Podesta is at the top of the Consigliere ladder, but he’s never been elected and never will be. He might be more powerful than Joe Biden de facto but de jure he’s just another employee. This matters only in the political show, but that show is what decides who wins or loses elections. A producer or an agent is only as good as the talent they represent.

The Balenciaga thing seems to be either directly downstream of politics as straightforward trolling the normies, or as pretentious highbrow edginess to differentiate themselves from the mainstream fashion brands. Haute couture does weird stuff for the sake of weirdness, and we’re all talking about Balenciaga now instead of Louie V. Probably a pretty successful and campaign.

That being said, I have no explanation for why elites would engage in this behaviour and then advertise it in these escape-room style random puzzle piece ways.

Why wouldn't they? You still seem to be thinking of it from a "this is obviously evil, they must know it is evil, so why would they do that?" perspective. The parent poster already gave one motivation (it mindkills a vocal subset of their opposition); the other aspect is that making obscure references for the benefit of those who get them feels intrinsically rewarding to many people, and the art you are talking about does not actually register as evil to far more people than would be willing to even admit it on the public stage. (I'm one of those people, so feel free to question me to understand this attitude. If I actually actively liked this kind of stuff, I imagine I would also enjoy planting random references to it everywhere. Compare to the Kabbalah jokes all over SSC.)

Eh, so what? First, to some extent this could very well be in a feedback loop at this point, where it is merely edginess that derives its coolness from the fact it triggers the right sort of people like Tucker Carlson, as opposed to any attraction to children. If Tucker keeps getting triggered it keeps being cool. Not very high brow, but I could imagine that dynamic being real. Similarly, Satanic symbols most frequently don’t evince any genuine belief in or worship of Satan, as opposed to simple desire to trigger Christians.

Twenty years ago gamers were revelling in this same sort of behavior, and perhaps the art world isn’t any more mature.

Even if Podesta’s art collection was indicative of genuine pedophilia, I guess there are a couple follow up questions. Is the rate of pedophilia for “the elite” any higher than among any other group of people? You get a big enough group together and you’re bound to have a few pedophiles, so finding one sus art collection doesn’t mean much.

This comment racked up a bunch of reports, including: Low effort, inflammatory, building-consensus, boo-outgroup, violence, and antagonistic.

I generally agree with all of those complaints. My own personal complaint is that you don't follow one of the engagement rules:

"Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion."

Your post is mostly written as if we are all on board with ideas and theories that very few people are actually on board with. I was about to list them all out, but I realized you were saying something in just about every sentence that is controversial enough to be its own full discussion.

In general this post doesn't badly break any particular rule, but it breaks so many at the same time that I think it makes for a good demonstration of what we don't want. 1 day ban as well.

You think the Epstein clients didn't know? Why did they make so many return trips and continue associating? These aren't all 17 year olds, the original accusation came from a 14 year-old and later went as low as 11.

How is this related to the Balenciaga stuff? Because it's the same set of people.

Whether they knew or not, it seems like being in the habit of screwing barely legal serving girls is not a good excuse for having sex with a highschooler.

We can also probably all agree that it is not pedophilia to sleep with a teenager who looks like an adult.

First accusation (probably legit): https://nymag.com/news/features/41826/

11 year old accusation (maybe not legit): https://nypost.com/2020/08/14/jeffrey-epstein-accused-of-sexually-abusing-11-year-old-suit/

You think the Epstein clients didn't know?

It probably runs the whole spectrum of guilt.

I like to imagine that if we got all the Epstein regulars in a room and dosed them with a (real) Truth Serum, there's at least one guy who would say something like "I don't even like teenage girls! You ever try to make cocktail small talk with a 15 year old? It was awful! But the contacts I made at these parties? I couldn't afford to stop going! Where else could you meet five billionaires who are instantly your new friends? You'd make money at these parties just from hanging around and hearing scuttlebutt. So I went, had a few drinks, tried to avoid the girls, then went home and fucked my wife. Occasionally, hey, when in Rome ya gotta do what ya gotta do to show you're one of the boys, but it wasn't something I liked, and it wasn't why I went."

Greed, power, fashion, sexual perversion are all bound up together in the same psychoses. Some probably had more of one than the other. If you take out the prostitution bit, I can't imagine how awesome and glamorous some of those parties must have been. Scientists, academics, lawyers, billionaires, politicians, geniuses. The absolute top tier. Elegance, luxury, total impunity. You know these men by reputation, by the news, by their publications; you know they aren't in prison. That atmosphere produces a strange effect on a lot of people.

Where else can you meet 5 billionaires?

You realize they do that every weekend in Palm Beach or NYC? They have dinner parties where the invite list is billionaire only and sometimes a service provider whose got a $100 million (like their art or real estate guy).

You didn't quote the rest of the sentence.

Where else could you meet five billionaires who are instantly your new friends?

Nothing binds like vice and crime. That's why the best initiations from the Agoge to my frat to gangs always involve a crime. A crime is a secret, and nothing bonds people together like a secret.

Given, I'll cop to never going to some billionaire's cocktail to-do in Palm Beach or NYC. Maybe they're super duper fun and everybody bonds super close. But I'll guess that even if a relatively "normie" academic could get in, they wouldn't get the same bonding.

The bonding occurs because you are both in the billionaires club.

I think Epstein ran younger than 17. It went to 14.

This is just "The Pyramid and the Garden". People aren't good at properly adjusting for the level of cherrypicking and degrees of freedom possible when you have thousands of people scouring a large world for evidence matching their pet theory.

A photoshoot for a fashion company reuses a "legal documents" prop from the shooting of a television drama as "office documents", the same company sells fashion that is vaguely leather-daddy inspired and didn't segregate it from photoshoots with children, and you conclude that "we are ruled by satanic pedophiles". (And they are deliberately embedding evidence about this in fashion photoshoots for some reason.) If you lived in a tribe of a few dozen people and happened to personally notice two coincidences like that about a single person, maybe that would be reason to be suspicious. But you don't, you live in a society of hundreds of millions where thousands of people spend time hunting down and broadcasting stuff like this for your perusal. As a result this doesn't even really tell us about Balenciaga's marketing department, let alone "society". But people's brains don't adjust like that, so give them a few coincidences like this and they'll either come to believe false things or dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory. And then the ones who do the latter are still vulnerable to the same mistakes in reasoning when packaged in ways that don't register as "conspiracy theory", especially ones spread by mainstream media sources.

The court documents on their own are excusable, sure. But in the same picture they have "BAALENCIAGA" on a prominently featured prop.

https://twitter.com/pope_head/status/1595422663190740993

Baal as in, the demon.

All this is doing is adding evidence that this brand had some edgelord on their art team. This isn't really showing that even artsy media design people have a higher preference for either child sexualisation or Near East paganism than the baseline, let alone the ruling classes in general. I guarantee I would have an easier time finding the same sort of material on 4chan or even YouTube (between kids doing lascivious tiktok dances and that viral song with names of Goetic demons, usually paired with freeze frames of people's dogs...) than you would in a fashion catalogue or Washington DC office.

And anything selling to non-edgelords should pay a heavy price when an edgleord is found with decision-making power. That's what keeps edgelord signaling power strong.

I mean, if people want to boycott this handbag brand or whatever it is we're looking at, more power to them (and the edgelords, apparently, who get to preserve their street cred). We're not debating whether to start funnelling EA donations to Ba(a)lenciaga, just whether to update our own models towards anything like "satanic pedophiles secretly run the US government", and possibly what, if anything, one ought to do about that depending on one's utility function.

(It's actually not at all clear to me that the subset of right-wingers who claim to value sexual propriety orders of magnitude higher than anything else are actually best served by opposing "the Cathedral". All things considered, the woke tribe is pretty puritan in its own ways; pulling the balance of power further away from it will certainly at least intermittently take us through a local minimum of a stalemate which is actually likely to look more libertine than the current situation, and it seems overly optimistic of those right-wingers to assume that they can carry their victory all the way past that minimum to establish some sort of Evangelical Saudi Arabia or whatever is the ideal there.)

(It's actually not at all clear to me that the subset of right-wingers who claim to value sexual propriety orders of magnitude higher than anything else are actually best served by opposing "the Cathedral". All things considered, the woke tribe is pretty puritan in its own ways

Yes, the woke tribe is very Puritan when it comes to any healthy sexual expression - their rules are basically "if it forms families and produces children it is to be condemned and if it makes that less likely, it is to be promoted".

"Less sex" isn't a terminal right-wing value.

Puritans are the same sort of degeneration of proper western values as modern progressives, actually. Yarvin of all people, who coined "The Cathedral" makes this point. It's all downstream from militant Protestantism destroying sensible Catholic institutions.

Traditional society shuns these excesses as the heresies they are and so do traditionalists.

Quantities of sex qua sex are immaterial, it is quantities of sin that are of import.

And Whitewolf let themselves die and completely fail to capitalize on the D&D craze and the Vampire trend because one guy had a few 1488 jokes hidden in the text of the new edition.

I thought accusing people of dogwhistling and being crypto-____-ists was retarded hysterical crap that smart people should ignore.

Okay, but why is that small child holding a teddy bear in bondage gear and a ball gag in the same photo as the pedophile legal document? At some point it isn't our hyperactive pattern matching fooling us and someone purposefully made some sort of joke (?) or reference to child sex abuse.

See my post here. And note the document is from a completely different photo shoot.

It's meant to be shocking to stand out. Fashion brands do weird stuff all the time to stand out. It worked well, I bet this was the first time you've ever talked about Balenciaga in your life.

According to them those were separate photos, and separate campaigns.

Okay, maybe that Twitter presentation fooled me. Or less likely, they are in damage control mode and lying about their photoshoots.

A photoshoot for a fashion company reuses a "legal documents" prop from the shooting of a television drama as "office documents",

  • This is just a damage control statement, I don't see any evidence in it.

  • Even they say it's only "most likely".

  • Why would anyone order a prop like that from a third party when you could just print some random document templates on the spot?

Why would anyone order a prop like that from a third party when you could just print some random document templates on the spot?

I don't know, why would anyone order a prop like that if they were actually doing what's written on the prop? The Occam's Razor answer remains that they're edgelords and that the fashion industry looks fairly pathetic from an outside view.

Still not sold on the idea they actually ordered this as a prop.

The Occam's Razor answer remains that they're edgelords and that the fashion industry looks fairly pathetic from an outside view.

The explanations that they're into pedo stuff, thought it would be hilarious, and that no one will notice (and if they do, they won't do anything about it) is just as simple.

If you think this was cherrypicking, not only would you have to reject the theory that it was done by pedophiles, you'd also have to reject the theory that it was done by edgelords. Doing it because they are being edgelords is still doing it deliberately, and that's inconsistent with being cherrypicking.

(My conclusion is that yeah, it was probably done by edgelords, but while that's not as bad as being pedophiles, it's not exactly exoneration, either. It shows horrible judgment on the topic of sex and kids. And I never see this excuse accepted when someone's accused of white supremacy. "Oh, he just said the N-word because he was being an edgelord.")

If you lived in a tribe of a few dozen people and happened to personally notice two coincidences like that about a single person, maybe that would be reason to be suspicious.

Surely this is an overstatement. Whoever set up those "legal documents" was definitely doing so deliberately.

Also the teddy bear is dressed in fetish gear and ball gag. Once might be happenstance, but twice in one photo was on purpose.

Edit: it may have been two different photos. Still two strikes from the same people.

I said it that way specifically to convey that the nature of a corporation rather than an individual means the key decision likely was an inaction, rather than an action. A search finds the bear bags were accessories made for Balenciaga SS23 Paris Fashion Week.

The Balenciaga SS23 show at Paris Fashion Week was staged in a starkly dystopian setting and challenged the fashion industry’s focus on restrictive categories and boxes, while exploring what it means to be a luxury brand.

Similar to the clothing associated with cyberpunk and with other dark-future settings like Mad Max or The Matrix, it sometimes drew inspiration from leather fetish clothing:

Throughout the collection, muted tones infrequently gave way to shocks of pink, red and yellow to stand out against the background. The cameos of black leather were dramatic and determined, with a long apron dress sporting buckles, zips and large hand-sized grab handles to arouse fetish sensibilities in the aether.

See this outfit - it is obviously fetish-clothing inspired, but it is not sexy and if you saw it in a dystopian science-fiction movie I doubt you would consider it particularly remarkable. But people doing fashion shows in 2022 are too deep in artsy signalling of their sophistication to do something as straightforward as "make costuming for a dark science-fiction movie", so they also contrast with various incongruous elements:

All of the looks became muddier the longer the cast walked in them, almost adding to the intentional deconstruction of ‘the collection’ as a concept. Snake-like, full body-length scarfs in bright colours added a knowing smile to the darker undercurrents, along with fake babies strapped to chests and teddy bear bags highlighting as accessories. In other places, constructions that seemed to integrate giant tote bags into the shoulder will never not be subjects of debate.

So now they have some bear bags meant to ironically contrast with the overall dystopian vibe of the fashion show dressed in miniature leather outfits inspired by science-fiction movies that were inspired by punk/etc. fashions which was in turn inspired by leather fetish outfits. That's not the key action, plenty of movies and fashion shows have done this with zero controversy. The key action is that the people involved didn't ensure there was some sort of memo or note saying "Some elements of the collection were indirectly fetish-outfit inspired, do not include in photoshoots with children." Frankly it wouldn't have occurred to me to do that either.

Then the photographers are handed this collection of nonsense - sunglasses meant to evoke The Matrix, random chains that are supposed to look like Mad Max or cyberpunk, bear bags dressed in leather meant to be among the elements adding an ironic note to the dystopian sci-fi. They are presumably told to create some photos in a more relatable context than a sci-fi fashion walk through a muddy ditch "deconstructing 'the collection' as a concept". I assume they don't actually sell any of those accessories, so this is not so much actually advertising specific items as tying together the high-fashion and consumer-oriented parts of the SS23 Collection on some conceptual marketing level. So they do some photos in a normal-looking house with a kid, and someone suggests the kid hold the bear. The people involved either don't associate the bear-bag's outfits with sex (plenty of people have never seen leather fetish outfits in any context other than maybe news footage of a gay pride parade), don't consider it their job to ask about it, or consider the connection so abstract that it doesn't occur to them it might be controversial.

I already linked The Pyramid and the Garden but I also liked this elaboration from "You Are Still Crying Wolf"

I want you to read those last eight points from the view of an Atlantis believer, and realize that they sound really weaselly. They’re all “Yeah, but that’s probably a coincidence”, and “Look, we don’t know exactly why this thing happened, but it’s probably not Atlantis, so shut up.”

This is the natural pattern you get when challenging a false theory. The theory was built out of random noise and ad hoc misinterpretations, so the refutation will have to be “every one of your multiple superficially plausible points is random noise, or else it’s a misinterpretation for a different reason”.

We started with some sort of artsy but coherent message, the "dystopian sci-fi with ironic contrasting elements" of Balenciaga SS23 Paris Fashion Week. Remove the context of the dystopian sci-fi vibe and it turns into incoprehensible noise, the bears no longer having enough to ironically contrast against. If it happens to combine with a photoshoot with children then suddenly the noise sounds like something specific. This is exactly the sort of thing we would expect from people combing through pictures until the noise fits what they're looking for.

Pizzagate had the same thing, some people from /pol/ looking through Instagram pages and taking note of the suspicious stuff they found. Since this was noticed a month after Kanye West was dropped by Balenciaga that might be what inspired someone to look, though I don't find any mention on 4plebs before it was on Twitter so it probably wasn't posted on /pol/ this time.

they do some photos in a normal-looking house with a kid, and someone suggests the kid hold the bear. The people involved either don't associate the bear-bag's outfits with sex (plenty of people have never seen leather fetish outfits in any context other than maybe news footage of a gay pride parade), don't consider it their job to ask about it, or consider the connection so abstract that it doesn't occur to them it might be controversial.

This does not fit at all with who would be doing a high end fashion photo shoot.

I won't pretend to understand modern art, but your links for 'satanic' appear to be... that. I imagine a boomer trying to parse Doom Eternal would have a similarity freaked out reaction.

As for Podesta's art collection, he's the campaign manager for a failed presidential candidate from a while back. Him having off-putting art is hardly proof of some grand conspiracy.

This is an interesting topic because it is one that can't be discussed with cool heads.

I would actually say that it's more a case of people with cool heads not bothering to engage with it because it because there's so little to actually engage with.

so little to actually engage with

If it was just Podesta's art and that's it, then sure. But we have Epstein. The guy who was constantly rubbing shoulders with the absolute upper echelon, was conclusively found to be running a p_do ring out of his private island and massive ranch and most expensive house in NY using hundreds of millions in ghost money, given a pass by the highest level of government when he was first caught in 2005, later commited suicide was suicided in an ultra secure prison while the guards were sleeping and cameras were malfunctioning. Closest associate was the Ghislaine Maxwell, recently convicted of sex trafficking to nobody. Daughter of Robert Maxwell, sisters run a firm that does cybersecurity for governments including the US. That's "so little"?

Podesta? Failed campaign manager? That's selling him a bit short.

John David Podesta Jr. (born January 8, 1949) is an American political consultant who has served as Senior Advisor to President Joe Biden for clean energy innovation and implementation since September 2022. Podesta previously served as White House Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton from 1998 to 2001 and Counselor to President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2015. Before that, he served in the Clinton Administration as White House Staff Secretary from 1993 to 1995 and White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations from 1997 to 1998.

He is the former president, and now Chair and Counselor, of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank in Washington, D.C., as well as a Visiting Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.[1] Additionally, he was a co-chairman of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.[2][3][4]

In his current role as senior advisor to President Biden, Podesta oversees the disbursement of $370 billion in clean energy tax credits and incentives authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.[5]

That's "so little"?

That's.... set of true facts. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's one guy who used his ability to develop kompromat to leverage himself into a situation where he could live the amoral child rapist lifestyle he craved.

I wouldn't expect a Netflix documentary about him or Maxwell if he was just the tip of the iceberg. I would expect either his victims to be missing (they aren't) or the supposed Bill Gates/Hillary Clinton victims to exist (as far as I know, they don't.) Best I have for you is that prince from England; he done it. But I don't think it's a case of 'the elietes' all being secretly pedos or whatever. At least, not based on Epstein.

Epstein's connections got him out of jail, so someone somewhere is complicit. I don't think you can make the magical leap that everyone is complicit, or that they all partake in his crimes.

That's selling him a bit short.

My threshold for caring about this guy after trawling through his email is incalculably high. He's just not that interesting, as his resume indicates. I wasn't able to find anything spicy and neither, apparently, was anyone else, so now we're looking at his... art collection?

Seriously?

If you really believe that there's a grand conspiracy of elietes, find another one to pick on, otherwise it seems like there's just a fixation on this one dude that leads to fanfiction being written about him. It's a lot like with the fixation on Trump, except of course Trump was actually important for a while.

You can say "pedo," this isn't TikTok.

I'll ignore the "p_do" part for now.

But anything described as "satanic" makes me roll my atheist eyes to the back of my head and back and then to the back again.

recently uploaded a disturbing video with bags that had babies in blood. This is not by coincidence. Lotta Volkova uploaded this picture on her instagram with the hashtag #Moloch which is an ancient Pagan god where they sacrificied children

Seriously I am supposed to be scared of this clown? Do you know who else refers to said child sacrificing God all the time? Us Mottizens!

Maybe I watched too many ISIS and Narco executions (actually scary) during my time but I read Volkovas shenanigans as an obviously intentionally "edgy but artsy" curated aesthetic. Real satanic shit has a look and feel to it, and its not this.

But I am sure there are some sheltered 40-year-old housewives who will lose sleep over this.

Why would you ignore the p_do part?

Not him, but I'd ignore the pedo part (why are we censoring ourselves here again?) because the "satanic" art is pretty much not evil without the pedo part, and the pedo part would be exactly as evil without the "satanic" art part.

Just Satanic -> 14 year old goths, nobody cares

Pedo -> evil for-pleasure acts, deserves death

Satanic ritualistic pedo -> WTF is even going on here

Satanic ritualistic pedo -> WTF is even going on here

Satanic ritualistic pedo -> Right wing Boogeyman

Because other people can/did comment on that. I can comment on the part of the post where I have something meaningful to talk about.

You mention the ironic, edgy use of the name Moloch by mostly atheist rationalists to describe a mindless yet malevolent emergent societal process.

I don’t believe it to be good faith to deliberately conflate it with the ancient Canaanite deity which inspired the reference. Its worship involved the abandonment or sacrificial murder of children.

Given the nature of the art, which do you think is being referenced in that Tweet? Here’s a hint:

Here’s an old photo of Bohemian Grove where the worlds most elite men gather each year and worship an effigy of moloch

EDIT: Since I've gotten several replies on the same basic theme, I'll elevate one of my later comments to here: The point is they’re not physically gathering around a symbol of society losing all the mutually-observed bits of politeness and turn-taking which kept us from all-out culture war. The conflation I pointed out does nothing to serve the conversation.

Bohemian Grove

"The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time—it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd." Richard Nixon, 1971

You see scary shadowy figures, I (and Nixon) see silly people doing silly things.

In short, I dont buy inti any of your premises. I can explain in detail if you wish.

There's enough otherwise normal seeming elite involvement in weird paganism/satanism larping to sense a pattern, and it doesn't seem particularly schizo to point it out. Bohemian grove as probably the most prominent example.

And this isn't just Marylin Manson shouting hail satan- a lot of the people doing this stuff are distinctly non-edgy.

Bohemian Grove people «worship» an owl.

I am entirely open to the idea that, as in the past with Freemasonry, there exist powerful conspiracies driven or unified by unorthodox metaphysical beliefs, including Satanism and the Cult of Saturn, rather than regular self-interest of concentrated power and information asymmetry.

I've yet to see good evidence of it. In any case, calling people Canaanite cultists because they're celebrating a statue is the peak of unfelpful peasant-with-a-pitchfork attitude. We have creepy sacrificial effigies at home.

I liked seeing Butter Lady burn when I was little. Doesn't make me a spiritual descendant of Carthaginians.

The point is they’re not physically gathering around a symbol of society losing all the mutually-observed bits of politeness and turn-taking which kept us from all-out culture war. The conflation I pointed out does nothing to serve the conversation.

Oh for sure, pointing to our/rationalist use of Moloch is either a joke or a bad faith deflection.

I am comparing the tweet hashtagged Moloch with the rationalist use with full sincerity.

My priors for Volkova being an edgelord is much more numerous than anything insidious.

"Rationalist" repurposing of occultist terminology might sound edgy, but it is massive own goal.

When normie, even secular educated normie who might be interested in rationalist ideas, hears "moloch" "egregore" etc... he imagines in his mind weirdos dancing naked around black altars with pentagrams and goat heads, and tunes out. Just make new words for new concepts, it is not hard.

There is a reason why Dawkins called his new idea "meme", not "demon possession".

I found out recently that my great grandmother was deep into the Eastern Star cult/lodge/social club. Named role in some of the rituals, of which there were a variety.

Now I’m seeing its symbology on bumper stickers. They’re coming for me next.

Also worth noting that there is no real historical basis for connecting 'Moloch' with an owl. In fact it's a question whether there ever was a deity called Moloch. One line of thinking is that in the Hebrew Bible, 'moloch' actually refers to the process of human sacrifice, rather than the recipient (of which there were many, including Yahweh himself).

Ah, so they’re really just way too into jinchuuriki?

Real satanic shit has a look and feel to it, and its not this.

How on earth would you know? Especially as a self-professed eye-rolling atheist?

How on earth would you know? Especially as a self-professed eye-rolling atheist?

Easily. Real satanic shit IRL looks like these organic losers or these astroturfed losers.

Easily

You and GP still have yet to explain how the cases that you linked and how whatever GP is vaguely alluding to are "real" and why. The "organic losers" you linked could be explained away as low IQ criminal edgelords and sociopaths doing stupid shit without much thought about ramifications. Maybe there was a serial killer in the mix. They were allegedly "deep into the occult and Satanism" but no details are given, and the fact that they were into the death metal scene strongly suggests that all the occult stuff was just part of their chosen identity. Or as they say nowadays, it was a LARP that got out of hand.

If they qualify as "Satanists," then certainly people who have no real incentive to engage in demonic "haha just kidding" cannabilistic blood feasts and hang (ironic?) paintings and sculpturs of mutilated, dead or sexual abused children all of their house (and who also coincidentally? hung out with a known pimp of underage sex slaves*) seem mighty suspicious as well? They didn't kill anybody, but why bother if you can just tell them that nobody will ever believe them? An evil mind might enjoy the fact their victim has to live the rest of his or her life bearing the wounds that were inflicted. And then these are massively wealthy and influential people we're talking about -- surely they have the means to make inconvenient people go away, non-violently or otherwise.

What I was getting at in my original post is that so-called theistic Satanism with black masses and all that isn't really Satanism at all. It surely evil, but mostly it's just a confused mockery of Christianity, and it does a poor job of serving Satan. People who sneer at Christianity without bothering to understand Christianity often miss this point.

What's real Satanism, then? Christians are called to imitate Christ, we do this by practicing obedience, among other virtues. Satan doesn't want worshippers, he doesn't want obedience. He wants a world of little Satans exercising raw amoral power to gratify their own desires and above all simply exercising it for its own sake.

This, to me, is what causes people to recoil from Podesta, Epstein, et al. and label them Satanic. None of them have a pentagram smeared in blood that they pray to nightly (or if they do, it's ironic and they think it's funny or edgy). But their apparent complete libertinism is quite Satanic indeed.

Side note: For a great portrayal of modern Satanists, read "That Hideous Strength" for the characters of Dr. Frost and Dr. Wither. Another excellent example is Dr. Weston in "Perelandra".

Side note 2: Yes, I think Nietzschean will-to-power stuff is essentially Satanic. That shouldn't be a surprise since Nietzsche himself would approve -- he wrote a book about his ideas called "the Antichrist".

* Before anyone gets their knickers in a twist -- were they free to leave any time they wanted?

don't christians believe that god created the devil? who else could have? weird that god would create a immortal being with magical powers whose purpose is to advance the cause of evil. seems like god and the devil have more in common than christians like to admit...

Of course, I don't mean actual satanism or occultism, whatever the fuck that means. I meant 'real' malicious things being done behind the scenes. And really supernatural beliefs let that be literal or allegorical are of no consequence to how I model good/evil. This of course rests on the assumption that we are speaking plainly enough to agree that "satanic" is just a loaded way to say evil.

Tony Podesta (not John) is probably a satanist. But, he's a satanist in the real world sense of the word, i.e. he an annoying edgelord that either pretends or actually does believe in christian fanfiction (where the bad guy is actually the good guy).

There is no evidence that satanism is actually widespread in political circles enough to warrant the conclusion that we are "ruled by satanists".

The Epstein thing is more concerning but it's unclear what it means (was he actually procuring for a cabal of rich pedophiles? was he trying to create a compromat for powerful people by tricking them into pedophile sex? was he a different CIA op that went rogue, Barry Seal style?).

Also, I have to say that wherever someone uses the word "satanic" I cringe really hard, as a atheist that was raised roman catholic it makes me think less of actual christians I have known and more of a parody of a christian fundamentalist. The kind of fire and brimstone christianity that exists more in the Binding of Isaac than in reality.

Where exactly is the reservoir population of this style of Christianity? It often reads like the fanfiction of someone who pieced together Christianity from some Children's Bible Stories, three Chick Tracts, and daytime TV.

This isn't directly connected, but there's a lot of conspiracy theory blogs that concentrate on occult symbolism in music videos, photoshoots and such. Of course there is a fair bit of that stuff going around; occult symbolism has been a part of art for ages, guys like Jonas Åkerlund surely know their occult symbolism front and backwards, and it's an easy way to provide a cool, mysterious aesthetic to things.

However, one thing I wonder is if the conspiracy theorists realize how much they themselves contribute to this dynamic. Most conspiracy theorists seemingly operate under the assumption that they're voices in the wilderness, ignored by all but the select few; however such discourses are actually quite popular in certain circles, not only among true believes but those who read them as "conspiritainment" (I admit I probably fit into the latter crowd). Surely artists and companies are also aware that just dropping a few hidden one-eye signals and masonic checkboards into a video will be an instant ticket to quite a bit of free publicity, sure to be shared by committed concerned citizens.

conspiritainment

I confess to scrolling Vigilant Citizen for schizotainment. I don't really believe the conclusions he draws, but I kind of want to in a weird way, and I think it's fun to temporarily suspend disbelief (in the same way that watching a horror movie is fun).

Eh. I'll put down for the record that I'm a bit suspicious that this may be a troll post, but taking your observations at face value, I think you are being confused in the face of a set of aesthetics, values and social mores which are foreign to you. You are conflating two things which are a priori separate and don't even strike me as particularly correlated once you control for socioeconomic grouping - edgy art flirting with sexualisation of children (by the looks of it in the one-digit age range) on the one hand, and Epstein's harem of 16+ year old girls on the other. Out of these, the latter seems to stand in an ancient tradition of rich and powerful men surrounding themselves with young girls to whom they can make offers they can not refuse, remarkable only for its violation of, ironically, California values (like half of the US, to say nothing of the rest of the world, doesn't actually have 18 as the age of consent!) that say if you look at a 17 year old funny you might as well be raping toddlers, and the blackmail element that it acquired thanks to the creeping intra-American universalisation of those. The former, on the other hand, stands in a seemingly almost as old tradition of affluent subcultures going down costly aesthetic spirals to signal commitment, like architects tiling old towns with concrete-filled abuse of the nurbs tool or French aristocrats getting lead poisoning and corset-induced intestinal impactations.

You know another elite aesthetic preference that has always disgusted me? Blue cheese. If I attempted to craft a similar narrative around it, it'd be probably something about our rulers' worship of rot and decay, and I'd be exhibiting a highly suggestive array of grainy photos of people in white tie awkwardly shuffling around at Oxbridge wine-and-cheese parties, closeups of Stilton (the worst stuff!), "memento mori" oil paintings and corpses of soldiers in the muddy trenches of Ukraine. The analogy is of course somewhat exaggerated (as you may be right to argue that 50 year olds enjoying the suggestion of sexualised 8 year olds and 50 year olds sex-trafficking 17 year olds are more similar than enjoying rotten cheese and enjoying actions which lead to the rotting of young men), but qualitatively I think it is similar enough.

("Satanic" is doing no work here apart from being your "disturbing outgroup stuff" signifier of choice, right? I don't see any pentagrams, goats or even dark angelic beings in there.)

A quick google says Epstein girls were as young as 11, often in the range of 14. Agree this is separate from toddlers, but I don't think you have a lot of good reason to claim that it's just guys interested in young girls as they were in ages past. Except that the age of marriage in Europe has been mostly 18-22 pretty much since they started writing this stuff down.

Marriage is not the same as sexual intercourse, and Epstein or his guests didn't marry (de jure or de facto) his girls.

I would imagine that historically age of marriage in Europe was more bottlenecked by the ability of the man to provide for the family, not prohibitions against intercourse at a younger age. Matter of fact, the Wikipedia page of the very first historical European ruler I sampled for a lazy argument said,

Less than a year after his marriage, Charlemagne repudiated Desiderata and married a 13-year-old Swabian named Hildegard.

I mean it's definitely weird art but I'm not really sure how it proves we're ruled by satanic pedophiles. As far as evidence goes I find it more likely Podesta just likes the shock value or these were a handful among so many pieces as to not even comment on his individual taste than that he's a satanic pedophile. And even if this was conclusive proof that he's a satanic pedophile it doesn't really follow that we're ruled by satanic pedophiles in any kind of organized way. My model is basically that you need to be kind of weird to want to do politics at all and even weirder to want to do it badly enough to get to the national level. Normal people who work a nine to five, spend time with their family and relax don't become congressmen.

OK, so they have disgusting p_do art and do weird gatherings where they pretend to drink blood and jizz off dead people but that's just edgy and for shock value.

OK, so this one dude who knows all of them was found to be running a literal p_do island and got suicided in prison, but that's just... well maybe they weren't all participating in that. You need to be weird to want to be a leader anyway.

What's proof for you?

From what I understand, you need to do a survey where you ask our leaders about their religious beliefs, and sexual preferences, and if, and only if, a majority of them check the "satanism", and "pedophilia" boxes, then you will be allowed to make your claim.

Goodhart's Law, that's an unlikely method to get at any secret or hidden beliefs if they're hidden or secret to allow them to maintain power.

He's butthurt about this one. I specifically said it'd be pretty unreasonable to get that kind of data:

I assume we're never going to get (4) short of some really impressive investigative journalism, so I think it'd be an interesting conversation what kinds of evidence could stand in for it. If you want to convince me that some significant fraction of people involved in the trans debate are fetishists, I need some kind of evidence that a bunch of them are fetishists. Maybe really widespread reports of children who say they are not trans who were being pressured into it? Some kind of internal slack channels being leaked? The FBI busting some kind of pedophile ring implicating a bunch of these people? Maybe something like your post implicating just a few people, but it happens again and again for months on end?

But he's clearly still upset about it. /shrug

At this point it's amusing, not upsetting. Opening with a demand you don't expect to be met, to make a slightly-less-extreme one appear more reasonable is a good tactic, but not when you overplay your hand during the opening, and go full Dr. Evil. Nothing you say after that will make you look reasonable.

It was a joke.

Ah, glad to see you've adopted some healthier epistemic practices comrade!

At the current rate things are going, we might get to "satanism is good, actually" in just a few years from now

Reddit is already there. "Satanists don't even think Satan is real, rube. It just means Logic and Science and rebelling against oppressive authority!"

Well...yeah. Not just nothing about Satan, check out the last FAQ:

Q: I WANT TO SELL MY SOUL, GET RICH, JOIN THE ILLUMINATI, ETC.

A: Please look elsewhere.

I don’t even want to call it a motte and bailey between Satanist humanism and Laveyan occult stuff. That implies plausible deniability. The former is just way, way more popular, especially among the terminally online.

OK, so they have disgusting p_do art and do weird gatherings where they pretend to drink blood and jizz off dead people but that's just edgy and for shock value.

From my atheist perspective every Christian who receives communion and believes in transubstantiation "[does] weird gatherings where they pretend to drink blood" of dead people. Somehow I'm skeptical you think Catholic communion is as sinister as whatever this is.

That's a pretty hot take with some pretty weak evidence.

There's not a lot of fence-sitters when it comes to this question.

I'm a fence-sitter. The amount of material and disturbing nature of it is so utterly beyond the pale, so absolutely ridiculous, that it's impossible to just shrug it off as nothing. On the other hand, I still find it plausible that it's just art-school, shock-the-normies, absolutely cringe bullshit. If it's the latter, these people are merely gross and pathetic rather than unbelievably evil. I guess that's a pretty weak form of fence-sitting, in which the object of the conspiracy is definitely awful in some way, but it does make a pretty big difference when thinking about what sort of people are actually in the ruling class.

That MartyrMade thread you linked originally had a podcast episode associated with it, discussing the Pizzagate conspiracy, that I don't see on the Substack anymore. Hmmm...

Personally Epstein's ring existing was enough to make creepers very suspect in my view.

On the other hand, I still find it plausible that it's just art-school, shock-the-normies, absolutely cringe bullshit. If it's the latter, these people are merely gross and pathetic rather than unbelievably evil. I

I do think it's more likely that "artsy" types who are under constant pressure to be creative and put out new things and push boundaries, and who rely on public acclaim (or at least on not being too widely hated) for their career, are in fact pushing boundaries, than it is that they are subtly admitting to possibly the most despised crimes in modern culture.

Like with bullies and mass shootings, the best way to discourage it is to just not take it seriously. Outrage and engagement are what they're looking for. Just roll your eyes and pretend to be bored while saying "don't cut yourself on all that edge" like they're a 13 year old writing poems in black eyeliner and swearing on counterstrike.

Maybe I just find it hard to get outraged about a child holding some stuff they probably just didn't understand, when earlier this week an 11 year old was killed because someone modified their truck, the brakes failed, and so far they've only been charged with misdemeanors. Where's the pearl clutching and outrage here? Why can you speed and ignore signs, kill someone, and get a misdemeanor?

Outrage and engagement are what they're looking for

Based on all the damage control Balenciaga is doing, I don't think this is accurate.

They were presumably looking for outrage and engagement among the people that would engage in outrage on the level of telling their edgiest friend that surely this time the art veered a bit too far in gross territory, whereupon the edgy friend would be like "now I'm intrigued" and go pay for a ticket - not among a mob of Twitterers with pitchforks.

In this case the company realizes they went too far, but a little bit of outrage is usually good (especially depending on who it comes from). And the actual creator might not care at all--short term, it's not great, but long term, it might still be a benefit. "There is no such thing as bad publicity" as the saying goes. Not literally true, but pretty close.

Suffice to say that accidents are unintended consequences of doing things in the world, which is a very different phenomenon than elite satan pedo parties.

elite satan pedo parties

When this was described by the OP, I figured they were being sarcastic, or maybe going for shock value (ironically, not unlike what I suspect Balenciaga of doing). If I had realized people were serious I would have been clearer that I think it's horseshit. Certainly a photoshoot by 1 company proves nothing--and there's no need invoke satan to justify going after Epstein's clients.

accidents are unintended consequences

While this is technically true, it also points you towards entirely the wrong policy. Negligence is an old and standard legal concept, and so is manslaughter. If you are operating a several-thousand-pound vehicle in public, you had better be in control of it. If you modify said vehicle, you had better know what you are doing. We would not tolerate "oh it was an accident" for any other context which resulted in the death of an innocent person because of negligent or reckless (and in this case, criminal) behavior. The excessive focus on the word "accident" even makes people think that car crashes are unavoidable, even though their frequency and danger is heavily influenced by behavior, infrastructure design, etc.

it's just art-school, shock-the-normies, absolutely cringe bullshit

Another point in favor of this interpretation is that it has no aesthetic redeeming value whatsoever; the works are just... flat out ugly. I'd expect a desire to glamorize the object-level to produce results far superior to, uh, the average art commission; but instead these pieces are of the quality I'd expect from medieval period artists. Which, considering this is modern "art", might be the entire point.

That's not to say that ugly art isn't absolutely a valid critique of the ruling class simply because their preference for expensive garbage to anything of actual quality tends to be a running theme in their preferred policies. "Intentionally preferring artwork with terrible visual aesthetics" should permanently end one's political career regardless of the object-level details; one should be booted from office for having an affair with someone less attractive than one's wife for that reason too.

That MartyrMade thread you linked originally had a podcast episode associated with it, discussing the Pizzagate conspiracy, that I don't see on the Substack anymore. Hmmm...

I can see it on my Apple Podcast app, released on June 27th and named BONUS The Jeffrey Epstein Series, pts. 1 & 2 (of 3) He released the third episode on October 17th. I do have his substack subscription so I do have access to extra episodes but these are from his free podcasts.

Yeah, I see that one too (also a Substack subscriber). I would have sworn there was another one that came out right when that Twitter thread did though. Lots of shared material with Epstein Part 3.

On investigation, it looks like I was thinking of an episode of the Pete Quinones show that came out in late October.

I agree with what you've said. Further to this, I think the 'satanic' labeling is playing itself out.

I get it, I'm right-wingish, but the 'literal satan' memes in the right social media sphere aren't bringing people to their side. They reek of 1980's dungeons and dragons moral panic.

It could be just rhetoric vs rhetoric on twitter, but it feels like a bridge too far.

Edited: making sure I wasn't directing at comment above who I agree with.

Yeah I agree the literal s_tan stuff definitely hurts the sales pitch, but it shows up in too many places for it to be some fake spicy detail added by the more conspiracy minded.

You can write pedo and satan without self censoring, bloody mary isn't going to appear in the mirror.

I like to not go too heavy on the special keywords.

Special to whom? I can understand being concerned about the glance of algorithmic Sauron when writing "pedo", but "Satan" is a word that both the Hot Topic fanfiction crowd and Reddit armchair generals will have posted hundreds of times before they turn 18.

I live in Canada, which is a communist country. That word is popular among conspiracy people, so I'd rather not post it 20 times.

In what sense is it a communist country? Do the workers own the means of production?

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What’s going to happen if you spell out Satan in full?

It's wild that there's 4chan-styled "user was banned for this post" flairs here now lol. Very lindy


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