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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36211 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.

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.

Look upon them, and weep.

Recently @2rafa responded to a jannied comment of mine on Reddit saying that within 80 years, my homeland and her homeland would still exist and have roughly a similar character to what they currently do but England would not, as its people and its traditions slowly get replaced by les peuples outremers. The original character of the towns and cities of the UK would slowly be gnawed at and eaten away while the institutions, traditions and social fabric dissolve in the alkahest of multiculturalism. She mentioned that it isn't surprising that the native population would fight against it as this replacement basically severs the link between the them and the future.

I agree with that sentiment and I absolutely agree the original character of what made Great Britain truly Great has been lost. But this loss didn't happen thirty or forty or whenever the immigrants started to come in big numbers years ago, rather it happened in the aftermath of the Second World War when the UK dropped its long standing traditions of Classical Liberalism, "an Englishman's home is his castle" and the Anglo developed system of limited government, preferring to go for the expansive and nannying welfare state model instead.

There is a saying that tradition is like a legacy codebase, half of it is deprecated stuff you can get rid of safely while half of it is absolutely mission critical to the project functioning and it's very difficult to tell exactly which bit is which. The UK had over the centuries since the enlightenment created both a social and legal system based on individual rights centred on liberty and freedom and built on a bedrock of Christian values where it was expected that the government would minimise it's interference with what you do with your personal property and take steps to ensure other people also couldn't interfere with it. Charity and helping the less fortunate was very strongly encouraged and the Christian values indoctrinated in everyone since birth meant that lots of people with the means to do so gave away a large portion of their income/wealth to the needy, but crucially it wasn't forced onto anyone. Indeed income tax was first introduced as a temporary measure to fund the British armed forces during the Napoleonic Wars, an existential threat to the country and most definitely not the "lets use it to pay the rent of those who don't have the skills to earn enough to stay in London otherwise" racket that's going on at the moment.

This system generally functioned extremely well, but like all systems there were edge cases where it failed. In a severely misguided attempt since the end of WWII (and continuing until the present day!) successive governments tinkered with this system and slowly removed the things that made the system work (e.g. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 which gave locals extreme levels of say into what you could build on your own property and is the prime culprit for the UK's current housing crisis), while if anything amplifying the things which were peripheral at best originally and now have become burdens upon society (e.g. how poor people renting in London effectively have the right to get to stay in of one of the only two alpha++ cities in the world and the taxpayer will fund their rent if they can't afford it themselves).

At the point the immigrants started arriving "Great" Britain was already in the process of dying. The things that made it great were being removed slowly the the British themselves. Plus new fads that were counterproductive like the destruction of the nuclear family were being adopted wholesale. It was only a small matter of time before things degenerated to the point where it was necessary to either import immigrants to make up for the collapsing birth rate or accept extreme economic pain for the vast majority of people. Britain choose to do the former. Indeed as Kipling warned a good thirty years in advance:

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

What remains of the original culture of the UK are not the things that made it great. Much like how a cadaver (initially at least) still looks like the person when they were alive but has lost that divine spark that made it more than just a heap of flesh and bones what we have at the moment is little more than a poor caricature of what the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment envisaged the perfect society to be like. It is an ersatz, cargo cult imitation where things as fundamental as the right against double jeopardy are no longer respected (see the Criminal Justice Act 2003).

Now admittedly the specific cases behind why this right was abolished were quite clearly where a guilty person had been acquitted but was clearly guilty after new DNA evidence was discovered and so their retrial led to justice being delivered (and equally, the family of Emmett Till were denied justice due to the Fifth Amendment which protects against double jeopardy in the US) but at the same time this change showed that another fundamental enlightenment ideal, that "you should not create laws based upon a few specific examples, but rather upon general principles" was no longer respected.

As such, the rot had already set in on the inside well before immigrants started coming over in large numbers and changing the outward, visible character and appearance of British society. Hence what they are now replacing is not a culture with hundreds of years of history, but a thoroughly modern creation that for most of its existence has had mass inward migration. This bastardised culture is not worthy of the protection that should have been granted to Enlightenment Liberalism, but unfortunately that is dead and has been long buried, and no amount of effort will ever bring it back. Indeed as a crude mockery of what I consider to be the best societal system discovered yet by man I would prefer if it disappeared as soon as possible. I see modern British culture as belonging to the same class of objects as smallpox and polio - something to be eradicated post haste - rather than that of the Giant Panda and the Snow Leopard - valuable diversity that should be protected by humanity and nourished.

Just yesterday ethnicity estimates for the 2021 UK census were revealed. As expected the percentage of the UK that is white British fell from around 81% to 75% since 2021. Given the continuing high migration that this country is now basically reliant on - the recent budget depended on very high levels of inward migration to be balanced, lower migration than expected in the next few years will create a short term fiscal black hole that will be very painful to British society, see what happened when Truss and Kwarteng tried to borrow with abandon- and the higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water. British culture and the country character will continue to change over the coming generations and it will be best for the natives themselves if they just go with the flow rather than trying to fight an inevitability.

This is exactly the kind of post we don't want. "I can't wait to see you get lined up against the wall" (no, you didn't explicitly say that, but this is clearly the message you are trying to send) is nothing but antagonistic.

It has not escaped our notice that @BurdensomeCount is trying to push buttons. Consider not rewarding this behavior by telling him how hard he's pushed yours.

Too late: the Brahmins are coming. Bangladeshification imminent! Learn to love your humble Varna and Jāti, fellow Aryan – and you, too, may hope to reincarnate into the upper class.

– t. ex-Goldman Sachs employee

Funnily enough while I'm not a Brahmin (as a non-Hindu I'm technically outside the caste system) I do have the light skin/height that's indicative of being a Brahmin and if I had to pick a caste I think I'd fit there more than anywhere else.

I don't get all the Brahmin hate though, especially from westerners who were never made to serve the Brahmins. Just because they're at the top doesn't mean they need to be brought down a peg. And while Varna may still be important Jati really doesn't matter too much if you're in the west. And this too is just for marriage, for friendships etc. anything goes.

He's an /r/dramanaut doing an uno-reverso on white nationalists, and getting off on the responses. The moderation style here has the unfortunate effect of letting obvious trolls wreak havoc, as long they post in a certain style, so it is up to you to not take the bait.

One must leave open the possibility of a non-self-respecting dramanaut.

In this house we believe that effort is a virtue unto itself.

And the "pedofascist" is deliberately edgy, but his position is coherent and makes sense – it's not far from what Peter Thiel preaches. He could have opted not to edge so hard and not call himself, well, a pedofascist, taboo squared, and he'd have sounded rather anodyne.

True, it's a bit derivative I agree and poor fashion. I shouldn't have included it and I would still have made effectively the same point.

I'm a long time /r/themotte and /r/slatestarcodex poster. I've never seen that poem before.

Some of us are déclassé enough to appreciate it; I thought the reminder that some in the UK already saw the connection was well placed. And if it introduces somebody new to The Gods of the Copybook Headings, that's great too.

I am going to disagree. I've been hanging around the Motte a long time now, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen the poem. I don't think it is as common as you're asserting, or else I would've seen it at least once before.

If we want to talk Kipling quotes which get used a lot, it has to be the Danegeld quote.

Really?

I’m not sure I’ve seen it from this community, but much like Catcher, it came up in high school English.

My pick for most overused would have to be “If-”:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

It’s just chock full of reactionary bait noble, masculine sentiment.

I haven't read Catcher in the Rye either, it didn't come up in high school for me. I did have some Kipling, just not this particular poem.

Are you right wing and looking for some poetry? Come on down to Rudyard Kipling's Poetry Palace! No matter what kind of right winger you are, we have a poem for you!

Drifting rightward because your wife just had a son and you are worried about the influence modern society has on masculine development? If- is the work for you!

Right wing because you oppose the racial spoils system we seem to be implementing and consider it a failure to understand the dynamics of negotiation? Dane-geld is now 50% off!

Consider both of those bad, but more symptoms of living in a society which has forgotten the most important lesson of history - that those who don't learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them? This weekend buy one copy of The Gods of the Copybook Headings and get a second free!

Gone full on conflict theory, and convinced the left are satanic pedophiles trying to exterminate white people? The Beginnings is now available, with a special introductory price!

So come on down to Rudyard Kipling's Poetry Palace for some hot, hot stanzas today, and remember our price match guarantee - find your poem cheaper elsewhere and you're a better man than I am Gunga Din!

You missed The Old Issue

All we have of freedom, all we use or know—This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw—Leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the Law.

Don't forget "The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon", that's a popular one about how the right wing will eventually have enough and rise up.

I've referenced it a handful of times, and seen many more. Purported contemporaneous politics aside, it's a potent admonishment to remember your basics and common sense in the face of utopian promises. The usefulness in the rationalist community feels obvious.

I'm surprised someone managed to end up at the Motte without having read Meditations on Moloch, which quotes from "Copybook Headings" extensively.

I have read it, though it has been a while so I reread (well, skimmed) it to see if I had forgotten details. I think you and I have very different ideas of what "extensive" means. The Kipling poem gets a few mentions in one small section of a much larger piece. Granted that I apparently had seen the poem before, but it is so insignificant within Meditations on Moloch that I'm not at all surprised that I didn't remember it.

I also do not recall this poem being mentioned in Scott’s blog post, but it is a pretty concise reminder of why conservatism tends to increase with life experience, now that I’ve looked up what a copy-book was.

The difference is that the poem is good.

But this loss didn't happen thirty or forty or whenever the immigrants started to come in big numbers years ago, rather it happened in the aftermath of the Second World War when the UK dropped its long standing traditions of Classical Liberalism, "an Englishman's home is his castle" and the Anglo developed system of limited government, preferring to go for the expansive and nannying welfare state model instead.

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place. You can even buy arms in open air markets with minimal regulations. Perhaps you can sense my dripping sarcasm, but I have little patience for these kinds of arguments. Taxes can go up and they can go down, but what - or rather, who - made Britain were the Anglo-Saxons.

This type of argument is the right-wing version of the blank slate.

  • -12

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.

Singapore is actually a great place and their government is significantly more limited on the tax and spend side (well, they have a ton of social housing, but that's a good thing). The UAE is also pretty good with a very limited government, Dubai has effectively run out of oil and they still do extremely well because of government fees on transactions. You don't have to choose the literal worst option.

Singapore is actually a great place

Yeah, and it's also a place that is 75% Han Chinese, thereby proving my point. Demographics will always trump whatever laws is on paper, libertarian or not.

Total overstatement. I feel the need to drag out the trope of East/West Germany and North/South Korea.

Don't know about Korea, but at least for Germany there were some notable differences even before the split after WWII. To name a few:

  • the east was much more agrarian than the west, although there were of course many industrial centers like Halle, Berlin or Breslau/Wrocław but these were much more spread-out than in the west

  • politically, the east was dominated by the protestant Junker class, the descendants of the feudal nobility that conquered/colonized the east, while in the west industrialist families like the Krupps had the most influence, with a much more mixed religious background overall, as most German Catholics lived in the areas that were to become part of West Germany

  • in terms of cultural history, the west was largely congruent with the core German territory since the first time there was something like Germany, while the east was a colonial conquest taken from the territory of the relatively unorganized Western Slavic tribes like the Sorbs or the Pomeranians that were stuck between Medieval Germany and Poland. Go back in history far enough and I guarantee that anyone whose ancestors have lived in Eastern Germany for a while will have a lot of Slavic ancestry, this is completely unusual for Western Germany outside of regions that have received heavy Polish immigration in the Industrial Age

I can't find a good map to illustrate this, but the most notable political thing about the territory of DDR - and I mean the specific territory - was that even during the pre-WW2 times they were the strongest area of support for the left parties, ie SPD/USPD/KPD combined. In the West German territories the Centre was a force, while the areas annexed by Poland were the ones where the Nazis had their most hardcore base of support, but the left dominated most of the territories that would end up forming the DDR.

(also @Syo)

Maybe these maps help: SPD, USPD, KPD; for comparison NSDAP, DNVP (monarchists, revanchists and hard conservatives), Zentrum (Catholic centrists and conservatives).

Looking at these, I agree that there is a trend, but it's not that strong and centered less on East Germany as a whole and more on Saxony* in particular, especially for the KPD votes. Both Nazis and DNVP were pretty strong in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Pomerania, all three of which would become part of the DDR.

*Funnily enough, my parents always called the Saxons the 5th occupying power (besides Russia, the US, France and the UK), because chances were high when talking to a representative of state power like a policeman in East Berlin you'd be spoken to in Saxon dialect. EDIT: I just found this article from the early 60s that investigates this cliché via a statistical deep dive quite like the debates about Jewish overrepresentation elsewhere in this thread. The result: while strongly overrepresented among the chief leaders of the DDR, Saxons are actually underrepresented in various important committees and positions.

I can't make out the territory which would in 1945 find itself behind the Iron Curtain, on these maps of results of German elections from 1920-1930.

China is over 90% Han Chinese, but I far prefer Singapore to it (and the Chinese state has higher taxes and government spending etc.).

I don't actually know. LKY was a great man (far far greater than me, if I could achieve the level of greatness he had in his pinky finger I would die happy) capable of performing magic tricks well beyond mere mortals. One factor that may have contributed is the onerous fines for public littering. I've been to plenty of houses back home that are really clean on the inside but are on a very very littered street so it's not like South Asians are hardwired to be dirty (equally I've been in plenty of unclean dwellings back home, but these were usually the homes of the middle class and below) but I feel it's more of an mentality thing where people see the outside as "not their property, not their problem" and either freely litter or don't agitate to create a situation where street cleaners come by regularly/people are educated to not throw their rubbish away. Plus the lack of public trashcans can be a contributing factor, here in the UK there's like a trash can every 100m in most cities while back home you can spend an entire day out without seeing more than two or three, which means people are just naturally more inclined to throw their trash on the street since the alternative is carrying it the whole day.

You find similar clealiness in Hong Kong Indian markets.

People tend to adapt really well. There's nothing unirradicable in Indian culture or DNA that makes them inclined towards bad hygiene.

How many Singaporeans do you actually know, and have you ever been there? I can't comment on the tax situation, but it seems to me that in pretty much every other domain Singapore is close to being the opposite of a small government, and rather like the perfect pervasive micromanagerial state. (Most recently, they were basically location-tracking everyone at all times under the pretext of COVID contact tracing.) Moreover, they manage their ethnic patchwork by mandatory quotas in government and even public (in Singapore, this is a sizeable chunk) housing, and by less outside-legible policies that seem to be directed at gradually whittling down the ethnic identities of everyone to food, dress and a handful of festivals. Hardly the Anglo right-winger's paradise it is made out to be.

I've been to Singapore and count quite a few Singaporeans among my close friends. The UAE is also quite micromanegerial as a country, to start a business you need to pay thousands in fees (fees like this are how they fund themselves given that there is no income tax) and of course there is the whole Islamic morality thing you have to adhere to (not an issue for me, may be for some westerners).

My point on limited government was geared towards the taxation aspect, Singapore is pretty damn big in the social control aspect of government (chewing gum bans, car licences costing 10s of thousands of dollars, mandatory military service, mandatory forced saving for medical bills etc.), but that isn't really something I mind too much when the policies align reasonably well with my personal views.

Hardly the Anglo right-winger's paradise it is made out to be.

Correct. It's most definitely not an Anglo liberal paradise, but that's fine. It was meant to be an example of a place where you could have small (taxation wise) government but still be very successful. I still wouldn't mind spending my life there because at least they have a coherent, consistent vision for society that doesn't depend on extracting wealth from a small productive class and spending it on everyone else.

My point on limited government was geared towards the taxation aspect, Singapore is pretty damn big in the social control aspect of government (chewing gum bans, car licences costing 10s of thousands of dollars, mandatory military service, mandatory forced saving for medical bills etc.), but that isn't really something I mind too much when the policies align reasonably well with my personal views.

Places like Singapore are also really easy to enter or leave, so if you don't like how the government is doing things, it is easy to go to somewhere else. That's one reason why so many people and businesses have been relocating from Hong Kong to Singapore recently.

Singapore is like a country club. It tries to attract rich and talented people by rules for being clean, pleasant, and orderly. Shame about the horrible weather.

Taxes can go up and they can go down, but what - or rather, who - made Britain were the Anglo-Saxons.

And who unmade Britain?

It seems like we should pay attention to the arguments those Anglo-Saxons were having amongst themselves, and explain the making or unmaking of Britain with a focus on the political questions they saw fit to focus on, like that of taxes. After all, one Anglo-Saxon's vision of the desired society can be radically different from another's.

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.

Somalia-the-meme was a civil war between a half dozen competing governments, many of which were fundamentalist Islamic. And that was still an improvement in most QoL measures over the previous socialist government.

And that was still an improvement in most QoL measures over the previous socialist government.

Interesting, have you lived in Somalia during this period?

I believe the situation was that the Islamic fundamentalists defeated the powerless, corrupt, ‘democratic’ government which did nothing but accept bribes from warlords, brought meaningful improvement to the public for a few years, and then were overthrown by Ethiopian military intervention.

I’m not sure where anyone’s getting that it was an improvement over the previous socialist regime; it seems clearly to have been an improvement over the ‘democratic’(read US backed and corrupt) regime which replaced it.

I frequently see Somalia trotted out as what a limited state might look like, but surely you can see why people who prefer a limited state don't find that compelling? Setting aside that the reference is outdated and Somalia has a government with explicit power over just about everything, "limited government" and "collapsed government" are not synonyms. Outside of the most fringe libertarians, people that favor limited government are not suggesting that there be no government to enforce contracts and maintain general public order. Rather, the claim is that governments shouldn't have the powers flexed during Covid or shouldn't be reallocating half of the economy.

Regarding blank slates, I'm inclined to note that the demographics of Somalia aren't what some of us would consider conducive to being the sort of place I'd like to live. I might even go so far as to note that I expect any local unit that has a sufficient number of Somalis to become the sort of place I would not like to live in short order.

Are you talking about supporters of "limited or small governments" or just anarchists? There isn't any sort of unified state over all of Somalia, small or otherwise.

Also, I don't think that someone like David Friedman wants a transition like Somalia in the early 1990s. I think he'd say that, under those circumstances, a small but effective government would be better.

Well except there are countless examples of very limited government and places succeeding. I’m very unfamiliar with communist countries not be totalitarian hellholes.

Warlordism might be a fair critique of David Friedman but…not of classic liberals who see a vital role for the state but one that is heavily limited.

What are the best examples of very limited governments succeeding?

I certainly agree that there have been governments which didn’t provide much in terms of social welfare but grew the economy quickly. But AFAIK most of the examples of libertarian success stories were not actually libertarian, they were just pro-business.

United Kingdom, United States, Swiss, Hong Kong, Netherlands, etc.

They might not all be that way today but they they all at different times experienced significant growth under a classically liberal framework.

I interpreted "stronger sorts of libertarian" to basically mean right-anarchists.

"Warlordism" is another term for "autocratic government that isn't internationally recognized". It's not as if warlords can't take your money and call it taxes.

It's a frequent critique of anarchocapitalism (anarchocommunism, too, for that matter) is that their systems just reinvent the government expect with some different characteristics (enough to allow ideologues to term it "not government) and in a worse format.

I have my issues with limited government types (namely that they're frequently hypocritical or at least self-deluding), but this is really only a critique of the far end of the spectrum. Most people who want limited government don't want a government that limited - they still want publicly funded police and fire departments, infrastructure they use, courts, schools, etc... When they object to "big government", they're generally objecting to the welfare and regulatory state (or at least parts of it) and infrastructure they don't use.

Reductions to the welfare and regulatory state might increase social disorder to some degree, but there's clear historical example that it's not enough to render states nonviable.

I would describe the Soviet Union as a much more central example of "communism" than Somalia of "limited government", but I suppose the problems we'll bump into are the exact definitions of things like "communism" and "limited government". I would be more than satisfied with a United States federal government that took approximately the fiscal role of 100 years ago, and I don't buy that this involves a swift descent to total anarchic collapse.

Well yes, because the federal government could disappear outright and most of the population is not looking at a total anarchic collapse, although interstate conflict might mean some people are in for a bad time and the poorer states would probably have a declining standard of living.

I'm not sure if this is intended as argument or addendum. Yes, part of the reason that I think the federal government is excessive is because American states are already large, powerful entities that can handle the vast majority of governing problems themselves. The federal government should handle external-facing issues and internal coordination problems between states, but generally take a hands-off approach to policies and spending that are intrastate matters (in my view, of course).

Maybe I'm misreading others, but I think this is much closer to the median position of American people that would describe themselves as favoring limited government than Somalia or Ancapistan or something.

A little of column a, a little of column b. The patchwork that replaces a disappeared federal government is unlikely to be predominantly libertarian(major land powers usually aren’t), and the federal government retrenching wouldn’t cause the same issue but as California shows, states are perfectly capable of overregulating, overtaxing, and overspending all on their lonesome.

Most states aren’t Florida or Utah. Federal regulations will just get replaced with state regulations that are more obviously one sided if anything.

I’m wondering- do you think a society that’s 80% Utah Mormon or Japanese or whatever other high performing group, and 20% Somali, would be a bad place to live?

I mean, based off the demographics, I’d expect it to be a pretty nice place to live, but probably with some neighborhoods to avoid.

Probably fine in the short run. I just looked at my current Census tract and a couple neighboring tracts and found that they're approximately 80% white, 10% Asian, and a scattering of everything else. If that shifted to 20% Somali over the next few years, I would take it as a strong signal to sell and relocate - I would not like the odds of the neighborhood retaining the characteristics that made me select it with that population shift and I would expect the population to continue shifting further. Currently, there are no neighborhoods to avoid within walking distance of me, so a shift to some neighborhoods to avoid is a noticeable worsening.

Let’s assume this is a stable society- some town in Oregon or whatever that’s had those demographics for 20 years. Does it seem like the sort of place you’d be willing to live in, assuming your work offers you a transfer with relocation assistance and you have the ability to make friends there or nearby.

Sure. I'm kind of skeptical of the sustainability of the arrangement, but I would not rule a place out based on a large Somali population. Minneapolis remains one of my favorite American cities despite their issues with Somali corruption (and more American-based violence).

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.

"If you like to keep warm, you can jump in a bonfire."

It worked for Sam McGee.

Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

Who among us hasn't wanted to, on some cold winter day, sit in the fireplace and let the flames lap at our flesh?

You've done an excellent, high-effort job of trolling here. You got several people to lash out at you in a way that required warnings. Well done.

Now stop this. This has been your schtick for a very long time, and while we more or less gave you a clean slate with the move here, this kind of supercilious baiting will not continue. Make well-crafted culture war arguments and talk about how awesome and superior your culture is - fine. But we are not blind to what you're doing here (trying to see how many people you can goad into losing their shit while you are technically abiding by the rules). You are not immune to having the wildcard rule applied just because you use lots of words.

There should be a word for the kind of situation where people who profess their love for intellectual diversity in practice prove incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate.

From what I know of the Count, including private communication, he was pretty much sincere here, at least in the "I contain multitudes" sense. If that triggered someone that's entirely on them; and especially given the everpresent concerns about our intellectual diversity the administration of this forum probably shouldn't strive to protect the feelings of the white supremacist-adjacent users in particular.

There should be a word for the kind of situation where people who profess their love for intellectual diversity in practice prove incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate.

If there is, find a situation where it's applicable, which this is not. If I were "incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate," I'd have banned him and the white supremacists.

We value intellectual diversity. We do not value trolling. BurdensomeCount may indeed actually believe what he's saying, but that doesn't mean he's not expressing it in a manner calculated to be flamebait. Just like the white supremacists who are able to stick around manage to do it without dropping pointless n-bombs and 13% memes, and the ones who aren't... can't.

You know at this point i'm not actually sure if your a troll. Your posts here, the other place, /r/drama, and the old place are so consistently truimphalist. What you're saying basically matches up with what your average muslim believes but you could also be a troll that's just commited to the bit. You know exactly where the line is and just how genocidal you can be without being dismissed. Some of your posts, if you are a troll, are outstanding. But i'll bite.

British culture and the country character will continue to change over the coming generations and it will be best for the natives themselves if they just go with the flow rather than trying to fight an inevitability.

Roll over and die: Or else!

Or else what? You'll carry on doing what you're already doing and what you always planned to do? A fate worse then a fate worse then death? That sounds pretty bad.

The fundamental isssue your people (and your paedophilic religion that you desire to force upon the west) have is that you don't build functioning societies. For all of your talk about saving the west through islam, it doesn't seem to be saving muslims living in the west who similar reputation around women as Africans, and a much worse reputation around children, who cannot seem to stop themselves joining gangs, who are hugely overrepresented in basically every voilent crime stat, and who are much more likely to live off the labour of others then any other group (the behaviour of Somali muslims in the benefits system is famous across Europe).

Your demands of acceptance already require massive, overwhelming campaigns of propaganda, censorship and social engineering and it is still only mildy successful.

I see modern British culture as belonging to the same class of objects as smallpox and polio - something to be eradicated post haste - rather than that of the Giant Panda and the Snow Leopard - valuable diversity that should be protected by humanity and nourished.

Maybe you are right. But the issue you will find, is that given the choice between living with us or you, everybody chooses us - Including your own people!

The fundamental isssue your people (and your paedophilic religion that you desire to force upon the west) have is that you don't build functioning societies.

Not acceptable. No, we don't have a rule against criticizing Islam here. We do have a rule about not making inflammatory statements about broad groups of people. Stop taking the ragebait.

stay in of one of the only two alpha+ cities in the world and the taxpayer will fund their rent if they can't afford it themselves

What on earth does this even mean? Is the other one NYC? You don't think any other cities on earth have a "alpha"? They're the largest Financial hubs, I won't dispute that and as that's your business I'm sure that looms large in your view. but there are other industries and plenty of places that are booming with them. Hollywood/LA don't have alpha? Silicon valley, no alpha? Hell, I think there are multiple cities in Texas alone that can be described as having alpha.

There's a think tank called Globalization and World Cities Research Network which basically ranks cities periodically based on how important to the global economy they are. They rank cities in terms of Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Sufficincy where cities are less important as you go down the list. Also alpha,beta,gamma get +- signs based on where they fall in their category. You can find their most recent rankings here (naturally there is a lot of subjectivity):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities_Research_Network

And my bad, I misremembered London and NYC are alpha++ in their rankings, not alpha+.

Hollywood/LA don't have alpha?

LA is an alpha city in their rankings. SF is alpha-.

Other city ranking thinktanks do exist, but GaWC is one of the most used ones and they all have London+NYC at the top of the world.

Ah, it's a measure of interconnectedness, this framing does color the complaint of being unable to live in an alpha+ city a little differently. I suppose the foreign influx of cities that are particularly connected to the rest of the world might reasonably increase the demand and thus make supply of housing more scarce for natives, but I'm not sure this makes me more or less sympathetic to native claims to the right to live in their own society's greatest city over foreign claims. It's essentially the same reasoning behind denying their claims that is used to advocate for open borders, "This is more economically efficient and you have no rights over the more naturally talented foreigner". On the flip side I am generally not sympathetic to people who feel entitled to live in expensive cities for more mundane reasons.

Can’t say I really understand this system. For example, how is Boston ranked higher than Houston? Houston has either the busiest or second busiest port in the US depending on how you measure it, Houston is just way larger than Boston in terms of population, Houston has a higher GDP than Boston, and it’s a major city for the energy and finance industries.

Don't ask me, I didn't make it, and as I said it's very very subjective once you get below the first few top cities. You can find a summary of rankings from many different organisations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city#Summary_of_rankings and they pretty much all have NYC+London as the top two.

how is Boston ranked higher than Houston?

Boston's top universities

Houston's top universities

Boston also beats Houston on GDP per capita $80k to $63k, and is often known as the most educated major city in America (thought I don't know the stats on it outside of Harvard and MIT being nearby). Also the Red Sox and the Patriots have been annoyingly good for years, and the Celtics are young and good; while the Astros cheat and the Texans and Rockets suck. On the other hand, Houston has Meg while Boston hasn't produced a great band since This is Boston Not L.A. came out. But the Boston Pops are legendary, while I don't know of anything out of Houston.

Point is there's more to city quality than GDP and population.

while the Astros cheat

I mean, so do the Patriots.

True, but I've forgiven the Patriots, since they had the decency to lose to Philly.

The list is very weird. I can't really fathom why LA is not in the Alpha+ tier. It just seems obviously more like those cities than any of the cities in regular Alpha.

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said

Ouch, this dreary poem again, the poem everyone loves and no one knows what is it about.

This poem was written in 1920, and it was not meant as timeless wisdom for all times and places, but as a commentary about current events.

What were the current events?

If you lived in UK 102 years ago, there were three major issues that split the country, issues that everyone politically aware had to take a stand on.

1/ Military. Should UK negotiate with other great powers to limit armaments, or should it strive to be greatest power ever at any cost?

This is what "the Cambrian measures" of the poem mean.

If you thought that what the country needs right now are more battleships, the bigger and shinier the better, congrats, you are Kipling.

2/ Social question, especially eight hour working day.

"the Carboniferous Epoch"

If you thought that workers and miners already live high on the hog and do not need any handouts, congrats, you are Kipling.

3/ Votes for women.

"the Feminian Sandstones"

If you thought that the country has already too much democracy, congrats, you are Kipling.

Now, what happened? Did the country followed Kipling's advice?

No, it did not.

The British establishment negotiated Washington Naval Treaty, let women over age 30 vote and even gave some concessions to the working class.

Were it good choices? If instead they engaged in massive military buildup and crushed the uppity mob with iron fist, would it make Britain great again, greater than ever?

It certainly didn't work out for them when they didn't do that.

Yes, what the Brits were doing was not working for them.

For example, when they taught the "wogs" English and invited them to study at their universities, and then strongly reminded them that they are wogs and never will be anything else.

This would not happen in ancient Rome or other serious empires of the past.

Want to be world spanning empire that lasts for centuries and is remembered for millenia? Behave like one.

Eh, for the same reason death of the artist seems like a good idea I think we can separate works from their time and let people of new generations take from them what they will. It's a catchier version of Chesterton fences for folk wisdom and I think accurate captures the spirit behind a kind of fundamental pillar of conservatism's distrust of too good to be true if socially popular claims. When the modern economists tell you that you can print as much money as you need and cite piles and piles of self referential research to prove the fact it's good to have some more ammunition to protect yourself.

MMT is a fringe theory. If you want to argue against it, you can just point to the consensus among mainstream economists. A highly specific modern interpretation of a hundred-year-old poem is not a good argument against anything.

If you thought that the country has already too much democracy, congrats, you are Kipling.

I feel seen, but that is a post for another day...

Were it good choices? If instead they engaged in massive military buildup and crushed the uppity mob with iron fist, would it make Britain great again, greater than ever?

Who knows? Do you? I don't. Alternative history provides an endless canvas to imagination. But I'm fairly sure that, were this program to succeed (despite structural reasons to the contrary), we wouldn't have heard anything about «appeasement», nor about Operation Sea Lion or The Blitz, and plausibly the Third Reich itself would have been relegated to footnotes of history. And the Empire might have lasted a great deal longer, and perhaps @2rafa wouldn't have any sordid tales of post-War collapse and sudden impoverishment of London elites to tell, and – just maybe! – @KulakRevolt would be fuming about the global kraken of perfidious Albion exploiting American vulnerability under the false guise of allyship, rather than the other way around.

The human and materiel losses incurred might always have let America sweep ahead—but I suppose that’s what you meant by “structural reasons.”

just maybe! – @KulakRevolt would be fuming about the global kraken of perfidious Albion exploiting American vulnerability under the false guise of allyship, rather than the other way around.

The only constant in every timeline is a man named kulakrevolt fuming about something.

higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water.

Immigrant birth rates always normalize to the local level within a generation or two.

Supposing you ever stop immigration. Which is, I'd say, not very likely.

In 1945 90 percent of the British were opposed to immigration. Now a slight majority support it. It’s possible for attitudes to change

I believe the standard response here is muttering something about Cthulhu. If one takes as an axiom that public opinion only swims left, then immigration must grow in popularity so long as it remains left-coded. You’d have an easier time giving an example that hasn’t leaned left.

Then just have anti immigration code left. It’s not as if that’s impossible. You can make a leftist case for being anti immigration.

Considering the stranglehold anti-white and pro-immigration extremists have on media, the possibility is irrelevant. In the UK not even a large-scale gang rape scandal involving possibly tens of thousands of children spanning decades could wake the people there up. By the unlikely time the attitudes of Europeans in the UK change, their political opinions will be irrelevant.

Or, immigrants and children of immigrants support immigration? One in six foreign born, remember. More than likely even more foreign-descended. Seems to me like it's the bad argument cousin of "areas with more immigration have people think more positively of immigration" -- no shit.

Do immigrants actually support immigration? My intuition would be that immigrants are for it to the degree that they're in the social sphere that profits from immigration and start being against it as they accumulate wealth.

Seems like many of the migrant communities in the UK hate each intensely though.

Yeah, it's great living in the front rows of the no holds barred knock down drag out ethic grudge match arena. :|

I mean; kinda yeah. Conflicts can be entertaining when you hold no stake in the outcome

It was only a small matter of time before things degenerated to the point where it was necessary to either import immigrants to make up for the collapsing birth rate

As an aside this is a total bollocks position. Most immigrants that go to the uk are family reunification migrants which means they are mostly middle aged or elderly and since most migrants don’t have that many kids anyway, the net effect is a wash on fertility. It just leads to more entitlement spending, resulting in net negative gdp growth

Most immigrants that go to the uk are family reunification migrants which means they are mostly middle aged or elderly

Wait, what? That goes against my understanding of the age range of immigrants, unless you're talking about a specific channel.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/family-migration-to-the-uk/

According to the Annual Population Survey, in 2019 there were an estimated 9.4 million foreign-born people living in the UK. Of these, an estimated four million said that the main reason they originally moved to the UK was to join or accompany a family member. This means that 45% of all the foreign-born in the UK are family migrants, equivalent to 6% of the UK’s population of 66 million.

Looks like I was slightly off. It’s roughly half of all foreigners are chain migrants

Given the continuing high migration that this country is now basically reliant on - the recent budget depended on very high levels of inward migration to be balanced, lower migration than expected in the next few years will create a short term fiscal black hole

Do you have evidence that immigrantion is beneficial to the British? Danes ran the numbers and discovered that non-western new-comers are a net negative on the fiscus. This is true even after excluding refugees.

There's this article from the Telegraph about the budget situation:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/11/17/why-jeremy-hunt-relying-surge-migrants-boost-britains-flagging

Archive link: https://archive.ph/f0rEW

In the short term the migration of workers is necessary to boost tax revenue. Long term the migrants might even be net negative, but short term since they all come over with jobs and you can kick them out in the first 5 years if they lose their job they are net contributors which helps with the current cash flow issues.

I've long thought that the rationalist and adjacent communities were full of, to be frank, a sad mix of quokkas and leering american PMC sociopaths rapacious and hungry to consume all that is good in the world in a metpahorical orgy of neoliberal greed, but thanks for expanding my horizons.

I'll add 3rd worlders who hate my people and wish us exterminated, our culture destroyed, and our nation wrought asunder to that list shall I?

I do not wish extermination upon any peoples, I just want you to see the light and reject the degeneracy that has taken root in your countries over the last few decades. Break free from the shackles and we can all come together as brethren.

Thanks for clarifying that. I have already seen the light, but one candle cannot burn at the bottom of an ocean.

There is only one brotherhood.

Peace through power.

I'm not sure if I really buy that migration is good for government finances. Maybe the UK handles it a lot better than my own country, but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.

Unfortunately it does not have a handy chart showing the net cost per place of orgin like this Dutch study has on page 76, but I imagine the numbers would look even worse here for non-EU migrants, since our welfare state is infamously easy to just leech of for life if you can't be bothered to work. The EU migrant numbers would probably look better due to all the highly paid eurocrats in Brussels.

Especially MENA and subsaharan African migrants are notorious for being a massive cost sink in pretty much every western european country they settle in en masse. I find it hard to believe that the UK alone has somehow managed to turn say Morrocans into something resembling a desireable citizen, given their horrendous performance in the rest of Europe. Mind you, then we haven't even gotten into the other problems importing an underclass from the third world brings with it. Of our prison population, 48% flat out doesn't even have belgian citizenship. I would not at all be surprised if >80% of our prison population had a migrant background. Then we also have the terrorism issue, but credit where credit is due that has improved in the last couple of years, we haven't had a serious attack with mass casualties in a while now. Either our secret service has seriously stepped its game up or the defeat of ISIS has made comitting an attack a less attractive prospect. Perhaps both, hard to say.

but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.

This is a 244 page document, can you point to where this is shown? Ctrl-Fing for 'GDP per capita' seems to contradict your claim:

Summing up results from the different impact channels, recent immigration has a positive impact on GDP, pushing it up by 3.5%. The effect is positive for both origins with a 2% increase from EU immigration and a 1.5% rise from non-EU immigration. Evidently, immigration also induces an increase in the population. Nevertheless, it still leads to a 0.7% rise in GDP per capita

And the Dutch study isn't loading for me.

I'm not sure if I really buy that migration is good for government finances. Maybe the UK handles it a lot better than my own country, but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.

We don't, it's just fudged. Stats that could paint migration in a negative light are ignored or massaged until they don't. Messaging prefers to use total GDP as a measurement to say that migration improves it -- not GDP per capita, which would expose the lie. Earn a single pound working at a hand car wash? Congratulations, you've increased total GDP! Messaging also prefers to say things like "immigrants are a net benefit to the tax take on average" while omitting that no immigrant becomes a net contributor before earning about 35k. This stat is misleading because it means a few top band high earners (and so high tax contributors) can "pay for" a load of useless layabouts in this statistic.

This stat is misleading because it means a few top band high earners (and so high tax contributors) can "pay for" a load of useless layabouts in this statistic.

How is that misleading? Admittedly this suggests a third option of "only accept immigrants likely to contribute lots of taxes", but it's surely relevant to the question that between "current immigration" and "no immigration", the "current immigration" option still leads to higher sum tax revenue.

In a severely misguided attempt since the end of WWII (and continuing until the present day!) successive governments tinkered with this system and slowly removed the things that made the system work

I want to post a rather long quote that suggests this happened earlier, going back at least as far as WW1:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.

He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 percent of the national income.

The state intervened to prevent the citizen from earing adulterated food or contracting infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase.

  • A.J.P Taylor, English History 1914-1945

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.

  • -20

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.

Yeah, they got me with that line too.

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.

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!

I've made 128 comments here (well 129 now), many quite lengthy and contributory I'd say (so I'm certainly no "troll" as in not of an earnest belief in what I post about). Why would one semi-tongue-in-cheek throwaway comment not directed towards anyone and without any malice, insult, or other rule-breaking character at the end of an otherwise perfectly fine and productive post providing a unique and valuable (to the conversation) perspective get me banned? Do you actually think I objectively deserve to be banned based on the rules or do you just not like that perspective?

There are also definitely a fringe type of person who, while being totally sincere, does nothing but derail every conversation they become a part of

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.

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 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.)

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.

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.

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.)

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.

(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.

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.

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

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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