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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34935 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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

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

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

  • -19

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.)

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

A: Please look elsewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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'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?

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.

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

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?

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.

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...

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.

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

"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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

More comments

I have a lot of sympathy (or maybe pity) for SBF. "Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.

I think it's hard for people, including technologists who haven't worked as quants, to appreciate the level of technology risk that's present in quant trading. In most of tech your biggest risk is having all of your data destroyed, and you can address that with well worn improvements in backups. You also risk being hacked but those breaches tend to be embarrassing rather than company ending. Even Sony, which was pwned as hard as you could possibly be pwned, ultimately recovered. But an additional risk in quant trading is accidentally and irrecoverably giving all of your assets away in a few seconds.

Even companies that are following all of the rules and have the right number of members of the professional management class in their ranks can destroy themselves in a matter of minutes. Knight Capital Group destroyed itself in 30 minutes by (with some creative license) failing to follow heroic practices around retiring old flags in protobufs.

Alameda/FTX had a culture that resembled "move fast and break things". They grew extremely quickly. I'm highly skeptical they were able to stand up robust accounting and practices to mitigate technology risks in so short a time.

When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.

When you thought you had $30b in assets and minimal liabilities, you can spend a billion or two on indulgences, charitable giving and campaign contributions. Your can say confidently you're not investing client funds. If those assets are suddenly marked down 90% you look like a fraud and you're in deep shit.

That's the nature of the business and he knew the risks. But probably in hindsight I'm sure he wishes he had been even more careful.

This isn't to say that I believe he definitely didn't commit fraud. Rather this is me saying that as someone who has pushed code that I thought accidentally gave away $10 million of my employer's money (the gigantic exhale of relief came when we learned I failed to scale by 1000x in the reporting and not the ordering), I am defaulting to blaming it on stupidity before malice.

So, I also have worked in HFT Finance and am currently director of Operations for a (fully CFTC regulated) BTC futures/options exchange. I completely sympathize with losing scads of money in seconds ( my biggest hit was $70k because I misread a settlement value) and I was working the day Knight Capital imploded (I had met the VP a week earlier at a CME training session!).

Anyway, I guess my point is that there's some serious differences between running a trading firm and running an exchange and as stated below, the security of your customers' accounts is paramount, possibly more important that the actual functioning of the exchange. This is why US exchanges are required to use 3rd party clearing houses and a variety of other services to ensure the proper handling of margin, reserves, fees, open interest and settlements. We have industry wide annual disaster recovery tests, risk control evaluations and hundreds of other hoops to jump through.

I think this was a huge hit to the credibility of all things Crypto but if there's a silver lining, it's that companies like mine, who take the extra few years to not only align with CFTC regulations, but help to inform how they can be improved, will ultimately be preferred over foreign companies that lack these controls--if BTC can maintain it's value. I don't want to seem like a CFTC fanboy, but regardless of the extent to which you think they make good decisions ,their mere existence creates some sense of normalcy and safety and provides a history of precedent that is mostly transparent. (I'm not sure I'd say the same about the SEC, fwiw).

Of course the big question is what is all this stuff and what's it worth and is the value of Bitcoin actually reduced because of US government controls. I'm not sure and always wonder about what the future of this stuff will be but I feel confident in saying some sort of digital blockchain currency will perpetuate into the future.

As for SBF, it seems like there's a lot reasons to be upset with the dude and his team. They really screwed up (or maybe they pulled a fast one, I dunno). To me, this whole episode seems to be more reflective of the un-serious direction our civilization has taken where we consistently fall for the hype and never seem to do the boring research. We hand billions of dollars to kids because we feel they've been vetted by some university or other pedigree. I've spent a life surrounded by grad students and high IQ scientists, doctors and lawyers and can say emphatically: smart people are some of the dumbest people I know.

They really screwed up (or maybe they pulled a fast one, I dunno).

I think, with regard to what you say about regulation, that this was the space they were trying to exploit. Looking for unregulated markets to get that edge, with of course the attendant risk, and they couldn't keep up the promise of "we will make gazillions" because the exploit holes were getting plugged one after another, so Bankman-Fried had to take bigger and bigger risks to keep the appearance going of "this guy is a whiz who knows how to make a fortune overnight". His One Weird Trick with Alameda, exploiting the difference in the price of bitcoin between Asia and the rest of the world, only worked - and could only work - once. After that, to make the same kind of returns as fast, he tried setting up FTX

In 2017, when he was merely 25, SBF collapsed the so-called kimchi premium, an anomalous delta between the price of Bitcoin in much of Asia and its price in the rest of the world. It was a daring feat of arbitrage—SBF is the only trader known to have pulled this off in any meaningful way—one which quickly made him a billionaire and achieved the status of legend.

Because of the existence of regulations, he could only pull it off once:

SBF decided to create some accounts on different exchanges and see if he could execute the trade. He couldn’t. But, interestingly, it wasn’t because the arbitrage opportunity wasn’t there—it was. But there was so much red tape with the banking system and currency controls that it was a difficult trade to execute.

Another day of work dealing with the red-tape problem netted SBF a single round-trip trade—to Asia and back—for a $20 profit. That was it: the proof of concept. There was an opportunity to be had. SBF immediately put $50,000 of his own money to work. The first job was just getting the money into the system. The operational challenges were huge. Not just anyone can walk into a foreign bank and start wiring money out of the country every day. There are know-your-customer rules, caps on withdrawals, citizenship requirements. Even worse, to any normal bank, the constant zeroing out, then maxing out, of a cash account—with the money coming and going overseas, to and from fly-by-night Bitcoin exchanges—raised every red flag in the book. It looked like laundering. It looked like drug money. There were even monetary policy concerns: The liquidity of the South Korean won is sharply limited by the country’s central bank.

So in hindsight, the system was working as it should work, except that there was a loophole. He found the loophole, but eventually it was filled in.

With a goosed-up capital account, the money started piling up so fast that SBF placed what he refers to as “a market order for employees” to tend to the Rube Goldberg operation that kept the capital spinning. There were constant blowups with banks, which are wary of anything crypto. Crypto was so new that regulators in South Korea and elsewhere were constantly changing their mind about regulations—then making those changes retroactive. It was a swirling mess.

And that's when he seems to have decided to go for the dodgy (sorry, "risk-neutral") side:

The Bitcoin arbitrage didn’t—and couldn’t—last forever. The Japanese appetite for overpriced Bitcoin withered (or, more likely, another shadowy arbitrage outfit also found its way to the trade and collapsed it). Either way, the spread narrowed to almost nothing. But there were other trades to be had. The simple fact that crypto was new, and that the tools traders needed to handle it were still under construction, meant that there were market inefficiencies all over the place. And behind every market inefficiency is an arbitrage opportunity.

The biggest headache for Alameda wasn’t finding the opportunities, but executing the trades. At that time, when it came to crypto exchanges, the choice basically boiled down to Coinbase or Binance. Coinbase makes a point of being regulated by authorities in the U.S., but as a consequence, didn’t offer the kinds of options contracts and derivatives professional traders need to hedge their bets. Binance, on the other hand, offered the kinds of derivatives SBF was familiar with when he traded for Jane Street—but as a company, it was continually moving from country to country in an attempt to evade all jurisdictional authority. Neither exchange was particularly good to trade on.

“Everything was rickety—there was no avoiding the ricketiness. Obviously, the line between rickety and shady is a little unclear at times, but the places that seemed like they were going to steal customer funds outright, we didn’t touch,” Singh says. “Even the best players in the space were having big problems.”

At this point, mid-2019, SBF decided to double down again—and scratch his own itch. He would bet Alameda’s multimillion-dollar trading profits on a new venture: a trading exchange called FTX. It would combine Coinbase’s stolid, regulation-loving approach with the kinds of derivatives being offered by Binance and others.

Looking back with hindsight, the warning signs were already showing up, but everyone was so ready to believe in golden geese and magic beans when it came to producing huge fortunes out of thin air that they ignored them:

The problem, as Bailhe saw it, was that FTX didn’t appear to need any money. She was correct, but what she didn’t know was that SBF was starting to think about raising money anyway. Alameda had some unexpected losses due to so-called counterparty risk. Arbitrage is, in theory, riskless. But not when the rickety exchange you’re using to place your trades suddenly locks up and refuses to disburse your money. Or, worse yet, when two crypto exchanges can’t even agree on what a crypto transfer looks like, and so the act of sending crypto from one exchange to another results in tokens just disappearing into the ether. And don’t even ask about futures contracts that see their terms unilaterally changed mid-agreement: the dreaded “clawbacks.” Alameda was not immune to the exchange-level shenanigans that gave crypto as a whole its sleazy reputation. But FTX had an ambition to change that. It was built to be the exchange traders could count on. SBF needed to get the word out. He wanted FTX to be known as the respectable face of crypto. This required ad campaigns, sponsorship deals, a charitable wing—and a war chest to pay for it all.

...FTX did need money, after all. And it needed that money from credible sources so it could continue to distinguish itself from the bottom-feeders who came to crypto to fleece the suckers. So, in the summer of 2021, when FTX started to raise its Series B from a who’s who of Silicon Valley VCs, Bailhe and Lin hit the “Don’t Panic” button. “Embarrassingly, we had never tried to reach out to Sam, because we figured he didn’t need us,” Bailhe admits. “I thought they were just minting money and had absolutely no need for investors.”

Uh, yeah, about those charities...

Alameda Research, the company that generated the FTX grubstake, still exists, and its purpose seems to be to generate profits—on the order of $100 million a year today, but potentially up to a billion—that can be stuffed into the brand-new FTX Foundation. Similarly, even now, 1 percent of net FTX fees are donated to that same foundation, and FTX handles nearly $5 billion dollars’ worth of trades per day. The foundation, in turn, gives to a diversified group of EA-approved charities.

So was it all really a sham? They plugged EA as their reason for existing, but nobody from FTX ever actually showed up to meet EA people?

A cocktail party is in full swing, with about a dozen people I don’t recognize standing around. It turns out to be a mixer for the local EA community that’s been drawn to Nassau in the hopes that the FTX Foundation will fund its various altruistic ideas. The point of the party is to provide a friendly forum for the EAs who actually run EA-aligned nonprofits to meet the earn-to-give EAs at FTX who will fund them, and vice versa. The irony is that, while FTX hosts the weekly mixer—providing the venue and the beverages—it’s rare for an actual FTX employee to ever show up and mix. Presumably, they’re working too hard.

Bankman-Fried kept shifting FTX headquarters to countries deemed crypto-friendly and lax on regulations, precisely because although he needed the appearance of being solid and reliable, the real money-making was done through being 'shady' and 'rickety'. And of course, the entire house of cards eventually came tumbling down.

Alameda/FTX had a culture that resembled "move fast and break things". They grew extremely quickly. I'm highly skeptical they were able to stand up robust accounting and practices to mitigate technology risks in so short a time.

When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.

Which is why one should not engage in seat-of-the-pants accounting when billions of investor dollars are on the line.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239033

Some notes on the Knight Capital anecdote.

Look, I’ve been on the “FTX collapse is overblown” train since the news broke. But that’s because I start by assuming crypto is staffed by rug-pullers or outright scammers. It doesn’t really detract from the amount of damage done. The fact that he had plausible deniability means that people can feel a little less bad that they bought his magic future money, not that they can write it off.

Do you think this should make me despise SBF less? If your summary is entirely accurate, it only serves as further confirmatory evidence that all of these enterprises are bogus, extractive scams.

The more I learn, and the more Bankman-Fried shoots his mouth off in interviews (I can't access that livestream from the NYT DealBook conference because frick me if I pay them a subscription just to watch that), the worse it all looks.

I started out thinking "well, magic beans, can't depend on them, he was foolish but could have happened to anyone". Now it's "yeah the guy was scamming from the very beginning, MacAskill et al. were just huge patsies that made his eyes light up at a way of getting rich quick by mouthing platitudes about charity. Sprinkle enough rationalist jargon into his pitch and they ate it all up".

Damning with faint praise. They failed to do the basic tasks of their entire purpose. They won a stupid prize from a stupid game.

This is the part that's sympathetic pitiful to me. Starting a business and failing at it badly enough that you lose customer money is just sad.

It's stupid, but not criminal. Unless you think criminally stupid is a thing.

I'm willing to bet that prosecutors will find a Rubicon moment somewhere in the chronology where SBF and whats-her-name decided to bail out Alameda with a quantity of FTX funds that would have been impossible to mistake for not-customer-money.

He didn't simply "lose" customer money, as though he were a factory owner all whose warehouses burned down taking his entire stock with them, leaving nothing to sell for the lucrative Christmas quarter and the enterprise up to its ears in debt and bankrupt.

He embezzled customer funds and funnelled them into Alameda in order to shore up his failing enterprise, just like any other common swindler who loses a packet on bad stocks or slow horses, and thinks that if he just 'borrows' that cash in the customer accounts and buys/bets on the sure thing he will make it all back and can repay and nobody need ever know.

That's stupid and where it crosses over into "criminal" is "taking money that is not yours to take and you know you shouldn't do this, or at least you ought to know".

He didn't simply "lose" customer money, as though he were a factory owner all whose warehouses burned down taking his entire stock with them, leaving nothing to sell for the lucrative Christmas quarter and the enterprise up to its ears in debt and bankrupt.

Permit me a moment to torture the analogy. Suppose you have warehouse full of valuable stuff that's been freshly manufactured ready to ship to buyers that have already paid for it. You spent all of the money the customers paid you (including profit) to build even more units than your customers ordered in anticipation of future demand. Right around this time your brother calls you up and asks you hey bro can you send me like a fuckton of units I've got a whale. You say sure. You look at your inventory list and ship only the extra units to your brother.

The units for your brother burn down in transit because of an accident. Nobody had insurance, because he was your brother and you both though you could manage the risk of casualty. Fuck. Well, I guess there's no profit but at least you can ship to your customers.

Then, while processing customer fulfillment someone looks at the accounting closer and realizes there was an error in inventory, you actually accidentally also gave away a huge portion of your customer's units to your brother too, which burned down in transit. Your warehouse is almost empty but still something like half of your customers got nothing. And you have no money to pay them back with.

Did you commit a crime? Or did you just flagrantly fuck up?

Did you commit a crime? Or did you just flagrantly fuck up?

At this point, I'm betting your brother was going to burn down the warehouses for the insurance and you thought you could improve on the scam by burning the units in transit.

"I thought you had insurance on them!" "No, I thought you had the insurance, it was your dumb plan in the first place!"

If you can't refund the customers the money you have 100% commit a crime in every legal system that has ever existed. That is textbook fraud. Incompetence is no defense against defrauding people of their money.

They failed to do the basic tasks of their entire purpose.

I hate to be dumping on EA like this and I've always thought the quokka meme was unkind and annoying, but it really does come down to 'everyone trusted Sam' and they did that because they were all EA and so of course they were all pure, high-minded individuals in this to do good for the world, right? Sam is one of us so we don't need red tape and regulations, his word is good enough, and he knows about iterated prisoner's dilemma, so he's gonna do right by us all:

Can Sun, FTX’s in-house legal counsel, tells me that his main job is to cement the many deals SBF makes on a handshake. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Sun says, the terms favor the other side. It’s another corporate policy derived from a rigorous logical argument: In an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, the best first move is always to cooperate. And, if the counterparty defects, “it’s better that I know this guy will screw me over now,” Sun says, “rather than later.”

Also the entire mindset around non-conventional morality/standards of behaviour. Whereas a dinosaur like me would be grimly insisting "yeah well these are the rules, so I am going to need more than a 'personalised emoji' to keep track of who's asking for money and for what, and who is granting it, so fill out these expenses claims forms IN TRIPLICATE" (I've worked/work in civil and public service, so the reason for all the red tape is to prevent shenanigans like this, and they do happen: boss guy waves through big lump of funding for personal friend/business crony and over-rides rules around it. Not when you have to fill out the forms IN TRIPLICATE, sir, I'm very sorry but them's the regulations).

I hate to be dumping on EA like this and I've always thought the quokka meme was unkind and annoying, but it really does come down to 'everyone trusted Sam' and they did that because they were all EA and so of course they were all pure, high-minded individuals in this to do good for the world, right? Sam is one of us so we don't need red tape and regulations, his word is good enough, and he knows about iterated prisoner's dilemma, so he's gonna do right by us all:

This but I'll raise you. Even if the reputation was well deserved and SBF didn't have a malicious bone in his body, it's still a bad idea to trust any one person so much. It wasn't just the EA community. VCs and other investors trusted him too. Nobody demanded a board seat? Nobody wanted independently audited financial statements? Everyone was smitten.

This is bad. Even if you're a genius and even if you're a saint, you cannot be perfect all of the time. You can still make catastrophic mistakes. Being challenged, having a process where you need to justify your request, out loud, to another human, is healthy. At the very least it's a sanity check.

Any company that scales past a certain size quickly learns that one person shouldn't have the admin password for every single system in the company -- even if they're qualified to do all of the things. Part of the reason is security, but it's also because by being the admin it's possible there's nothing in place to ever force them to go through the gatekeepers that the company has stood up for good reasons. They might not even know there are gatekeepers now!

Absolute trust is bad. I expect if Elon ever flames out spectacularly for technological reasons it'll be over something similar.

VCs and other investors trusted him too. Nobody demanded a board seat? Nobody wanted independently audited financial statements? Everyone was smitten.

That is the part I don't understand. Whatever about the EA community, where it seems his brother was part of it and brought him in that way (and hence people did trust him as "he's Gabe's brother"), these were allegedly hard-headed business people and he bowled them over with charm, though what charm he has I have no idea. He must be one hell of a persuader. Again, I have to quote the Sequoia article, because these were the people who after one flippin' Zoom call just threw money at him, and the writer of this article seemed to have contracted a massive man-crush as well:

As Covid-19 descended, Michelle Bailhe, a young gun at Sequoia Capital, and veteran partner Alfred Lin were starting to closely examine the crypto space. Lin, a no-nonsense workaholic if there ever was one, had little patience for the kind of utopianism that motivated the first wave of cryptopians. Lin’s intellect was tempered in graduate school at Stanford, where he studied statistics and price options, swaps, and derivatives. And when he thought about crypto, the question he asked himself was: What is it good for?

…Bailhe spent months researching the space full time, focusing her energies on the exchanges. She met with every founder and every company that would have her. And she built a map—a landscape, as such a document is called at Sequoia—of the entire market.

…FTX did need money, after all. And it needed that money from credible sources so it could continue to distinguish itself from the bottom-feeders who came to crypto to fleece the suckers. So, in the summer of 2021, when FTX started to raise its Series B from a who’s who of Silicon Valley VCs, Bailhe and Lin hit the “Don’t Panic” button. “Embarrassingly, we had never tried to reach out to Sam, because we figured he didn’t need us,” Bailhe admits. “I thought they were just minting money and had absolutely no need for investors.” Learning otherwise, they quickly contacted SBF and organized a last-minute Zoom call between him and the partners at Sequoia—at four California time on a hot July Friday afternoon. Bailhe was adamant, putting her reputation with the other partners on the line: “I’m like, ‘No, it’s worth it. Cancel your afternoon.’”

The Zoom went well for all concerned. SBF looked relaxed as he answered questions, talking, as he usually does, in complete paragraphs about topics of extreme complexity. Ramnik Arora, FTX’s head of product and another ex-Facebook engineer, remembers the meeting clearly: “We’re getting all these questions from Sequoia toward the end. He’s absolutely fantastic.” Arora locks eyes with me, and I am mesmerized. Arora is intense—calling to mind a Bollywood version of Adrian Brody. “Unbelievably fantastic,” he says, shaking his head.

Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’”

That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”

Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.

“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.

“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.

“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.

…“We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”

…The B round raised a billion dollars. Soon afterward came the “meme round”: $420.69 million from 69 investors.

After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern-matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.

But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.

So I find myself convinced that, if SBF can keep his wits about him in the years ahead, he’s going to slay—that, just as Alameda was a stepping stone to FTX, FTX will be to the super-app. Banking will be disrupted and transformed by crypto, just as media was transformed and disrupted by the web. Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

Forget crypto, if someone can just figure out what Bankman-Fried has to reduce people like this to squeeing fanboys and then bottle it, that's a sure-fire fortune!

Also, I have to wonder what Michelle Bailhe is doing now; she's the one 'staked her reputation' and persuaded them to give Bankman-Fried a hearing, ouch!

Jane Street, the esteemed quant trading firm SBF and Ellison came from, have had their reputation tarnished a bit as a result. But on the other hand...

Forget crypto, if someone can just figure out what Bankman-Fried has to reduce people like this to squeeing fanboys and then bottle it, that's a sure-fire fortune!

SBF and Ellison apparently were not successful in convincing them to help build their rocket ship to the moon, so maybe they're much smarter than we thought.

Also, I have to wonder what Michelle Bailhe is doing now;

Still at Sequoia as a Partner in their Growth section. Privated Twitter around when things started falling apart. @Sequoia has been rather quiet for the last couple of weeks. They did post an update regarding their exposure to the whole mess.

Forget crypto, if someone can just figure out what Bankman-Fried has to reduce people like this to squeeing fanboys and then bottle it, that's a sure-fire fortune!

These insane asset bubbles are torture for professional asset managers obligated to deploy capital in related spaces. Sure, they can try to sit it out, but the crypto clown-car has been rolling for years now, with idiot 23-year-olds popping out as billionaires left and right. Andreessen launched a crypto fund and returned something like 5x in just a couple of years. Where's your return, investors and colleagues ask? What's your crypto strategy? How many years can you spend shifting uncomfortably in your seat and muttering "well, but, in the fullness of time..." before you make a move?

Yeah, but if your 20-something whiz kid replies, in answer to "so what can your shiny new bauble do?" that "you can buy bananas with it", then you should be smiling and closing down the Zoom window and muttering under your breath "waste of a frickin' afternoon", not going ALL CAPS I LOVE THIS GUY.

I suppose this is why I'll never be a millionaire!

Alameda/FTX had a culture that resembled "move fast and break things". They grew extremely quickly. I'm highly skeptical they were able to stand up robust accounting and practices to mitigate technology risks in so short a time.

When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.

The problem is that they didn't even try to have anything in place to handle what is basic practices in running any kind of a business. The bankruptcy filing is apoplectic about this, and sure, you can write that off as "old, out-of-touch guy doesn't understand modern new Internet" but even the adulatory pieces (like the Sequoia article which I keep coming back to again and again because you can pull so many plums out of it) describes how it was being run like a college dorm. And, uh, it keeps giving EA a black eye in the process, since it was via EA that Bankman-Fried met the likes of MacAskill and got involved with EA people and used them for labour and sources of funding to start him off. Bankman-Fried was making fast and (relatively) easy money off the "kimchi premium" but like all good things, that came to an end. So what next? Well, spinning up Alameda Research and FTX into a crypto exchange!:

The first 15 people SBF hired, all from the EA pool, were packed together in a shabby, 600-square-foot walk-up, working around the clock. The kitchen was given over to stand-up desks, the closet was reserved for sleeping, and the entire space overrun with half-eaten take-out containers. It was a royal mess. But it was also the good old days, when Alameda was just kids on a high-stakes, big-money, earn-to-give commando operation. Fifty percent of Alameda’s profits were going to EA-approved charities.

“This thing couldn’t have taken off without EA,” reminisces Singh, running his hand through a shock of thick black hair. He removes his glasses to think. They’re broken: A chopstick has been Scotch taped to one of the frame’s sides, serving as a makeshift temple. “All the employees, all the funding—everything was EA to start with.”

The HQ building is distinguished by a reception desk in the microscopic lobby. The door is unlocked. There is no receptionist. I peek around the corner and into the FTX command center—29 desks in a room designed to hold 8, at most. Every desk touches two or three others. There are no aisles. To get across the room, you have to wade through (and, at times, climb over) a sea of office chairs. Walls of wide-screen monitors—two, four, even six per desk—stand in place of cubicle walls. The screens erupt like palm leaves from aluminum uprights and are oriented willy-nilly: up, down, sideways. Some screens are mounted so high they seem to hang down from the ceiling. It’s office environment as jungle, and the oddest thing about it is that no one seems to be home.

At first blush, the scene is classic startup—the kitchen full of snacks and soda; the free catered breakfasts, lunches, and dinners; the company bathroom stocked with everything you’d need to actually live at the office: Q-tips, disposable razors, Kotex. In keeping with the fashion aesthetic of senior management, the dress code is marketing-swag-meets-utilitarian-merch: gift-bag T-shirts featuring the FTX logo, nylon athletic shorts, white-cotton gym socks.

So it was chaotic and disorganised, but that doesn't mean anything more sinister than incompetence and biting off more than they could chew, right? Except again, and this is going off bits and pieces I've read online but don't have bookmarked to quote as sources, there was something going on below the surface. One of the 'co-founders' quit in 2018 because of unspecified concerns about how it was being run, as in 'not 100% honest'. Another claim is that early on, when a bunch of people who thought they were co-founders or equal partners or however they had taken it on trust that FTX 'belonged' to them all, wanted to leave and cash out what they thought they were due, turns out that Bankman-Fried had registered everything in his name and was the sole legal owner of the entire kit and kaboodle. So there are indications that he wasn't simply over-eager and not able to handle this, but had basically good intentions.

There's an entire web of entities associated with the entire FTX/Alameda operation, and Bankman-Fried holds majority ownership of most of them (again, God bless the bankruptcy filing, Mr. John J. Ray III may be old-school but he knows how to track down what he needs to know):

For purposes of managing the Debtors’ affairs, I have identified four groups of businesses, which I refer to as “Silos.” These Silos include: (a) a group composed of Debtor West Realm Shires Inc. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “WRS Silo”), which includes the businesses known as “FTX US,” “LedgerX,” “FTX US Derivatives,” “FTX US Capital Markets,” and “Embed Clearing,” among other businesses; (b) a group composed of Debtor Alameda Research LLC and its Debtor subsidiaries (the “Alameda Silo”); (c) a group composed of Debtor Clifton Bay Investments LLC, Debtor Clifton Bay Investments Ltd., Debtor Island Bay Ventures Inc. and Debtor FTX Ventures Ltd. (the “Ventures Silo”); and (d) a group composed of Debtor FTX Trading Ltd. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “Dotcom Silo”), including the exchanges doing business as “FTX.com” and similar exchanges in non-U.S. jurisdictions. These Silos together are referred to by me as the “FTX Group.”

Each of the Silos was controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried. Minority equity interests in the Silos were held by Zixiao “Gary” Wang and Nishad Singh, the co-founders of the business along with Mr. Bankman-Fried. The WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo also have third party equity investors, including investment funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and families. To my knowledge, no single investor other than the co-founders owns more than 2% of the equity of any Silo.

To my knowledge, Mr. Bankman-Fried owns (a) directly, approximately 53% of the equity in Debtor West Realm Shires Inc.; (b) indirectly, approximately 75% of the equity in Debtor FTX Trading Ltd.; (c) directly, approximately 90% of the equity in Debtor Alameda Research LLC; and (d) directly, approximately 67% of the equity in Clifton Bay Investments LLC.

Also, Alameda was making loans to several of the founders/executives of FTX, and whatever about Bankman-Fried's alleged austere lifestyle, what did he do with a personal loan of $1 billion?

Related Party Loans Receivable of $4.1 billion at Alameda Research (consolidated) consisted primarily of a loan by Euclid Way Ltd. to Paper Bird Inc. (a Debtor) of $2.3 billion and three loans by Alameda Research Ltd.: one to Mr. Bankman-Fried, of $1 billion; one to Mr. Singh, of $543 million; and one to Ryan Salame, of $55 million.

He definitely got in over his head, but it's looking like he was spoofing all along and was aware that he couldn't keep the promises he was making. He figured out a way to make a quick buck (the kimchi premium) but that was never going to last, and once it ran dry, it seems like he couldn't go back to being just another quant trader looking for his old job at Jane Street back, he liked the fame and praise, as well as the money, from being the bitcoin arbitrage genius and so he looked for more ways to make fast, big bucks off crypto.

EDIT: Whoops, how could I forget the "software backdoor"? That moves things from the "well-meaning but dumb" column to the "oh yeah shady as frick" column:

There was no daily reconciliation of crypto positions. A software backdoor “conceal[ed] the misuse of customer funds”. User keys and critically sensitive data were sent around the group by an “unsecured group email account”. Group payment requests went “through an online chat platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalised emojis.” A paper trail is largely non-existent.

I think the part that makes people read this more as "stole client funds" is the extravagant spending SBF was doing even while his firm was on the brink of collapse.

The ways to read this do not preclude that he was simply mistaken, but given that a lot of that spending seemed geared towards creating a friendly political and public relations environment to operate in, it sure looks premeditated on some level.

Oh right, there's the part where he presented himself as the "regulator-friendly" face of crypto exchanges vs. the much more libertarianish and Gov-skeptical Coinbase and Kraken.

And finally the reports coming out from the New CEO are giving me the picture that things were so horribly bad over there that it was either EXTREME amounts of negligence, or perhaps an intentional effort to keep the situation so obfuscated and insecure that malsfeasance

A) Would be harder to detect, and

B) Would surely look like negligence.

https://apnews.com/article/ftx-trading-former-ceo-d2c2b881dc0eb0ec37b454674f446b52

Which is ironic if he was supposed to be the one welcoming tighter regulation.

To me, there's a plausible hypothesis that sometime this year SBF became aware of how screwed they actually were, and whilst attempting to keep the house of cards from collapsing and attract new money he was also laying the groundwork to personally escape the worst consequences by acquiring political allies, getting PR puff pieces published, and getting deeply engrained in charitable giving via the EA community, so that he wouldn't look like your stereotypical corrupt exec.

Alas the full crypto-winter made things collapse faster than expected.

Why is this plausible? Because he admits to being openly misleading on at least some levels:

In an interview with the online news outlet Vox, Bankman-Fried admitted that his previous calls for regulation of cryptocurrencies were mostly for public relations.

“Regulators, they make everything worse,” Bankman-Fried said, using an expletive for emphasis.

Here's an interview where he's called out his previous claims about being excellent at managing risk:

https://twitter.com/Ringalls86/status/1598327159055159301

Well, what happened?

As the CEO, the buck should stop with him, regardless. I don't care much whether it was ignorance, inexperience, or greedy overindulgence that led to the outcome. Either we establish actual skin in the game for people entrusted with others' money, or we have yet another institution failing to protect the average person from the misbehavior of 'elites' and 'experts.'

Why is this plausible? Because he admits to being openly misleading on at least some levels:

Well, suppose we were talking about Pfizer instead of FTX.

“Regulators, they make everything worse,” Bankman-Fried said, using an expletive for emphasis.

Do you doubt that the CEO of Pfizer has said this aloud (and worse) about the FDA in closed door meetings with a handful of trusted people and definitely not in writing? Pfizer absolutely depends on being in the FDA's good graces to survive and they almost assuredly suck them off all day long and will never say a bad word about them in public.

Is this evidence of malfeasance from Pfizer? Or are they just playing this game and they and everyone know it's bullshit?

Or do you mean that as an EA courting nerd savant he's supposed to be above all of that and the fact that he sank to at least the level of normal CEO (in this limited regard) shatters the image and makes him somehow worse?

As the CEO, the buck should stop with him, regardless. I don't care much whether it was ignorance, inexperience, or greedy overindulgence that led to the outcome. Either we establish actual skin in the game for people entrusted with others' money, or we have yet another institution failing to protect the average person from the misbehavior of 'elites' and 'experts.'

At least according to his public statements he does not deny that he's not completely responsible for it. The question, IMO, is whether or not failing spectacularly at business is a crime you go to jail for.

Which is ironic if he was supposed to be the one welcoming tighter regulation.

From what I'm piecing together from online articles he was cosying up to regulators for (1) moving to a softer regulatory body (the CFTC not the SEC) and (2) as moves in his fight with Binance, which wasn't regulated. If that worked, then Binance either had to get regulated (so losing an advantage) or stay out (and get a reputation as untrustworthy and unsafe).

Binance really pulled a reverse uno trap card move on him if that was the case.

I don't know if Binance is on the level (it seems to be a bit sketchy itself and to have avoided a similar crash by the skin of its teeth) but you have to admit, Changpeng Zhao played a blinder in his on-off fight with Bankman-Fried. First he extended the olive branch and then pulled the rug out from under Bankman-Fried just as hope of a rescue seemed within grasp, including turning off any other potential rescuers with "Sorry Sam, after taking a look at it the entire mess is too terrible for us to take on, see ya!" Truly, revenge is a dish best served cold!

I don't know. The FTT collapse seemed preordained once the Coindesk article was published, even if CZ was the catalyst that toppled the house of cards. And I think pulling out of an acquisition was inevitable for the same reason that SBF's attempts to "fundraise" after the FTT crash were doomed: their balance sheet is a black hole, and no acquirer on earth with the resources to bail out their customers would come to any other conclusion after even a cursory look. SBF's whole "well played, CZ, you won" shtick looks delusional in hindsight.

If anything, CZ probably wishes that he had just quietly sold as much of the Binance FTT holdings as he could after the Coindesk article landed. The outcome would be the same, but he wouldn't feature in the headlines, and they'd have probably recovered at least $100M or so in the sale.

He transferred huge sums to Alameda, who then lost it gambling. Where would he have thought that money was coming from, if not customer deposits?

Alameda was always a clear scam. 15% risk free is always a scam proposition.

"Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.

He legit stole client's funds though. They were supposed to be idle just sitting in cold storage. Instead the guy directly routed them to Alameda (For FTX US, the bank account that you would deposit your money to is Alameda's) and gambled with them by placing huge directional bets. And that's ignoring all the real estate and donations that he has done that also came from these funds too.

Yeah. It'd be one thing if Alameda was deep underwater but funds could be recovered from FTX balances, but Alameda tried to double-down on their bets with client funds

When you thought you had $30b in assets and minimal liabilities, you can spend a billion or two on indulgences, charitable giving and campaign contributions. Your can say confidently you're not investing client funds.

I don't think he could, even wrongly, make that claim with any level of honesty. He didn't have 30b in assets; his clients did. FTX's revenue was high but nowhere near high enough to justify his expenditures. And most of the paper value reflected paper that couldn't be plausibly considered anywhere near its claimed worth, either nonconvertible coins or other things that could not be converted to cash.

Does that number include unrealized gains? Crypto exchanges also provide broker-style services, unlike traditional exchanges. Bitcoin grew from $4,800 in 2020 to $69,000 each by 2021. Lots of cryptocurrencies grew on that scale. The brokerage parts of FTX were almost certainly exposed to this upside.

"Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.

Is it? IIRC FTX was calling for funds to be wired to Alameda all along (I'm kind of baffled that this didn't raise flags in cryptoland. But, then again, Tether is somehow still a thing.)

That right there is all we need: that is bad practice to the point of being immoral and a lie given that FTX told customers their funds were separate from Alameda. That's damning enough.

But it gets worse.

When you thought you had $30b in assets and minimal liabilities, you can spend a billion or two on indulgences, charitable giving and campaign contributions.

Except a significant portion of that value was simply coins that FTX had minted or some other shady crypto company had done the same thing. It was funny money, pumping up the valuation. And SBF himself knew this, given the statements he's made about exchanges being insolvent (so their coins are worthless) and the infamous Ponzi scheme discussion with Matt Levine where he basically admitted a lot of this shit is worthless.

The rest was customer funds that he should never have been gambling with in the first place.

SBF did not believe he had $30b in assets the way a bank that held stock, bonds and real estate did. If he claims so I'm inclined to believe he's lying, or so stupid as to not be trusted tying his laces.

So, ultimately, it doesn't matter if they actually were hacked after shit hit the fan.

Umm... How did he accidentally backdoored the software of the exchange so he could wire without alerts. How did he accidentally exempted Alameda from the auto liquidation algorithms. How did he accidently tapped into customer accounts?

No - when running an exchange custody of your client funds is your most important responsibility. If you “misplace” them or misappropriate them that’s either intentional fraud or criminal negligence of the highest degree.

Yeah Corzine still pisses me off, he should have gotten a much much stiffer penalty imho.

When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.

I'm not buying your explanation here, like at all. Yeah there's not really any crypto-specific accounting software out there, but several of the issues FTX had would have been found in under an hour by any random schlub who completed a double-entry accounting course on youtube or skillshare. Having $3 billion in customer funds go into the bank account of an entirely different company (that is also owned by SBF) and never actually get transferred to FTX's accounts is beyond amateur hour. The worst accountants in the world could notice an issue that big. It was almost certainly fraud, and if it wasn't it was reckless and criminal levels of negligence.

The "accounting error" looks like "had no accounts or accounting at all". That is certainly a big error. (And what is this QuickBooks love, we use Sage at work 😁)

As for auditors, I can't do better than this gem from Mr. Ray And The Filing (at this stage, it's practically bedtime reading for me). Yeah, they had auditors, two sets of 'em even! Mr. Ray knows of one firm, but the other...

One of the firm’s auditors is “Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates they are the first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland,”

I have a lot of sympathy (or maybe pity) for SBF. "Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.

The FTX terms of service were very clear in saying that client digital assets belonged to the client, were the property of the client, were under the control of the client and were not to be loaned or traded out. "Title to your Digital Assets shall at all times remain with you and shall not transfer to FTX Trading. None of the Digital Assets in your Account are the property of, or shall or may be loaned to, FTX Trading;"

Caroline admitted that in fact they intentionally transferred/loaned these customer deposits to Alameda. That is straight up embezzlement, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

This is like a bank drilling into a customer's safe deposit box to take their gold, lending out the gold and then losing it. It's theft, not merely a trading mistake.

This is like a bank drilling into a customer's safe deposit box to take their gold, lending out the gold and then losing it. It's theft, not merely a trading mistake.

You're assuming there was a bank account called CLIENT FUNDS and another account called EXCHANGE FUNDS and they decided to raid the CLIENT FUNDS one to make bets.

What if there was actually just a gigantic intermingled account and the separation between client funds and exchange funds were records in an accounting system that, when they snapped it to reality, they realized the funds they had left were smaller than what they were liable for in client redemptions?

Someone better at financial accounting than me explain this, because it sounds like he was hiding funds:

Customer custodial fund liabilities are comprised of fiat customer deposit balances. Balances of customer crypto assets deposited were not recorded as assets on the balance sheet and are not presented.

This runs all through the bankruptcy filing when parsing the "balance sheets" provided for the various 'silos'. So whatever fund they were keeping as CUSTOMER FUNDS, they sure weren't keeping any separate records of "we took in $50 million of customer money that wanted to buy crypto and bought $X million of crypto with it, and here's a list of the customer accounts with who owns what".

That's going beyond carelessness. But if I'm interpreting it wrongly and there's an honest reason for doing this, go ahead and explain it to me. For instance, this is one of the "balance sheets" where the Customer Custodial Funds are the fiat balances, but whatever crypto assets they might have held aren't anywhere:

WRS Silo

Consolidated Assets as of September 30, 2022

Current Assets

Cash and Cash Equivalents $144,207

Restricted Cash $267,738

U.S. Dollar Denominated Stablecoins $68,035

Customer Custodial Funds $102,225

Accounts Receivable $2,978

Accounts Receivable, Related Party $71,563

Loans Receivable $250,000

Prepaid Expenses and Other Current Assets $21,448

Crypto Assets Held at Fair Value $1,026

Total Current Assets $929,220

Property and Equipment, Net $2,017

Other Non-Current Assets $429,428

Total Assets $1,360,665

(1) Amounts shown in thousands of U.S. Dollars.

(2) In the above table, assets shown reflect the elimination of intercompany entries within and between the WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo.

(3) Restricted cash at the WRS Silo is primarily comprised of approximately $250 million in restricted funds at non-Debtor LedgerX.

(4) Customer custodial fund assets are comprised of fiat customer deposit balances. Balances of customer crypto assets deposited were not >recorded as assets on the balance sheet and are not presented.

(5) Loans receivable of $250 million consists of a loan by Debtor West Realm Shires Inc. to BlockFi Inc. of $250 million in FTT tokens.

(6) Intangible assets (in the amount of $229 million) are not reflected above. These consist of values attributable to customer relationships and trade names.

(7) Goodwill balance (in the amount of $135 million) is not reflected above.

WRS Silo

Consolidated Liabilities as of September 30, 2022

Current Liabilities

Accounts Payable and Accrued Expenses $6,014

Accounts Payable, Related Party $124,221

Custodial Funds Due to Customers $102,225

Purchase Consideration Payable –

Loan Payable –

Lease Liability, Current $1,672

Crypto Asset Borrowings at Fair Value $1,737

Total Current Liabilities $235,869

Lease Liability, Non-Current $9,399

Deferred Taxes $20,185

Contract Liability $887

SAFE Note, Related Party, Non-Current $50,000

Other Non-Current Liabilities –

Total Liabilities $316,014

(1) Amounts shown in thousands of U.S. Dollars.

(2) In the above table, liabilities shown reflect the elimination of intercompany entries within and between the WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo.

(3) Customer custodial fund liabilities are comprised of fiat customer deposit balances. Balances of customer crypto assets deposited are not presented

So this is showing "We have $102,225,000 in customer funds (paper money) and we owe them that amount back" but nothing about "and we bought such-and-such amount of crypto as instructed by them", if I am interpreting this correctly.

It sounds like when you opened an account at FTX, wired them money, and then bought bitcoin with it, no bitcoin was ever necessarily bought. You just got a bitcoin-denominated claim on FTX assets.

That's where the shazam part comes in. It's not at all clear if (1) they took your money and told you it was invested but they spent it on personal loans and Sam's big nap time beanbag (2) they took your money and issued you their own tokens in magic beans (3) they took your money, bought bitcoin, and then wheeee! gambling! oopsies, lost it! never mind, try again with new monies!

Money was certainly coming in, and it was certainly going out, but the in-between part of whose money where when wasn't being tracked. Or at least, only Bankman-Fried knew where it was going. At least, that's how it seems.

The fact that all the dollars were sloshing around in a single big pool doesn't negate the fact that many of them weren't FTX'S dollars, but instead customer dollars. Instead, the act of throwing the money into a single big pool itself is evidence that FTX and SBF were extremely reckless with client funds, and didn't care that the money wasn't theirs in the first instance.

"Title to your Digital Assets shall at all times remain with you and shall not transfer to FTX Trading. None of the Digital Assets in your Account are the property of, or shall or may be loaned to, FTX Trading;"

And that is what he is relying on as a defence, or part of one. "FTX didn't do any of that! It was Alameda, which was totally separate!" Yeah, sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

too many risks, not enough reward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold on.

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

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

I did not imply that people were being smuggled in.

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

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

Motte, meet Bailey...

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

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

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

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

Are there any lockdowns left to protest in the West?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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