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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27699 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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The biggest argument in favor of EDKH, and the reason I endorse a (mild) version of it, is that it was predictive, and already existed prior to its occurring, giving the authorities every opportunity to prevent it. Almost all conspiracies are post-hoc rationalizations that look at the facts and then concoct a theory to retroactively explain the events. But EDKH predicted it ahead of time.

That is a very good point. Think of Seth Rich's death. No one knew the guy until he died, and then retroactively a compelling narrative was made to explain how his death might have been convenient for, and arranged by, powerful people. But for Epstein, the same people who questioned the official narrative, were pointing out how he was going to get whacked to stop him from talking.

An average joe hitting a homerun in baseball or playing a hole in one in golf is unusual but it's going to happen once in a while. But if they call it right before they do it, there's likely more to this story. Is anyone really seriously thinking Prigozhin's death was accidental?

The main question though is whether they have been calling it (wrong) every time before.

I don't think there have been any prominent "calling it" moments like this. The four most similar cases I can think of where someone is/was crying wolf about their assassination and it didn't happen, but if they had died (or do die) there would definitely be retroactive conspiracy theories are Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, And Edward Snowden. So if you're being maximally harsh you could call it 1/5. But none of these have had quite the same level of strength. Everyone believed that Epstein had dirt on prominent politicians that he had not yet spilled, which made getting rid of him quickly a priority. People hate Trump and Musk for public reasons and while killing them would remove them as an annoyance, it wouldn't keep any politicians out of jail. Assange and Snowden already leaked their secrets and assassinating them would just be petty revenge, it wouldn't unleak the secrets. Assassinating any of those four would increase the risk of a politician going to jail, not decrease it as in Epstein's case (conditional on the probability of getting caught being less than the probability of him spilling the beans). Additionally, the U.S. government has never had one of those four in custody in a way that would provide such an easy opportunity to off them. And, while I don't pay a ton of attention, nobody has been warning about the potential for assassination attempts on these four except for Trump, who has in fact been the target of attempted assassinated multiple times (though not necessarily by a conspiracy unless you count stochastic terrorism). So depending on how you categorize it we're either 1/5, 2/5, 2/2, or 1/1. Personally I'd go with 1/1, since Epstein was (as far as I know) unique in circumstance of being in a prison with known incriminating evidence on (probably multiple) politicians.

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