This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Either he was directly assassinated by the intelligence agencies he was working for, so he won't expose the extent of his operation to the public, or was assisted with his suicide for the same reason.
When you see someone destroying evidence, you should assume that said evidence was important by default. But if you want a theory, it's that his clients likely included many powerful and influential people, who need to be punished.
No shit? What else do you expect when authorities refuse to follow up on leads?
Well, I mean, it seems to me that we have a situation where the official account (unaided suicide) is mostly plausible, there's a minimum-EDKH that's plausible and would be hidden (aided suicide), and then there's a maximum-EDKH that's implausible and is unlikely to be successfully hidden (murder by a third party).
The case for it aided suicide or murder are that circumstances around unaided suicide seem kind of weird to observers. That's not a whole lot to build a case on.
At any rate, my position is that unaided suicide is most likely, aided suicide is reasonably possible, and murder is sufficiently unlikely that we can rule it out; and that the difference between unaided and aided suicide is unimportant.
I don't actually see anyone destroying evidence, though. What's the evidence that's missing?
Yeah, but so what? So is his assassination. It was plausible for Imane Khelif to be female, and it was plausible for him to be male. It was plausible for COVID to have natural origin, and it's pkausible for it to have leaked from a lab... Plenty of cases have more than one scenario, and it's ridiculous to assume that in the presence of multiple plausible scenarios, we should side with the one being out forward by our institutions.
Yes it is, unless you can present stronger evidence. The evidence for his suicide is just as circumstantial.
Jeffrey Epstein.
I don't actually think assassination is plausible. At the very least it is less plausible than one of the other explanations - it requires a lot more moving parts, especially since no particular candidates for either ordering or carrying out the assassination seem to have been identified, or had any evidence pointing towards them.
Nor do I think it's ridiculous to say that, in the presence of multiple plausible scenarios, we should assign higher weight to the official story, if only because it is generally more likely for any given official statement to be true than false. I am not naively claiming that governments never lie about things. I'm saying that things the government says are true are usually either true, or in spitting distance of the truth. They are often massaged a bit, but outright lies are unusual. If nothing else, the government saying that something is true is not evidence that it isn't true. The government may not be always right or always truthful, but its hit rate is better than that of speculating internet randos.
The entire case for EDKH is based on the idea that the official explanation is unsatisfactory. But so far I don't really see a convincing reason to think that the official explanation is that unsatisfactory. The official explanation is pretty plausible. I don't assign 100% probability to it - as I said, I could imagine a minimum-plausible-EDKH being true - but nothing stands out that makes it clearly false. There's no smoking gun that makes me reject it.
Bribing guards to either kill him, let an assassin kill him, or assist him with suicide doesn't strike me as a particularly complex mechanism. At least not any more complex than the series of unlikely events that we are asked to write off as coincidences.
Again, what evidence would you expect to be there when authorities are refusing to follow up on leads?
This is only true if you count things like the daily weather report from the NOAA as "official statements". In cases where lying is in the interest of public institutions they have been found to lie deliberately and frequently, and cases where they opt to tell a truth that is inconvenient for them are insanely infrequent (unless you count declassifications that happen decades after a given fact, I suppose).
This is only true if we grant the official explanation the status of null hypothesis. It's absurd to do so, and you haven't even attempted to justify why we should. EDKH is just as plausible, you haven't given any evidence that would falsify, and are demanding that it's proponents do all the work while you sit back and poke holes in it.
Well, that's why you're not paid to investigate these things. Just consider the probabilities involved. If someone came to your house claiming to be from Mossad or Bill Clinton's people or the Royal Family or whoever and told you that they would totally pay you a lot of money if you committed murder on their behalf, what would you do in response? What would the average person do? What would the average person who has no criminal record and has a job in law enforcement do? If you read enough true crime cases you'll learn that finding a hit man among the general public is incredibly difficult in the best of circumstances because the vast, vast majority of the time the guy you meet in a bar who's short on money and has a checkered past inevitably goes straight to the police.
In this case the murderer wouldn't even have the luxury of picking a vetted assassin from among the general public; he'd be relying on two specific people who are members of the law enforcement community to conduct the hit. People who are specifically screened for not having any criminal record, let alone murder. And you're asking them not only to commit a capital crime but commit it in such a way that will fool the medical examiner and require them to stage the scene. And they would be the only two people with access to the target at the time of the death and be the obvious first suspects in any investigation. And this person is a high-profile inmate whose death will be national news. One of these people is a woman (this detail never seems to get mentioned for some reason). And there are two of them.
And if they do accept your offer and successfully kill Epstein, then what? Given that they've never killed anyone before, there's a good chance that they get prosecuted for his murder. Do you really think that someone under indictment for a capital crime is going to keep his mouth shut for your benefit? What reason could they possibly have to keep quiet?
If you're one of the guards in question and someone offers you money to kill Epstein, why would you even believe that they are who they say they are? How much money would this person have to pay you to take on this kind of risk? At the very least, it is guaranteed that you will lose your job in the aftermath and be virtually unemployable at the same salary you were making, so it would have to be enough money to live in New York for another 50 years, and with a high standard of living, at that. Of course, if either of this guards were living the high life with no discernible source of income, that would raise all kinds of red flags (or at least pique the interest of the IRS), so you'd have to keep this money hidden away so it didn't look like you were living beyond your means, working at whatever menial rent-a-cop job you could get. What would make you think that some rando you met in a bar actually has this kind of money? Of course you're going to demand prepayment. After all, once a man commits murder, breach of contract doesn't seem like such a big deal.
If I'm the guy ordering the hit, how to I get this money to him? Write him a check? How easy do you think it is to transfer that kind of dough without raising any red flags among the banking community? Or maybe you think it would be easier to show up with a suitcase full of cash to a bugged hotel room with Federal agents waiting for you in the parking garage. Or maybe NYPD if he happens to go to them instead. Getting someone to commit murder on your behalf is hard. Getting someone to commit a murder that he will immediately be suspected of is harder. Getting two people to do the same? Damn near impossible.
Consider the probabilities here, just for fun. Let's generously assume that 5% of the extremely law-abiding-background-check-passing population would commit such a murder for the right price. The odds are already 95% that your attempt to off Epstein will end with you in handcuffs. Add in a second person (required here) to be in on the plan and the odds of failure are now 99.75%. Add in a generously high 75% chance that they can actually commit the murder without arousing any suspicion, and you're now down to about 6 hundredths of a percentage point likely to succeed. Even if I use the impossibly optimistic assumption of 50/50 all around, you still wind up in prison 7 out of 8 times. And why are you taking such a huge risk? To prevent the theoretical uncorroborated testimony of a guy who is wholly incredible and has nothing to gain by talking. These conspiracy theories make no fucking sense whatsoever.
I admittedly don't know the logistics of killing a man, but enough people get killed by accident in stupid brawls that I have to ask - come on how hard is it to strange someone and wrap some cloth around him afterwards. Are you going to say that it would leave evidence of murder? The evidence was literally already examined by a pathologist claiming it's more indicative of murder, and summarily ignored. Your assumption that any indication of foul play would trigger a proper investigation is completely unfounded.
Yes, I absolutely 100% believe that, and I would like to know what empirical evidence is your belief that this is in any way unlikely based on. From child castration fetishists joining professional medical associations in order to normalize their fetish, to the Community Relations Service twisting people's arms to say that the murder of their children is not about race, I've seen enough brazen conspiracies that have only come out by accident, that the rationalist default idea of "someone would have squealed" looks patently absurd.
Or take something that you might find less controversial: do you think Prigozhin's airplane just so happened to suffer a completely innocent accident? Or do you think these kind of assassinations only happen in countries like Russia? I think both are absurd, but the latter is the more absurd of the two.
You really think that the CIA or the Mossad would have any trouble delivering someone a suitcase full of cash? You think either of them would be questioned by the banking community, of all people?
Step me through why the FBI or NYPD would dare to get in the way of intelligence services. And before you get to that, tell me how would they evem know there's anything to get ij the way of.
I did, it does not come out the way you want.
Keep in mind that the official explanation is that the prison was an absolute clownshow where the cameras were falling apart so frequently that both of the ones aimed at Epstein's cell just so happened to be not working, and both of the guards on duty fell asleep at the same time. Let's generously assume that 95% of guards like that would refuse a suitcase full of money to strangle a pedophile with guaranteed impunity, how many of them do you think would refuse a suitcase full of money for "hey, why don't you lend me your keycard and uniform, and take a day off"?
Your entire argument works on the assumption that the American system would immediately trigger an alarm if any irregularity was found. That assumption is not backed by anything in this reality.
The thing that pisses me off the most about these Epstein conspiracy theories is that seemingly none of the people putting them forth have bothered to read the Inspector General's report of the investigation into his death. Hence, these people, yourself included, cite the "official explanation" without knowing what the official explanation even is, and go off half-cocked on theories of how Epstein could have been murdered that contradict the most basic facts of the case. To wit:
The pathologist you're referring to is Dr. Michael Baden, who said specifically that Epstein suffered a hyoid bone fracture which is more indicative of manual strangulation, and that he'd never seen such a fracture occur in a case of suicide by hanging. Dr. Baden's personal experience aside, it is well-documented in the medical literature that such a fracture indeed does occur in a minority of hangings, particularly among older people. In any event, Dr. Baden didn't bother to address any of the other findings from the autopsy that indicate a hanging: The fractures in the other neck bones, the ligature pattern, the petechial hemorrhage, the plethora, the lack of lung muscle hemorrhage, and the lack of defensive wounds. None of these were consistent with manual strangulation.
Faking a hanging so that it fools a medical examiner isn't simply a matter of strangling the guy and wrapping a cloth around his neck afterwards. You have cause a number of specific injuries while not causing a number of other specific injuries, some of which won't manifest until time of autopsy. And, as far as Epstein is concerned, the murder would have had to accomplish this without Epstein fighting back at all.
The rest of your post just wanders back into the fever swamps where we go from Epstein being murdered by two compromised prison employees to there being an entire systemic effort to get rid of him involving practically everyone in the Department of Justice, plus various state and local officials as well, at which point I don't know what to tell you. Actually, I do know what to tell you: If you want to go on with this, read the report. The whole 120 pages. Tell me what you think is accurate and what information you had that the IG's office didn't bother considering. Then we at least have a basis for conversation.
I'm actually happy to concede this argument, everything that you said that flows from this.
...but this is insane. There's no going from-to, the theory as far as I'm aware is that Epstein was an intelligence honeypot. No, it would not involve practically everyone in the Justice Depertament.
I kinda wish you answered my Prigozhin analogy, because I think it distills the disagreement between our worldviews. Do you think the idea that Putin ordered his hit is a fever swamp? If not do you think these kind of hits are meticulously documented throughout the Russian bureaucracy?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link