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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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It's not unlimited, but two cameras going out, and two guards taking a nap simultaneously, is pretty impressive, no?

It's only impressive if the base rate is cameras have 99.999% uptime and guards never ever sleep through shifts.

What if cameras being in a general state of disrepair and guards routinely falsifying records because "they didn't see nothing"
is the norm and you generally never know because usually this huge gap in accountability never counts against, and in fact is to the benefit of the corrections officers?

It's only impressive if the base rate is cameras have 99.999% uptime and guards never ever sleep through shifts.

No, at those odds it's not "impressive", it actually starts leaning towards "unlimited". Even, if the chances of each failure (either camera, or either guard) is as high as 50%, you end up with a ~93% chance of some part of the system catching the incident.

Now, you can argue that a 7% chance is nothing to scoff at, but aren't conspiracy theorists the ones being accused of picking the less likely option for ideological reasons?

Also if the rate of these incidents is so high in that prison, at some point you have to start questioning the decision of sending Epstein there to begin with.

What do you mean that prison? I'm certain they're all alike because they all have the same incentives.

Epstein is like the 1 in 10,000,000 prisoner that society didn't want to wind up dead in his prison cell with no surveillance.

That is an interesting question: to what extent is "suicide watch" in a prison actually taken seriously, versus as a rubber-stamped "well, we tried" box to feel better about ourselves without substantially changing things. It's a somewhat dark thought, but I guess not surprising.