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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31758 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I read an article from Zerohedge recently that listed a bunch of conspiracy theories that will be proven true on 2023. After well every conspiracy theory last year seems to have been proven true. I can’t find the article right now. I read thru their list and thought all the conspiracies were dumb and basically every conspiracy theory that seemed to be likely true has already been proven true.

I have two questions?

  1. What conspiracy theories still exists that haven’t moved into the >50% now think is likely true.

  2. Presuppose theirs a potential snitch who has all the documents and proof to show the world that the conspiracy your running in fact does exists. Is there any reason to kill him or you should just let the culture war battle happen and not worry about going to jail etc.

Maybe my mind isn’t curious enough to see new conspiracies but it does feel like a lot of them were checkmarked true the last year.

I nominate these:

  1. Joe Biden is the Big Guy. I mean, everybody thinks that, but there's no proof. I expect it will show up eventually.

  2. There's something that covid vaccine does to athletic young males that makes it significantly riskier than presented (which was pretty much zero risk)

  3. Facebook and Google (YouTube) are as controlled by US government censors as Twitter was, and regularly and with minimal filtering execute governmental requests to suppress information and dissidents

  4. Ray Epps confirmed to have been working for US government

  5. We learn China has been lying about their covid stats and the real numbers of deaths are horrendous and all their zero-covid strategy was a colossal atrocity

We learn China has been lying about their covid stats and the real numbers of deaths are horrendous and all their zero-covid strategy was a colossal atrocity

Way to verify it would be survey representative sample of mainland Chinese citizens, ask them how many of their family members died or vanished vithout trace during early 2020.

This is standard approach, but there are numerous possible problems with it (starting with different definitions of "family" in different cultures)

  1. What does it mean “the Big Guy”?

  2. The data is already quite strong about this. It has already been a warning in vaccine information for more than a year. What we don't know, how much of a risk it is. Probably not that great in absolute numbers. However, the benefit from vaccine in young people is also not that great. We don't know if the benefits overweigh the risks.

  3. Very likely indeed.

  4. Who is Ray Epps?

  5. I don't think that China lying about covid matters. Nothing about covid really matters anymore. Most stats are only meant to scare people without true understanding how risks are/were age stratified. It took 3 years for European Medicines agency to finally say that covid risk increases exponentially by age even though we learned it within the first 2 weeks of pandemic.

  • There was a person mentioned in Hunter Biden communications under the alias "the Big Guy" to which, as the communications allude, went part of the profits. It is widely assumed that it is Joe Biden, and he was a knowing partner in Hunter's dealings, but so far there's no direct proof of that AFAIK.

  • Ray Epps is a person who took active participation in the events of January 6, by his own admission "I orchestrated it", and was seen inciting certain violent actions, but who for reasons unknown is treated in a radically different way from all other protestors by Democrats, and not only his prosecution was dropped without any plausible explanation, but he was invited to testify in front of Jan 6 commission, and during that testimony the interrogators basically fed him (pun!) the answers. It is suggested by some that the reason for all that is that he is one of the many FBI informants that we know were present at the scene (and in general most right organizations, such as Oath Keepers or Proud Boys, are infested with FBI informants, which makes it plausible that there should be some at the scene on Jan 6) or an agent of some other governmental agency.

Thanks for the explanation.

I don't think it is Joe Biden though. My priors are that sons don't really want to be controlled by their fathers. But in case he had such a relationship with his father, he would had called him less formally, like “Dad” or similar.

Ray Epps is more interesting. I think the worry about January 6 being a potential coup is overblown. Recently Germany had arrested a bunch of people for plotting a coup and restoring monarchy. The media described them as a group of senile men who had got hold of weapons, i.e., nothing serious and all immediately forgot about it. The same is probably true about January 6 except they were not seniors but younger fantasists and some of them had guns (but everybody has a gun in the US). It should not be paid such an attention. Sadly some people died in the crowds but fatal traffic accidents also happen and it is time to forget about this.

The only difference I can see is that Trump was tweeting something and the irrational hate of Trump has been a feature of the US politics. I am not saying that Trump is a good man but he certainly is not guilty of all the outrageous things he is accused of. Whatever Ray Epps' role was, it doesn't change the fact that it was just a spontaneous crowd gathered in naive beliefs, probably instigated by social media viral messaging.

Whatever Ray Epps' role was, it doesn't change the fact that it was just a spontaneous crowd gathered in naive beliefs, probably instigated by social media viral messaging.

Sure, but the question here is that there were some acts of violence and unlawful behavior. They are greatly exaggerated and overblown by the media (as expected) but who initiated them? Most people that are prosecuted are found guilty of the most mundane things akin to "walking where the government told you not to walk". However, we know some people did instigate the violence. Who were those people? We also know the FBI had informants there, and the FBI is not shy of using provocation tactics (see Whitmer "kidnapping" plot) - so were the FBI informants among those who instigated the violence, in order to turn a peaceful protest into something they could make a Congressional commission out of? If there were such people, we'd expect them to not be prosecuted, but instead to be used as vehicles for promoting such agenda.

And here we see a person who seemingly took part in instigating violence, was not prosecuted and is being used as a vehicle to promote the Dems agenda. If we learned he was working for the FBI (or any other part of the government apparatus) - it would confirm that the suspicions above are indeed true. Otherwise, we do not have a plausible explanation of why Epps was treated completely different from what we expect and see other protestors, often not guilty of anything more than walking through a space the government didn't like them to walk, are treated.

  1. There were other messages saying to use code for Joe Biden as they were paranoid about Op Sec.

  2. Hunter mentioned in a message to Hunter’s kid that the kid is lucky that Hunter doesn’t take money for the kid like Joe does vis-à-vis Hunter.

  3. We know they commingled funds.

  4. Finally there is testimony by Tony B.

So far, the evidence heavily suggests Joe was invoked.

I don't think it is Joe Biden though. My priors are that sons don't really want to be controlled by their fathers. But in case he had such a relationship with his father, he would had called him less formally, like “Dad” or similar.

One of Hunter's (former) business associates who was on the email chain in question was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, and specifically confirmed that in this case "Big Guy" was a sort of code when referring to Biden Sr. It would have been weird for them to all call him "Dad"!

It might be. Tucker Carlson is not very reliable though.

Why do you say that?

tucker isn't the source, former business associate tony bobulinski is the source

tucker's reliability is mostly irrelevant here, we're not relying on "unidentified source promise"

Tucker Carlson is not very reliable though.

like what?

I don't know who Tony Bobulinski is and how trustable he is. The fact that Tucker quotes him doesn't add anything. It is just mostly gossip which may be correct or may not. It doesn't update my priors much.

Maybe I am going the way that Taleb calls via negativa. I am careful and exclude things I don't have enough positive information about. That eliminates most of disaster modes (of course, it also makes me to lose some potentially great deals too).

More comments

Compared to whom?

Practically everyone who is qualified to speak about this matter.

More comments

What does it mean “the Big Guy”?

If you want to learn about American scandals, British tabloid gutter press is the way to go ;-)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11056505/Hunter-Biden-associate-referred-Big-Guy-SECOND-message.html

Who is Ray Epps?

Big Trump fan from Arizona, who traveled all the way to DC to meet his idol, and then, instead to listening to his speech, engaged in highly sus behavior.

Meet Ray Epps

Meet Ray Epps, Part 2

This means Epps came to the Trump speech early in the morning with the sole intention of recruiting a mob to follow on the heels of the Capitol breach team he would personally oversee while Trump was speaking—the very breach team we have covered in this report whose operators would remove the fencing, signage and barricades before the masses would arrive at the Capitol.

Let’s put this all in context:

Ray Epps flew 2,300 miles from Phoenix, Arizona to Washington, DC for a Trump rally, supposedly as a Trump supporter.

Epps arrived at the rally entrance more than two hours early, camped out to constantly shout recruiting instructions about coming to the Capitol after the speech, but then skipped out on the speech itself, because he was too busy personally orchestrating the Big Bang Breach Team that kicked off the riot and tore down the fencing, barricades and signage, which made rallygoers totally unaware of the legal booby trap they had walked into.

For 5, what's your explanation for why their reported numbers are shooting up now? To me it always seemed likely that they were covering up their real numbers but I don't see why they would stop that now, whereas if they were telling the truth and have a mostly COVID-naive population then it would make sense that at some point they would have to pay the piper.

I'm going to use another conspiracy theory to explain this one: several of the Vietnam vets I grew up with claim the wall is missing names. That vastly more Americans died over there, but that only some names made the wall. But by randomizing it, it just becomes a bunch of guys who know one guy who was missed, so the natural reaction is oh well it was an oversight, what's one more one way or another, but that it adds up to thousands. But 59,000 is a big enough number that thousands more can get lost in the sauce.

I've never looked into it beyond that, but a similar dynamic might work here. ChiComms are increasing the number of reported dead, to "catch up" to unreported dead, so that the numbers get big enough that they're hard to check.

This sounds like POW-MIA conspiracy theory mangled in retelling.

TL;DR: many more Americans than officially announced were captured by North Vietnam. US government knew about it, and deliberately let them die in captivity.

Mainstream history take

Conspiracy theory take

Oh the POW/MiA conspiracies are in my view true, and separate.

What I'm saying is that I was told directly, riding to a trade show with a one time Green Beret, that so and so got blown to bits in front of him and the name isn't on the wall. This is the same story I've heard from multiple vets.

Now, it's not impossible they were confused! They missed the name, the name he went under to his buddies wasn't his legal name that's listed on the wall ("James <estranged father's name>" legally; "Jimmy <Mother's name>" to his friends), the guy didn't die but was grievously wounded and 40 years of alcohol have conflated complex and traumatic memories, or they're flat lying to make a point about Vietnam. But the dynamic is the same: you have one guy claiming a few names are missing out of 59,000; well it's probably just an error and the overall narrative remains true. But how many errors can you cover up before the narrative itself is false?

Idk what that number that allows Chinese COVID dead to disappear into the ether would be. But it's more than they were reporting prior. At that point, a smart journalist could have collected enough names to throw numbers off. Now they need a big enough number that reporting its falsehood becomes difficult, impossible without setting off government alarm bells. Can you gather 100,000 anecdotes without getting into trouble in China? I doubt it.

Because it's getting too big to hide? Especially once full lockdown is removed, people start talking to each other and notice some people are missing. If the official statistics (arbitrary example) says there are 100 people dead in the whole China, and you know 20 people with dead relatives just in your city, it's impossible to believe. But if you add up a bit more, then it becomes more plausible.

I mean, I don't have any data now, right now it's just a suspicion, a theory and a gut feeling. We'll see.

Given how much more quickly it swept through the rest of the world, it doesn't seem plausible that it's been raging for two years in China and is just now getting too big to hide.

We learn China has been lying about their covid stats and the real numbers of deaths are horrendous and all their zero-covid strategy was a colossal atrocity

I think it's more likely that COVID just genuinely doesn't do a hell of a lot even if you 'let it rip', especially if you don't use the absurd attribution criteria that was used to justify the lockdowns.

Good list and what I was looking for.

  1. Agree on but their is plausible deniability now. But if proven people will just say we knew that all the time

  2. Hamlin might do this. But it’s certainly not the initial diagnosis. I also think COVID itself causes damaging, but repeated boosting probably causes damage that doesn’t need to be done

  3. Think this is assumed

  4. Lowest confidence here but there is something odd going on with him

  5. I think this is false.

  1. I actually find this highly unlikely while also being substantively true. Joe Biden doesn't need cash out of these deals because Joe Biden never pays for anything anyway.
  1. God will that be horrifying to learn.

I don't see why Biden needs cash less than Clintons, and Clintons took money from basically anybody.

Along the lines of your first point, Biden could both be the Big Guy and also not have any substantive involvement with the deal. Hunter could well have entirely invented his dad's interest in an attempt to make everything seem juicier to his collaborators and then taken his dad's share for himself, and no one is the wiser.

Getting involved with these things (particularly given that he knows his son is not a reliable agent) isn't something Biden would obviously do. On the other hand, obfuscation to protect his only son after the fact instead of throwing him under the bus is something I'd absolutely expect.

(Even if more evidence does come out linking Biden, this is probably the backup story that will be the party line.)

FYI, something went wrong with your formatting and both numbers show up as "1." for me.

Each point is as important if not more important than the proceeding point.

Well 1 was one and the rest would fit the second 1, wouldn't they?

I just wasn't sure what you meant and thought it was the Markdown formatting messing up your list, so I thought you might want to edit to clarify. Not sure what you even did to get two "1."s as


1. foo

42. bar

renders as


1. foo

2. bar

no matter what number I replace "42" with.

The rdrama code base has "View Source" as a feature which is kind of neat. The original comment:


1. I actually find this highly unlikely while also being substantively true. Joe Biden doesn't need cash out of these deals because Joe Biden never pays for anything anyway. 


5) God will that be horrifying to learn.

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