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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31668 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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In an update on the case of the 5 year old kid in a blue hat taken away by ICE, Judge orders release of 5-year-old detained by immigration authorities in Minnesota.

I was curious what the judge actually wrote, so I delved into the actual court opinion which I found here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172886492/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172886492.9.0_3.pdf . And it seems this judge clowned himself with the most insane deranged court opinion I've ever seen. I've seen some performative court opinions, but I think this one takes the cake with gems like:

Apparent also is the government's ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.

Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

Interestingly, the court opinion makes exactly 0 legal arguments to support its decision.

I'm increasingly disappointed that activist judges aren't even pretending to be arbiters of the law, but are just doing whatever they want. Of course you expect an enemy judge to make his decision and figure out the justification later, but you expect them to at least think backwards and figure out some kind of fig leaf of legalese to claim that he actually believe that is the law. Instead this judge makes a mockery of the process. And of course for whatever reason, federal judges have never been punished for not doing their jobs.

At least the kayfabe of pretending we live in a country with laws I think is critical for legitimacy. At least for now the court of appeals can write a quick "your a retard" order on Monday, but even so it's a bad look.

For a neutral-ish perspective on the court opinion, try giving an AI the court opinion and asking what it thinks.

PS: AI told me that that the same judge is a known joker and is known for writing this punny though legally sound opinion here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/8725121.pdf

Bud Selig-Barry Bonds.

I guess baseball is the American past time so it’s fertile field for finding a parallel for American politics and in this case asylum abuse.

Steroids were of course illegal back when Bonds and everyone else was doing them. Bonds is not in the HOF because he took steroids despite having a legitimate argument for being the GOAT. I’ve never agreed a HOF should have a morality clause. The villains can get in too. It’s in the name “fame”. But this is basically a way of declaring Bonds a criminal. Selig is conveniently in the HOF. I have never understood this about the HOF since Selig was the enforcer of the rules and it always seemed to me like he made steroids unofficially legal.

Asylum under the Biden administration is very similar in my opinion. Asylum laws were never designed for people like Conejo. Everyone knows this. He is clearly an economic migrant. This is also weirdly basically a holocaust law in design since it’s from the post-war period. We have a Democratic process for making laws and Biden clearly allowed the law not to followed. He’s the Bud Selig in this situation.

Conejo I am going to call an illegal. Even though he claims to be following the asylum laws if he actually understood the law he would know the law doesn’t apply to him. He’s frauding America. I am not sure if a Spanish first person is even capable of understanding the word asylum or read the legalese; he just has counsel telling him to sign here etc and say these words. He’s of course my Barry Bonds in the situation. Following the system by how it is working during the 2020-2024 and not the spirit or letter of the law.

Obviously we need to just deport the guy if we want to be a nation of laws. You can’t care if he has a cute 5 year old kid with him or then the first thing anyone who sneaks into the country will do is get their gf pregnant and then hide for 9 months. And that’s basically open borders with zero control over who lives here.

I guess this is just more evidence that Biden was the villain either thru choice or dementia. If you want the rule of law to mean anything then we need to follow the law honesty and you can’t have huge gaps in what the law means like asylum.

I’ll joke I am a fascists now. That’s because I don’t think we have or had the rule of law recently. At which point opting-out of our system is just recognizing what has already happened. Legitimacy was already losts.

For the record I do think first safe country can be a little stretchy. For Venezuelans they come close to the purpose of asylum legalese. And I think it can be argued when you have 10 million asylum seekers it would be unreasonable for them to all go to the first safe country which is basically Colombia. If you view them as legitimate asylum seekers then it would be reasonable to spread them out across the major countries in the Americas. I don’t think during WW2 people would reason Switzerland needed to accept 10m Jews. If you also view Venezuelans as legitimate asylum seekers then I think creating 10m asylum migrants makes an US-Venezuelan hostilities as Just War with the US being the hegemon of the Americas.

I don't understand, what is your argument against this judge's decision? It seems like you're just assuming consent on this. The decision seems like obvious common sense to me, it's the bare minimum I would expect from a judge with any integrity. Standing up for American values, the constitution, and freedom isn't "activism", that's what judges are supposed to do.

  • -15

The kid was/is in custody since his father was taken in on a lawful warrant and his mother refused to take him. It doesn't take a gigantic legal intellect to think why doing your best to force through 'Depriving any legal birthright American citizen of their parents is against the constitution and American values' opens up a gaping channel for future mischief.

Standing up for American values, the constitution, and freedom isn't "activism", that's what judges are supposed to do.

But that also leads to abuse of the Starfleet Academy sort: "mommy may have been an accomplice to murder, but we can't send her to space rehab! because that would separate her from her kiddy-winkie! so mommy can commit crimes and get away with it! that's the just and fair thing to do!"

Why did the mother refuse to take the child? How about if instead of deporting daddy, he had been sent to jail for crime? Would it be "no, he has a five year old child, you can't send him to jail"? What about all the five year olds who get taken in by state agencies because no parents/parents in jail?

Especially when coupled with abused birthright citizenship

Orders from trial courts only rarely contain opinions. The judge decided to write a brief opinion critical of the administration from putting him in a position where he had to issue the order. Why? Because he can. Judges make performative comments like this all the time, it just usually happens during motion arguments when nobody is there but the court staff and the attorneys.

This isn't true at all

This isn't true at all

I agree. In federal court in the US, when the judge writes an opinion, there is normally an explanation of the decision. Sometimes the judge will make a decision orally on the record and explain his reasoning in that decision. It's very unusual for the court to make a decision without any explanation. Sometimes it happens with evidentiary objections at trial, but if there are written motions it's very rare.

In this case, there was kind of an explanation, but it doesn't really conform to what federal courts normally do. It's virtually certain that there are precedent cases on the issue of whether an arrested pursuant to an administrative warrant is legitimate. So that ordinarily, a federal judge would cite to a couple of those precedents and explain why, in his view, the precedents do or don't apply.

Edit: The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that rov_scam is recounting his experiences in state court in his state

That's definitely part of it; even for the specific question of bench trials brought all the way to final judgment, there's a lot of state courts (and even some state appeals courts!) that just don't do opinions for all but the most noteworthy matters.

I think some of the confusion is more about what counts as an 'order'. For laypeople, we tend to think of judicial orders as serious decisions: even if we recognize the difference between a final appealable order and something like a motion to stay, the latter's about as far down the line as we really put in the same bin.

But there's a lot of other things that are 'orders' in the sense that the court will fuck you over if you don't obey it, but not 'orders' in the sense of any serious legal decision. At the lowest level, there's a lot of stuff that's just 'we're going to next meet at X date' or 'parties should send me Y paper of Z pages on A, B, and C' subjects, withdrawal or substitution or an attorney, extension of time, yada yada. These are orders, technically, but they're just standard process stuff rather than serious evaluation of legal policy. In the middle, there's things like orders on motions pro hac vice, or discovery orders, or even demands to prepare around certain topics. These are 'decisions', but they're decisions that have a fairly standard answer, or where the logic underlying them is self-explanatory in the order.

At the higher end, there's stuff that could plausibly be serious and sometimes even final orders if granted, but basically never are and don't really need serious introspection to get there: this entry is an order on motion for judgment on the pleadings, and that'd be worth a long digression if it were actually granting judgement, but it's not, and it's very rare for that sort of order to exist. Recognizing a jury verdict is technically an order, and there's some ability for judges to issue things like judgment notwithstanding verdict, but it's not something you have to explain most of the time. Sometimes this stuff gets an opinion, and sometimes it doesn't, even when it's a final order.

By contrast, it'd be a little weird to see a final judgement for a federal case (where not settled, defaulted, consent judgements, yada), without an accompanying opinion explaining the law in detail. It probably happens, though the examples I can find tend to be civil forfeiture cases that are closer to default than I'd consider.

The messy bit is where, exactly, this order falls. Grants of writ of habeas corpus are kinda appealable orders, depending on situation, but they're not exactly the 'everybody's presented their full argument and had their day in court', either. I'd expect to see at least some attempt at a serious explanation for a high-profile case, but I can't swear every single one has been treated seriously by the courts, either.

((On the gripping hand, neither Grok nor Claude could find an example of a federal grant of the writ of habeas corpus without an accompanying opinion. Which doesn't mean much!)

I think some of the confusion is more about what counts as an 'order'.

To a large extent, I agree. But I think that for the most part rov_scam is the source of the confusion. Because any way you slice it, for this type of decision, a federal court would normally explain its reasoning -- either in a written opinion or by reading something orally into the record. The fact that you don't get an explanation for other types of motions and/or in some other courts is irrelevant.

And as I noted elsewhere, in this case the court did actually explain its decision. It's just that the decision appears to be bizarrely deficient in its analysis. Because this can't be the first time a court was confronted with the issue of the validity of an administrative warrant. The court should have cited the applicable precedent authority on this issue and then applied it; or explained why it applies; or explained why it doesn't apply; or whatever. Even if there is no precedent on this issue, stating that the United States has violated the separation of powers is not something you do lightly. You cite authority on that issue (which surely exists) and explain why it applies or doesn't apply.

The bottom line is that this is an objectively bizarre opinion and the Occam's razor explanation is that it was somehow informed by TDS.

I'm confused wasn't the kid taken into custody on account of parental abandonment and not having an available legal guardian? It's not like the kid was arrested perse and trying to rule 'Immigration law cannot be enforced on the parents of dependent birthright citizens' has obvious issues and misaligned incentives.

I'm increasingly disappointed that activist judges aren't even pretending to be arbiters of the law, but are just doing whatever they want.

To me this, just proves that the Trump admin has (accidentally?) struck a small vein strategic gold. Apparently directly antagonizing the left causes a small but significant fraction of their institutionally embedded partisans to lose control and let their masks slip. This seems like evidence in favor of the efficacy of further accelerationism and direct antagonism from the right. Previously, it was believed by many on the right that long-march leftists were simply too clever, disciplined, and coordinated to challenge directly. Instead, the only option was to "exit" or to go full Benedict Option. But no longer. It must be frustrating for the more self-possessed and strategically-minded leftist partisans who are quietly manipulating procedural outcomes in a plausibly deniable way. Their grandstanding compatriots are giving away the game.

The Gramscian concept of the Long March Through the Institutions as determined by mainstream liberals was based on the assumption that the only token right-wing opposition that will arise will come from loser cucks like Mitt Romney, John McCain or Jeb Bush. It was never supposed to be challenged by someone like Trump.

The Gramscian concept of the Long March Through the Institutions was developed by Gramsci, who was not a mainstream liberal. The mainstream liberal concept of institutional dominance is much less sophisticated - basically that liberals dominate institutions because institutions are IQ-selected and liberals are smarter than conservatives - and this opinion is an example. Judge Biery assumes that everyone smart enough to read a legal opinion already agrees with him, so there is no need to write in a way which assumes good faith on the other side of the argument, or that seeks to persuade.

It was developed by Gramsci for his fellow Marxist-Leninist cadre. Otherwise he is dead and forgotten by everyone besides dissident rightist political theorists. Those who have implemented it are identitarian mainstream liberals – feminists, LGBT+ activists and liberal culture warriors in general. Them coddling their own sense of intellectual superiority is beside the point. The point is that the Long March by definition represents the opposite of accelerationism. In other words, it succeeds as long as the marchers and their opponents are both decelerationists. To the extent that you ever reveal your true motivations at all, you only do so when you’re already structurally unremovable from power, when the limited but irreversible gains you’ve been steadily making reach critical mass. As OP correctly pointed it out, this assumes “that long-march leftists were simply too clever, disciplined, and coordinated to challenge directly”. What this also entails is that hardliner leftist culture warriors are to be reined in so as not to alienate the normies too soon.

That seems like a certain way to make sure your positions aren’t very high IQ for long.

I am disappointed that the Trump admin has returned him. His asylum case looks obviously bs to me since Ecuador is not an extremely dangerous country and there are many places between the US and Ecuador. If the Biden admin can just do something illegal then I have no issue just ignoring a court on deportation. Being a nation of laws was broken before Trump showed up.

Apparently directly antagonizing the left causes a small but significant fraction of their institutionally embedded partisans to lose control and let their masks slip.

Too bad for Trump that it doesn't matter. Similarly to when 4chan tricked the left into thinking the OK sign was a racist thing... it didn't knock the left out of power, it just mean now you could get canceled for the OK sign.

Cancelling people for the OK sign does have the potential to alienate normies though, provided that the anti-woke media spins it the right way.

I don't think people here understand how totally goulish "Mother of two shot through window of car as she tries to escape", "ER nurse who loved his dog and had a concealed carry permit shot in back X times by ice after his weapon was seized trying to defend woman", "Small child in cute hat taken into ICE van, has to be forcibly released by judicial order." looks.

You can look at the images on your screen, and no amount of "But the context! She was a radical! He was a terrorist who scuffled with the cops a week before! Little bro was illegal!" is gonna matter. It's the vibes that count here, and the vibes are rancid.

I might put something on the main culture war thread next week, but as a practice draft of that comment: This is the Worst Thing To Happen in optics since Iraq, a war so bad yet so important to the cultural right it got a black guy elected president and made a generation more atheist and more leftist than anything since the great depression.

If the rightists don't learn from the past, it's gonna happen again.

Reform literally always has bad optics; conservatism (currently leftism) defines itself by being on the right side of those optics.

This is why reform is hard.

Optics debates are inherently bad faith. Every time someone says "The optics of this are good/bad!", they're manifesting their own claim.

Personally, I think Democrats really need to worry about their optics of "retarded, violent street crazies". And all of those white, Democrat Karens harassing Latino and gay/black Feds! Dems look so racist it's crazy! Just like they did with Bull Conor and segregation. Terrible optics. They really need to spend a lot of time defending themselves over this crap.

This is one reason I think Trump has a lot of room to do whatever he wants. I don’t think there is a coherent pragmatic Democratic Party right now. He might lose the mid-term but he can do things without 50% approval because when the big election occurs the Dems won’t be able to unit. It feels like a fractured party right now.

Your attempt to pull a UNO Reverse card here falls flat, because the implied accusation against your interlocutor of concern trolling is not credible. On a forum like this one, it is a given that basically nobody wants the DEI/pro-immigration/pro-trans/? wing of Democrats to win, and therefore the parent poster's concern (that ICE's strategy might lead to just that) is more likely than not genuine. On the other hand, you are not even trying to convince anyone that you would be unhappy if the Democrats' access to power suffered due to any putative bad optics.

The parent might not favour your specific brand of Republican politics, especially if that brand is just "more power to God-Emperor Trump and his goons", but it seems very plausible that they are coming from a place that is more like "please, surely none of us want to go back to the Obama/Biden years, so stop doing things that will lead to that" than "I want you to stop doing things your party likes and start doing things my party likes". It might of course be that the former is not very compelling to you because you are one of the people who have memed themselves into valuing everything other than "whatever Trump does, or perhaps more of it" at minus infinity so there is simply no viable solution that involves any form of restraint, but if so that would make you unusual enough that you should state your value function explicitly rather than just shit-flinging because you assume your interlocutor knew this about you and wanted to troll.

On a forum like this one, it is a given that basically nobody wants the DEI/pro-immigration/pro-trans/? wing of Democrats to win

This seems like a square (if obviously non-malicious) example of that "consensus-building" thing the rules prohibit. And, in point of fact: hello! I want them to win. Not without qualifications, I have considerable misgivings with aspects of the mainstream "woke" left, but I still find them the least bad option.

Fair. I mean, I want more people who want them to win around! In this context, it just seemed more expedient to talk down Iconochasm who felt besieged/mocked by and snapped back at an outgroup that most likely was not involved in that exchange at all.

Every time someone says "The optics of this are good/bad!", they're manifesting their own claim.

Yes, but the claim is just that "Democrats do/don't like this".

Personally, I think Democrats really need to worry about their optics of "retarded, violent street crazies".

They don't, because control of the media means the normies will see the retarded, violent street crazies as good and normal and the people they are fighting as fascists.

Yes, we have two Hispanic agents who shot a white guy dead, but the narrative that ICE is going around rounding brown people is not hurt in one bit by this.

we have two Hispanic agents who shot a white guy dead

That's extremely - "funny" is the wrong word to use here, but it's sure something.

Queer

In the

appearing, feeling, or behaving otherwise than is usual or normal

sense

With no apologies to Alanis Morissette, I believe the term is "ironic".

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Yes, but the claim is just that "Democrats do/don't like this".

Sure. But "Democrats don't like this" is a very different claim than "the optics of this are bad".

Sure. But "Democrats don't like this" is a very different claim than "the optics of this are bad".

The link is "Democrats control the optics".

But isn't it true that the american public is largely moving against ICE in polls? Incidentally I also think that it's crazy what the "protestors" are getting away with, including being called protestors in the first place. But unfortunately, most people don't seem to agree, which is what the optics argument is referring to. Yes, the bad optics are also arguably partially downstream from highly sophisticated media propaganda, but not entirely, and it doesn't change the fact that most people who hear about this are against it.

My point is that "optics" as a concept has a pseudo-Uncertainty Principle. Because it's entirely about appearances and impressions, it's impossible to talk about without interacting with it. For example, saying this

But isn't it true that the american public is largely moving against ICE in polls?

Normalizes the idea it's purporting to describe. The line between descriptive and prescriptive blurs. You could just as easily say that in spite of all the rioting and harassment and crimes, a large majority of Americans still want to deport all illegals and a supermajority want to deport all illegal criminals.

We're a decade past the two screens epiphany. "Optics" are extremely silo'd. Addressing the concept at all necessarily involves accepting a partisan framing, which necessarily involves promulgating it.

There is no dispassionate analysis here. It is impossible to talk about "optics" without defacto engaging in Mean Girls style social manipulations.

But unfortunately, most people don't seem to agree,

And stating this normalizes that belief. The choice of framing itself functions as an act of persuasion.

The Motte is a tiny and obscure forum. Posts here are not going to normalise anything or materially affect the outcome of the culture war, even on the off chance that they persuade a significant number of posters here. In fact, assuming this is necessary to make it possible to have a reasonable debate here at all; if you treat this forum as a pulpit where posts must be judged for their effect on the course of history rather than their factual content, you just reproduce the grandstanding popularity contest dynamics of Xwitter and Reddit.

One of my favorite parts about this website is how people manage to express my ideas in ways much more descriptive and eloquent than I ever will

Great stuff, thank you for sharing

Normies don't read the anti-woke media.

I remember that companies cancelling people for the OK sign was a spectacle so cringy that even Bill Maher ridiculed it on his show, which is normie-friendly entertainment by anyone’s standards. When the woke overplay their hand and they come across as desperate and shrill, even the media that isn’t particularly known as anti-woke will not play along with their agenda.

I remember that companies canceling people for the OK sign went on for many months, and the New York Times posted breathless images swearing various figures were making OK signs in public.

There was a high school in Chicago that chose to reprint the yearbooks at a cost of over $50,000 because some of the basketball team was doing the OK sign. (They weren’t. It was the circle game.) Extra hilarious because most of the team members making the sign were black.

Which is just another case of a news report alienating the normies even further.

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left causes a small but significant fraction of their institutionally embedded partisans to lose control and let their masks slip.

Just as an example, Technology Connections (calm, nice, midwest technology YouTuber) just went absolutely brain numbingly ballistic after an incredible video on renewables, nullifying all the work.

I can totally imagine a pro fossil fuel person watching the video, changing their mind, watching the coda about politics, and then doubling down...

I wish supposedly objective people would stop doing this.

That was a terrible video; he starts by talking about the moral superiority of midwesterners. And then he goes to silliness, like suggesting that buying half a tanker truck of gas over 15 years is unreasonable. Honestly, I expected it to be a whole tanker truck, so I guess I wasn't off by that much. But that's wrapped within the sillier thing -- he's banging on about how the fuel can only be used once.... but that's true of any energy. He complains that pointing this out is a "gotcha", but it's just a response to his own "gotcha" about fuel being single use. He's on somewhat more solid ground when instead talking about economics, but then the details matter and he just glosses right over the "what about nighttime" issue. He also then goes and compares the price by the palletload of solar panels to the retail price of gasoline (rather than considering the delivered price of electricity, including batteries -- unless he's ONLY going to use his car at night, so he can charge during the day).

"There's a 27 Megawatt solar farm build in DePue, Illinois. Why is that?" Answer: subsidies, in the form of selling indulgences Renewable Energy Certificates.

And then in the rant section, after he's constructed this whole case that solar either already does or soon will make economic sense, he complains about Republicans taking away subsidies. Bitch, please... do you not believe your own case?

I think the most confusing part of this video was dumping on Starlink. Legacy telecoms don't want to provide Internet to Assfuck, Minnesota? We can just launch satellites and beam down high bandwidth Internet to any point on the globe between the Arctic and antarctic circles? Everything is working as intended, the market provides. What is the problem?

But it's ridiculously impractical and requires continual expensive maintenance by chuds (like Musk); the existing technology is good enough or even ideal in certain circumstances, so we should just stick with that.

You know, kind of like electric cars.

If only there were a video describing this phenomenon. Here's one that springs to mind.
The frustrating part is that he's proven he knows better than to do this. (And yes, this naturally applies to his pet social issues too.)

But it's ridiculously impractical and requires continual expensive maintenance by chuds (like Musk)

It's a good thing those cell towers erect themselves!

Just as an example, Technology Connections (calm, nice, midwest technology YouTuber) just went absolutely brain numbingly ballistic after an incredible video on renewables, nullifying all the work.

And yet he's still friends with the Aging Wheels guy, who's red tribe-coded as fuck, quirky hobby aside.

Is the Aging Wheels guy red coded? I mean, he's got the homesteading stuff going on, but I never got that impression. He loves quirky european cars, electric cars, etc...

Well, he owns land in the middle of nowhere (grew up there as far as I understand), has several trucks and a bunch of farm animals. Not exactly a blue stereotype.

I would seriously guess not anymore.

A lot of Blue's had their brain break in the last few weeks - it's even being reported by mainstream media (Mark Halperin)

Technology Connections has always reminded me of another nice, friendly, but left-wing technology youtuber, CathodeRayDude. He's a little quirkier than Technology Connections and covers more old PC stuff, but he has the very similar vibe of "geeky leftist dork who believes he is enlightened by his intelligence."

CRD has a very droll sense of humor and he's fun to watch, but he definitely has a nasty habit of going on unnecessary political tangents where he insults the right, especially about trans issues because his partner is transgender. But mostly he complains about capitalism and how all jobs are awful with a kind of antiwork energy, which kind of makes my eyebrow raise, because I feel like if he weren't dating a transgender person or weren't from Oregon, he'd be a self-employment bro talking about how you've got to make your own money away from the corporate machine, small businesses baby! kind of guy.

What I don't understand is why people with this personality -- which is often skeptical, critical, capable of immense analysis of technological and engineering tradeoffs -- are often unable to see that there are elements in politics where different policies have different tradeoffs for different people. Energy policy is one of the clearest ones, where its obvious why Californians with living memory of smog and pollution, and Oklahomans and Texans and West Virginians, would have different assumptions about the value of burning fossil fuels for energy.

What I don't understand is why people with this personality -- which is often skeptical, critical, capable of immense analysis of technological and engineering tradeoffs -- are often unable to see that there are elements in politics where different policies have different tradeoffs for different people.

There's been recent, massive, and overwhelming change to see conceding any genuine motivation for the political enemy as not merely misguided or wrong, but active and malicious betrayal. The Blue Tribe's further down that slope, but the Red Tribe isn't exactly slow at it, either.

((for an extreme example, I'm trying to write up the Varian Fox verdict, and it's a mess because the only people covering it are the ones that are absolutely uninterested in the pro-trans viewpoint, while the pro-trans people are largely unaware it happened.))

I don't know the cause. It's tempting to point at the growth of 'animus' as a Kennedy-school legal theory, or social media filtering, or increased polarization, or the takeover of HR-focused careers, or just external pressures making being the knee in search of careerism.

But it's bad, and it's getting worse, rapidly. There's always been a little on the edges, where knowing enough about guns set you outside of the acceptable discussion window with gun control advocates, even when that knowledge was necessary to make the very laws gun control advocates wanted. Now, it's hard to think of a culture war fight were that isn't the norm.

Perhaps worse, even for those of us autistic enough to be skeptical and analytic, where do you think the information's going to come from? A Blue Triber that goes looking up some Red Tribe values, you're going to be lucky if the best you find just looks like an overt scam site; more likely you'll get to something like thefp or fox news that 'everyone knows' isn't even a good model of what Red Tribers think, and completely disconnected from reality. And Red Tribers going to wikipedia can honestly say the same thing. What's left? Talk to your Other Tribe friends?

hat I don't understand is why people with this personality -- which is often skeptical, critical, capable of immense analysis of technological and engineering tradeoffs

As someone who is old enough to remember how tech people used to be (and is more or less one of them), this change makes zero sense to me.

IMAO, this sort of thing is where, "the past is a different country," saying gets its teeth. Again, IMAO and all that, but the barriers to tech were higher and different, the PMC hadn't yet metastasized, kids could still fail out of public schools, colleges were not yet degree factories with extra steps, TFR decline wasn't quite a Thing beyond the Doomers, the American monoculture had yet to be fractured by the internet, Western ideology seemed ascendant in the larger world, Social Media had not yet been unleashed upon the world, etc. etc. etc.

Somewhere in my head there lies an ill-formed effortpost on these themes. If I can keep myself from getting too turgid in my prose, I may even write it and perhaps post it.

The progressive tech weirdos purged all the other tech weirdos who didn't keep their head down, so the only ones you'll hear from are the progressives.

RIP, the entire video was totally reasonable until he launched into an unhinged rant about how republicans are evil

As a long time watcher and patreon supporter of his, I'm afraid to watch that video.

It was obvious for years he was chafing at the thought of not being able to discuss politics without risking a large portion of his viewership, but it seems the restraints are gone now.

Yeah, honestly one of the less surprising crashouts I've seen to the ICE situation. I like his stuff, but he's always strongly given off that very particular nerd vibe I became super well aquatinted with in college, of the intelligent guy who bases his identity on being the "smartest guy in the room", and in so fully embodies the Freddie deBoer "politics is obviously solved" aspect of wokeness.

I doubt that his viewership is going to care about this.

It was completely and disappointingly unhinged, every stereotype of disgruntled leftists, 0-100, etc.

I watched some of that reasonable video, and my only conclusion was, this seems to be an example of two films on the same screen.

He introduces oil energy by describing some uses, but underplays that importance (nearly all modern wealth is built upon the super high energy return provided by fossil fuels). When that high energy return stops any time, we have to get much much poorer.

Isn't the whole point of the video that we won't get much poorer if we switch to renewables?

Depends on which "we" you're talking about.

"We" meaning urban white-collar folks in places like southern California, who already own EVs with high quality roads and charging infrastructure? Yeah, they can probably make it work, and they'll see a nice benefit from less air pollution.

But for people in rural areas, small islands, or especially in 3rd world countries? That's going to be rough. It's not just a matter of producing enough energy, it's getting it where you need it. A lot of these people have no power grid (or a highly unreliable one), no engineers that can maintain an EV, and no one coming to help them if they suffer rough weather or an extended blackout. For that, the ability to store up "energy on demand" in a simple can of gas or propane tank, is absolutely necessary. The heat that it generates is also just as important as the electricity.

Ironically, a lot of these people are also early adaptors of solar, since it works well in a small off-grid capacity. You can use a solar panel to charge lights, computers, cell phones, etc during the day, then at night you either go to sleep or burn some propane when you need to. They can also use a simple EV for short range trips that they can charge from home, while also using gas for longer trips. It's a very practical solution to save money and get more independance while still having that oil when they really need it. But forcing these people to go "100% renewables, 0 fossil fuels" would be impossible, and lead to a lot of resistance from some of the best solar advocates.

Could be, but it's false.

Amusingly, the order was initially dated February 31 https://twitter.com/ASFleischman/status/2017712436409733160

I tend to be critical of strongly worded opinions that strive to be historic.

But if you're going to do one, you've got to make sure you haven't issued it on the 31st of February

He's not the only person; my parents just got an electric bill due the 30th of February...

Do they intend to pay it on the 12th of Never?

Isn’t Biery making the legal argument of “administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster”, i.e., the Fourth Amendment? Your claim of “exactly 0 legal arguments” seems exaggerated.

I ran the opinion through AI (Claude), and while it agrees that it’s heavy on rhetoric, it also said the 4A argument is strong.

Also, small typo in your appeals sentence: it should be “you’re”, as in “you are”, not “your” (possessive).

Also also, you may enjoy this joke: What's the difference between God and a federal judge? God doesn't think he's a federal judge!

Claude

I'm quite surprised at this result, because gemini and chatgpt are both adamant that the opinion has no legs to stand on.

I know that Claude used to have document tokenization problems, which caused quite bad hallucinations when a document was attached. I'm not sure if it's been fixed or not.

The claim that Administrative Warrants are categorically invalid under the 4th because "the fox can't guard the henhouse" is fantastically stupid, and completely upends the entire apparatus of administrative enforcement. Administrative Warrants not signed by a judge have never been held so, only when attempting to enter private areas (such as a home) would the 4th Amendment be implicated. As the two were picked up in public, the reasoning is facile.

There are precisely two federal judges I would trust to oppose administrative warrants on originalist principles. There is a coherent argument to be made (that I mostly agree with), but there is a zero percent chance this judge would apply such a principle fairly across the board.

Not to worry, it's one of those "category invalid" things that will be categorically invalid only when it's convenient for the side making the decision. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, for instance, will never have a similar problem.

Please don’t run things through AI and accept its output. Lawyer here and AI gets things wrong all the time.

I've seen a few examples of lawyers praising AI for its legal mind. What does it get wrong in your experience?

I think the replies are somewhat overstating how bad LLMs are - they do have all those failure modes, but the rate at which they fail in those ways isn't that high. And also sort of assuming that the alternative is any better - getting a smart domain expert to spend some time answering you question is of course much better than getting an LLM to, but you weren't gonna do that anyway. At the same time, I agree that 'I (nonexpert) asked Claude and it said this' isn't that useful of a contribution, and when not guided by an expert the LLMs are probably not gonna be that informative on an issue of this complexity.

LLMs are generally terrible at any sort of task where accuracy and rigor are core constraints. Imagine the full range of legal opinions that exist on the internet, intelligent, retarded, and everything in between. Now imagine what the average of that mass of opinions would look like. That's effectively what you're getting when you ask an LLM for legal advice.

Otherwise see @gattsuru's comment below.

Necessary starting caveat: Unikowsky is an absolute putz when it comes to anything Trump-related, and his analysis should be recognized as on the "ought" side of any is-ought divide, and, more damningly, an "ought" that will not apply to any case where he doesn't like the victim. That doesn't completely destroy his analysis about AI effectiveness, but it does undermine how and what he's evaluating.

For more specific problems:

  • Hallucinations happen. Newer models are better about avoiding them, but they're still prone to it. This is critical because, whether it's a hallucinated citation, incorrectly summarizing the contents of a citation, or hallucinating facts or claims by parties in the case, it's a central example of sanctionable behavior.
  • Even large-context models struggle with the amount of information in a lawsuit, and most models aren't large-context (and many APIs will obfuscate when you're getting downgraded).
  • Worse, they get loopy under certain nonobvious situations: going toward the last 20% of a context size, repeating a word too often during a prompt, so on.
  • It can be very hard to get the LLM to understand core constraints for a specific environment. Citing out-of-circuit cases as if they were binding, not checking if a case was overruled or constrained to its own four corners, even basic formatting stuff can be a problem, here.
  • Most LLMs, unless very carefully prompted, are people-pleasers. They'll quite happily give you the answer you want, even if you aren't explicitly saying what you want, even when this means disregarding well-known counterexamples

There's a defense that people, even lawyers or judges, make many of these same mistakes, and that's true. It's still a problem and a limitation.

AI can be a useful tool, but it's a tool.

I disagree with your claim that Unikowsky's analysis on Trump is outcome-driven against him. Directly, you accused him of letting his bias against Trump drive him to think that Trump could be removed from the ballot. Yet, when the case was actually decided, you can read Unikowsky's take on it. He doesn't explicitly say what he thinks should've been decided, but while he thinks that from the 'law nerd' perspective it's wrong, he ultimately seems more sympathetic than not to the claim that the practical consequences of keeping Trump on the ballot mean it's worth deciding it 'wrongly'. Which is outcome-driven in the other direction!

IME, everything you say about LLMs here is correct ... which is why anyone using AI for something of legal import ought to use multiple AIs to check each other's work. Having Grok / Opus / GPT fight it out should be more effective.

... summoning not 1, but 3 uncanny entities to grant wishes in tandem ... I think I'm starting to get why demonic possession coming in groups rather than one demon is so common. (That, or hallucinations and ticks don't respond to exorcisms as well but do know how to change their name mid exorcism, but the one that's a cautionary tale about overusing AI is more immediately relevant?)

God damn it, please reality would you stop making the more unhinged exegeses of Revelations sound like they're coming true? I mean, the kind of thing that was all about "the locusts are helicopters, the sign on the forehead and hand is embedded chips". Now we've got "our name is Legion for we are many" due to Grok et al all uniting in one hivemind (Moltbook).

I really did not want to be living in the End Times.

I read the article. It’s somewhat interesting but the interesting question is what did prediction markets say. Most SCOTUS opinions are easily predicted (and frequently written about).

I’d expect an LLM to do better there compared to areas with less items written. In the example I was referencing, if an LLM could step back and try to understand the regulatory scheme, it would have understood its answer was counter to the scheme. Once you know that, you have to really study to make sure you aren’t missing something. But not sure it’s capable of that meta check.

Pretty much everything. Literally yesterday there was a question asked by a generalist that he ran through an AI. The response was the opposite of the right answer as there was a specific reg on point.

I also find that AI is bad at understanding the meta analysis behind cases (ie doesn’t really understand the policy and therefore has a hard time generalizing).

It is a better google but still wrong—sometimes in clear ways like the ref on point and sometimes in less obvious ways where it doesn’t understand nuance.

It's quite a mindfuck to have AI produce like 700 lines of code that work on the first try, which would cost like $500 to have a human write, but if you ask it to write a 1000 word essay it goes by in a blur that seems okay at first but if you read it with your brain on it sounds bad and wrong.

In truth if you look at the code more closely you could make it much prettier and more sensible but it all kind of works well enough that you don't care. Whereas it's really hard to make a written essay acceptable.

Hell, I've had AI give confidently wrong answers to things as straightforward as page limitations under specific local rules, which normal google would have answered just fine.

One would expect him to outline the factual circumstances of the arrest and why a warrant would be required in the first place.

No, one wouldn't expect that. Orders from trial courts seldom come with opinions. I file hundreds of motions per year and exactly zero have ended in a written opinion. If I'm lucky I might get an explanation from the bench. Usually the judge doesn't say anything but that he'll take it under advisement and he signs an order prepared by counsel a week later.

No, one wouldn't expect that. Orders from trial courts seldom come with opinions.

Are you talking about federal courts? It's pretty normal for federal courts to either file written opinions or to read an opinion into the record.

It's common, but I don't think you realize how many motions are filed in a typical case. Not many come with opinions, even the contested ones

It's common, but I don't think you realize how many motions are filed in a typical case. Not many come with opinions, even the contested ones

Just so we are clear, you are saying that it's common in federal court for judges to decide contested written motions without a formal explanation, either by way of a memorandum opinion or by reading the explanation orally into the record?

Is there any rule for which decisions come with opinions and which ones don’t?

For example, Pennsylvania Rules of Appellate Procedure § 1925:

Upon receipt of the notice of appeal, the judge who entered the order giving rise to the notice of appeal, if the reasons for the order do not already appear of record, shall within [60 days] file of record at least a brief opinion of the reasons for the order, or for the rulings or other errors complained of, or shall specify in writing the place in the record where such reasons may be found.

But that's specifically for decisions that are appealed.

Thanks for the clarification. I've read about five court opinions in my lifetime, so not very familiar with the standard structure.

Related article:

The saga of Judge Pauline Newman is well known. For three years, the Federal Circuit has not assigned any new cases to Judge Newman because she refuses to obtain certain medical tests. Back in April 2023, I described this process as a stealth impeachment. A judge without any cases is no longer a judge.

I suspect the most obvious reply is that there is a difference between impeaching a judge and simply taking away their cases. After all, Judge Newman retains her fixed compensation and title. I am not so convinced. A judge's job is to decide cases. Imagine that Congress passed a statute providing that any judge who rules against President Trump will no longer be assigned any new cases, but they can keep their salary and title. Or what if Congress were to pass a statute divesting jurisdiction over every suit filed against the executive branch in Boston, and reassign those cases to the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas. How would Judge Young and his colleagues respond?

Imagine that a federal judge decided that he would no longer offer any rationales for his decisions. He would simply invite the parties to court, listen to their arguments, and announce a judgment for the plaintiff or the defendant from the bench, and then adjourn court. Following that oral order, the clerk would enter a judgment for the prevailing party. The judge explains that he only needs to issue an order, and no statute requires him to explain his reasoning. The Circuit Court consistently reverses this judge's rulings, and grants writs of mandamus, but the judge continues his practice.

Based on this "pattern or practice" of rulings, many litigants in the district file misconduct complaints. Could this complaint proceed, and if so, could the Judicial Council order that no new cases would be assigned to the judge until he begins to issue reasoned decisions for at least some of his rulings?

Welcome to Banana republic tactics, where the only thing that matters is tribe loyalty and where the state is just out there as a resource to be plundered. I remember a case from my country where a judge was assigned a lot of cases outside of his area of expertise. He was then slammed by disciplinary action for too many cases not being decided on time, and was impeached on those grounds. Of course lazy judges who had similar infractions got a free pass.

As I said, prepare for more of for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law. Just look at all the insane fraud that was discovered recently. The thing is that for many people - especially those hailing from corrupt environments - this is not a fraud. It is rightful spoils which need to be claimed and directed, so money flows to proper coffers aligned with a correct tribe, thus protecting the spoils from enemies claiming them. Exactly as with old eastern bloc "socialist" saying: he who does not steal from the state steals from his family.

It is obvious if you think about it - you have large swaths of population that think that USA is an illegitimate fascist state. Stealing and defrauding such a state so that it can be destroyed and abolished more quickly is a good thing. It is similar mentality of how many people saw the illegitimate socialist states, the state capacity fell as people not only lost trust but started to actively hate it or at least saw it as an opportunity if stealing was normalized.

This seems absurd about a 98-year old judge. It seems far more likely to me that the 98 (!) year old judge is just genuinely having cognitive issues. I have some elderly relatives who are younger than that and are about as sharp as you can hope for at that age, but just like with LLMs if you speak to them for a few minutes the picture is different than if you do for a few hours, and neither I nor they would want them to be federal judges.

Let me offer a fanciful hypothetical (perhaps not as fanciful as a hypo about the Alien Enemies Act and the British invasion). Imagine that a federal judge decided that he would no longer offer any rationales for his decisions. He would simply invite the parties to court, listen to their arguments, and announce a judgment for the plaintiff or the defendant from the bench, and then adjourn court. Following that oral order, the clerk would enter a judgment for the prevailing party. The judge explains that he only needs to issue an order, and no statute requires him to explain his reasoning. The Circuit Court consistently reverses this judge's rulings, and grants writs of mandamus, but the judge continues his practice.

Sometimes I wish the Volokh conspiracy contributors wouldn't make it so patently obvious that they never practiced law a day in their lives.

Even in the types of cases where written orders are rare, judges will typically make an oral record which is also typically available in transcript. This is standard in criminal law, for example. If a judge is just like, "Guilty, 10 years in the department of corrections for you" that would be both incredibly rare, and quickly overturned.

It’s pretty obvious that Blackman is referencing the kind of cases that customarily require an opinion being drafted; not the basic motion practice for many attorneys.

Except no such category of cases exists. There are categories of cases that are more likely to get an opinion, but that's no guarantee that you're going to get one, even if the trial judge really likes to hear himself talk. I have had a few cases where the judge wanted us to provide additional briefs on a relatively new argument we were making and I thought he might issue an opinion but he didn't, even though he seemed interested in the legal basis of a hearsay exception that he made up himself.

I do public interest litigation, and 90% of the orders I recieve include some sort of written opinion. Your experience is by no means universal. Cases involving matters of public importance or setting new precedent usually get written opinions.

This seems pedantic. You know what Blackman means. High stakes important cases where opinions are common. Most lawyers don’t practice in that space but Blackman is talking about cases that will go to circuit cases frequently and are of import.

New epstein files stash released - search here: https://www.justice.gov/epstein

Trump is mentioned lots of times though some of the more lurid accusations (I was gangbanged by Trump and a bunch of other rich dudes) seem to be non credible. Epstein emailed himself about how he was annoyed that Bill Gates needed medicine from banging underage russian girls - probably fake blackmail. He also got banned from Xbox Live, shared coomer FNAF 4chan threads, talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences, getting advice on silencing a girl trying to expose his friends. For our global-intelligence-conspiracy friends, there are some connections to intelligence agencies.

Mods, remove this if it's a crappy post. It's hard to come up with a through line for this, other than "WOW he knew a lot of people".

It was previously alleged that Epstein wanted to "seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his New Mexico ranch". It looks like there is evidence he did in fact do this. This document appears to be a diary from one of the victims, describing her being used as a surrogate mother, never to see her baby(s) again. Some key quotes:

Close your eyes close your eyes close your eyes. Dont speak she doesnt talk. I cant stop shaking and its been a week. A decision was made but I cant tell Jeffrey. These things happen. Why didnt I close my eyes fast enough. The doctor was different again. I think from Israel. He had kind eyes but didnt speak directly to me. This was different. A shot and those rod like things had a hook and so much pain. Ghislaine said to push all the pain away. I don't understand Blood and water all over the bed and she was right. Like a feeling when your tummy hurts and you have to push She said to close my eyes and put her hands over my eyes but I didnt close them because of these tiny cries. I am so lost. I saw between her fingers this tiny head and body in the doctors hands. It reached its tiny arm up and and had a tiny foot. I closed my eyes and no more

After so many bonding moments with Jeffrey, Ghislaine, their baby inside me with me in the middle she wouldnt even look at me.

Superior gene pool ?!? Why me? Why my hair color and eye color?

I miss the person I was before I was made into what feels as a human incubator

The code used in these is that every other letter is placed on the second line. The document alternately deciphers it on each other page. There's some newspaper clippings that provide some more hints. Some unanswered questions:

  1. Are there two separate births being described here?

  2. Is the first one is actually some kind of partial birth abortion. This may have occurred in 2003 before the ban, given this text in the document "clipping with date, National Geographic, September 2003". The description of the "rod like things" that "had a hook" and the emphasis on page 5 "SHE WAS. Not is." makes me think so.

Also, I see "Maralago" mentioned very cryptically:

They are missing the biggest in my own backyard and so many more! Like Maralago and where I see Mr. Joe and Mrs. Anne.

What did she mean by this?

EDIT: Maralago is mentioned after that clipping about a "Slave Camp," so the implication is that Maralago is a slave camp. There is a reddit thread where some other investigators have dug into this deeper. There are other files that provide more evidence that Trump abused this girl

We all knew Epstein was bad. But we didn't know the depths of his evil. I'm talking of course about cannibal rituals and torture with a magical scimitar that leaves no wounds.

That didn't actually happen of course. Fabulists and crazies can email law enforcement. I think this is the danger of such a big data dump. Some part of it is real in some factual sense. Some other part of it is modern day Satanic Panic. I see on reddit people discussing Trump checking underaged girls for tightness and then auctioning them off. That's horrific. Really vile. And I'm just a little suspicious also as fictional as the magical scimitar.

This is the problem, though. Huge public cases like this draw all the crazies out. And the more plausible crazies get their stories passed around and disseminated as "really truly did happen but The Man is covering it up, this is why the FBI/CIA/take your pick are hiding the real facts of what Trump/Bush/take your pick did!!!!"

We saw it to a milder extent with Kavanaugh (online media uncritically calling him a rapist) and mocking him for losing his cool and being visibly angry during the deposition. It wasn't just three allegations against him (Blasey Ford, Ramirez, Swetnick); every loon and politically revved up activist out there were deluging the FBI and the Senate Judiciary Committee with allegations which he had to answer. So even if it was "All right, Mr Kavanaugh, can you confirm that you were not in Little Nowheresville with sixteen other guys on the night of 15th May 1996 and you all gangraped [Jane Doe #89] and then had a ritual Satanic sacrifice of her unborn child?" he had to provide evidence that no, indeed he wasn't there on that night.

I'm not surprised that there are the likes of "okay so I've been abusing drugs for years but it's true about the magic scimitar" accusers out there with the Epstein case. It doesn't make me more sceptical about some of the allegations, because I was already sceptical about them, but yeah: the likes of 'Katie Johnson' are clearly out there trying to make a buck off this somehow, and making things even worse than they already are. Was every single thing Virginia Giuffre alleged 100% factually true that it all happened that way? I don't know, and we'll never know now, because she's dead and questioning the veracity of this victim is unthinkable.

talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences

Now this is slightly interesting. "at least some of them know what they're doing and are just lying" is a thought that doesn't normally cross my mind not because it's not true, but because it's pointless to speculate about. I just provisionally assume that any given 'anti-racist' is a true believer in universal humanity. But of course they aren't. The "lore" after all, is fairly accessible for someone reasonably intelligent and curious.

I wonder how this looks from inside their own heads. Brave holders of esoteric truths vigilantly guarding the demos from dangerous knowledge?

As a True Believer in Universal Humanity, I hold the following Views on race/genetics/intelligence:

  1. The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist.

  2. There is not, currently, sufficient evidence to refute the null hypothesis.

  3. It is possible that sufficient evidence could exist in the future; however, the existence of such differences, even if proven, would not justify the conclusions drawn by the far right.

  4. If such differences exist, they do not make members of the less-intelligent groups less deserving of human dignity, any more than someone born to a more-intelligent group would become less deserving of human dignity upon suffering a head injury.

  5. The existence of a racial intelligence gap would mean that Nature herself is a racist, and those born with greater intelligence thus bear a disproportionate duty first to alleviate the immediate condition of those thus victimised by Nature, and second to develop and deploy some method of repairing the damage done by nature to those individuals.

This duty is not penance for having been born a member of a privileged group; it is the principle that If You Have The Means At Hand, You Have The Responsibility To Help.

How long in the past do you prolong 'universal humanity'? Is Homo erectus same intelligence as us? Homo habilis? Homo heidelbergensis? Do you assume that evolution stopped at some point?

How long in the past do you prolong 'universal humanity'?

To the first point at which apes became capable of hosting immortal souls made according to Tzelem Elohim; 50,000 years as a lower bound.

Note that the distinction is academic absent the general resurrection of the dead, whether via divine intervention or, per Nikolai Fyodorov, human agency; in either case, the question would be answered by the same changes that made it practically relevant.

It might be a nitpick: resurrection of dead means resurrection of individuals. It's much more probable that we'll get enough-complete genomes for other species of hominids.

Ok. Thanks. What is some archaic population (say, flores hobbits) would have survived somewhere?

In that case, (assuming we have not discovered a method of directly measuring souls) we would have to examine their capabilities to make a determination.

(Some have hypothesised that the Pirahã might be such a population. Sometimes I wonder how Pokó's daughter would have grown up had she been adopted by a Brasilian family.)

The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist

This hypothesis is equivalent to what could be called the "Egalitarian Hypothesis"

The Egalitarian Hypothesis is that genes (technically alleles) which influence intelligence are distributed equally among all racial and ethnic groups.

From this perspective, it is more easy to see that you are unfairly privileging the hypothesis you like. The default hypothesis should be that intelligence is no different from any other measurable human attribute, such as height, eye color, and so on. Given that other human attributes are clearly NOT distributed equally among all racial and ethnic groups, the null hypothesis should be that it's the same for intelligence.

The need for an agreed-upon null hypothesis is one of the common criticism of frequentist statistics by Bayesians...

'Null hypothesis' does not mean 'most likely hypothesis'; it means 'the hypothesis that the thing for which we are looking does not exist.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis

'Null hypothesis' does not mean 'most likely hypothesis';

I agree that's not the definition of "null hypothesis" and I have never claimed otherwise.

Here is a thought experiment to demonstrate my point:

Suppose that a previously unknown species of bird is discovered; 6 members of the new species are exposed to a high dose of radiation, a level that is known to kill roughly half of birds which are exposed. After the radiation exposure, 2 of the six die within a few weeks. There is a debate over whether or not this new species is invulnerable to radiation. There is no special reason to think that this new species is different from any other species of bird, but for some obscure political reason, there are people who insist that this new species is invulnerable to radiation.

Concerning our experiment, what should the null hypothesis be?

The null hypothesis would be that the value of X (in this case, susceptibility to radiation) does not differ between group A (previously known birds) and group B (the previously unknown species).

The null hypothesis would be that the value of X (in this case, susceptibility to radiation) does not differ between group A (previously known birds) and group B (the previously unknown species).

Notice that this does NOT agree with your previous definition of "null hypothesis":

it means 'the hypothesis that the thing for which we are looking does not exist.'

Here, the thing we are looking for is a relationship between (1) exposure to radiation of members of the new bird species; and (2) death.

By your own reasoning, the null hypothesis is that this new bird species is not susceptible to radiation. Yes, this is a silly conclusion but that's the point: There's something very wrong with your reasoning.

The 'thing for which we are looking' is usually 'a difference in variable X between group A and group B.

X can be 'rate of disease progression/recovery' with A and B being patients administered a new medication vs. a placebo.

X can be 'susceptibility to radiation' with A and B being species of bird.

X can be 'biological capacity for intelligence' with A and B being human ethnic groups.

More comments

H0 (null): no difference between populations

H1 (alternative): radiation resistance of the new population > radiation resistance of the reference bird population

This is the typical formulation. Null typically assumes no effect or no difference between the populations being considered.

H0 (null): no difference between populations

H1 (alternative): radiation resistance of the new population > radiation resistance of the reference bird population

This is the typical formulation. Null typically assumes no effect or no difference between the populations being considered.

I tend to agree with you as to this particular example, but consider some of the formulations which have been floating around. Such as the "hypothesis that no relationship exists" Given that we are looking at (1) radiation being administered to the new bird population; and (2) deaths among that population, one could argue that the null hypothesis is that no relation exists between the radiation and the deaths.

I think that your formulation does not necessarily work either. For example, suppose there is an obscure un-contacted tribe of people in some remote rain forest and for whatever reason, the question on the table is whether the male members of the tribe are taller than the female members. Suppose further that we meet (and measure) only 4 members of the tribe -- 2 males and 2 females -- and that both of the males are significantly taller than either female. What's the null hypothesis here? Is it simply "no difference between the populations being considered"?

Yeah but "intelligence is equally distributed among all human races" is a positive hypothesis of it's own, that's why you are effectively doing what he said.

The null hypothesis is indeed one of a set of competing hypotheses, but it’s typically the one that assumes no difference between populations.

If I want to show that two distributions are statistically different then I start with the assumption that they are not and then set out to disprove that.

Similarly, if I believe the populations are not actually significantly different, I believe it’d still be common to set up a null hypothesis that they are not different and then either confirm or reject the alternative hypothesis.

If I want to show that two distributions are statistically different then I start with the assumption that they are not and then set out to disprove that.

And what assumption do you use when you want to show that they are the same? It's just a matter of how you formulate your question.

Yeah but "intelligence is equally distributed among all human races" is a positive hypothesis of it's own

I would tweak that just a bit: "Intelligence is a unique human attribute in that unlike other heritable human attributes, the alleles for intelligence are distributed equally among all races and ethnic groups."

From this perspective, one can see that the "thing we are looking for" is evidence that intelligence is fundamentally different from other heritable human attributes.

In any event, as suggested by another poster, there is a more serious flaw with the argument, which is that we are being presented with an isolated demand for rigor. For example, there are people out there claiming that underachievement of Group X is largely due to historical treatment of Group X. Using the "null hypothesis" argument, this type of claim should fail even harder.

As a matter of technical statistical terminology, the null hypothesis when testing two groups for equality is that the relevant average (usually the mean, but median tests exist) is the same for both groups.

The whole point of frequentist statistics is that the test doesn't care about what you believe or what the results mean, its just a handle you can turn and get a publishable paper out 5% of the time (if the null hypothesis is true) and rather more often (if its false). A null hypothesis and a prior are different things that exist in different paradigms.

As a matter of technical statistical terminology, the null hypothesis when testing two groups for equality is that the relevant average (usually the mean, but median tests exist) is the same for both groups.

In this case we know for a fact the averages are not the same, the debate is over the causes.

In this case we know for a fact the averages are not the same, the debate is over the causes.

By stubbornly insisting the averages are the same and there's just something wrong with measurements which show otherwise, the debate over causes can be avoided. As I said, a defense in depth. It's not happening and if it is it's due to racism and even if it's not, we should take from the able to subsidize the unable.

There's an interesting contrasting series one could draw.

  1. Racial intelligence gaps are probably just real, as seen from all the IQ tests of different racial groups, the distribution of Nobels and technical achievement across the nations
  2. Even if they were not real and the gap in performance is due to culture, then much the same conclusions should be drawn (do not bring in people from low performing cultures - or commit to authoritarian mass-scale re-education and indoctrination programs to get them up to speed)
  3. If there is no biological or cultural effect on intelligence/achievement and it's just racism, then maybe white countries should just accept they're incurably racist since, somehow, their ambient racism field is still suppressing the achievement of POCs despite all these expensive affirmative action and DEI efforts. Perhaps oil and water just don't mix and they should be kept far away to minimize the effect... Or maybe 10x more money and effort needs to be spent on DEI? $1.2 Trillion wasn't enough, what about $20 trillion to sub-saharan Africa? Could the ambient racism field be tapped for power, how is it so effective at inducing dysfunction in blacks, even over long distances, even after great spans of time since whites had any influence? Is the racism field defending itself by getting Trump and other populists installed, is it too deep to root out?
  4. Maybe the only solution is genocide, to get rid of the ambient racism field?

I know this sounds sarcastic and dumb but if you take the premises and run with them under utilitarian human-dignity logic, that's where you end up. If white genocide raises world happiness by destroying the racism field and thus raising more black and brown bodies to high standards of living and achievement, isn't that then good? Revolutionaries in the 1960s debated this, some proposed the necessity of killing white babies to stop them growing up to continue the oppressive racist-capitalist system.

On the other hand, it would be much easier for the people with all the H-bombs and MIRV'd ICBMs to do the genociding... Or a transhumanist fix nowadays, I suppose. What does it even mean to make someone smarter and more capable with a transhumanist fix, is this ego-death, overwriting a personality, overwriting a whole racial group?

The exact mechanics of the racism field deserve much more study. This is an extremely important effect, if it's a real thing. Spooky action at a distance, across vast spans of time, very potent effect! And it seems to only 'work' when white people do it - Ottoman and Algerian slave-raiding and Japanese conquest/genocide doesn't seem to have the same effect white racism has on black and brown communities.

If the ambient racism field is just made up, then those who've been promoting and proposing the theory should be treated very seriously. After all, they would have overseen and promoted the waste of tens trillions of dollars, the misallocation and the miseducation of hundreds of millions based on a lie.

The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist

How does the null hypothesis have a place here and why do you get to decide what it is? We aren’t approving drugs here, we’re just trying to weigh two theories, it’s completely unfair to arbitrarily privilege the one you like more.

How does the null hypothesis have a place here and why do you get to decide what it is? We aren’t approving drugs here, we’re just trying to weigh two theories, it’s completely unfair to arbitrarily privilege the one you like more.

That’s kind of like asking how does algebra have a place here, we’re just trying to solve for a variable in this equation.

A hypothesis test is a method to provide evidence for or against two competing theories using data and the way that they’re commonly constructed is to assume a null hypothesis as being the one where the data are not from significantly different distributions.

A standard hypothesis test is not the only method and its use in science is sometimes over stated but it’s by far the most common approach to address such questions, and that’s just how it’s structured.

It’s kind of Occam in the end. It’s simpler to assume that there’s no difference between how fast this group of monkeys climb trees vs that one. If I wanted to posit that the second group climbs faster, I can collect data and argue that it backs up my assumption, but the null case is null because it makes less assumptions.

It’s kind of Occam in the end. It’s simpler to assume that there’s no difference between how fast this group of monkeys climb trees vs that one.

Sure, sure, but the anti-racist monkey has been sitting at the bottom of its tree for generation upon generation now while increasingly bitter and haggard progressives glare at me like it's my fault it won't climb.

Oh but here come the anti-HBD guys, the biggest internet forum debate jobbers this side of flat-earthers, and today they're saying "null hypothesis" a lot. Like if they play this game about who has to prove their hypothesis well enough, we'll suddenly forget that their monkey is never ever going to climb that fucking tree.

It's been a while since I took a science class, but IIRC every scientific investigation has to have a null hypothesis. Wikipedia says that the definition of "null hypothesis" is the hypothesis that no relationship exists—i. e., intelligence has no correlation with race.

You can set the threshold for rejecting the null hypothesis at any significance level you want. You have to set it quite high (by social science standards) to not reject it in this case, but if you're starting with the conclusion you want, that's what you do.

The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist.

There is not, currently, sufficient evidence to refute the null hypothesis.

When it comes to people in general who hold this position, you know, fine, it's not my business what they believe. But I absolutely do not want to hear from them their own (inevitably far more tenuous) theories regarding racial achievement gaps and the like. They can just sit back and be baffled, and if anyone asks them what to do about it, throw their hands up in the air because they have no idea.

But I absolutely do not want to hear from them their own (inevitably far more tenuous) theories regarding racial achievement gaps and the like. They can just sit back and be baffled, and if anyone asks them what to do about it, throw their hands up in the air because they have no idea.

I think that's an excellent point. If, as another poster stated, the "null hypothesis" is "the hypothesis that no relationship exists," and we are going to apply this kind of analysis, then there is zero basis to look at achievement gaps and blame white racism, "patriarchy" "colonialism," "the legacy of slavery" etc.

You've certainly got your soldiers lined up in an impressive defense in depth. But reality does not care.

If You Have The Means At Hand, You Have The Responsibility To Help.

Rejected. The able are not the proper slaves of the needy.

Alice is 5' 2"/157 cm. Bob is 6' 3"/190 cm.

Expecting Bob to get something off a high shelf for Alice does not make Bob Alice's slave.

Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.

But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said.

Rejecting the notion that the more able ought to help the less able is rejecting civilisation itself.

  • -10

Rejecting the notion that the more able ought to help the less able is rejecting MARGARET MEAD'S DEFINITION OF civilisation itself.

Alice has a womb and Bob does not, but Bob wants to have a genetically-related child. Since Alice is "more able" than Bob, does she therefore have an obligation to provide Bob with a genetically-related child?

Alice has a womb and Bob does not, but Bob wants to have a genetically-related child. Since Alice is "more able" than Bob, does she therefore have an obligation to provide Bob with a genetically-related child?

No, because the cost to Alice is far greater in that case.

You never said anything about the cost, merely that "the more able ought to help the less able". Now you are putting up guardrails. Fine. Define them. Exactly how "costly" must an action be to make it no longer required for the more able to help the less able?

My point was that Ayn Rand and Peter Singer are both wrong; If Alice needs help, and Bob has the means to assist, I reject both the notion that 'Bob has exactly zero obligation to help' and the notion that 'Bob is obligated to contribute even to the point of self-destruction'.

I have discovered a truly marvelous definition of one person's obligation to their neighbour, which this forum is too narrow to contain. I don't have a *complete answer', but there are some useful heuristics.

For the most part, mind > body > personal possessions > non-personal property (idiosyncratically referred to by Marxists as 'private property').

The genitals and reproductive system ought not be subject to the dictates of the community, provided that everyone involved is a consenting adult.

If you do not live or work in the same place as someone else, in a modern society your obligation to them can usually be discharged by financial support, allowing them to purchase whatever they need from someone else.

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Alice is 5' 2"/157 cm. Bob is 6' 3"/190 cm.

Expecting Bob to get something off a high shelf for Alice does not make Bob Alice's slave.

Sure it does. Bob's got his own things he'd prefer to do. Alice's need is no call on his ability. She can go find a ladder. Or offer Bob something of value.

Rejecting the notion that the more able ought to help the less able is rejecting civilisation itself.

No, it's just rejecting Communism ("From each according to his ability..."). And Margaret Mead, I suppose.

She can go find a ladder. Or offer Bob something of value.

And if there aren't any ladders around, and Alice doesn't have anything Bob wants?

Then I'd say that Alice should perhaps make an agreement with a particularly scarce resource she is statistically overwhelmingly likely to possess, so that she can get all the things on the high shelves she wants in exchange for allowing [a] Bob exclusive access to that particular resource.

In other words, this is why marriage exists.

Genitals and reproductive systems are not a resource, and making women's survival contingent on marriage has often given abusive men the ability to inflict terrible suffering on them.

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I guess she doesn't get what's on the shelf then, unless Bob is feeling magnanimous.

And if 'getting what's on the shelf' is a metaphor for survival? Maintenance of human dignity?

Can you be certain that the precedent that you set won't come back to bite you in the hindquarters?

I would rather live in a world where the sink-or-swim, devil-take-the-hindmost, law-of-the-jungle social-Darwinist mode of organisation is left in the past and remembered as one of humanity's many mistakes, even if it means that if I become extremely wealthy my taxes will support people who are not useful to me.

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In addition to Corvos' point, civilization has also historically required the less able to defer to the more able. It's a two-way street; The able help and do a disproportionate share of the work, and in turn, get status and power, the less able give up status and power in exchange for being provided for.

Modern societies' insistence that you can get one half without the other is partially a sham, and partially the thing that is killing it.

civilization has also historically required the less able to defer to the more able.

People have historically done lots of things that they ought not to have.

The able help and do a disproportionate share of the work, and in turn, get status and power, the less able give up status and power in exchange for being provided for.

Almost, but not quite.

If you have the ability to help someone, and you help them, you deserve appreciation. In extraordinary cases, you deserve prestige. You are not entitled to dominance, and you sure as hell aren't entitled to dominance over the people you helped.

I assume you are familiar with the phrase "with great power comes great responsibility." Do you recognize that it runs the other way as well? With great responsibility, comes great power? If so, what's the difference between power and dominance? If not, why not?

I assume you are familiar with the phrase "with great power comes great respons[i]bility."

I am familiar with that phrase. Part of the responsibility is to not use that power to do bad things. Reducing someone else to a state of subjugation, for no other reason than that you can, is a bad thing.

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It seems to me that a tall man who isn’t allowed to decide when and where and if he fetches things for shorter people is just a step-ladder made of meat.

What if there are 10 Alice’s who genuinely need things fetched down on a constant basis?

What if there’s only one Alice but she abuses him and makes her dislike of him known on a regular basis?

What if Alice and her fellow shorties have subjected Bob to a constant campaign of psychological manipulation since birth explaining that his tallness is a privilege to be used for the benefit of the short, or indeed that his tallness is actively oppressing them by causing shelves to be built which they can’t reach, for which he must repent by serving them in the manner they demand?

In many of these scenarios Bob appeared to be… let’s not call him a slave to avoid the noncentral fallacy, but certainly slavelike. Similar to an indentured servant.

In practice, what seems to happen is that ‘we’ or ‘society’ determine how much labour Bob is required to do for the underprivileged (in our benevolence). In which case Bob is not only their servant but even more so ours.

Civilisation does require this to some degree but the scales have tipped far too far in the last hundred years and the racial version has finally tipped far enough that all of us are Bob and we’re sick of it.

Rejected.

Yeah, I didn't get that either. The moral claim that the strong must help the weak is just that...a claim.

He really is the globalist Forrest Gump. He had a hand in the subprime mortgage crisis? And the development of video game micro transactions? He helped Larry Fink’s son through the drama of knocking up his situationship? He’s acting on behalf of the Rothschilds while funding random far right geneticist bloggers? He may actually have had the most interesting life in his generation.

He helped Larry Fink’s son through the drama of knocking up his situationship?

That there is why Epstein was so popular and trusted, not as in a comment further down where it says he could pass for one of the upper class. He was a fixer, and trusted to do those kinds of jobs. He may have thrown parties and hosted the hoity-toity, but in the end he was one of the professions: socially acceptable to be seen with him on familiar terms, but he's never going to be 'one of us' for the old money (Wexner, for example, was very much 'new money'). I think that might also explain his parties; the right sort of people take it for granted that Jeff will lay on entertainment of the "hot girls who are willing to sleep with you and not make waves later", that's part of the duties of his role as fixer/all round guy who gets it done for you. Hence why after his Florida case there were still high society contacts willing and able to help him rehabilitate his reputation, it wasn't a shock surprise revelation that he was pimping girls. Of course he was, that was all part of what he did as a manager for high worth individuals:

On the evening of December 2nd, 2010, a handful of America's media and entertainment elite—including TV anchors Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos, comedienne Chelsea Handler, and director Woody Allen—convened around the dinner table of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It wasn't just any dining room, but part of a sprawling nine-story townhouse that once housed an entire preparatory school. And it wasn't just any sex offender, but an enigmatic billionaire who had once flown the likes of former President Bill Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak around the world on his own Boeing 727.

...But the uproar over "The Prince and The Perv"—as the British headlines screamed—mysteriously drowned in the Mid-Atlantic. New Yorkers barely batted an eye about the scandal-mongering across the pond. "A jail sentence doesn't matter anymore," says David Patrick Columbia, founder of New York Social Diary. "The only thing that gets you shunned in New York society is poverty."

"In the Midwest, where I am from, he would be a social pariah," says Lorna Brett Howard, a political activist and wife of Irving Post Capital CEO and Aeropostale director John Howard. "What I see here is if you have big money or are famous then you get a pass."

...The conventional wisdom among his friends was that Epstein has been victimized by greedy, morally dubious teenage girls and unscrupulous lawyers. "I've never condoned paying for sex, but if the young lady lied about her age it's her own fault," explained one socialite, who along with hedge-fund manager Wilbur Ross and real-estate magnate Leon Black hobnobbed with Epstein at a Southampton movie screening just two months after his release from "community control" in Florida.

..."No one in café society gives a damn that a 15-year-old girl gives massages," says one frequent charity-benefit guest.

That's always the risk with courtesans, they get greedy and try to extort more money out of their rich clients. That was the view back then. We can even link it to Stormy Daniels, who took her hush money, spent it, then tried to squeeze more blood out of the turnip with her court cases against Trump. That's the kind of expected sex scandal when you pay these kinds of women for sex.

I actually think this is why he and Bannon got along so well, because Bannon has also had a very Forrest Gump kind of life.

I’m going to be honest I don’t care about who had sex with prostitutes. The only interesting things about Epstein to me are, was he an Israeli spy? Was he murdered? Was Ghislaine actually a reddit mod? I basically take for granted that 90% of men would have sex with everything that walks, given the chance, so none of that stuff is revelatory. Especially men that aggressively seek power/wealth/status, as they say, men only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting.

Was Ghislaine actually a reddit mod?

Several /u/Maxwellhill posts were included as evidence against her by the FBI. Not quite confirmation, but as close as we can get barring an actual confession in my opinion.

Really? Do you have a link that's crazy it got (more or less) confirmed.

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 9/EFTA01245114.pdf

Especially men that aggressively seek power/wealth/status, as they say, men only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting.

It would be funny if that one thing turned out to be a genuine friendship, and people like Trump, Musk, Chomsky, Bannon never came anywhere close to the prostitutes (much less teenaged prostitutes). Hence Musk's seemingly oblivious plan to bring his wife on the "heli" that we discuss elsewhere in this thread.

For men of that power/wealth/status, people are always looking to get something from you or butter you up to screw you over later—what if Epstein's appeal was that he was a guy who never gave off those vibes? Just a bro who wanted to chill with his homies on his island, watch internet videos, and shoot the shit about things like racial IQ statistics.

I mean damn, look how happy and relaxed Chomsky and Bannon were together in Epstein's presence, like two old best friends reunited after years apart.

That honestly seems to have been Epstein's major talent; he was charming and friendly and even though he was out to make useful friends and connections, he could present him as sincere and interested in you for yourself, not for what you could do for him. As you say, rich people are used to others trying to make use of them, so someone who was "hey Jim, great to see you, tell me what do you think of my newest art piece?" and talk to them on that basis was disarming.

And then once he got the reputation of throwing the parties that you needed to be seen at, of course everyone who was anyone and those on the tier down from that wanted to be on his guest list.

talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences

It's pretty funny that out of all celebrities so far Chomsky has suffered the greatest aura loss among his supporters from the Epstein situation. From getting photographed palling it up together with Bannon to now potentially being redpilled on the racial IQ question. On Reddit last time around there was already a vibe of "that's what upsets me most about one of the most famous and prolific leftist academics featuring prominently in a sex trafficking and underage prostitution scandal: him being friendly with a rightwing political figure."

I checked reddit, and the dominant line is basically "Epstein was an extremely popular socialite, taking photos with him or crossing paths socially doesn’t mean someone fucked underage girls". Certainly. But I can't overlook how carefully that nuance is defended when the figure in question is a progressive. Anti zionists used to flex that no one on "their side" was connected to Epstein. It's the same crowd that insists on interrogating power, thinks they’re anti establishment because they dislike the old elites, whilst being perfectly obedient to the new ones. Skepticism becomes “conspiracy,” inquiry becomes “smearing,” but only when the subject sits on the correct ideological shelf.

This is why I think the whole Epstein Files are massively overhyped. 99% of whatever comes out is (and was always going to be) "this person knew Epstein", and the remaining 1% is "this person went to Epstein's island, but there's no confirmation of them actually committing crimes there." As long as Epstein hired at least one 18+ year old prostitute, then every single person in the files has plausible deniability, even if they straight up admit to having sex with girls at his island.

The Epstein lead died when he did, because he wasn't stupid enough to actually write down the truly incriminating details. The pedos won when whatever shenanigans they pulled to enable his death worked (imo suicide with security guards turning a blind eye and killing the cams ahead of time for him), and they're all going to get away with it.

All the files have is more heat and un-proven allegations for both sides to sling at each other. Scandals without substance.

They had years to censor the incriminating 1%

The Epstein lead died when he did, because he wasn't stupid enough to actually write down the truly incriminating details.

This is just incorrect - there's at least one former ambassador from Mexico who is getting burned by the revelation that he fathered a child with an 11 year old girl in Mexico. But moreover, it wasn't stupidity that lead to him writing down the truly incriminating details. He most likely believed that his connections would allow him to escape any kind of serious punishment, and when he received a sweetheart deal due to "belonging to intelligence" he was proven correct. Even then, there are actually things that he considered too sensitive to put into an email - see the one where he's asked if he has anyone with influence over Assad. I don't even think it counts as stupidity - why bother protecting yourself from the intelligence agencies reading your email when you can just call up the people in charge of those intelligence agencies and ask them to get you out of trouble?

The most disheartening revelation was that Epstein was in communication with, and possibly funded, the hacker known only as “4Chan”

New conspiracy — Epstein did this all for the lolz.

I mean, he's a cross between Lex Luthor and the Joker, and as soon as he died, civilization burst into flames and hasn't stabilized since. If it turns out that we live in a world where a human can be the container holding back a force of chaos and destruction, some of which leaks out through his own acts of evil, then ... I mean, might as well be how reality works, at this point.

Does that increase the odds that top 10 reddit user (maxwell-hill)[https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/] is Ghislane maxewell.

I don’t think there’s any serious doubt at this point. Ghislane was that user.

Someone should correlate the emails sent by Ghislaine to the subjects discussed by MaxwellHill. Eg on Jan 10 when Ghislaine’s email is about x, is the account more likely to post about x? In emails where she is on a flight for 8 hours, is there a lapse in account posting?

Someone should

Maybe someone could even be lazy doing that by prompting Claude to do all the work?

I love imagining that the world's greatest boogey man is talking smack on Call of Duty and bitching about it on 4chan afterward.

The most interesting revelation from the Epstein Files to me is just how incredibly unimpressive all these famous and important people appear in private. Epstein palled around with some of the richest amd most influential people in the world, and all their emails come across like they're written by insecure teenagers bragging about that one time they touched a boob.

I expected better from society's supervillains.

We’re all just human

My head cannon is that the World Wars erased too many of the really talented elites.

I expected better from society's supervillains.

As the saying goes, high school never ends.

Epstein palled around with some of the richest amd most influential people in the world, and all their emails come across like they're written by insecure teenagers bragging about that one time they touched a boob.

To be fair, Elon Musk always comes across that way.

(Trump, of course, touched all the boobs, all the big ones that is, he doesn't bother with those small ones although yes, ladies, they're nice too, but Trump touched the biggest boobs)

I have decided to resign my position effective immediately with BG3 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Larian Studios has quite a lot to answer for, it seems.

talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences

WTF, I love Chomsky now.

Mods, remove this if it's a crappy post. It's hard to come up with a through line for this, other than "WOW he knew a lot of people".

It's fine. While more commentary would be nice, there's no need to say something for the sake of saying something.

Elon Musk previously claimed Epstein tried to get him to go to the island but Elon refused.

However, Elon appears in the Epstein files asking to go to the island. Some back and forth emails to pick a date for the visit, so it looks like he did go there and again rather than refusing to go, he requested to go there himself. Multiple times actually.

Here's Elon in 2012 (reminder, that's after Epstein had been convicted for procuring an underage prostitute) asking when the wildest party would be.

Here's Elon again a year later with some back and forth planning a date for another visit.

He really own goaled himself by pushing the Epstein files. Why did he tweet 'Trump is the Epstein files!' if he's living in a glass house. Even smart guys have their derpy moments I guess.

"how many people will you be for the heli to island"

"Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on =our island? "

smh my head, Elon looking to bring sand to the beach.

Who would have thought Elon the type of nigga to bring his wife on a guy's trip.

I love the "jeevacation@gmail.com" email address and the blank subject line for coordinating their... plans.

Who would have thought Elon the type of nigga to bring his wife on a guy's trip.

Though that would incline towards "Elon was not there for the underage negotiable affection". If he's off on a guy's trip to Lolita Island for the wild parties with the pretty girls, he's not going to bring his missus, as you say. Thus whatever was going on, he may have thought it more like some kind of swingers' thing (was Mrs. Musk agreeable to that? Guess we'll never know) at the most.

Yeah, all else equal, him intending to bring Talulah would be Bayesian evidence he didn't think it would be some high school girl fuckathon.

Thus whatever was going on, he [Elon] may have thought it more like some kind of swingers' thing

Which funnily enough, would actually make him sound like a cuck and more pathetic than if he were just heading over there to bang some teenage girls. If your wife is late-20s Taluleh Riley and you're bringing her to a swingers' event where you think the other WAGs will be the likes of Ghislaine Maxwell, Melinda Gates, Hillary Clinton, Valeria Chomsky, etc. you're not getting a whole lot out of letting your wife get railed by the other men.

I was thinking more along the lines of that rather pathetic (to me, anyway) Resort Island of the Swingers. Uh, did someone post about something like that on here a while back? I know I read some kind of description by a participant, and honestly it sounded to me like way too much work to be fun. Maybe Elon was thinking the same thing was going on with Jeff and his Private Island of Wild Parties for the Select.

Someone should ask her.

Elon doubled down today:

I have never been to any Epstein parties ever and have many times call for the prosecution of those who have committed crimes with Epstein.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2017606707372016039?s=46

I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his “Lolita Express”,

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2017490775324655826?s=46

Are there definite mails showing a past visit or only planning ones (which presumably didn’t pan out)?.

So far I have only seen planning ones. However the planning ones show Musk asking whether he can visit and one of them has Elon asking when the "wildest party" will be, when discussing a date for his visit. So unless I'm missing something here or these documents are fabricated, the idea that it was Epstein taking initiative and Elon always refused seems demonstrably a lie, because we have emails with Elon asking whether he can visit.

At least one site claims the "Girls FTW!" email is fake and does not appear in the release.

Correct, but the one the message you're responding to referenced is real.

One interesting aspect would be how much we can trust the emails on Epstein's account who appear to have been sent from other people.

I think it depends on the technical specifics. If they scraped the data from his computers, then (unless the senders are the technical geeks who gpg-sign their mails) there is no proof that the sender ever wrote that. Epstein was obviously not the person who would be beyond falsifying mails for the purpose of insurance.

If they scraped them from Google (I think they did that), then the odds of him having messed with the mails sink. It might be that anything in the inbox, header and all, is still trivially writable via IMAP though. Ideally, one would want the mail server logs, but I am not sure if Google even keeps hashes of the mails they received. This still leaves the defense "that mail was sent from my mail server, but it was hacked", but with Epstein that seems a bit far-fetched, Epstein was clearly not some uberhacker.

Of course, if Epstein had messed with his inbox, one would expect that we would find things a lot more juicy in there.

This issue came up with the Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden email leaks. While basically no one signs their emails, modern anti-spam technology means nearly all modern emails are signed by the sending server using DKIM. Theoretically, a privacy-conscious email host would regularly rotate their DKIM keys and publicly post their stale ones (i.e. make sure it's trivial to forge old emails), but in practice GMail does not do this and a quick web search finds no one recommending this.

In short, given the full headers, it's possible to cryptographically verify emails really were sent by the user they appear to have been sent by. (Obviously, someone could have gained access to the account who is not the owner of the account or there might be other reasons why the server's signature might not correspond to the human who wrote the email, but those are a lot less likely than the ease of forging an unsigned email.)

Theoretically, a privacy-conscious email host would regularly rotate their DKIM keys and publicly post their stale ones (i.e. make sure it's trivial to forge old emails)

Uh, you mean publicly post their stale public keys so it’s trivial to verify old emails?

No, I meant what I said. There's no difficulty finding the stale public keys. The stale private keys should be published. DKIM can't provide strongly deniable authentication, but publishing the old private keys would give a weak version of it.

Ohh, I see, the point is to make it so that emails leaked after the fact are indistinguishable from forgeries.

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Why would they need to be infiltrated by NSA agents? They'd hand over emails given a warrant.

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Okay, but we're talking about noted felon Epstein here. There'd be no difficulty getting a warrant on all his shit.

Formatting fix:

Q: Why would they need to be infiltrated by NSA agents?

A: They'd hand over emails given a warrant.

That’s consistent with Elon never going. Doesn’t seem like they set a date etc

Also consistent with Elon Tryharding. See Path of Exile ghost account etc.

Unless this breaks some obvious threshold where I need to notice I am likely going to ignore anything on Trump. I 100% believe he banged Stormy Daniels for money but none of his ex-wives fit the pedophilia bro type. I do not think there is a huge overlap in guys who bang Daniel’s (big breast) and into underage girls.

For the reason perhaps I should give other people with accusations the benefit of the doubt. Bill Gates though does have pedophile vibes. Even DiCaprio vibes like a guy who would probably go younger if he was allowed to. Trump just seems to have always gone for a different body type.

“He knows a lot of people” It’s weird how a quote from a movie will stick with, but in the movie never been kissed the one baseball player friend of hers who also went back to High School said something like, “If one person says your cool then everyone will go with it”. My view is if you have one famous person vouche for you and then you meet 5 more and handle it well then it’s easy to know 500 famous rich people. You are in the club. It’s much harder to find the first famous friend than number 100.

I have no reason to disbelieve that Trump had sex with the odd 16 or 17 year old. He was a famous libertine in an era when that was much more acceptable. There's no reason to believe he specifically looked for that, of course, and the majority of his mistresses were probably old enough to get plastic surgery on their own.

I cant help but feel that this is purposely daft. I happen to be both into skinny, and fat women. I married a skinny woman, but if I we're a less faithful man, I feel that I would pursue trysts with fat woman exclusively, because that's what's not available at home.

On the Trump note, I agree, nothing here really passes my sniff test, but I also don't believe they would release anything that would actually incriminate him, if it existed in any of the "files"

Ok so you might be non-conventional. I feel like most guys I know always date the same girl. I had one person in my 20 something friend group I would always get in conflict with because we would always want the same girl. Other friends this never occurred because even if the girl was conventionally attractive and I knew that I would have zero interest in her.

I feel like most men do have very strong types. If you are going to pay for sex you are probably going to buy exactly what you want. I guess it’s possible Trump would have sex with someone like 16 year old Britney Spears but I think most people who have pedophile attraction prefer girls who have ballerina style bodies (no chest, fairly-like 90 lb girls).

It would be interesting to know why % of men have true attraction to a wide variety of body types. My gut says it’s very low.

I have the opposite intuition. My feeling is that there are enough people in both the government and media committed to #RESISTing Trump that if they had anything truly concrete that they could use against him it would have come out by now.

It's not about Trump actually having sex with 16 or 17 year olds, it's about spreading the message of guilt by association. He and Epstein were best buds. Epstein arranged underage sex slaves for his rich friends and contacts. Lurid claims of "I was raped by both of them when I was thirteen" just help that along. Nobody (except the dwindling number of people who do care about distinctions like "underage means under 18, not 12 years old" and "did this really happen?") cares if it's true or not, it's just convenient mud to throw.

He's a racist. He's a transphobe. He's a sexist. He's a rapist. He's a paedophile. He's a Nazi. He's a convicted felon (36 FELONIES!!!)

"Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him" is pretty bad in and of itself, making him an accessory through inaction. Conversely, "somehow missed all the red flags about Epstein being a pedophile despite palling around with him" would be pretty damning for Trump's intelligence even if it's ethically exculpatory. So if you establish a sufficient degree of regular association between the two that it has to be one of the two, you have a pretty tight case for Trump either being complicit, or incredibly dumb. Your only way out is to argue that Epstein was so good at covering up his sins that an intelligent man could genuinely hang out with him repeatedly without ever suspecting a thing; and does anyone seriously believe that?

I hate to nitpick but "paedophile" is doing a lot of work blurring things here. If we're talking "under 18 but around 16 at the lowest", then properly it's ephebeophilia and technically it's attraction to young but sexually mature individuals. Paedophilia proper is pre-pubescent children.

But since "minor child" can refer to "this girl was 17" as well as "this girl was 12", then charges about minor children can be weaponised to mean "Trump etc. were raping twelve year olds" and not "Trump and Prince Andrew etc. were having sex with 17 year olds whom they thought were willing or at least paid-for escorts doing a job".

And it's the Trump was raping thirteen year olds version which is the one being used in online spaces, because Orange Man not alone Bad, he is Most Evil of All Evils and MAGA is most evil and we're fighting Nazi fascism and if only this time we scream loud enough, the normies will finally turn on him.

I don't know what age of girl Epstein himself was personally attracted to, he does seem to have liked them very young. But that does not mean that everyone who went to his parties and his island liked them that young. If you know Jeff from his parties where hot nubile young girls hang out and pay attention to the rich men, you don't necessarily know he likes to fuck fourteen year olds, you think he's like you and every other guy who likes hot nubile seventeen to eighteen to twenty year olds. Maybe some of his "special close friends" also share Jeff's interest in fourteen year olds, but that is not going to be common knowledge for the circles he moves in. Only those who need to know will know and will be invited to the island stays where the fourteen year olds are.

So Musk may well have been one of those deemed "don't need to know" and even "not important enough to cultivate, not in the circles I want" which seem to have been established finance and old money, as well as Big Names in science and the arts. Musk may simply not have been a big enough name or the right kind of big name for Epstein. Maybe it was simply personal dislike. Who knows?

Your only way out is to argue that Epstein was so good at covering up his sins that an intelligent man could genuinely hang out with him repeatedly without ever suspecting a thing; and does anyone seriously believe that?

That depends, do you think Noam Chomsky is intelligent or not? 😁

I think you've misunderstood me. I never argued that Trump was himself attracted to underage girls. What I view as pretty likely is that Trump knew that Epstein was in that business, and yet did nothing to report and expose him; not because he was himself interested, but because he didn't care/couldn't be bothered/preferred enjoying the other perks of being pals with Epstein to doing the right thing and getting on Epstein's bad side in the process.

I'm not sure why you went off on the tangent about Musk and what he knew, as I never brought him up. I agree that Musk probably didn't know, but then it's not clear that he ever even got as far as the island. I feel like it would be considerably more difficult to have actually attended one of the "wildest parties", and still not realize that there were sketchy things going on. Wouldn't there be an interaction somewhere along the way of Epstein making it clear what range of girls he had on offer, to let the guest have his pick? And judging by all the leaked material and reports, does Epstein sound like he would couch such an offer in such carefully-guarded terms that an uninformed, intelligent man genuinely couldn't pick up on the scandalous age of some of the options? Maybe I'm picturing this all wrong, but that's where I'm coming from.

And no, I don't especially expect that this will have real consequences for Trump. It's just that it should. If your buddy is an unrepentant rapist then you have to turn him in, it's not enough to politely say "not for me, Jeff, thanks" and keep sleeping with the adult prostitutes he fetches for you. "The President knew about a serial statutory rapist and did fuck-all about it" should be a scandal to rock the nation all on its own, never mind whether he personally partook, and it's very depressing that it isn't (though yes, certainly the muted response is downstream of the boy-crying-wolf dynamics from the Left lobbing spurious accusations at Trump every Tuesday such that when a genuinely outrageous one arises it barely registers).

That depends, do you think Noam Chomsky is intelligent or not? 😁

I think he might very well be morally complicit, in the sense described above ("knew Epstein had unsavory hobbies but couldn't be bothered to do anything about it").

judging by all the leaked material and reports, does Epstein sound like he would couch such an offer in such carefully-guarded terms that an uninformed, intelligent man genuinely couldn't pick up on the scandalous age of some of the options? Maybe I'm picturing this all wrong, but that's where I'm coming from.

I don't really care to defend Trump but surely any fixer is going to propose what's on offer pretty opaquely if anything so specific as a request is ever even made. Stuff like conversations that come off as just idle curiosity:

Epstein: "What do you like in a woman?"

Trump: "I've always been a big fan of the Russians, great people, wonderful people, and so affectionate"

Epstein: "I knew you were a man of good taste, I have a party I'm throwing for some Russian Oligarchs in a few weeks and they're bringing many girls with, would you like to come?"

Trump: "You always throw the best parties Jeff, I'm always telling the staff you throw the best parties. Of course we'll come, I bet you can get a lot more people coming if they know I'll be there."

Epstein: "I think that's true, I'll make sure to invite some more girls who would love to meet a famous television star like you, are there any particular types of Russian girls you like the best so I know who to invite?"

And if Trump goes on to describe prepubertal Russian gymnasts then Epstein goes down that path, but if he starts talking about mature matriarch types Trump needn't ever have been informed of the other offerings.

What I view as pretty likely is that Trump knew that Epstein was in that business, and yet did nothing to report and expose him; not because he was himself interested, but because he didn't care/couldn't be bothered/preferred enjoying the other perks of being pals with Epstein to doing the right thing and getting on Epstein's bad side in the process.

That's the entire point of the whole "Trump and Epstein" publicity, and thanks for putting it so succinctly. It doesn't matter if Trump was himself fucking underage girls, what matters is his morality. He knew and did nothing, hence he is a bad person.

The question of course is, did he know? Did he know about the fifteen year old masseuses? Did he know they were doing more than giving regular massages?

Side A says of course he knew, because Orange Man Bad. Side B says there's room to doubt he knew.

This is what, in the end, it comes down to: not a question of paedophilia or the rest of it, but political mud-slinging. And it all depends on how we gauge the honesty of those involved: is Lawrence Kraus telling the truth or lying here? Should he have known about the fifteen year olds?

Professor Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and author of Quantum Man, has planned scientific conferences with Epstein in St. Thomas and remained close with him throughout his incarceration. "If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge," says Krauss. "Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they're not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people."

As to why I included Musk, because he's been in the comments as well as to "did he know or not?" Ditto with Chomsky, where the more interesting question is "Okay, attempting to hob-nob with the likes of Chomsky was all part of the rehabilitation effort after the Florida court case, but what was Chomsky getting out of it?"

"Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him" is pretty bad in and of itself, making him an accessory through inaction.

No, that is not how being an accessory works in the slightest.

I meant in the moral sense (and, as FttG said, the reputational sense), not in the strict legal sense. I thought describing the alternative scenario as "ethically exculpatory" made this clear and I didn't need to specify both times.

Not in the legal sense, but absolutely in the reputational sense.

Only if you accept the basic guilt-by-contagion premise of the left side of the Culture War.

I disagree. Knowing that an acquaintance of yours is a pederast (or "merely" an ephebophile) and refusing to report him or cut ties with him reflects badly on you, even if it's not legally actionable, and this social convention long predates wokeness.

What crimes does this extend to? There are crimes of a whole range of severity. At what point does it become severe enough that you are obliged to cut ties or report? And what if you have less than 100% confidence that he committed the bad deed?

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Are you really saying that there is no such thing as a moral duty to report or otherwise act upon knowledge of evil deeds committed by others? If you're a passive witness to a murder or rape, and could identify the culprit, it's not at all immoral of you to move on with your life and keep the secret? Really?

When Epstein first got arrested, the investigator reached out broadly to Epstein's social caste for information. Purportedly, the only person to take the call and speak with him was Trump.

My google-fu is failing to find a cite for that; the current doc dump is obviously clogging the search results. But pretend for a second that it's true. In that hypothetical, would you say that such an action would make Trump uniquely righteous?

There's also the line from Trump saying Epstein likes women "on the younger side". It's hard to be sure without hearing the tone, but that seems like a polite, faux-friendly knifing, similar to the comments people like Seth McFarland made about Weinstein before his behavior came fully to light.

Do you think McFarland is more or less "guilty by association" than other celebrities who knew about Weinstein but kept silent?

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None of what you said is about "Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him".

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I do not think there is a huge overlap in guys who bang Daniel’s (big breast) and into underage girls.

I think that Stormy Daniels (and his wives) do put to rest any claim that Trump is an exclusive pedophile.

However, knowing one of his sexual tastes does not rule out the possibility of him having additional sexual tastes. If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?

From an evo-psych PoV, the obviously advantageous path for a man is to fuck any fertile-looking woman his society lets him fuck. Being exclusively into teens or MILFs would really limit reproductive success, especially in monogamous societies where your marriage partner will likely start as a teen and age into a more mature woman later on.

We know that Trump was big time into running Miss contests (and allegedly walking into their dressing room). To my knowledge, he did not run any Mister contests, so it seems plausible to conclude that sexual attraction was one of the things which got him into that. Now, I am very much not into these contests, but it appears to me (starting from the label, a 'Miss' is a woman on the marriage market) that they are rather about young, nubile women than mothers with big breasts. A 16yo selected to appeal to Trump would be much closer to a Miss winner than Stormy Daniels is.

If the allegations were that he had sucked off underage boys, then I would be with you in finding that implausible, bisexuality seems to be relatively rare and there is no indication that Trump likes dicks.

And of course, there is Trump's creepy birthday message to Epstein. It could be about the both of them enjoying hunting federally protected birds on his island, but somehow I doubt it is.

However, knowing one of his sexual tastes does not rule out the possibility of him having additional sexual tastes. If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?

I would at least expect it did cover "decides he'll try steak for a change is not the same as decides he'll try raw roadkill".

Has this been your experience with any other public cheater, that they espouse "variety is the spice of life?" Best I can tell, most everyone has a "type," and they stick to it. The most famous that comes to mind is Tiger Woods, who slept with a large number of women who all vaguely looked like his wife (I was a big fan of the article from a journalist who was not so much upset by the fact that Tiger Woods was a philanderer, but that he did not "sample all the varieties of the world")

Has this been your experience with any other public cheater, that they espouse "variety is the spice of life?" Best I can tell, most everyone has a "type," and they stick to it.

Yeah, that's my general impression as well. I think that given the choice between (1) a 25-year old beauty queen; and (2) a cute 15 year old, Epstein would have taken the second choice and Trump the first.

If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?

We're talking about the guy who's famous for still eating McDonalds all the time even though he's a billionaire TV star WWE HoFer president, right? He does not strike me as a guy starving for novelty or transgression.

Most Miss America winners during Trump's life have been 20+, which seems like a reasonable gauge. If that's what we're using as a proxy score, Trump likes 'em near or past college graduation. And frankly, the difference between 16 and 21 is much bigger than 21 to 26, and that would have been more extreme in decades past.

Trump's pageant was Miss USA, where the winners skew slightly younger, but also haven't been under 20 for a long time. But the reason why Donald Trump, pageant baron, stinks of kiddie-fiddling is that he also owned Miss Teen USA, and bragged about being able to hang out in the girls' changing room because he owned the pageant. A quick look at Miss Teen USA winners shows that there is no paedophilia here - the girls look like the physiologically mature women they are. But it isn't and shouldn't be socially acceptable.

Outside Red America, both feminists and social conservatives think that teen pageants shouldn't be socially acceptable at all, but that boat sailed a long time ago.

A 16yo selected to appeal to Trump would be much closer to a Miss winner than Stormy Daniels is.

Not helped by the fact that age of consent laws vary from country to country, and that there are exceptions where what would be "statutory rape" gets relieved by 'Romeo and Juliet' laws so you don't label a 17 year old who had sex with his 16 year old girlfriend as a sex offender. Also that despite legal ages of consent, the de facto acknowledgement seems to be "teenagers are going to have sex before that age, so teach them about contraception, abortion, and sexual health".

In some US states, it would be legal (if unseemly) for Trump to have sex with a 16 year old.

In some US states, it would be legal (if unseemly) for Trump to have sex with a 16 year old.

Sure, as long as he is not paying for the sex, and has no reason to believe that anyone else is paying her to have sex, either. Epstein's Island is Florida IIRC, and there AoC seems to be 18, so the excuse "I thought Jeff had just invited some teens who just liked to fuck older guys" will not fly.

Also that despite legal ages of consent, the de facto acknowledgement seems to be "teenagers are going to have sex before that age, so teach them about contraception, abortion, and sexual health".

AoC is the age at which you can have sex with anyone without your consent being considered violated. If multiple people of a common age have consensual sex, most legislatures recognize that this is not a problem which needs fixing, no matter if they are 11, 15, 17 or 99. Locking up two 11yo's for statuary rape of each other hardly seems very worthwhile.

If two eleven year olds are having sex it very damn much is a problem. Not a locking them up problem, but "oh shit the dumb kids are gonna contract so many STIs and run the risk of getting pregnant because physically they can get knocked up".

It looks like there's serious dirt on Bill Gates and Elon Musk at least. The funniest possible timeline is if Trump of all people has no credible evidence against him, but like every other elite from the USA on both sides of the political aisle does. So far I've only seen the non-credible witness stuff with regards to Trump, but I understand there are literally millions of files so who knows what will turn up in the coming days.

I'm a hardcore leftist and of course extremely anti-right and anti-Trump, but, yeah, I'm not seeing any new revelations about Trump, here, and so far there don't seem to be substantiated allegations Trump ever did anything sexual with anyone underage. I could think of hundreds of reasons to hate Trump and to consider him a terrible person and a terrible president, but the Epstein stuff is effectively just noise when it comes to him. If there's a bombshell regarding him and Epstein, everyone will know about it immediately.

Bill Gates though does have pedophile vibes.

I think you're probably just suffering from bias due to ideological disagreements with him. While Gates was/is clearly a creep, none of the emails suggest he did anything with any underage people, nor are there any other allegations or pieces of evidence pointing to that. He probably regularly cheated on his wife, and as the emails show he even contracted an STD from a prostitute, but I see no evidence or suggestion (or "vibes") he was a pedophile or did anything like that.

the emails show he even contracted an STD from a prostitute

Of all the things I did not expect to know, or didn't want to know, "Bill Gates the Nerd King was a playa" is very high on the list.

You clearly haven’t seen his sexy photoshoot from 1983.

(The photos weren’t published in Teen Beat as the article claims, but they are genuine.)

Oh, Lord.

Bill? Put your glasses back on, get off the desk, and what are you doing with those floppies?

There's an old story from Mark Cuban about Gates getting a girl he was trying to seduce. I don't remember it well enough to recall a date but Gates married 5 years before Cuban sold Broadcast.com.

Story can be found in this NYPost article here.

“I’m buying these girls drinks and doing shots and everything and they’re like, ‘I’ve got to go to the bathroom’ — I think for real,” a laughing Cuban said. “And then they don’t come back and I’m like, what the f—?"

<james_franco_first_time.jpg> Most reliable bar-going young women.

Common polygyny W. You can think you're a big shot with $3 million (in 2025 dollars) as a 26-27 year-old, but then get mogged by a bigger fish.

https://youtube.com/shorts/x8tLF_qocoE

Cuban says he was around 26, so it was 1984 or 1985, and was thinking he was the king with being 1 million dollars rich. Gates had a net worth $350 million when he was thirty.

Interesting that m00t met Jeffrey Epstein right around the time the political board reopened.

Epstein also cited TRS in reference to B/W IQ gap, greatest ally after all???

I appreciate them making the chart black and white. Very helpful.

On a more serious note, I wonder if there's something off with the transcription, a lot of text is garbled. I wouldn't put it past the FBI to print and scan images.

How confused are you?

My boomer uncle has read a bunch of Unz (even though he doesn’t like him) and Jared Taylor lol. Honestly, though, I think it’s clear that while, after his first conviction, his friends would still mostly see him one on one or in private, his social calendar shrunk considerably and he spent most of the day online in the usual places curious people inhabit.

If he was 10 years younger he’d probably have been here.

SCOTT IS IN THE EPSTEIN FILES

Literally in an email chain named, “Forbidden Research” LMAO

EDIT: Did Epstein fund MIRI? Eliezer Yudkowsky had a Skype with Epstein during a MIRI fundraiser.

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I mean, I'm fairly certain germline-engineering humans with CRISPR is indeed forbidden.

As for "dangerous", well, two reasons.

  1. CRISPR has a tendency to sometimes misfire and fuck up other stuff than what you intended. When tampering with plants or animals, no big deal, do more than necessary and dispose of the defectives. With humans, more of a big deal.

  2. CRISPR itself can be encoded into inserted genes. This allows for gene drives - super-heritable traits that are always passed on to offspring (because you inherit one allele for the trait, and then that allele itself overwrites its counterpart from the other parent so you now have two copies and will always pass one of them to any child). One of the more obvious uses of this is in pest control: you introduce engineered versions of the pest species that are super-heritably of one sex, causing extinction when it wipes out the other sex. If such a gene drive were introduced to humans, genocide would be necessary to save the species. More generally, attempts to unilaterally alter the human gene pool this way open up a giant squirming can of worms that we'd all rather remain closed.

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How would you even introduce it in sufficient numbers?

Well, I mean, it does double every generation relative to population growth (because it's passed on to all children, always), so you only need one to kick it off (or a few, to avoid teething problems with the first affected person happening to die childless). Not an imminent threat of extinction, but of course the longer it goes the bigger headache you're going to have uprooting the entire family tree, and you always have the twin problems of "lots of people will object to genocide"/"the necessary social changes to do it anyway over their objection are not especially pleasant and won't necessarily go away".

More imminently, I suppose there are faster-breeding species that we need that could be targetted, although I can't think of a gotcha off-hand (and likely wouldn't share it if I could; while my innate tendency is to be the Oracle, I make some attempt to be the Sage and not dump all my infohazards into public circulation).

He's not talking about CRISPR in human context, but in general, no?

I don't know.

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It doesn't have to be a hard genocide, but you're still talking about quite a serious invasion of liberty.

Eugenics. "Germline engineering" as per the email, the modern version is polygenic embryo selection as brought to you by competing commercial concerns promising super-babies (super-healthy, we mean, certainly we are not claiming to give you super-IQ Master Race Aryan babies, no no no!)

The Master Race Aryan babies is the boogeyman being invoked here.

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What’s =ith all the random equality =igns?

There are many email clients that can't deal with "long" lines of text that are more than 80 characters, so if you want to send them portably you can use equal signs to continue a line. I suspect whatever software they're using is incorrectly removing the newline and the first character of the next line instead of the equal sign and the new line.

Could be an artefact of OCR, you get a hell of a lot of similar symbols replacing random letters in older scanned-in versions of text that is then uploaded. If someone was scanning in original emails then running them through some kind of conversion to PDF format, I wouldn't be surprised if such errors crept in.

Ever tried getting Adobe PDF converted to Microsoft Word? Even with all the updates, it's still a pain for this kind of detail.

No, as DenpaEnthusiast alluded to in his reply, it's some email program getting confused and mishandling quoted-printable encoding, part of the Internet email standards. Basically, the original SMTP mail protocol wasn't "8-bit clean", it dodn't allow anything but printable ASCII characters (32-127) in the message body, so if you wanted to send a message with one of the characters in the 128-255 range (like, say, the various accented characters of European languages), you needed to use this "quoted-printable" mechanism to escape the character by representing it by an equals sign followed by the hex representation of the character. Also, equals signs by themselves represented "fake" line breaks, as the original SMTP protocol didn't allow lines longer than 80 characters. The gory details are all in Chapter 6.7 of the standards document RFC 2045.

Today I learned more than I knew yesterday!

Demis Hassabis? Terence Tao? How deep does this go?

Michael Vassar

Michael Vassar has a lot of hits in the database. Epstein even asks for his contact info. Is this where he learned his "techniques"?

EDIT: Okay, he definitely went to the island. Everything makes sense.

It seems like the "non credible accusors" thing is a recurring theme in these files, and might explain why so much of them is still redacted. What are they supposed to do if some anonymous source makes up a horrifying claim about a famous person, with absolutely no evidence? They'll record it, of course, but they can't really prosecute the person unless someone else comes up with actual evidence, or at least is willing to give testimony. Releasing this sort of "anonymous rumor" is just tarnishing someone's reputation for no good reason. So it's redacted.

Yep. I'm reading about how George Bush senior raped a man and participated in cannibalism and torture rituals with a magical sword that leaves no scars. I'm feeling a bit skeptical about some of these.

His sentence structure, paragraphing and grammar is so awful, yet we're led to believe this is Elite Human Capital who legitimately earned billions in finance? This whole thing was deeply sus from the start and only gets more sus.

It’s countersignaling.

In industries such as finance that generally pride themselves on prestige, professionalism, and attention to detail, it’s a flex to write terse emails of varying proofreading quality, as if you’re just that busy or important. It’s long been memed that managing directors will write stuff like:

  • pls do
  • pls check
  • pls fix
  • eta?
  • thx

As entire emails to their more junior employees.

So far, all the biography is consistent with him being at least very good at sales. While intelligence helps, you don't have to be that smart (or good at writing) to be good at sales.

He didn't earn billions, Lex Wexner gave him power of attorney over his wealth for some reason (maybe a scam maybe because both worked for the same goals).

Eh, he could be really good at handling numbers and selling crap by the bushel when it came to speaking and verbal communication, but bad at words for written communication, especially if he was just transcribing 'stream of consciousness' thinking rather than constructing a polished argument. A lot of the tech-side people write dreadfully, and a lot of us humanities types still need to count on our fingers. Hence the eternal war between the two cultures.

Using Paul Fussell's nomenclature, there are two very different classes near the top.

The upper middle are the ones who generally use their brains to pay for their lifestyle. Professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers and so forth.

Above them is the upper class, which as a class does not value education (especially not education in things which allows you to earn a living, like some pleb).

It seems to me that Epstein was really successful at passing as upper class, and that this was how he made money. Some of the filthily rich trusted him with their money not because he was the most brilliant quant in New York, but because they perceived him as one of them.

It seems to me that Epstein was really successful at passing as upper class, and that this was how he made money. Some of the filthily rich trusted him with their money not because he was the most brilliant quant in New York, but because they perceived him as one of them.

FWIW, I think this is why Trump hated the guy. That upper crowd was willing to come to Trump parties and take his money, but they still laughed at him for being "a poor guy's idea of a rich guy". Epstein, OTOH, was some sleezy rando who basically fast talked his way into the club and then rode it on sheer momentum. Seems like the kind of thing that would set Trump off.

Absolutely common in medicine, finance, tech. Less so government but for some people, well look at Trump posting.

When you are at the top of the heap you don't need to angst about making sure you used good grammar and avoided typos, you just vomit out something for everyone else to translate.

Good managers understand their impact on the staff but most people aren't good managers, casual(ish) communication is a thing, and the absolute apex types aren't really interested in being good managers most of the time even if they can be.

It's a meme in medicine because of attendings vomiting out word salad instruction (especially for research) that students pour over like they need the Rosetta Stone.

I do this at work all the time. We have an hour marked for teaching? I'll slowly, calmly, and didactically teach you the pathophys associated with what we got up to today.

Send me an email at 11pm saying you won't be at the hospital tomorrow because of a curricular responsibility? I'm responding with "Sur" at 5am.

Good managers understand their impact on the staff but most people aren't good managers, casual(ish) communication is a thing, and the absolute apex types aren't really interested in being good managers most of the time even if they can be.

After all, that's what your secretary/administrative assistant is for 😁 I've worked jobs where I've been handed something by the boss along the lines of "this is my speech for the big do tomorrow night, turn it into readable and functional prose".

It's a meme in medicine because of attendings vomiting out word salad instruction (especially for research) that students pour over like they need the Rosetta Stone.

Proving your point, it's "pore" not "pour" (blame autocorrect?)

Proving your point, it's "pore" not "pour" (blame autocorrect?)

My grammar is ass. Any time it is not ass, know that I spent far too much time on writing it.

Am I capable of correct grammar? Possibly.

Do I want to? No.

Is this the perk of seniority (at least at work)? Yes.

Does this hopefully further my point given that I ideally have established myself as a reasonably educated and intelligent person in ten years posting here and at our predecessors? Dunno.

PhD Comics: Average Time Spent Composing One Email

OK, but in that case the professor is responding to simple yes/no questions or giving permission/orders. The student is writing a lot because he's nervous about offending his professor, not because he's putting a lot of thought into the ideas. The professor can still write long research papers though.

In this case, they're talking about fairly high-level stuff and giving opinions, but still writing as if they're a 3rd grader who needs ritalin. You can see he does put in effort when he wants to be polite ("I have decided to resign my position effective immediately with BG3 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I have not come to this decision quickly or without a great deal of thought"). But then he writes shit like: "on a different note=C2 , you have encouraged me to look at data , no holds barred. =A0 mortgages. inequalities . opportunities" wtf is this supposed to mean? I mean I know what he's implying, but the way he writes this is just garbage brainrot. Yeah, "look at data," brilliant advice there, I'm sure no one else has ever tried that, glad he could spare his valuable time to write that out, but obviously his time is far too valuable to bother specifying which data or what he's supposed to make of it. That doesn't read to me like a brilliant guy who's pressed for time, it reads like a guy who's drugged out of his mind and barely able to write anything at all, while desparately trying to sound smarter than he really is.

15 years ago this would have triggered me, now on the other side? bhahaahahaha

Wow, don't need any more reinforcement for my low effort posting.

I sometimes work with people near the top of a trillion dollar company and they’re clearly bright but just make the minimal effort to communicate, like it’s better for me to burn time decrypting their ambiguity than for them to write clearly from the start.

I don’t know if it’s some kind of a power move, they really are too busy to communicate any better, or maybe they’re just operating on too little sleep.

I don’t think finance bros give a shit about grammar. But there is also a huge divide between private equity types and public market types. You need stronger soft skills if you interact with non-finance people and need to sell stuff and build out a business like in PE.

It does seem like Epstein was more of a tax guy and/or wealth management guy.

Yeah I've worked in jobs with direct exposure to UHNW guys in text channels. Most of what gets you to that level of financial heft is a combination of drive and going all-in a few times in a row, which means in my experience they can be all over the place in literacy and communication skills. As you leave the pack of the UMC increasingly actual competency/skillset matters less than having the right mix of risk tolerance, luck and stubborness to actually make it through the great filter to hyperrich levels.

Epstein wasn't a finance bro, he was a tax-dodge bro. His entire net worth came from buddying up to billionaires with strategies on how to tax-optimize their personal holdings. Requires a lot less intelligence when your opponent is the federal tax authorities rather than other razor sharp finance types.

Epstein wasn't a tax-dodge bro, he was an underage sex slave and blackmail supplier "bro". The reason he didn't need to spend any effort or time securing his work (see all the "had fun raping kids - jeff, sent from my ipad" emails) was because he knew that if he ever got picked up by the security organisations he'd just make a call to their boss and have the case called off - see Acosta giving him a sweetheart deal because he "belonged to intelligence".

I noticed this too. Maybe he used good grammar and spelling when writing formal documents to his finance associates and used bad grammar with his friends and cronies. Many people who met him described him as bright and charismatic even back in his younger years before he was famous, so I figure that these emails can't possibly capture the full extent of his communication skills.

Watching him write such incoherent slop to Chomsky and then reading his glazing replies is unbearable. Can't piss off the donor. Or turn down his offer to get a ride in his private jet.

Pinker was wrapped up in this too and I read his defense a few years ago and didn't really appreciate where he was coming from and thought he was just trying to distance himself.

The annoying irony is that I could never stand the guy [...]. Friends and colleagues described him to me as a quantitative genius and a scientific sophisticate, and they invited me to salons and coffee klatches at which he held court. But I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante — he would abruptly change the subject ADD style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack, and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data. I think the dislike was mutual—according to a friend, he “voted me off the island,” presumably because he was sick of me trying to keep the conversation on track and correcting him when he shot off his mouth on topics he knew nothing about

Now that I'm much more familiar with Epsteinspew I completely get it.

I'm a Pinker enjoyer, but his saltiness here makes me chuckle. "Jeff didn't dump me, you know. I dumped him. It was a mutual dumping."

Virgin "systematic data" Pinker vs. Chad "intuitions" Epstein.

I think the dislike was mutual—according to a friend, he “voted me off the island”

I would have loved to see the expression on that friend's face when he delivered that line.

I'm not a Pinker admirer to any great degree, but yeah that reads like "Everyone else was dazzled by him, but not me. And because he knew I could see through his bullshit, he dropped me from the invites to the cool parties. Not that I'm bitter about that, or anything!"

His sentence structure, paragraphing and grammar is so awful, yet we're led to believe this is Elite Human Capital who legitimately earned billions in finance? This whole thing was deeply sus from the start and only gets more sus.

Uhhh, no? We are absolutely not supposed to believe that. Are there people who are still clinging on to that?

I’ve even seen people here obtusely sticking to that line against all evidence as recently as a few months ago.

Isn't the official story still that he's just this random finance billionaire who was also a sex trafficker and killed himself in prison... no, the footage cannot be found?

So far as I know the official story is not 'this guy is Mossad/CIA/Illuminati and that's how he has all this money despite being a complete weirdo and allergic to writing properly.'

They're STILL blotting out names on those emails too, it's not a good look.

My understanding is that he had some sort of weird possibly-homosexual relationship with a big NYC rich guy which he parlayed into control of his affairs and used that to accumulate the majority of the money?

That’s Les Wexner. There’s no evidence they were gay, but there’s evidence both were straight (the girls). Those who deny that Epstein worked for Israel can only hold up their hands in confusion as to why a billionaire financier set up Jefffrey Epstein with properties, powers of attorney, a jet and an infinite money glitch. But if you look at what Wexner was doing in the same year he employed Epstein, it was forming the MEGA Group, billionaires who would meet in secret that directed their funds and influence toward pro-Israel causes. Then of course, Ghislaine’s father was an agent of Israel (as per Victor Ostrovsky) whose funeral was attended by “the President, Prime Minister, and six serving and former heads of intelligence” of Israel, with Yitzhak Shamir eulogizing “he has done more for Israel than can today be said.” Epstein may have been working with other intel agencies at the same time, but I personally believe the Israel connection is the most satisfying explanation for his rise and reach.

Epstein wasn't gay, but Wexner could have been closeted*. His mother ran him, he married very late, and wasn't linked with a playboy lifestyle of arm candy before marriage. It wasn't an affair as such, but Epstein seems to have been genuinely charming and Wexner practically made him the majordomo of his wealth, and because Epstein seems to have managed that properly, he was able to use that backing to pretend to have (and really to have) more contacts and wealth of his own than he really did.

Epstein's genuine talent seems to have been in networking. He was able to make connections with the right people at the right time to get him into better and better positions where he was able to get closer to real money, and to make deals that (a) made him rich (not mega-rich, but rich) and (b) when those went sour, there was always somebody higher up and of greater status willing to be his backer and support to protect him.

*This article from 1985, when Wexner was 48, comes as close to flat-out saying it as it can, even though it comes with Wexner's own denial of being gay. There's mentions of girlfriends, but no specific names, and when the interviewer is touring one of Wexner's houses there is no mention at all of a 'lady of the manor' or any long-time companion. Interested in the arts, working in fashion, and the killer phrase "confirmed bachelor". Wexner was clearly more comfortable in the presence of men he trusted, and once Epstein managed to wangle that position of trust, he had it made:

And there is his widowed mother, Bella Wexner, the secretary of the company.

Bella doesn’t like her place and has her seat shifted next Morosky, closer to Les. She wears a white suit, and her black hair is pulled up tightly from high Slavic cheekbones into a bun. She holds herself in a careful way, like a taller Helena Rubinstein, with that instantly acquired czarina majesty some Jewish women take on with age and great fortunes. “This is a woman who was buying dresses 22 years ago and now has a personal net worth of over $100 million,” Wexner says, explaining his mother’s reluctance to talk. Les gave his mother 10 percent of the company. He also gave 10 percent to his younger unmarried sister and to his late father, whom he’d made chairman of the board.

“He was the son at all times,” says his friend Pete Halliday, “early, middle, and late. He always gave the floor to his father.”

…He is half in love with it, half in love with the other worlds that success has led him to. Not only finance, real estate (besides the Gurney house, he owns small chunks of New York), giant schemes, and takeovers, but art and philanthropy. He is on the boards of Sotheby’s and the Whitney, about to leave the American Ballet Theatre’s. However painful it may be for him, Leslie Wexner is inevitably emerging. He has had an apartment in New York for fifteen years, but suddenly he finds himself discovered, written about in “Suzy.” Ann Getty is on the phone before 8 a.m. He has lunch with Liz Rohatyn and her daughter, Nina Griscom. He is courted by women, for he is tender and gentle and a billionaire alone, and by charities, because he gives massively. He puts a trompe l'oeil mural of Fifth Avenue in his office in Columbus, but then he pulls back, flies out, disappears to the little dinners in the little city he says he prefers.

…And they crowd in on him, all the high-school kids from the suburb of Bexley who got the red cars on their sixteenth birthday when he, the only “tuition” student from outside the district, had to run for the streetcar; all the pretty girls who never noticed him but now stand very close and knot their fingers behind their back when they talk to him and look wham into his mournful eyes, trying hard while Bella Wexner watches her 47-year-old bachelor son; the friends from Ohio State; a few fashion V.P.’s shooting their white cuffs as the national business reporters and stock analysts run to the phones.

…It is why he goes to Vail for a single night to look out at the mountain and hold the woman he has had flown in in his arms. It is why he isn’t married, though after knowing him a year, one girlfriend converted to Judaism and actually changed her last name to Cohen (which Wexner insists was not because of him or because of what it would do to his mother if he married a Christian).

… Wexner is what used to be known as a “confirmed bachelor.” He doesn’t feel alone. He doesn’t seem to want a child, and, despite what he says about the perfect woman—Ali MacGraw as she was in Love Story, someone who is “very, very pretty” and not aggressive—he seems to be waiting to achieve some mystical harmony and balance in himself first. “A lot of people think because I am not married I am asexual or homosexual, but I enjoy a relationship with a woman,” he says sometime later, hating to discuss this, known for keeping this part of his life very tucked away. Of course, like his social absence, this increases his mystery and allure. Only Alfred Taubman, among his friends, still constantly tells him to get married, but Wexner, whenever asked, says, “Me and the pope.”

Les insists on his own things in place—the Wexner possessions—and, if he is across the country and knows they are laying a carpet in one of his homes, it bothers him. It’s a deep fussiness—he gets a physical on every birthday, does cardiovascular exercises, puts snow tires on his cars. He has always had a sense of how things should look, from the time he decorated his first room, when he was a boy. “He would have been an interior decorator if he was not in this business. Fashion, fabrics, colors—this is what he likes,” says his friend Rabbi Herbert Friedman.

…“Most people can’t figure Les out,” says Professor Cullman. “He’s the enigmatic but energetic leader. He’s the product of a female-dominated childhood—his mother, assertive, effervescent, bright, and action-oriented. His dad was contemplative and rather shy, uncertain of himself. As a male in a female-dominated household, he became both shy and dominant at the same time. A very unusual combination.”

...Though now Bella Wexner is often in Florida, and they no longer go on buying trips to Europe together, her office in Columbus is right next to his, and she is a force. It was Bella he asked to make the motion at the board for the tender offer for Carter Hawley Hale. Ask Les what is new in his life and he will say, “Mother just gave $3 million to the children’s pediatric hospital in Columbus.” He has not forgotten how she used to come home at night and start all the housework after her day in the store, how everything in his house was always clean and right in its heart.

Paging Dr. Freud, indeed. "The woman he has had flown in" is one hell of an awkward phrase. Does that sound to anyone here more like a description of a girlfriend, or more that of a paid high-class escort who may be more of a geisha/hetaira there for company, conversation, entertainment and some intimacy but not necessarily sex? More to quiet those rumours of "is he gay?"?

The young Robert Maxwell procured weapons for the IDF from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe during the Israeli War of Independence, and the details of precisely what he bought and how he bought it are still not public. That would be sufficient to explain Yitzhak Shamir's presence and remarks.

Athough I assume Robert Maxwell was talking to Mossad regularly, there isn't a good reason to think he was some kind of super-agent that would explain parts of the Epstein story. In addition, he would have been most useful to Mossad for his contacts in the Soviet Bloc, which didn't pass over to Ghislaine, and were a lot less valuable after 1989 anyway. John Major also hinted that Robert Maxwell had been useful to British intelligence during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Conspiracy theory shower thought - Maxwell jumps off the boat at almost exactly the time he ceases to be useful to British and Israeli intelligence.

The dates also fail to line up for a Robert Maxwell-Epstein connection. Ghislaine moves to New York shortly after Robert dies, and starts dating Epstein about two years later, after the Epstein-Wexner connection (which is the key to Epstein's wealth, and therefore to any sane conspiracy theory) is in place.

Robert Maxwell did know Epstein in the 1980's, but only in the vague sense that all elite coethnics know each other. Their business interests didn't overlap except for about 10 months in 1991 when Maxwell tried to expand in the US - Maxwell was active in the UK and Europe whereas Epstein was focussed on the US and the Gulf.

None of this means that Epstein wasn't Mossad, of course. Just that Mossad didn't use the Maxwell family to recruit him.

Mossad helped Maxwell buy newspapers, and Maxwell allowed Mossad to use his wealth to fund operations in Europe, according to Victor Ostrovsky’s book. In that sense he was a super agent, but it would be more correct to say he was a super saiyan, those individuals who inform Mossad about important details around the globe. And that sounds like a very good line of work for someone like Epstein with his suspicious sum of money and suspiciously intricate recording equipment in his home. According to a separate whistleblower, Ben-Menashe, Maxwell tipped off Mossad about Mordechai Vanunu

The young Robert Maxwell procured weapons for the IDF from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe during the Israeli War of Independence, and the details of precisely what he bought and how he bought it are still not public.

Cool. I always wondered how they got enough hardware for an early war and how they were able to win. Where did you learn about this? Is there a good book on this man and/or the events?

One of my favorite stories is that Czechoslovakia was an early supporter of Israel and provided them with quite a few guns. Several of these guns were surplus German guns from WW2, so Israelis were literally fighting for their existence using guns emblazoned with swastikas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_shipments_from_Czechoslovakia_to_Israel

More comments

EDIT: Sorry - I made a wrong turn somewhere.

I think you might have replied to the wrong comment....

Oh, ffs. Thanks!

I think your comment ended up as a reply to something completely different.

The fact that Jeffrey was a channer really does lend a lot of credence to the idea that Ghislaine was a reddit powerjanny.

Ghislaine had mostly moved on with her life after 2008. She was dating the Gateway PC guy and then that younger man and doing her rich woman ocean charity BS project.

The most we know is he met with/talked with moot a few times and looked porn on 4chan. I would be somewhat surprised if he ever posted (words, anyway) or looked at any non-porn boards.

Direct links to 4chan images are not reliable.

There also used to be a bug on 4chan many years ago where two different images posted at the same time by two different users got swapped, due to uploaded image filenames basically just being their upload timestamp in Unix time. Led to some serious WTF moments in threads from time to time.


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