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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27039 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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If they were going to kill him, they’d have done so before he made it back to New York to be arrested by the FBI.

If they were going to fake his death, they’d have had his plane ‘crash’ or have him die quietly of a heart attack three months before the FBI was ready to arrest him.

If your response to this is “yeah but doing it in a Manhattan jail makes it less suspicious”, clearly that isn’t the case, a locked-room mystery is so much more exciting. If Epstein had died (or “died”) in January 2019 in his Paris mansion of a heart attack none of this global scandal would ever have happened. You really can’t overstate this; the powers that be are powerful enough to perform a perfect exfiltration from a high rise high security Manhattan jail, pay off or threaten everyone involved, find a body double, hack every camera or disable them etc etc, but they can’t get a heads up on an FBI investigation, despite them being so leaky that even mid level mafiosos usually know they’re coming? Nah.

As an aside, old people have vastly poorer reaction times. Epstein would be in his 70s; gamers in that age range don’t really play shooters anymore, they play MMOs, RPGs, strategy games.

A conspiracy theorist could respond with the following:

You’re assuming "they" had the option set you think they had. Killing him before the NYC arrest might have been harder rather than easier: he had private security, controlled environments, and (depending on the timeline you pick) he wasn’t yet in a federal facility with the same leverage points.

You’re assuming the goal is "least suspicious" -- but it might be "most explainable". A heart attack in Paris is less controllable since it invites autopsy uncertainty in a foreign jurisdiction, questions about private doctors, and paper trails. On the other hand, "suicide in jail" comes with a template of negligent guards, broken cameras, and bureaucratic errors. It's not "less suspicious", but it is "more deniable". Suspicion can be tolerated if it can't be proven.

You're treating the FBI as a monolith, whereas it's actually factional. Not everyone in law enforcement is on the same team. "They" might not control the early stages. The "heads up" might come late, after the arrest is already imminent.

etc.

As an aside, old people have vastly poorer reaction times. Epstein would be in his 70s; gamers in that age range don’t really play shooters anymore, they play MMOs, RPGs, strategy games.

Although "it's someone other than Epstein playing" does weaken the case for him still being alive, it doesn't directly imply that he's not in control of the account. Who's to say, after all, that he didn't have some Gen Alpha girl playing Fortnite right in front of him?

This is the first time it's occurred to me that I might want to enjoy shooters while I can. Never really been my thing but the thought of not being able to do it is kinda sad.

You can definitely still play shooters or most other reaction-based games when you get older, you just shouldn't be doing PVP or extremely hard difficulties if you want to have a good time.

Honestly even PVP can be done. Frankly, a lot of people online are bad (or were when I used to play). If you practice, you can probably be good enough to not be at the bottom of the pile even at 70. But you're not going to be top tier, it's true.

Another possible angle here is that there are shooters which are pretty slow paced, like Holdfast. It equalizes reaction time a lot when you can only fire one round every 30 seconds. Granted that's an outlier in how slow it is, but the point is that different shooters can have very different levels of twitch reflexes needed.

You're right. I'm used to PVP shooters using lobby balancing like TF2. In the days of ubiquitous skill-based matchmaking the penalty for being bad is far lower. A septuagenarian won't make it very high on the ranks, but most games can provide a steady stream of drunks, stoners, and Gamer Girls for them to feel good enough to keep playing.

I wonder if, as gamers get older, you would be able to have a TF2 (or similar game) server populated entirely by old people. That would also neatly solve the reaction time issue if you could pull it off. It's not a handicap if everyone is handicapped the same!

If you're a young (gamer) guy, I strongly endorse getting good at shooters at least once. I was the kind of nerd looking down on it until I got really into one (BFBC2) due to friends, and it really is very different, intense and fun. It really gets your adrenaline up. I still have a lot memories burned into my mind.

I'm so old that I played Counterstrike in its beta release days, and man were those good times.

Yeah, it was a different world playing against your friends on the LAN. I don't play modern shooters, but I do miss that.

I second this so, so much. Nothing better than a nice big LAN party with a good FPS for all night mayhem!

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