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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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I haven't been around here consistently over the past few years, so I'm not certain what the average opinion on the Epstein files is on TheMotte. For myself, I follow Michael Tracey Thought on this: basically, it was a total non-event that only had legs because of the ideological ammo it gave to both right and left wing conspiracy theorists. Epstein was a creepy guy, but he was nowhere near the monster people have made him out to be.

The AI-Epstein connections you listed are either irrelevant or barely there. Yud is the only real connection, and no one with any power in the labs even listens to him, though of course he's influential on some of the rank and file, and everyone's heard of him. It doesn't appear that he had any direct connection to any of the leaders of the big three. Dario's wife is just another hustler who was pitching anyone she could; doesn't mean anything to me.

I point towards a recent badly phrased post I made.

The energy against the target (in this case Epstein) isn't because of the target. It is just because they were the first to be uncovered.

Energy gets built up in a subconcious societal consensus that something wrong is happening. When society finds evidence that they were right, then all of that pressure is unleashed on the unlucky first stumbler.

It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic.

I specifically call this out.

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