domain:nytimes.com
Jiro
1d ago
Revealed preference here is related to switching costs, not to which someone would prefer in a vacuum.
What do you think is likely to have happened?
Either he was directly assassinated by the intelligence agencies he was working for, so he won't expose the extent of his operation to the public, or was assisted with his suicide for the same reason.
Why is this important?
When you see someone destroying evidence, you should assume that said evidence was important by default. But if you want a theory, it's that his clients likely included many powerful and influential people, who need to be punished.
As far as I can tell from the outside, the EDKH theory is largely circumstantial
No shit? What else do you expect when authorities refuse to follow up on leads?
anon_
1d ago
My friend, that's what the sales guy said. And by the way he's the cousin-in-law of the prison super.
anon_
1d ago
How much more suspicious activity and lucky coincidences would there need to be to convince you (if you're a current denier) that Epstein was murdered/"allowed" to kill himself?
I want to object to this conjunction. This conjoins two wildly different things.
Maybe let me set out a continuum
a. Epstein didn't want to die and (one or more) people made him not be alive x. Epstein wanted to die and (one or more) people removed safeguards that might have otherwise prevented his suicide z. Epstein wanted to die and managed to kill himself despite typical jail safeguards
Obviously we're going to have to draw the line somewhere between a/z on when it actually becomes a conspiracy and no long (as you say) "legit". I'm putting a finger on the scales here, but I think (x) is probably a lot closer to (z) here.
If we want to start moving closer to (a) here, maybe we could say
d. Epstein didn't want to die, but one ore more people convinced him that if he didn't kill himself, they would torture his family forever. They then removed the safeguards and encouraged him to do so.
Or maybe closer to x.
q. Epstein spoke with someone who told him (truthfully? who knows?) that there was no way to beat his charge and that no one would extract him from the justice system. He then formed an intent to die which he carried out.
t. Same as (q) but the someone also got the guards to look the other way.
We can go on and on. Anyway, I really don't like conjoining "Epstein didn't kill himself" with "Epstein had no option and decide to kill himself" and "Epstein killed himself and the guards let him do it". It's a classic motte and bailey.
I'll divulge my object-level feeling here:
- High confidence: Epstein formed, based in part on what he learned in that call, an intent and desire to die.
- Medium confidence: The information that caused him to form that belief was broadly truthful
- Equipoise/don'tcare: Someone caused the prison to allow this to transpire contrary to typical prison procedure/rules.
From there, I think I'm confident that we should call it a suicide in the broadest sense of "Epstein killed himself". Insofar as you want to get into the conspiracy theory of the last point, eh. It's fine I guess, I don't object, but I don't think it's really much of a conspiracy theory.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I don't know if it's just "nothing ever happens", I'm that guy by temperament, and I can't see Epstein denialism as anything other then pissing on me and telling me it must be raining.
I'm leaning more towards status anxiety as the explanation, as I've never seen the same kind of skepticism from them about establishment approved conspiracy theories.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I wonder if I can take this as an opportunity to just start from the top?
I have very little prior investment in Epstein. I had never heard of him before he became famous on the internet - for years literally the only thing I knew about Epstein was that he's the guy who didn't kill himself. "Epstein didn't kill himself" was a meme I saw in a range of places but I didn't know what it meant or its significance. Eventually I did get curious and looked it up, and what I got was basically that Epstein was a rich asshole, that he had social connections to a lot of other rich assholes, that he liked sex with underage girls, and that he was eventually caught, went to prison, and probably killed himself there. There are theories that he didn't kill himself, ranging from those that seem superficially plausible (e.g. a sympathetic guard helped provide tools and opportunity for him to commit suicide) and those that seem a lot more implausible (e.g. a wealthy or influential person organised an assassination to prevent him revealing damaging information), but I did not bother looking into it much more than that. Either suicide and what we might call the motte of EDKH could be true, and either way it's inconsequential. The bailey of a large elite conspiracy to kill Epstein before he can reveal something dramatic sounds so much less likely that it would take significantly more for me to update in that direction.
So the questions I would ask you, as presumably an EDKH-believer, are:
What do you think is likely to have happened?
Why is this important?
As far as I can tell from the outside, the EDKH theory is largely circumstantial - here are a bunch of odd things that happened around Epstein's death, it is implausible that these were all just coincidences, here are some other plausible explanations. There doesn't seem to be any truly solid evidence of foul play; just a lot of things that seem suggestive. Is that much correct?
Right now where I am is more or less, "probably he killed himself, there's an outside chance that some sympathetic guard or other staff member helped him kill himself, anything larger than that gets Basic-Argument-Against-Conspiracy-Theories-ed away, and I don't care very much which of the former two theories is true". So, why should I update in the direction of anything more significant, and more importantly, why does it matter? Why should I care about this?
anon_
1d ago
They do not. They even removed Israelis from it in decades past.
But even if they did, the fact that Hamas controls it at this moment would mean that they are not responsible. A nation is responsible in humanitarian law for areas that one actually controls, not for areas that it makes normative claims.
For example, the ROC isn't responsible for Mao's starvation even though they still (remarkably) claim they are the sovereign government of all of China.
anon_
1d ago
I don't think the limiting factor for Hamas is recruits or manpower. It's not a binding constraint.
Meanwhile, the Japanese didn't have any trouble trusting the US even after we obliterated an entire city, hospitals and all. Or maybe they didn't trust us but realized that when one starts a war, one takes the chance that they will lose and be conquered, at which point they wouldn't have a choice one way or the other.
lagrangian
1d ago
Was there a specific use-case for the highly strict clock synchronization?
It's the underlying magic of Google's Spanner database, allowing it to say fuck the CAP theorem.
The entire purpose of Israel's exercise of government-like power has been to prevent Gaza from leveraging resources or building state capacity in a way that would harm Israeli interests. That's obviously challenging, since it goes against the will of the vast majority of Gaza's population, and they have had to maintain some degree of pretense that Gaza is self-governing to appease the international community. October 7 broke that balancing act, because Israel is now exercising it's authority in such a blatant way, and has created such a severe humanitarian disaster, that the international community can't turn a blind eye anymore. The UK and Canada are threatening to recognize Palestine as a state now, this would have been unthinkable five years ago.
Just to clarify, when referring to governmental or government-like, I'm describing how Israel de facto controls many elements of modern statehood for Gaza and the West Bank. Eg. Defense, law enforcement, taxation, regulation of the movement of people and goods, medical care, etc. They effectively have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That does not mean complete or universal control over all elements of Palestinians' lives, just that they hold onto many of the authorities that would normally rest with the government of an independent entity.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
Japan and Germany were centralized states. The centralization that made it coherent to talk about Japan or Germany surrendering was what allowed Japan to quash the holdouts, and that lack of coherence is what makes it difficult to imagine a Hamas instrument of surrender.
Has there ever been an insurgency quelled by immiserating the population? Successful counterinsurgency campaigns I can think of usually revolve around convincing the citizens that they are better off the supporting the state than the insurgents. A little hard to do that when the citizens blame the state for starving them.
TeknOShEeP
1d ago
The screw is to demonstrate the effect that quite a lot of holsters might have of putting slight pressure on the trigger shoe. The fact that you can get the gun to fire without pulling the trigger past the sear release simply by jostling the slide is, in firearms terms, completely and totally unacceptable.
Yeet_far
1d ago
If you have the chance to go back, get the soup dumplings and the garlic green beans. The soup dumplings in particular are 10/10
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
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Conscript/reservist army. Most of the bulk of the fighting force isn’t going to be particularly well trained. And a larger percentage of the regulars are in the technical fields like the navy, the tank corps, and the Air Force. There are only about 2,500 actually well trained shooters in the whole thing, and those run into high attrition rates since they get used for a lot of the more complex tasks. In the footage I’m seeing a lot of absolutely terrible tactical malpractice. And the IDF is doing the Vietnam strategy of rotating out the troops to fast for them to learn anything.
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Decent equipment, overly reliant on tanks. Probably would have serious difficulty maintaining fuel and ammunition logistics in the event of an actual major ground war. Probably would have insufficient artillery if they could not rely on the IAF.
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Poor military culture. Israel used to have a pretty good military culture but over the past 30 years they have slipped into the American/Chinese mental model of “career military service is for losers too poor or stupid to do anything else”. So crucially, you now have incompetent undertrained draftees being led by incompetent NCOs and officers. This is what lead to the absolutely horrific failures of readiness and discipline that allowed October 7 to happen.
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It’s not actually that big. 650,000 reservists sounds like a lot, and is fine for the theater sizes they have fought in so far, but it would make attritional warfare or warfare fought over a wide theater difficult. Given the recent indications from the Ukraine War, and the fact that the last country to fight Iran ended up in an eight year long trench war that caused them 1.5 million casualties, this isn’t good.
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Overly reliant on air power. The Air Force they have is good. But it is vulnerable to gradual attrition or sudden catastrophic losses. In the era of drones and advanced ballistic missiles, aircraft are vulnerable on the ground. Again it’s also not that large only 250 fighter aircraft. It’s about the same size as the Turkish Air Force, and smaller than Pakistan’s. Air defenses have gotten a lot better, and nobody knows how well they would do at air to air since there hasn’t been much air to air for anyone in the last fifty years. And I don’t think they can necessarily rely on their opponents being absolute hamburgers in the air anymore.
Overall it’s not terrible, and a lot of these problems aren’t unique to Israel. But I think the myth of the IDF has grown so big that people have gotten a very unrealistic view of its actual size and capabilities.
And I certainly don't know how jailhouse surveillance systems work.
Prisons use commercial grade CCTV systems with multiple redundancies (eg recording backup), alerts for camera or recorder failure, strict maintenance contracts for callout (within x hours; say within 24 hours) and more. Commercial grade Network Video Recorders are dedicated pieces of equipment that include NTP compatibility and high quality internal crystal oscillators for internal timekeeping. Clock fidelity should be tested during the commissioning and maintenance process. The dual recording servers can be setup on 12 hour (or even 13 hour) loops that overlap (eg Server A starts its recording loop at 00:00am and Server B starts its recording loop at 06:00am) preventing 'missing minutes'.
All that said, some systems and technicians are better than others.
tldr; the systems used are designed knowing that one of their major purposes is to provide post-incident forensics and serve as evidence in a court of law.
It's another unlikely coincidence in a string of coincidences.
odd_primes
1d ago
I'll address the culture war point, since other people are far more qualified to talk about the issues with the P320's internal safety. Ron Cohen, the current CEO of Sig Sauer, was previously the CEO of Kimber. There is a perception that he aggressively cut costs and relied on Kimber's strong reputation to sell sub-par products at a premium price point, cashing out before consumers caught on. Now he's at Sig, and strangely enough a formerly well-respected brand appears to have aggressively cut costs and are suffering quality control issues while coasting on their strong reputation... It's starting to look like a pattern. People would be pissed with Cohen no matter what, but the optics of a Jewish CEO deploying the private equity looting playbook on popular brands has resulted in the sort of backlash you'd expect from certain corners of Twitter.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I'm generally sympathetic, but even if your utility function has a straight 0 for the welfare of bums, you still have to account for second order effects of any policies you implement on ordinary people.
Simply displacing them immediately runs into public goods dilemmas. If you don't want them in your neighborhood so you bus them a couple miles East, then they start harassing the people who live there. But then your neighbor doesn't want them in their neighborhood so they bus them a couple miles West and they're your problem again. Now you both have the same number of bums but you're both paying extra for wranglers and bus fares for no net benefit.
Massive jail terms for small misdemeanors runs into issues with non-bums who occasional have small misdemeanors. You get drunk at a bar and your asshole buddy who's supposed to be the DD bails and leaves you stranded so you try to walk home but fall asleep on the sidewalk. Or your spouse cheats on you and you find out while in public and start yelling at her. Or a bum starts assaulting you and you defend yourself but the police end up arresting both of you and both end up in trouble. Ordinary and sympathetic people get in trouble with the law way way way less often than bums, but it's not unheard of. It's not as if the laws are perfectly just and you, by being a good person, are automatically immune to ever getting in trouble with it. If you get a 5 year jail penalty for something stupid it could ruin your life, which is why small things normally carry small penalties.
If you straight up genocide the bums you run into huge PR problems, human rights violations, and again, the opportunity for this to sometimes happen to regular people.
There are sophisticated, intelligent, and probably effective solutions that people are unwilling to do, such as escalating penalties for repeat offenders (much more than whatever they do now). But then it DOES matter what the solution is, because bad solutions are bad, even for you.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, Philippines, Pattani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn't respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its' allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves. The people of Islam awakened and realized that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about "Human Rights" were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world.
We can see that Osama Bin Laden was pretty upset with Israel. It, amongst other things, motivated him and he caused no small amount of trouble for the US and the West in general. How many new Bin Laden's are going to emerge from this current episode?
Mantergeistmann
1d ago
I just don't think disproportionate violence is okay, even if provoked
Is there a (consistent) way to win a war without disproportionate violence? If you're better at fighting than your opponent, you will inflict more violence upon them than they do upon you (and if you're fighting in enemy territory/homeland, their civilians will suffer more than yours).
P-Necromancer
1d ago
Hmm, alright, I can extend some tolerance towards sloppiness in extemporaneous verbal remarks. I still think most of the ammo paragraph is highly misleading nonsense, but I'm willing to file it under verbal diarrhea and take your interpretation at face value. And, sure, the razor wire might be a war crime; like I said, I didn't look into it.
As to the meat of the matter: The Rome Statute you're citing is this one?
Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
(If I've somehow gotten the wrong one: Sorry, and don't bother reading the rest of the comment.)
(Both 8(2)(b)(i) and 8(2)(e)(i) have the same text; one is a list of 'other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law' and the other 'Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in armed conflicts not of an international character, within the established framework of international law.' Not wholly clear which applies myself, but the rule is the same.)
(Israel hasn't signed this statute, but I'll concede the point if the behavior is a war crime by any international standard with substantial support.)
This is... not a very strict clause. I, perhaps naively, thought the standard was much higher. Especially since this is the infamous ICC which the US and Israel refuse to subject themselves to.
As best as I can tell, this statute doesn't distinguish between lethal and nonlethal weapons at all. (Not just this clause; I searched the whole thing for 'lethal' and various non-lethal technologies, and read all of 8(2)(b).) It's just as much a war crime to 'direct attacks' with a baton (or .22 LR rubber bullets) against civilians in general or 'against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities' as with a machine gun. Conversely, if the individual civilian is taking direct part in hostilities, it doesn't seem that they're entitled to any protection under this clause (other clauses and statutes certainly limit what might be done with them even then, but normal infantry rifles with normal ammunition certainly isn't forbidden by 8(2)(b)(xx)). It also does not distinguish between armed and unarmed civilians who are taking a direct part in hostilities.*
So when he says
Why would anyone need that, even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives against an unarmed population? It’s inappropriate. That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
That's not supported by the statute. They might not need those rifles to defend their lives against an unarmed population, but they're not forbidden from doing so. If they're 'defending their lives,' the individuals threatening them are certainly taking a direct part in hostilities -- have blown way past that standard -- and so may be shot. Even if they accidentally hit other civilians in the process of shooting them; that's not 'intentionally directing attacks' at them. That could run afoul of 8(2)(b)(iv):
Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;
But I think it would not in general. The attack must be launched knowing it will cause incidental loss of life or injury, which applies to a missile strike but generally wouldn't to aiming at a particular person and missing. Maybe it'd apply to over penetration? Even then I'm not sure you know it'll happen and that the collateral damage will be clearly excessive.
Concerningly, I'm not even seeing any protections against negligence (except in the narrow sense of 8(2)(b)(iv)) or even deliberately structuring the sites so as to maximize the probability that incidental loss of life that is not clearly excessive will occur. (I suppose this arguably could include issuing standard rifles to soldiers with crowd control responsibilities, provided you could somehow prove that was the intention. Not easy at all, especially if there's any meaningful chance they'll encounter armed, organized opposition.) Perhaps the court would be willing to fill in the gaps there, but it's not in the statute.
If they deliberately shoot civilians who aren't fighting, yeah, that's a war crime. And he's alleging that has happened, fair. But the nature of the rifles is orthogonal to its status as a war crime.
('Not a war crime' is not the same thing as 'morally correct,' or 'tactically wise.' I address only the first, as that's the question at hand.)
* I'm pretty sure? There is 8(2)(b)(vi) that forbids:
Killing or wounding a combatant who, having laid down his arms or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion;
My read is that someone who is attacking without weapons has not surrendered in any sense, even if laying down one's arms is a sign of surrender in general.
Mantergeistmann
1d ago
As a rule of thumb, international agreements never require states to do anything that would be to their strategic disadvantage. If they did then no state would ever agree to them in the first place.
Indeed, even the Geneva Conventions generally say things like "if your opponent makes use of this for their advantage, it loses protection under these conventions in that instance". They really wanted to discourage people trying to gain a strategic advantage by breaking the rules and hoping their opponent was too moral to then ignore said rules.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I think this is hyperbole
It's not written into law, if that's what you mean, but both the actions and public statements by European governments are not consistent with equal protections under the law.
and to the degree that it's true, is it less true of European Jews?
Sort of, in that you could get away with saying things about Europeans that you would not get away with saying about Jewish people... but it's also true there's been a spooky shift in public sentiment lately.
But either way, by your logic, all this should mean is that Europeans should also be collecting passports.
As for other Jews, well, they know people like our resident Jew-haters are around, loudly proclaiming what they think of Jews and less loudly implying what they'd like to happen to them. Are you paranoid if there really are people out to get you?
Not sure if that's worse than all the talk of dismantling white supermarket cisheteronormative capitalist patriarchies, especially that anti-Jewish sentiment is still yet to reach the heights of power that the anti-cis-het-white-men sentiment is spoken from.
Is that because they hate white people, or because their religion tends to be a liberal-leaning religion?
If that was the reason, I'd expect them to be at their mist liberal where they are most religious, and I'm seeing the opposite.
The "impression" that Jews are all disloyal parasites because of the ADL is
...not what I said.
First of all I literally finished off with saying that judging Jewish people by orgs like the ADL will leave you with a skewed view of them, but more importantly: where did I say anything about disloyal parasites? I gave the ADL as an example of Jewish paranoia, and no amount of "people out to get them" justifies the levels of finding Nazism in ham sandwiches that they engage in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
North Korea has a fairly substantial steel and chemicals industry and a large munitions industry, they have the whole of the warmaking pyramid (save the very top in advanced avionics, aircraft engines and the like). That's what juche is about, self-reliance. Israel just has the top section of the pyramid in advanced manufacturing and R&D. They're reliant on imports of precursor materials and are quite rate-limited in basic things like shells and bombs. Ukraine for instance is a proper industrial power, they have/had a large metallurgical sector.
GDP and dollar figures aren't the right way to look at military production. North Korea is a dollar pygmy but a munitions giant.
There's no liquid market for bombs or shells in the short term, spending more can just raise the price you buy at rather than increasing production. That's why North Korea has been able to provide more munitions to Russia than the EU to Ukraine.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1d ago
I’ll light a candle and pray for you to overcome your traumatic time-travel travails.
I’ve chipped in my 10 quid at enough popup RSPCA booths on British Town High Street that I think I’ve bought an indulgence or two. The sad dog posters always get me.
My primary concern is the ghost of Hector haunting me for my presumptuousness.
The biggest argument in favor of EDKH, and the reason I endorse a (mild) version of it, is that it was predictive, and already existed prior to its occurring, giving the authorities every opportunity to prevent it. Almost all conspiracies are post-hoc rationalizations that look at the facts and then concoct a theory to retroactively explain the events. But EDKH predicted it ahead of time. Everyone knew that Epstein had dirt on famous and powerful people. We still don't know exactly who, you can't point to any one specific person and say for certain that they went to Epstein's island AND committed crimes while there: anyone who visited might plausibly not have known exactly the details (they might have come expecting sexy 18 year old prostitutes and been shocked and offended when offered an underage one, or Epstein might have known their temperment and offered exclusively legal and willing prostitutes to certain members.) In fact I would be shocked if there wasn't at least one person who physically went to the island and yet committed no crimes there. But there were lots who did, and some of them are probably politicians, and each has a large incentive to want him dead before he can spill the beans. And we knew this and they should have had him on extra super suicide watch as a result. He was one of the most at risk and most important prisoners in the last century. I don't care if they had to have a guard paid to literally sit outside his cell and watch him 24/7, it should have been completely and utterly impossible for him to die via any cause, even a heart attack, without immediate intervention.
The reason I believe EDKH conspiracy is because Epstein is dead, and if there wasn't a conspiracy he should be alive. Now, in a literal sense I think the most likely scenario is that Epstein physically did kill himself with some sort of deal with the powers that be regarding his legacy or heirs or something or other, and then they had the prison warden turn a blind eye. The reason I don't think this falls afoul of the Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories is exception D that scott points out in his article:
I don't think this requires a lot of people to actually be in on it. Possibly as few as three: one politician, one highly ranked prison officer (not necessarily the top, but high enough to pull some strings), and Epstein himself. Politician gives the go ahead wink wink nudge to the officer, officer arranges the schedules, residence, and guard patrols, and temporarily disables a camera, and then Epstein hangs himself with no witnesses in exchange for whatever the politician promised. It's likely that it was a little more involved, there were probably a lot of politicians on his list who gave tacit approval or wink wink nudge nudge when big politician says he'll "handle it". A bunch of guards might have been suspicious about the slightly unusual orders they received. But most of them don't need to be directly involved or have any incriminating details with which to whistleblow, just conspiracy theories of their own. Even the stronger version where Epstein was literally murdered only requires one additional person: the assassin, who has obviously strong incentive not to whistleblow themselves.
This is important because Epstein had important information. I firmly believe that the real Epstein list was in his head. Any physical list is going to be something like "visitors" to the island which is suspicious but not incriminating enough to act on. Without Epstein's testimony we have no way to distinguish stupid people who wanted to have creepy but legal fun with young adult girls, sex offenders who had sex with underage girls, and national traitors who had sex with underage girls and then got blackmailed by Epstein into abusing their political power for him. They're all going to get away with it. Even if his death involved no conspiracies at all I still want everyone we can possibly verify as responsible to at minimum lose their jobs, and probably go to jail for criminal negligence. He should not have died and we knew he would anyway, before it happened, and yet it still happened. That's why you should care.
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