domain:nytimes.com
It’s not unlikely that Epstein was “allowed” to kill himself because his attorneys bribed some jail staff, sure. That isn’t what 99% of people online mean when they say there were suspicious circumstances around his death, though.
If “the powers that be” wanted to kill Epstein to prevent him from talking then
(1) They would have been aware in advance of the huge criminal investigation into him and that charges were being prepared, given that it had already involved interviews with dozens of witnesses, and given that the press (notably the Miami Herald) had been reporting on the renewed attention to the case since late 2018.
(2) They would surely have killed him when he was a private citizen and before he was arrested and locked up in a jail in the middle of NYC. Slip some nerve agent or poison into his tea in Paris or London two months before and he dies of natural causes before charges are quietly dropped due to the primary suspect being deceased, happens all the time.
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Even if he had information or secrets to trade, Epstein would only have talked if he could make a deal. There was no deal to be made. The public can occasionally accept mobsters getting out of jail free / a sweetheart deal in exchange for ratting on the whole organization because they’re only involved in a bit of extortion, drug dealing and the occasional murder of their own kind. The public (and it was public and media pressure that led to the Epstein prosecution) was never going to accept someone who allegedly molested hundreds of teenage girls getting a year or two in prison (a second time).
Epstein’s lawyers told him he was going to die in prison and it is very plausible he told them that in that case he wanted to do it now. He had no immediate family other than his brother, no children, no wife, was too toxic for anyone else to visit. What awaited him was a life in solitary (if he was lucky), no sex, no travel, no interesting conversation, no power, no money, plus occasionally getting stabbed like Chauvin when getting moved between his cell and the yard when the prison officers looked the other way. He wasn’t religious in a way that would preclude suicide. It is not highly uncommon for those on bail for serious charges to kill themselves.
RenOS
something is wrong
1d ago
Golden Vow is great! Early on 40 FP might be a lot so spirits are a better use if you don't have enough, but later it's not much and it will stay strong since it's a % dmg/def buff.
The scaling changes are also what you want if you play an hybrid build anyway.
2rafa
1d ago
All people who live within your borders are, and of right ought to be, citizens of your state, and the government of your state has equal responsibilities to them as to any other citizen.
Why? I don’t think European or Gulf Arab countries have a duty to naturalize their migrant workforces.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1d ago
Im not talking about a US thats opposed to Israel. They still give them weapons (and steel/chemicals/whatever), just expecting payment. Im also not necessarily talking about short-term buying, thats why it matters things are signaled in advance, so they can make their own stockpile if thats important.
GDP and dollar figures aren't the right way to look at military production.
The GDP stuff is about the political aspect of the spending. Is there something left from the objection after that? Are NK rockets cheaper to make than youd expect based on quality and local labour costs?
anon_
1d ago
You can exclude people from entering your country, you can expel parts of your country (Malaysia/Singapore, India/Pakistan), but you can't treat certain people living in your country as non-citizens.
But they aren't any part of the country. Indeed the whole thing has been about denigrating Israeli territorial claims to the West Bank & Gaza and elevating the case of Palestinian sovereignty over it!
despite Israel's permanent control of the external policy of each enclave.
This is hardly Israels desire. They would like nothing more than to leave Gaza to Egypt and much of the West Bank to Jordan, provided that they actually were guaranteed that their neighbors would not permit the use of that territory as a launching pad for violent attacks. That's the absolute least any country can do for it neighbors in peacetime.
This whole thing is just another hack: "we'll launch rockets from the territory to force you to react, then when you control the ground we'll insist that now it's your sovereign territory and you are obligated to govern it".
anon_
1d ago
The largest opposition of population exchange here has been the Arab world.
It seems impossible to break in any sense, largely because they don't suffer any of the consequences.
anon_
1d ago
So there are new Hamas soldiers being officiated every day. But the officiatiation is not formal and organized. They join small cell structures (in all likelihood apolitical and religiously moderate, if not irreligious) who are then provided with weaponry (and ideas) by a small number of Hamas intermediaries (and these are the extremist ones).
If this is true it is a grave violation of the laws of war. The Geneva convention unequivocally requires that armed forces must be “under a command responsible for the conduct of its subordinates”.
That it should be totally impermissible to create a set of small cells without any independent command authority is completely obvious, especially in the current context.
In any event, they certainly aren't soldiers as the word is used in the field of international law.
Jiro
1d ago
Israel is creating thousands of boys every week who want nothing more than to fight back against Israel — because they just saw soldiers shoot their grandmother, or shoot their little sister, or kidnap their brother, or maybe Israel bombed their entire family, or maybe they were mistreated, or maybe their cousin is starving.
You'll notice that this argument applies to shooting enemy soldiers just as much as it applies to civilians. By your reasoning, Israel shouldn't shoot any enemy soldiers because it creates thousands of boys who saw their brother or father or uncle or whoever get killed by the Israelis, and who want revenge.
Also, notice that bombing Nazis didn't create more Nazis. Why? Because Germany was saturated with Nazis already. Boys who saw their relatives killed were already steeped in Nazi propaganda and probably would become Nazis no matter what you did. If for some reason they didn't, they'd just get drafted anyway.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
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:
D. All else being equal, small conspiracies are likelier than big conspiracies. A cult may take over a town without the average person knowing it; it would be more surprising for them to take over a country.
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.
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.
Later on... You mean if I put around 10 points into Mind to increase FP?
I still don't know in what direction to take this character. He's now level 25 or so, and I've been putting all the points into Vigor for a while, because I was advised to prioritize that stat until it's at 40. Str is at 15, Dex 18. Still lacking a ranged damage alternative except some darts I throw on occasion.
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