domain:streamable.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
He tried to engage with, rage-bait and jostle with the 4chan crowd to raise his standing I think, only for his lowly political aspirations to flop. Problem is that the 4chan crowd are just plain better at being rude and aggressive online.
That's not to say he lacks his own clapbacks. I recall an exchange along these lines:
Will Stancil’s 2011 NYE Rape Spree Groyper: We are going to do things to you that have never been done before
Will Stancil: I don't know, I thought you made your intentions perfectly clear
Not to mention Vril Stancil, Triumph of the Will, Stancilwaffen...
HereAndGone
2hr ago
It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.
I think Epstein was competent (he managed to get and hold that job at Bear Stearns) but he was also greedy and couldn't stop himself from ruining a good thing by trying to profit even more out of it. His fundamental untrustworthiness meant he couldn't hold down anything honest, and he got himself entangled in his whole web of fake stories, deceit, and trying to find shortcuts to easy money.
Did he really commit suicide or was he killed? Suicide is odd. He might indeed have done so, because even if he survived all the scandal, he was looking at years in prison and once he got out, he would have nothing left. No money, no contacts, no chance of rebuilding his fortune and status. This was not a man who would be content to live a poor, obscure life. Momentary despair and seeing no other way out? That's plausible.
(Also plausible: he didn't intend for it to be successful but rather a 'cry for help' suicide, banked on the guards finding him in time and then he'd maybe be moved to better conditions or his lawyer could argue for clemency from the court due to his mental distress, but it didn't work out for him that way).
HereAndGone
2hr ago
Regarding Maxwell, I think that was two con men trying to exploit one another. As mentioned in the original post, Maxwell had few connections in the USA and his media empire was built on sand (see the pensions fund scandal) and he wanted to use Epstein's contacts to get a foothold in the US, and Epstein of course wanted to use another rich guy for whatever he could extract out of him.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
I agree that Epstein was a fabulist so we can't trust any claims he might have made. I think if there was any 'intelligence gathering' it was more akin to him trying to shop gossip around to anyone who would pay for it ("hey I have all these connections with rich and important people, you might be interested in what I can find out") because he was that sort of untrustworthy little toad, and that the best/only connections he had as contacts were Mossad or somebody who knew somebody who was connected to Mossad, and they might have bought bits'n'scraps because hey, why not? this guy might turn out to be useful sometime if he ever does stumble across anything important or we can finally find a use for him (I have no doubt, for instance, that they'd be happy to gather blackmail material on the Royal Family via 'Randy Andy' just because).
Dean
Flairless
2hr ago
And rightly so. Please keep that link and reminder on hand. It is certainly a good example of AlexanderTurok's bad faith characterizations of past arguments.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
Yes but they also import 60% of their calories which means they can focus on growing the 40% that's easiest to mechanize.
I will also note that Japan has some of the highest food costs in the OCED, at an index (avg=100, USA is at 94) of 126 in 2025.
Japan also doesn't seem to have great farm labor wages either
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3hr ago
It seems like we agree on the knock on effects more than I initially thought
If you're all for redistributing wealth from the middle class down then we are brothers in arms
I think that would end up being very unpopular, but c'est la vie
Lots of duty based systems eg confucianism lasted long term. I'm not sure how well adapted they are to modern day life, where a lot of the scaffolding¹ that helps maintain the systems is crumbling. But these systems usually specifically have moral parables about people behaving virtuously — dutifully — even when they're reciprocated not just with nothing but with active ingratitude and disrespect.
Confucianism is an explicitly reciprocal duty-based system. It was often explicitly modeled both in terms of father-son relationships, where the son's obedience to the father is contingent on the father being a virtuous enough patriarch to be worth respecting, and between subject and sovereign, where a sovereign's failure to maintain virtue is the basis for losing the mandate of heaven and being replaced by someone else who will appriopriately fill the duties required.
Confucianism and deontological religions have a commonality in that the duty-based system is based on relationships that are reciprocal. Religious deontology works from the premise of virtue's relationship, and thus duty to, one's own god. Doing so brings you closer to your god / earns good karma / etc. from your metaphysical duty-obligator. More secular Confucianism works from the premise of the duty to natural relationship of [child] and [parent]. Doing so brings you more harmonious relationships with the other part of the relationships.
No major deontology system has ever worked from a premise of a duty towards an action outside of the context of the relationship. Even when the Christians preach charity to one's enemies, it is based from the premise of the relationship of the charitable practioner to their god. When the virtue-ethicists like Aristotle talk about balancing bravery between cowardliness and foolhardiness, it is in the context of its effects on, and the relationship of the practitioner to, others.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
A lot of pro choicers also call it a “clump of cells,” not a baby.
A "clump of cells" can't kick its mother.
otherwise this false on the face of it.
Then give me an example of a pro-choicer telling a woman the late-term baby she wants to give birth to is a clump of cells, not a baby. Shouldn't be difficult if this is something they really say.
shoeonfoot
3hr ago
Thanks. I was going off my vague recollection of these kinds of articles:
In a 2021 interview about their book Trump's Democrats, Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields noted that many Obama–Trump voters likewise voted for Trump in the 2020 election, in some counties in even larger numbers than in 2016. Muravchik and Shields assessed that these "flipped" Democrats would continue to be a key factor in future elections.
2rafa
3hr ago
It's also notable that the headmaster at the Dalton School while Epstein worked there was Donald Barr. Barr worked for the OSS (CIA precursor) during WWII and was also former AG Bill Barr's father.
This is incorrect, Epstein joined Dalton 3-4 months after Barr left (which I believe may even have been before Epstein dropped out of NYU) and there’s no evidence Barr would have had anything to do with his hiring.
"According to Hoffenberg, it was Robert Maxwell who first introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s."
Hoffenberg was quoting Epstein, whom he knew since this would have been in late 1992 / early 1993 before the Towers Financial collapse. Your friend asks who how you’re dating an infamous tycoon and press baron’s daughter, saying that her father told you to look after her before his mysterious death is peak Epstein, peak drama, peak bullshit, just like telling them you were personally centrally involved in Iran Contra which he was also known to do.
Ghislaine’s friends at the time, not to mention her brothers (who were very close to her and to their father, and to whom he had actually entrusted her care) first heard of Jeffrey after she moved to NYC full-time and introduced him as her new man. Epstein’s narrative that Maxwell senior introduced him (a sleazy New York conman less rich, less influential, less powerful and less well connected than countless other rich and influential friends he had) to her as her ‘protector’ doesn’t make sense.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3hr ago
If there was a blackmail info collection operation, I don't think the purpose would be directly "making Zionist billionaires turbo-Zionist" or something like that but more like "This info might come useful at some point. How? Who knows? Black swan events and all that" style.
Dean
Flairless
3hr ago
If you ignore a few millennia of cultural understanding of duty-as-virtue ethics, perhaps.
Duty-based ethics, aka deontological ethics, are highly reciprocal. This is especially true in the western tradition, due to the derivation of why there is a duty and to who. Namely- because God. Hence why deontological ethics and religious ethics are so intertwined across history, since the fundamental question of any duty-based ethical system leads to 'according to who?' whenever a secular authority demands dutiful obedience.
A god isn't required to be that 'who,' but it is the moral authority higher than any king to make those demands for obedience something more than arbitrary human with thugs and clubs. In turn, religious deontologies are incredibly reciprocal- you do your duty unto God, which can entail more worldly obediences as well, and you go to heaven. Defy your duties, and you are separated from God / go to Hell / bad karma happens. God's love may be unconditional, but the state of grace of being close to god is not. Your reciprocal gain for doing the right thing is that your soul will go the right place, no matter the worldly harm you may suffer. This isn't exactly unique to Christianity either, as a brief review of any karmic system metastructure can show.
But the element of God isn't required for reciprocity either. One of the most successful non-theistic deontological ethic systems about duty, Confucianism, is explicitly reciprocal. It appeals to a 'natural' relationship rather than a deific basis, namely the relationship of fathers to sons, but this duty system is obligations on both parties, the failure of which on either part can justify action by the other. A son who lacks filial piety may be disciplined. A king who lacks virtue loses the mandate of heaven and may be replaced.
The non-abrahamic reciprocal duty also goes back from east to west to the foundational civilizing force of western antiquity, Rome. In Rome, the patron-client relationship wasn't a brief transactional relationship of bribes or business, but a fundamental social institution. Patrons provided support and benefits to their clients, from nepotistic favors to representing them in court or assisting in arranging marriages, and in turn the clients owed loyalty, respect, and support... so long as the Patron provided. But if the Patron didn't, then another, more worthy, Patron could be shifted too. This was a bedrock arrangement of not only rome itself, but everywhere Rome dominated, as this was the relationship deliberately pursued between Rome and its clients/allies/conquests/etc. And it was part of a broader mindset that didn't limit this to the secular, but the religious practices as well, where Roman polytheism was part of a reciprocal 'if we don't show piety we will be punished' leading to 'show piety for divine favor' paradigm.
All of these duty traditions far, far, far predate any contemporary notion of 'rights-based mindset.' The Jews were in covenant long before millennia before any enlightenment philosophers were quibling over human rights. The enlightenment built from the corpse of the Roman reciprocity. The Confusicians and the Hindus and more didn't need their example to figure out their own thing.
Duty-based ethic systems are highly reciprocal.
Crowstep
3hr ago
Without doxxing myself too much, a friend of mine recently witnessed a hostage situation in his building, with a particular lowlife slashing his girlfriend across the face and threatening to kill her baby.
The kicker, this guy was the baby's father, and the third child the mother had had with him.
Admittedly, this was an underclass woman, so not exactly the heiress and Jeremy Meeks.
My explanation is just that same women are hybristophiles, just like some guys are into feet or whatever.
DradisPing
3hr ago
There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s.
"According to Hoffenberg, it was Robert Maxwell who first introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s."
It's hard to establish exact dates for things this far out, but at a minimum we know that Epstein was dating Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine around the time of his death. It's more likely than not that they knew each other.
It's also notable that the headmaster at the Dalton School while Epstein worked there was Donald Barr. Barr worked for the OSS (CIA precursor) during WWII and was also former AG Bill Barr's father.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
3hr ago
It would redistribute from “all consumers” to “lower / middle class”, because more competitive lower wage job openings would have a domino effect in that whole class but not above it. In effect, it redistributes from rich to poor and middle class. There’s a cut-off, because our professional classes seldom consider managing a retail store or something instead of entering finance or law. But the retail store manager had considered being a teacher, the teacher had considered working in hospitality, the […] down to agricultural workers. Any small scale model you imagine would show this effect. The same happened with the peasantry after the plague, when the number of agricultural workers decreased so they could compete for wages, but there was a social cut-off preventing nobles and traders from ever considering any work beneath their social level.
The eminent refused to take on menial roles, not because they could not perform these “unskilled” tasks, but because to do so would be unworthy of their social rank, and it was unthinkable to abandon that social and labor hierarchy. Farm work was peasant work, whether performed by serfs bound to a particular manor, tenant farmers or wage laborers hired by the year or the season. But the staggering mortality of the Black Death reduced this previously sufficient peasant population sharply enough to create a severe labor shortage.
This is because we have an enormous amount of wealth “stuck” in the upper class. You can unstuck it by making them pay more for things, sending the payments to those poorer. There was a brief period where this was done with programmers during the dot com boom, but now there is an excess of domestic programmers and also they are importing overseas semi-slave labor.
your argument implies that minimum wage increases are a pure upside policy
If you have too many workers it would leave many unemployed. Hence the whole “deport 22 million and stop letting more in”.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
That you might not get jack shit in return and you do it anyway, because it's your duty.
"Reciprocation" doesn't mean you, personally, get something out of it, it means the person has duties of their own.
2rafa
3hr ago
We are talking about an immensely wealthy and connected woman, who according to this allegation was personally spending hours each day manually reposting links across Reddit to farm karma. This while being a socialite and running an ocean conservation foundation and falling in love (twice) with younger men and staying close to her family and doing various other things - including hanging out with Epstein.
Yes, it is implausible. If it was a Mossad or other intelligence operation she (a socialite who knew many powerful people, the ‘face’) wouldn’t be anywhere near the online cyber-ops people running online influence operations. Many people knew her during the relevant period, has anybody remarked that she was on Reddit every 5 minutes? Would Mossad have her set up her account under her real last name? It’s not tenuous at all, even if it’s so stupid as to be so ridiculous that it wouldn’t arouse suspicion (which of course it did anyway) there would be no reason to do it.
All of which is to say that if she was behind the account (which I consider extremely unlikely but not impossible) it was not an intelligence operation but a weird hobby for a middle aged woman. The linked post discussing the sharing of links about case-related things is also extremely disingenuous given how prolific a poster the account was.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4hr ago
Eh. That's a statement that would not be so easy to prove - examples of the sort of slippery slopes that are enabled by encouraging the sharing of such "human reactions", and what sort of communities form at their bottom, abound (as the advantage gained by exhibiting the "reactions" is so strong that nobody is going to leave that $5 on the ground in the long run), while if discouraging it is in fact a bad thing, this badness must be rather subtle.
I didn't suggest that it's a "nuclear bomb" in the sense of one instance of it being immediately massively destructive (though it certainly can be; in the phpBB era, I have once seen a fairly major community ripped apart by what was, impressively enough, one sharing of such a "human reaction" by a guy's sockpuppet account LARPing as a Japanese half-sister (a critical mass of people including staff really wanted to believe).)
FistfullOfCrows
4hr ago
I mean, tbh if I were a japanese women I'd probably be into Yakuza dudes, you get this guy that has power and influence and respect. I can imagine why they like em so much.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4hr ago
Turok makes the mistake of then coming to this forum of actual thoughtful people and assuming the conservatives here need to answer for the worst Trumpists the engineers of X can serve. The conservatives here don't recognize themselves in the criticisms he levels at them and drama ensues.
I am not a newcomer to the SSC sphere, I've been posting on ACX and DSL for years, and I've won DSL's Diadochus award for my posts twice. (I'm also currently banned from both places.) I'm not attributing the stupidity of Twitter to this place, I'm just reading what people here write, like coffee_enjoyer:
Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf. Picking fruit is so Edenic that it’s the first recorded activity of humanity. In what world would “picking fruit” be pathetic? I think you are having trouble dissociating the image you have of these things now, with what they would look like if employers didn’t have a semi-slave class. There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people. They work quite hard, then they drink in the evenings and dance and fuck and make music and so on. This is exactly what agricultural work was for nearly all of history. Not for the slaves, of course, but for the non-enslaved.
This, by the way, is what I mean by "poverty fetishism" and "third worldism."
Clementine
4hr ago
You can’t sustain such systems long term.
Lots of duty based systems eg confucianism lasted long term. I'm not sure how well adapted they are to modern day life, where a lot of the scaffolding¹ that helps maintain the systems is crumbling. But these systems usually specifically have moral parables about people behaving virtuously — dutifully — even when they're reciprocated not just with nothing but with active ingratitude and disrespect.
¹ things like belief in a god who will reward you for virtuous behavior if you're not rewarded by the beneficiary here, stronger community bonds, staying in the same place for decades or centuries so that having a good reputation meant more than it does today, etc.
Corvos
4hr ago
My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that there was no actual pedophilia on Epstein’s island of the form that give people nightmares.
Forgive me for being lurid but I would have thought that if Epstein were deliberately luring in pedos there would be more 13-year-olds and 8-year-olds and fewer ‘haha she’s 17 years and 11 months old, pay up or I tell the police’ girls.
I can absolutely believe that Epstein found such entrapment to be a useful extra string in his bow but I doubt he was specifically advertising it as pedo paradise.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4hr ago
slaves beat out sharecroppers
Assumes facts not in evidence.
You can tell yourself that we're all chuds
Not chuds. White collar guys, but IMO you've melted your brain with a political ideology that is all about justifying, sanewashing, and whataboutisming the views of the catturds of the world, in a parallel to how middle-class wokes justify, sanewash, and whatabout the dysfunction of the underclass.
The real reason is that blaming the Jews is always popular, but Mossad in this case makes it easy by being an intelligence agency with plausible motive, means, opportunity, and most of all enough competence that it wouldn't leak.
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