domain:cspicenter.com
DradisPing
6hr 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
☕️
6hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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.
We need to get to the bottom of this. Were there any pedophiles in the pedophile cabal, or was it wholly infiltrated by blackmailers with no authentic dedication to pedophilia at all?
Is there any gold in Fort Knox?
No, I mean I used to have a duty-based mindset and I pulled myself partially out of it by noticing that people who are very interested in my duties towards them (personally or in a wider sphere) are often uninterested in any duties they might have to me, or regard their traditional duties as historical oppression now thankfully abandoned.
One must have both. Otherwise it’s just playing cooperate with defect-bot.
Don’t get me wrong, I know what you’re getting at. I’m just saying that, long-term, people have to feel that their duties broadly even out. It doesn’t have to be literal ‘I will give you X if you perform Y duty’ but ultimately you have to persuade people, generation by generation anew, that your conception of duty and virtue is a valid one they should follow.
I would say that a big part of the decline in duty you mention is both sexes observing, in different times and at different ways, that they seemed to be being taken advantage of. You can’t sustain such systems long term.
sohois
7hr ago
Assuming Epstein didn't kill himself, why does it have to be Mossad or another intelligence agency that did it? All kinds of powerful people used his jet and were possibly involved in paedophilia through him, there are hundreds of people with motive and means. One of his more high profile connections was the 4th in line for the British crown, is it hard to imagine such people wouldn't be able to arrange a death?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8hr ago
· Edited 7hr ago
Eh, if that post is the meat of the allegations, I would quite strongly lean towards it being a coincidence.
The evidence seems to boil down to:
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Alignment of gaps in posting with two big events in Ghislaine Maxwell's life. Just two events? Surely a person this public and active will have had more than two known events during which they could not have been on Reddit. Did the internet sleuths check for that? Why no mention? Seems like the potential for cherry-picking is great.
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The reddit user posted pro-pedophilia dogwhistles. Pedophilia absolutely mindkills normies, so it's not surprising they overindex on this (and preferring world models in which your enemies are a small number of individuals with many aliases is a curiously universal tendency: see the standard 4chan argument where all the disagreeing posts in a thread are insinuated to be by the same person, or more recently organised as a raid by some discord), but this in isolation is actually a fairy weak Bayesian signal considering that Reddit powermods are a famously degenerate bunch. Also, wasn't the narrative about Ghislaine Maxwell that she looked more like a case of someone who would (for whatever reason) do anything for Epstein, than like a proactive pedophile?
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The username.
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The reddit user stopped posting after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest. From what I understand, this happened well after the Reddit user started being dogpiled on the suspicion of being Ghislaine Maxwell; it is plausible enough that the Reddit user abandoned their account from the pressure (I imagine they were getting smothered in loads of hatemail, and there were probably some e-bloodhounds on the case who would have gotten to their personal email, phone number, address etc.).
Against this, we have:
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The low base probability.
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The extra low base probability that an active, put-together socialite would have the time and motivation to be a Reddit powermod. Again, Reddit mods are a famously low-human-capital bunch; is the amount of energy the job takes even compatible with normal functioning?
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The Reddit user, per the screenshots in your post, seems to have primarily posted tech and privacy activism news. This alone codes so heavily male that, if I saw it on some aggregator blog being linked from HN with a female name attached, I would pull the "I bet this person is a transwoman" card. (Fun game to play with tech blogs.) Am I supposed to believe that, on top of being a rich socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell also was a one-in-a-million unicorn nerd girl with male self-actualization patterns who is into privacy and free speech rights?
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All the other evidence that one would expect to be found under such a level of scrutiny but is conspicuously absent. Did the Reddit user ever insinuate insider knowledge of finance or high society, which Maxwell would have had? Reddit's status economy places a high value on "I have this uncle who has real insider information so let me explain to you plebs". Would the powermod have foregone this opportunity? What about the absolute standard things OSINTers do such as trying to infer time zones from posting patterns? Are we to believe that Maxwell had perfect opsec about this while being so conspicuously trash about other things?
In the end, "Epstein's manic pixie also secretly controlled Reddit and used it to spread hypnotic pedo propaganda" seems too much like the sort of appealing but unrealistic narrative that people with main character syndrome would fall for (like, "everyone's political archenemy once slighted me by deleting my edgy post on /r/offmychest; this is personal"), plus the QAnon tendency of yearning for the legible tropes of cartoon villains, and then confirmation bias would do the rest.
The thing is, I think your argument is completely plausible and I allow for it in (2). Epstein exploited Wexner, but Wexner was and is a committed Zionist and was long close to the WJC and Lauder, who in turn were and are clearly very well connected in Israel, particularly the center and center left. If someone in Wexner, Lauder or Barak’s orbit (including Israeli intelligence) asked for a favor, an introduction, or information Epstein had acquired, there is every chance Epstein would have done it as you say on an ad-hoc basis, probably not for money but for influence and favor trading (useful given his sexual proclivities had put him under investigation from the mid-1990s).
It’s also obviously, clearly true that Epstein had powerful friends who ensured he was given a sweetheart deal in the early 2000s. They may have been ‘intelligence’, they may just have been very well connected Wall Street people who were close to the Bush administration for whom ‘belongs to intelligence’ was a convenient smoke screen for more naked corruption and favor trading (I think this is more likely; telling Acosta Epstein is intelligence is more likely to stop an investigation than telling him a top donor is friends with him). You don’t need Mossad to frustrate an investigation if you’re friends with a former president and very close to leading GOP donors, which Epstein was.
But crucially, this is all very different to the allegation, made explicitly by Tucker, that Israel and Mossad were behind his immense wealth and also behind a sex-trafficking elite kompromat operation. It is more likely that Epstein was a pervert who preyed on teenage girls (often from poorer backgrounds, in NYC, West Palm Beach, and via modelling world connections he had made through Wexner and the 1980s New York fashion scene from Eastern Europe, and before that his former and before that current students) his whole adult life. As he grew in wealth and power, he sometimes offered girls he was seeing to business associates, not as kompromat but as sweeteners for deals and friendship (Meister, Wexner’s ex-insurance man who introduced Epstein to him and regrets it, explicitly says that Epstein showed up to his house once with models and offered them to him).
Eventually, he used his seduction (likely romantic) of Wexner to catapult himself into the top echelon of NYC wealth, met Maxwell, fresh into exile after the scandal around the collapse of her father’s business, and joined the global elite. At this point he began to attract the attention of people for whom knowing what that elite is doing and thinking was and is important, and as he became aware of his victims reporting him more as the 1990s went on (before then, between ~1965 and 1990 or so no cops would have taken it seriously at all, but the early 90s saw the emergence of third-wave consent based feminism, modern workplace harassment guidance and law) he may have played those connections to try to stay clear of jail.
But no, I don’t think Mossad got a failed high school teacher a job at Bear Stearns. I don’t think they gave a billion dollars to a washed up, fired trader who was unhireable by any legitimate Wall Street firm because he violated securities law in the hope that he would Gatsby his way into the world’s elite and set up a sex trafficking blackmail operation.
I feel like I'm the only person in existence who doesn't like Cowboy Bebop.
It's a very vibey show but it's all aesthetics, the characters and their motivations are about as deep as a puddle, and the episode-to-episode plots make very little logical sense and feel like they were all made up on the spot with a lot of technobabble to cover up the sheer lack of effort put into any of the plotting or worldbuilding. I watched many episodes and never got the sense that it was a coherent world with rules that had to be adhered to at all. Incoherent ass-pulling constitutes a significant portion of how most of the plots in each episode actually progress, and it's really hard to be invested in the episodic narratives when some deus ex machina can be invoked at literally any time to turn the plot on its head. The overarching reaction I had to most episodes was "This is happening now, I guess". Honky Tonk Women is an early example of an episode that's just needlessly contrived and really only exists because of a lot of irrationality and a one-in-a-million coincidence without which the plot would not happen.
They also try to pull emotional scenes at the end of most episodes that don't hit IMO because they spent too little time fleshing out the characters; that moment in Asteroid Blues when it's revealed that Asimov and Katerina won't make it to Mars is clearly supposed to be a pensive one, but you've spent all of 15 minutes with them at that point and so the emotional scene feels unearned. Also seriously, does anyone actually like Faye Valentine? She's a selfish, arrogant, lazy individual who often leeches off the rest of the Bebop without so much as a show of gratitude, with a bad habit of gambling all her money away.
Visually, aurally, it's a great experience; the whole atmosphere is immaculate. But you need more than that to carry a show IMO, and animes almost always fall apart on plotting and characterisation for me (Japanese narrative writing generally rarely delivers on these fronts). Ghost In The Shell is another great example of a classic anime with fantastic art direction crippled by a wafer-thin narrative, which purports to be way more than it actually is given that it has basically nothing much to say on the subjects of consciousness and AI it touches on (what it does say is vague and bordering on incoherent). This banger of an intro sequence deserved so much better.
Pigeon
coo coo
8hr ago
This is often not the case and is counterintuitive for many.
I recall when I was a student, an ICU consultant asked us to guess whether most people who go to ICU die from the initial resuscitation or escalation of intensive treatment; the time during of intensive treatment; or the time when we try to step down patients from intensive care; he was impressed at the few of us who guessed the last. Turns out we’re quite good at maintaining signs of life with technology, even as we are helpless to fix an otherwise nonviable body — at least if you’re stable enough to get into ICU and didn’t have your chest caved in by a bus.
This probably makes more sense once you try to guess about how often ICU doctors have to have difficult family meetings with patients’ families about withdrawing life support, versus patients dying while on life support.
Browser
8hr ago
I feel also lack of permissible targets for aggression within the hugbox makes for super performative expression directed towards those allowed. If you're a modern liberal you're only really allowed to express hatred or violent intentionality towards MAGA or transphobes.
Same way I feel if Trump walked into the middle of one of the Floyd riots he'd likely be significantly more at risk of spontaneous crowd violence than if Joe Biden was at Jan 6
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
9hr ago
I feel like I have hit my gaming retirement, not bothering to play anything other than a new eroge. Not even my digital fast got me playing again.
Chikan Undercover Agent Rina is good, though. It's not yet another RPGM or Ren'Py VN, it's an actual roguelite game with actual mechanics. You control the eponymous sexy police agent who has to detect and arrest Japanese train perverts while resisting their molestation attempts. Get to the end of the line, defeat the boss, repeat three more times to win.
Clementine
9hr ago
Duty without reciprocation is just exploitation.
No, that's precisely the kind of rights-based mindset that I'm describing as not being duty-based.
Duty without reciprocation isn't exploitation, it's virtue. That's the entire point of duty-based thinking. That you might not get jack shit in return and you do it anyway, because it's your duty. The entire concept is of having things you do simply because you are supposed to, not for other incentives.
It is, admittedly, a very traditional mindset. But it's a fundamental lynchpin to how the whole thing holds together.
Hieronymus
9hr ago
I mean, I agree. It was weird. But looking back on it, it’s kind of adorable nonetheless.
Corvos
9hr ago
It’s also the case that once the just cause has triumphed for a couple of generations it will look a lot less just.
After a while, the people in charge aren’t just any more, they’re incurious conformists upholding a system whose virtues they no longer understand. Social parasites get in at the cracks. The various downstream issues the just cause creates at scale are papered over to prevent exposure.
Corvos
10hr ago
The thing is, you have to offer the rights/privileges if you’re going to ask for the duty. Duty without reciprocation is just exploitation.
What I’ve found is that due to inertia a lot of people expect traditional duties from men: chivalry, serving women first at meals, paying for and organising dates, being the breadwinner when necessary, child support, a certain level of strength and stoicism and respect.
But they aren’t willing to put up the traditional privileges: obedience and respect from the wife and the children.
For marriage, I don’t everyone understands and agrees on what they’re supposed to get out of it. People are constantly negotiating their wants and expectations and they don’t feel comfortable with the idea of just doing their duty because they aren’t sure what they’re going to get back from it all.
Why do slaves pick cotton? It's obvious that they don't want to, and neither do white sharecroppers: but only the latter have the skills to do better jobs.
Answer: because slaves beat out sharecroppers because THEY HAVE A COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE. THEIR LABOR IS CHEAPER. IT IS LITERALLY FREE.
YOU CANNOT COMPETE WITH FREE.
Do you know why American workers are paid more? It's because their aggregate productivity is higher. And because of this, the basket of goods they have to purchase to live makes WORKING AT SLAVE WAGES ECONOMICALLY UNTENABLE.
IF SOMEONE CAN WORK AT A TENTH OF YOUR WAGES, IT IS THE SAME THING AS COMPETING WITH FREE.
You know who picked the fruit before the influx of illegal immigrants? AMERICANS! Very poor Americans, but your countrymen (I'm assuming you are American). That an entire industry is sustained by the systematic violation of immigration law is no mere accident or economic inevitability. The only reason this perverse status quo exists is for the profit margins of corporations and the electoral schemes of bourgoise liberals.
Going back to having one's food picked by one's countrymen isn't the end of the world. The job isn't pleasant. But if it paid a livable wage, then Americans would do it. Americans will do many unpleasant things for the right kind of money. Just not for the pittance given to illegal aliens.
No doubt you have some sort of smart alecky answer to this post already prepared, but I will tell you now that you're not fooling anyone. You're being ratioed (a term that as a twitter addict, you are no doubt familiar with) into the ground because your arguments are bad. Whatever you're thinking you're gaining by pretending to be retarded is diminished by the fool you are making of yourself. Then, of course, is the retreat into sour grapes. You can tell yourself that we're all chuds and we're ganging up on you, that we're all woke rights no better than the ones on the left.
That isn't the case either. But believe what you want. It's a free country. People also believe in lizardmen and astrology. You do you.
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.
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