domain:themotte.org
Rov_Scam
6hr ago
My take on the whole Epstein thing:
I've posted here on several occasions arguing that anyone who knows anything at all about prisons would know that most of the Epstein murder conspiracies would be impossible without cooperation from practically the entire Department of Corrections. I'm disinclined to make those arguments in detail again, so suffice it to say that I think Epstein's death was clearly a suicide. One other reason for this is that it makes sense: He lived a life of wealth and privilege and was about to spend the rest of his life in prison. He achieved a notoriety that would make it difficult for him to lead a normal life even if eventually released. He had already been on suicide watch. His life was already over, and he finished the job. Even if he had dirt on people it would be pointless to use. No prosecutor could have offered him a reduced sentence for it at that point, and in any event, that's not the way ratting people out works. Epstein was the ringleader; no DA is giving a mob boss a deal to rat out soldiers whom he ordered to murder people, and no US Attorney is pleading down a sex trafficking charge in exchange for uncorroborated information about a rape that happened decades ago, especially considering the source of that information.
That out of the way, it also seems unlikely that Epstein was actively pimping out the girls the way it's has been implied in the media. Over 100 girls have come forward, and only a few have claimed they had sex with anyone other than Epstein. You'd think that with how often Bill Clinton's name has been thrown around at least one person would name him, but no one has. You'd think with how close Trump is to the whole thing someone would have made a credible accusation, but all we have is a Jane Doe lawsuit that nobody took seriously, even in a media environment that would use almost anything as ammunition against Trump. The allegations are so incredible, it's not clear that a real person is behind the anonym. What seems likely is that Epstein was using his wealth to attract underprivileged girls and runaways, and keeping them as a sort of personal harem. It doesn't seem likely that he was running a brothel to hold wild sex parties for the rich and famous.
The upshot is that I think Trump is actually being honest about this. There are no Epstein Files, at least not the kinds of files that the conspiracy theorists assume exist, i.e. unequivocal records of certain powerful people engaging in sex acts with trafficked minors. I do, however, think it's likely that there are some records that don't mean anything that could be seized on by conspiracy theorists as "evidence". Stuff like evidence that Trump visited Epstein's island, or that one of Epstein's girls had appeared in a Trump-related beauty pageant, or something like that that doesn't really mean anything but doesn't require too much of an imagination to lead to the conclusion that Trump was either partaking in sex with Epstein's girls or complicit in some kind of business arrangement. If nothing else, it seems likely that Trump's name came up often enough in the investigation that it will turn into a lot of smoke Trump doesn't want to have to deal with.
So that's my take. The question I have, though, is why Trump proceeded the way he did. He had to have known that either no "Epstein files" existed, or that if they did exist his name was likely to come up a little more often than he'd be comfortable with. I know politicians make campaign promises they can't possibly keep all the time, but why even talk about this? Especially, why talk about it after you've been elected and Epstein is out of the news? Is Pam Bondi really stupid enough that she'd go out on a limb like this before she'd spoken to the president about it and before she had reviewed the files herself? It seems that if a journalist asked about the Epstein files it would be easy for her to say that it wasn't an active investigation and she accordingly didn't know anything about it, or that they'd start looking into it when DOJ priorities allowed, or whatever. Not that that really mattered, because nobody cared at the time. Even after Elon said something about it, it disappeared from the news within days.
The Trump administration could have just let this one die, but instead they had to make the unforced error of issuing an official statement that the files didn't exist. What the hell were they thinking? And now all the boneheaded statements made in the past implying its existence come back to bite them. And Trump keeps making matters worse by making fun of the people who are calling for their release, and saying he may release some of them (i.e. the ones that don't implicate him), and going back to denying their existence. And now Republicans aren't even sure how to handle it.
The other day, Ro Khanna (possibly the slickest Democrat in the House) tried to slip an amendment into the crypto bill calling for a House vote on the release of the files. It was blocked, with only one Republican on the Rules Committee voting for it, but the die is cast. You can bet your bottom dollar that an Epstein Files amendment is going into every piece of GOP-sponsored legislation from now until the end of the term. This is going to keep coming up, at least until the Republicans break ranks from Trump. It's a win-win for Democrats. This is much better than if Biden had just released the files himself. If Trump were in them and Biden released them during the election season, it would have been seen by the Trump base as fake news and more lawfare the Dmocrats are throwing out there to rescue a dying campaign. Now that the onus is on Trump, it looks different. Going into the midterms, every GOP rep in a competitive district is going to have to wonder whether they get primaried for defying Trump or primaried for caving on the Epstein thing. They're going to be getting a lot of calls.
Having had time to think about this, I'm leaning towards nothing existing at all. Even if Trump was somehow implicated, it's hard to see how it could do him real damage considering how eager his base is to buy his explanations. He'd just say that he released it because it didn't implicate him, and that would be it. The story would blow over in a week. But if there's nothing to release, that's a problem. He can't possibly deliver, and all the while it will look like he's hiding something. I don't know how this ends, since we're in uncharted waters here, but I suspect it will be entertaining.
Not even exaggerating, I've strongly considered making up some third-date ideas that require both parties to spend extended time away from their phones, or at least without internet access on them.
Or failing that, just carrying around a signal jammer.
Convincing a woman to give up a their smartphone will probably go as well as asking them to cut off a finger, but maybe one can ween them off the most harmful apps and restrict them to just messaging friends and sharing photos to a site that doesn't allow viewers to interact directly.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
6hr ago
any consequences are going to happen even for the most vilest shit imaginable
People will not be punished for imaginary crimes.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
Knock your girlfriend out, drag her to a campsite outside cell coverage, tell her it's surrounded with bears (and hope she ends up on the right side of the man/bear question), and after she recovers her focus and executive functions, drag her to church?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
To summarize:
@faceh contended that there were about one million women who met the criteria he considered marriagable: Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified. Not ‘obese.’ Not a mother already. No ‘acute’ mental illness. No STI. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30. Therefore there aren't enough good women for all the men.
I countered that there were approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all the specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent. Therefore, there aren't nearly enough good men for even that small number of women.
I picked 65k because it's about what you make as a Cop/Teacher, or a forklift operator at a local warehouse that's always putting up billboards for workers if you pick up a little overtime.
2rafa
6hr ago
This is only partially true. Excepting some URM (who are usually still in the 98th+ percentile for their demographic and so usually still would have studied very hard) and some athletes (who again are usually still 95th percentile plus academically), almost everyone who gets into Harvard in 2025 did work to tiger-mom levels. Sure, a few mega-donors’ kids with parents on the board of trustees make it in (although you’d be surprised at how many of them work very hard too), and there might be a handful of geniuses who get to international math olympiad champion status and perfect SAT and GPA without ever trying who make it too, but they’re in the small minority.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
6hr ago
And currently the newest Sudanese civil war has displaced around 16 million people and created 4 million refugees, yet I don't see them coming here.
WhiningCoil
6hr ago
I don't think you understand. In order to work at a Fairfax, VA McDonalds, you need to speak spanish in order to communicate with the rest of the staff. They literally won't hire you.
Well, that's not 100% true. I saw a single white teenager working at a Burger King around 2009 in Reston, VA. His coworkers were laughing and carrying on during the lunch rush flipping burgers, and he was all alone, head down, working the fry machine. Couldn't understand anything anyone was saying around him. One of the most depressing things I'd ever seen in my life.
Last time I was in Loudoun County, 2015-ish you could still find entry level work as a native English speaker. The Roy Rogers in Leesburg was staffed entirely by very polite local highschoolers. That may have changed in the last 10 years though.
JarJarJedi
6hr ago
Or maybe the inferior people just want to know what the frick is going on up there and is there any chance anybody there is listening and any consequences are going to happen even for the most vilest shit imaginable. And Trump isn't very interested in it because he's already up there, and figuring out what was going on when he wasn't is much less interesting than using the time he is for whatever he wants to. You can call it "inferiority complex" but there was a time when it was called "representative democracy". A long time ago, in a place far, far away... Of course, a lot of people - it looks like including you - think that only some people deserve to be represented, smart, reasonable, decent people that agree with you. And all those other people certainly shouldn't get anywhere near it. They are too dumb and wrong for that.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
6hr ago
Scott Greer has a good article on this:
This issue is important to much of the Right due to the belief in “Critical Pedo Theory.” This notion imagines that the world is ruled by a pedophile cabal and “systemic pedophilia” is inherent to the current order. These elite pedos are evil by nature, which is why they use space lasers to cause forest fires and wield their weather machine against red states. These right-wingers hoped Trump would battle the cabal as president. QAnoners thought he did so in his first term, clinging to fake news stories about the admin secretly arresting and executing prominent child molesters.
The Epstein announcement came as a shock. Here’s their leader telling them that a core element of their worldview isn’t true. Rather than follow Trump’s advice and move on, they’re up in arms, with some threatening to ditch MAGA altogether. It illustrates how fundamental CPT is to a large cohort of conservatives. Trump bombing Iran and implying he may be open to some form of amnesty didn’t elicit anywhere near this kind of backlash from his base. For a significant number of Trump voters, the pedo cabal matters more than anything else.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6hr ago
have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
There's been some controversy over how AI has impacted top level Chess and Go, but my impression is that top players of those games still find them enjoyable and worthwhile, even though many hours of AI study are required to succeed at the top professional level in both games now.
I play a lot of fighting games, which for the most part only get better and more fun as you get deeper into the meta. Learning the meta gives you more tools and options to integrate into your gameplay, but because the game has inherently unpredictable elements (twitch reactions, making reads on your opponent, etc), they always stay fresh and it's impossible to fully "solve" them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
The things Asians are having their kids do aren't really things that help them grow or learn, they're just a box checking exercise to help them get into college.
The question of how you get into the ivy league is entirely determined by what admissions officers decide gets you into the ivy league. Given that most of the elite colleges have shown themselves vulnerable to political bullying, it would be fairly easy for the government to order them to favor candidates who had part-time or summer jobs over candidates who didn't. This would benefit everyone.
Summer jobs are good for kids. They build independence. They put them into hierarchies that are different from the ones they are used to at home or in school. They get them out of the house and help them meet people. They are capital-G Good.
JarJarJedi
6hr ago
the best private schools, institutions and cultural guidance western civilization could provide.
If he best schools and institutions can provide is something like this - which is the default setting in many elite institutions nowadays - then one shouldn't be surprised about the results of it. If you spent so much effort convincing people Western values are evil and Westen civilization needs to be torn down for its past sins - it wouldn't be too strange for people to internalize it and reject those values?
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
It does not hit your credit score.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
6hr ago
I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.
They could get jobs, unemployment rate is very low.
WhiningCoil
6hr ago
Man, I sincerely hope you don't strike out on an app for chubby chasers. Because if fat chicks have so much brainrot they are shooting you down 99.99% of the time, I'm not sure I want to see the creature you become.
HMK2
6hr ago
In my home area, Northern Virginia, all the jobs that teens used to do - fast food, lawnmowing, child care - are now done by adult Central American immigrants. It's been that way for thirty years or so!
I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.
WhiningCoil
6hr ago
This is a long story, but I'm getting to a point, I swear.
A buddy of mine in college converted to Mormonism to date a girl. He was a character, but this story is going to be winding enough without getting into that. One day we went over to his girlfriend's house to meet before we all left to go see Lord of the Rings in theaters. I forget which one, maybe Fellowship. It doesn't matter.
It's around Christmas time, and this huge Mormon family is bursting at the seems with wholesome energy. Every little girl wants to show you want they've been baking with their mother. Every little boy wants to show you their somersault or some trick. The house is decorated, the Christmas tree is up, good times. So me and a buddy of mine are awkwardly sitting in the living room, not really sure what to do or say because this is not a vibe we grew up with. In addition to our usual awkwardness I might add. And two of these kids are throwing a little toy football closer and closer to the Christmas tree. My buddy and I, we don't say anything, but we're looking at each other with a panicked expression that needs no words. We are both thinking, if that ball actually hits that tree, a kid is gonna die in front of us.
Anyways, ball hits the tree, ornaments fall, train doing loops around the base falls over aaaaaaaand.... nothing. Dad chuckles, asks them to take it outside, life carries on like nothing ever happened. The boys clean up the mess they made and go throw the ball around outside. After my buddy and I piled into the car to go see the movie once everyone had arrived, we talked about how Christmas was at our homes growing up. How the house was transformed into a veritable museum of Christmas, and our mothers would fly into a violent rage if they so much as heard an ornament jingle due to a single heavy step within 20 feet of the tree. And it slowly dawned on us, that we were the fucked up ones. That family we just visited, they were the happy well adjusted ones.
It sucks realizing in your 20's that you were raised wrong. And not just "could have done better, but basically OK", but fundamentally the opposite of how you should have been raised. With all your intuitions about family dynamics and how to view and treat loved ones horrifically and possibly permanently miswired. It sucks watching the increasingly small demographic of well adjusted, family oriented peers you may have politely filtering you out and pairing off. It sucks getting older and realizing, you've been left behind with the other rejects, and now you've got to find the least damaged item in the returns bin to try to build a life with, knowing full well that's all you are to someone else as well.
I have no fucking clue how I did it. I have no fucking clue how anyone else is expected to do it today, except that it seems even more impossible, and the odds even more remote. But it sucks seeing all the "good ones" taken, and it hurts even worse realizing that goes for you too.
gattsuru
6hr ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Saying one thing, then saying another, does not actually tie these things to each other. There was an entire and recent court case at SCOTUS specifically about how Harvard does not select the makeup of its student body from mere academic records or test scores, and just like New York's carry permit rates post-Bruen, Harvard has been hard and heavy at defying SFFA.
Sending your kid to put eighteen hours a day into study over their summer vacation will not get them to Harvard. Pushing them to have a hundred very marketable extracurriculars, which is another part of the equation here and goes very overlooked by the Compass, also won't. I think you already know that.
John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
It's a little funny that only 'mathematics' is the only part of that list that overlaps with the modern College Prep Uber Allies approach, and it's becoming an increasingly smaller portion of the focus. That's both the problem, and the kinda damning fault of this sort of rant. There's fair arguments about the tradeoff between the 50% chance of success at a mid-tier college and Mike Roweism, or about tradeoffs between education and work experience (so long as you don't flinch when anyone mentions what post-grad degrees do to total lifetime income). There are some less fair arguments where we compare college grads to non-college graduates and mumble whenever everyone mentions external variables, but are still worth knowing about.
Turning the debate into An Ivy League graduation specifically versus flipping burgers for a summer isn't just putting a thumb on the scales, it's throwing out any pretense of balanced evaluation.
faceh
6hr ago
Well, serious question.
How do you make God more interesting than or more impressive than whatever's happening in their smartphone?
You reminded me of that 10 day revival on a Christian College campus over two years back. Which was very interesting to see at the time, but nothing else seems to have come of it? How to maintain such a thing in the current era of extremely short attention spans.
thejdizzler
6hr ago
Okay bucko let's look at what Mr. Get Better Soon wrote and see if I really took it out of context.
What is a good job? It’s a job that pays you enough to afford your own apartment, own a car (unless you live in a place like NYC or SF where it’s impractical), and pay for an adult lifestyle—probably $70K at the low end, depending on the city. If you can afford your own place, congrats, you’re an adult man...until you can do this, you’re a boy. Men, as a rule, don’t have roommates.
This is the quote that I refer to and you and I cite. How reasonable is 70k? The median income after tax in 2020 was 64k, and data that I could find from 2016 from the census bureau suggests that cities on average had about a 4% higher household income than rural communities. So let's call the median income 66k in cities, and since men out-earn women, 70k actually does make sense.
The national average for a one bedroom is 1,713 a month, so you are indeed right that this fits with the suggested 70k income, leaving plenty of money for savings, car payments and discretionary spending.
Can you achieve these milestones on a lower salary? The first quintile is pretax earning 45k a year. In this scenario a single apartment is eating up more than 50% of your income, not to mention car payments. So possible, but not financially wise. So maybe we lower the bar and say that these income requirements are locking out around 25-30% of men out of the dating market. Point still stands.
Now what do I actually say about this advice:
Now I'm not saying that the advice I see from this guy is necessarily unhelpful for the individual: you will have more success if you earn more, aren't fat, and can hold a conversation. And historically some self-improvement was necessary to have for example, land to support your wife and future family.
Nowhere do I dismiss this advice as bad or non-actionable. In fact, some amount of wealth generation is and has always been necessary. This is the expectation. What you fail to engage with is my argument that I don't think the average man can meet these standards. It doesn't matter if the number is 70k or slightly lower, more and more men are being priced out of the market.
This also has fuck-all to do with my personal income situation. I don't make 70k now, but I will as soon as I finish my PhD. In terms of his other requirements, I think I'm okay too: certainly below 15% body fat, dress pretty well (although this could be improved easily), am well read, speak multiple languages and am quite social. What I'm critiquing is this attitude that you, Get Better Soon and other posters here that we can solve these issues merely by improving ourselves. I am not saying self-improvement is bad, nor that it won't increase your odds of success, I am saying that it is insufficient to deal with social decline, which is manifested in this issue and the others that I mention.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
6hr ago
I sometimes feel like I'm getting too far out there for thinking along these lines, but then I remember this scandal:
State supreme court justice resigns over pornographic email scandal
McCaffery is at least the fifth public employee – and the highest ranking – to lose his job over the email scandal, which grew out of an internal review by the attorney general’s office into how it handled the Jerry Sandusky child molestation investigation. The others, who all resigned, were the secretary of environmental protection, a lawyer in that agency, a state parole board member and a county prosecutor.
2nd Pennsylvania justice to resign over porn email scandal
I remember initial reporting indicating the emails might have had images far beyond simple pornography, but now I can't find sources. Kane also made allegations that US attorneys were involved, but I can't find that charges were ever filed or anyone resigned.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
7hr ago
I hate to be pithy, but the problem is that we have forgotten God. I'm serious.
As we lose our connection to the divine and to a personal sense of moral agency, and responsibility, our society can't help but fall apart like this. A religious revival is desperately needed.
The problem with systems is that they can be gamed in a way that takes the joy, the fun, and even the intellectual work out of it for everyone else. One of the reasons new multiplayer games are a lot more fun to play than old ones is that for the first few weeks after a game is released, or while it’s in beta, the nasty people, the min-maxers, the forum theorycrafters, have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta, increasingly of course because even the developers now design to it (see World of Warcraft’s designers building raids with the expectation that players will play the most meta builds, with all the most advantageous mods/addons). Why bother experimenting, playing, using your own intelligence when someone else who gamed the system with the ‘meta’ will curbstomp you for 1/10th the effort.
The problem with meritocracy is precisely that everyone except the underclass and the generational super rich is required to participate in it. Don’t, and you will be left behind. If you are a doctor and want your children to be doctors (an ancient professional right, just as the son of a blacksmith might become one), you will probably have to work them to the bone because they will be competing with every son and daughter of every sniveling, striving pauper who harbors the same ambition for their children.
Of course it shouldn’t be so. Let us reserve 75% of medical school places for the children of doctors. Perhaps 85%, even. Of course the child of an accountant should have it easier becoming one than some random person. AI changing all this stuff aside, it’s a perverse system that forces the children of good families into torturous over-education just to maintain their own standard of living.
A big part of the reason Americans voted for Trump is because we were tired of the rotten policies of the meritocracy. I wanted an heir. Those chosen because they tried so very hard at school failed their country.
Oh come on this is just getting silly now.
People have sex, and age. If that's a dealbreaker then you're basically just looking for an excuse to stay single at that point.
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