pedophile
From 1/6 one thing we have never been given any information on is the alleged pipe bomber. Zero. Nada. The only planned terrorist activities on that date.
I have no idea what happened here. Was it the CIA. A lone wolf Democrat activist trying to paint maga as terrorists? Some smart maga extremists crazy enough to do the strategy but smart enough to do it right?
person of interest https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-identified-person-interest-capitol-pipe-bomb-case-jan-10-2021
Conspiracies do hide in plain site. Eipstein being a pedophile and getting a sweet deal was well known. Hunter Biden laptop to a lesser extent.
The left also hasn’t tried to hammer the right on the issue of a pipe bomber being there. And the left often tried to play up things that weren’t done/known like Trumps covid disinfectant drink bleach thing, Ivermectin as dewormer, or the fine people hoax. Maybe it’s not enough of an edge case to get people to fight over it or the powers that be knew not to publicize it because if people looked into it more it would be bad.
Edit: I guess you could argue Russia/State Actor did it. Saw that America had gone crazy. And wanted to escalate. Could have their Michael Westen whose good enough to do it right without being caught.
Is a dollar on sale for 40ish cents? Talk me out of maxing out PredictIt contracts relating to Joe Biden, if you would please.
The numbers are super volatile, but right now, PI thinks Joe is 60c for becoming the Dem nominee, so "no" costs 40c. Now, this likely pays out upon the formal nomination at the convention, the final day of which is 45 days away, as the rules clarify that the replacement of the nominee prior to election day has no impact on resolution. But if the daggers are to come out, they really ought to come out before Joe formally nabs the nomination--otherwise you end up with total chaos and only 75 days to select a nominee, raise money, and campaign to the general public. Sure, a hot swap generates excitement, earned media, and a real chance to beat Trump, but if you're going to go that route, you reap way more of the rewards and less of the cost to do it asap.
It looks pretty impossible to me for the dems to let Biden run unopposed. Sure, one Dem rep thinks Trump will win and the sky won't fall, but everyone else is shouting from the rooftops that America will be doomed, and surely a large portion of these are true believers who will do all that they can to avert said Armageddon. Does anyone actually think Biden can beat Trump? He's down more than 3 points nationally, double that in battleground states; he's only getting older with ever more adverse scrutiny, which also shifts the focus away from Trump, which was really the only way to win, to make it a referendum on Trump's character, since his presidency itself is remembered fairly positively by the crucial independents; there is no end to Ukraine or Gaza; inflation is easing but nothing is actually getting cheaper, they're just getting pricier more slowly. Trump is so hated that there is a firm floor for his favorability to fall--what else can you throw at a man who's been called a felon, fraud, fascist, rapist, pedophile, insurrectionist, Russian plant, and democracy-destroyer?
So, if Biden can't win, and the Democratic Party thinks Trump must not win, then there is only one logical conclusion, which is Biden can't run, and so he won't be the nominee. Now, I understand the big money is outside of prediction markets. But I'm not smart enough to calculate the secondary effect orders to trade options on macroeconomics or individual stocks as they relate to who wins in November. Sticking strictly to the $850 limit per contract on PredictIt, then--
Tell me why I shouldn't max out Joe Biden "no" for being the dem nominee. The $850 limit at 40c will return 2.5x, minus 10% PI's cut and 5% withdrawal fee (partly diluted by credit card points) in less than two months. How could I lose? Why aren't you heading to PI yourself right now to claim your free money?
(I mean, I know the literal answer is somehow the Dems just ratify Joe's nomination in 45 days, but can even Dr. Strange with a time stone find such an implausible outcome?)
sliders1234
1yr ago
There is something I uniquely hate about using “radical wing” as a term. It’s just feels like you are implying they are crazy people.
In Europe the right is rising. But I don’t like calling them “radical”, they would be normies for most of history. Today’s neoliberal establishment of “open borders” were the radicals until about 1980. I feel like labeling something radical is just means to lazily call a side as not worth considering their ideas.
At some point all the political groups have been the establishment and in power. Even the Pride and a lesser extent the pedophiles found themselves in the establishment since 2020 but were far outside of it in 2000.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I love the Lovecraftian descriptions. "40% dead." "Not of this earth." "Unnatural gleam." "He did not blink at regular intervals."
It reminds me of the (sadly unfinished) ZHP novel Barron where Bai Den is this font of limitless evil power:
Mueller had warned of this possibility days ago, explaining that the Satanic rituals of the DNC and the international pedophile cabal would send psychic ripples across the entire world, blanketing the country in madness and shadow. The reality of that turned out to be far worse than Barron had imagined, a sensation of something gnawing at him, trying to eat him alive.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Asserting that homosexuals = pedophiles really requires evidence, not just asserting it because you really super believe it.
On the one hand, it's been months since your last ban. On the other hand, you now have a lot of warnings and bans stacked up and you've already been told that you're running out of warnings, and low effort shitting like this is pretty much all you do.
I'm giving you a 3-day ban and telling you knock it off with the naked culture warring.
2D3D
1yr ago
I am actually thinking of Jessica Yaniv and all the other pedophiles that claimed to be trans all while trying to gain access or actually perving on little girls. Its not straight male sexuality, its trans preferences and bigots should be ashamed of questioning the intention of trannies.
For me the fairly obvious point is that most modern trannies don't fucking bother to pass. They shotgun some clown makeup on and wear a dress, but put zero effort into waxing, dieting or otherwise trying to be women. If they actually looked like submissive and breedable femboys they'd get more acceptance, but modern western trannies are just ugly fatties claiming unverifiable special privilege.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
What exactly have you contributed to the discussion here?
We have Nazis and Holocaust Deniers and white nationalists and pedophiles and Repeal the 19th (and the 13th and 14th...) party members here, and people who really really fucking do not like them manage to refrain from posting "You suck and your arguments are bad" every time they post.
So far, this is not the "mind-blowing" politeness you promised, and this is about your last warning because I'm sick of seeing these low-effort potshots in the queue just because you can't control yourself.
Mewis
1yr ago
It's not obvious at all to me that Houllebecq was writing about the illegally young, or how quoting another author demonstrates that, or indeed how it demonstrates anything other than that it is, in fact, possible to write about pedophilia without being a pedophile yourself.
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
CSAM is one of the least rational areas of politics.
In the dark ages before the sexual revolution, there were all kinds of sexual deviants against whom upstanding, proper citizens could unite. Gays, interracial couples, unmarried women having sex, kinky people, people using birth control.
Today, most of these targets have been swept away by a big wave of sexual tolerance. Saying "it is wrong to have sex before marriage" makes you sound like a cringy old person.
However, we have also established that adults having sex with kids is bad because it causes severe psychological issues for the kids.
So pederasts and pedophiles become the lightning rod for most of these innate drives to police the sexual relations of their neighbors -- which did not magically disappear.
This is obviously a very emotional topic, and such topics often allow you to score big political wins. Under an evidence-based system, the focus would be on preventing the actual sexual abuse of children both by exclusive pedophiles and other men who act opportunistically. This would entail de-stigmatizing pedophiles who did not commit any sexual offenses with kids (which in turn would increase the odds of them willing to risk therapy, which would reduce the odds of them becoming child abusers) and trying to get the shared social environment of both perpetrators and victims to speak out if they suspect sexual abuse is going on.
CSAM would be treated like snuff videos. Commissioning a snuff video is commissioning a murder and should be punished as such, and paying for them should be a felony to discourage their production, and if you want you can also criminalize distribution and possession. But if half of your homicide department works on possession of snuff video cases, then I would argue that you have your priorities wrong -- most murders do not happen for the creation of snuff videos, nor does their consumption precede most murders. Fake snuff videos lack the thing which makes them immoral in the first place -- a victim. Even if you want to regulate horror movies, it would be a good idea to not simply classify them as snuff.
Cirrus
1yr ago
His personality is enough to ruin him. The Establishment wants defense in depth. It’s easier to defend your way of doing things when the Schelling point is based on personalities, rather than policies.
If the Establishment didn’t do everything it could to destroy Trump and make an example out of him, then there could be a future Trump who goes a bit further. Someone with Trump’s appeal but who could also seriously change policy and the way things are done.
It’s the same reason why progressives have ratcheted up the social movement lunacy to defend pedophiles (as MAPs) and transgenders. When all of the oxygen in the room is being sucked on these topics, it means that people aren’t challenging gay marriage (which was a controversial topic only 12 years ago). Gay marriage is effectively off-limits until the pedo-question is settled, so progressives have an incentive to waste people’s time on pedophiles so that they aren’t having to defend gays. Even though it’s a harder assignment defending pedophiles rather than gays.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
All of these are plausible depending on surrounding factors absent from the example. As written and inferring from base rates, and assuming some degree of mental illness on John's part, I'd think 1 is most likely, but 2 is fairly plausible, if we assume the mental illness is something along the lines of "pathological liar" that keeps him exaggerating even as it starts to fail to gain sympathy.
It could also be a more steelmanned version of 1, what if people do keep trying to kill him? Like, not these specific people at his work, he's still exaggerating about them, but what if it's other people? Maybe John lives in a really bad neighborhood and gets mugged once a week, barely escaping by throwing his wallet and running the other way. Maybe he has to fight tooth and nail and ends up in the hospital regularly badly wounded. Maybe it's not about John at all, it's just a really bad neighborhood and everyone who lives there gets mugged regularly, or maybe John looks like an easy target. But the repeated trauma makes him think it's a conspiracy and he's not smart enough to pick out the pattern: person in dark alley = mugger, person in office = friendly, and he just thinks all people have a 50-50 chance to attack him.
If we reduce his pattern-matching abilities even further, maybe he never actually gets mugged, but he keeps doing something stupid like climbing rusty fences and scratching himself, or drunk driving and getting in accidents that almost kill him, and generalizes that to people trying to kill him.
Or maybe he just watches too much TV and movies and people are trying to kill each other all the time (especially trying to kill the protagonist) and he thinks of himself as the protagonist, therefore people must be trying to kill him.
If instead, we increase his pattern-matching abilities, maybe he does regularly get mugged, or his friends and family members do, and he notices that most of the muggers in his bad neighborhood have a certain ethnicity, and so he becomes a racist. Or maybe he goes to the police to fix the issue but they don't take him seriously because he sounds like a paranoid nutjob (when he accuses the actual mugger and Alice from work in the middle of the same rant the police can't tell which one is real and which is exaggerated), then he becomes anti-cop, or anti-government, or anti-whoever is in charge of making the cops be so lax on crime and oh hey have you read this article about how such and such group is secretly controlling the government to be soft on crime or whatever?
Stepping out of the metaphor, which I think is somewhat of a weakman for this phenomenon, I think this simultaneously explains a large chunk of racists (in all directions), anti-religion, anti-capitalists, etc etc etc. Bad thing happens to person or to people that person knows, or hears from (sometimes signal boosted and exaggerated by the media, sometimes by word of mouth). There is a real pattern causing it to happen repeatedly, though sometimes it's a pattern as complicated as "The Entire Economy", it gets oversimplified, exaggerated, and then attributed to a particular group, and the people who believe this explanation become radical anti-that-group. It's a combination of paranoia and actual pattern recognition, because there usually is an actual legitimate instigating factor that is genuine Bayesian evidence against that group, it's just much weaker than would be needed to draw the exaggerated conclusions they come to. There ARE evil racist white men trying to keep minorities poor. There ARE worthless degenerate minorities who live on crime and welfare and contribute nothing to society. There ARE corrupt police officers abusing their authority. There ARE pedophiles in government jobs. There ARE Zionist supremacist Jews who want to control all of America and manipulate it into being pro-Israel. All you need is for someone to encounter some of these in real life, or evidence of them existing, and then the pattern matching can begin until it spirals out of control.
And some of these people will have genuinely convincing evidence on their side, by sheer random chance. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been mugged. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been unfairly harassed by police. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been stared at suspiciously by shopkeepers despite doing nothing wrong. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been laid off by a Jewish boss. They're going to look at the evidence they've seen with their own eyes and be unconvinced that it might be a coincidence. It doesn't seem like a coincidence, it seems super unlikely. If their life were admissible as a scientific paper it would reject the null hypothesis. p < 0.05. They're Jellybean people!
I think that's what a lot of this is. People who perceive patterns where there are none, people who pick out genuine patterns and misattribute them, and people who have coincidences happen to them that are rational evidence when viewed from their individual perspective but don't stand out when you adjust for multiple comparison tests.
plural
1yr ago
It absolutely is a leftist demand, but it only applies to things that aren't western. Anime style can only be attractive to people who are pedophiles. Therefore anyone attempting to be attractive in anime style is appealing to pedophiles. When I think back 10-20-30 years nobody would give a shit about this at all. Sailor Moon would be re-edited for American audiences now with more modest clothing and all sexual innuendo changed to say "pickles... .. ... farthead" or whatever they change many modern japanese translations to say.
Because it doesn't matter it's just a videogame or an anime and only children watch those and if you watch or play them you're a child and probably a pedophile if you enjoy anything not western.
This is a huge vibe I get from literally anyone trying to crusade against "underaged girls" being exploited in the videogames. Of course they'd never say that but every other aspect of their political and cultural bent is left, they just happen to also think that underage anime girls presents some kind of major moral issue because they're fighting pedophiles.
Not many people gave a shit about trying to censor American Beauty and those that did certainly aren't the same people that give a shit about a 100% more tame anime visual novel coming out now that will get rejected from steam while "Hitler rapes all the milfs" will be sold without problem. A japanese visual novel will get rejected from steam for an underage girl wearing a towel for a scene but a western visual novel about underage siblings engaging in incest and cannibalism, that's fine, the art style isn't even anime. Or even outside of mainly sexual content something like the Witcher or Cyberpunk is fine for twitch but I can guarantee if the characters were anime-looking it would be banned, or maybe if they were simply produced outside of the western-okay-to-be-sexual sphere and anime-looking is just a happenstance.
Sure there are some hardliners that don't want any sexuality in anything and will side with the crusaders but the crusaders are faux fighting pedophilia and they're almost entirely left wing. Why? I don't know in either case but the only people that I've encountered that care and are happy when steam bans a visual novel that has like a two second scene of an "underage" girl in her underwear are all left wing, to the point that it's most of their commentary on reddit dedicated to it.
SSCReader
1yr ago
Why wouldn't we short-circuit that to just "has that desire"?
You probably could, simply say someone who has that addictive desire yeah. I was just editing your example definition, to point out, that there was a potential exit, in that I could be wrong so that someone who once was an addict and no longer has that desire I would consider no longer an addict. For addiction you can't generally know if you will be an addict until you have experienced it, whereas a pedophile can (and usually will) have those desires before they ever abuse a child. A pedophile who never abuses a child is still a pedophile, but there is no such thing as a cocaine addict who has never tried cocaine because the experience of what it does to you and how it makes you feel is part of developing the addiction.
My point is the zeitgeist already was that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, I am in my 50's and that is certainly what we were taught about addiction when I was a kid. "Not even once!" Whereas current doctors (like self_made_human) seem to think addicts CAN become not addicted to drugs. So is there some kind of "new science" and does it run the direction you think it does?
My experience would say the opposite, that we USED to believe addicts can't be cured and now we are beginning to believe they can. Which could mean that there never was a really settled zeitgeist in the first place, for things to move on from. And therefore politicians and activists can simply use the version that best supports whatever position they are trying to argue in the moment (or more charitably that whatever belief they have is WHY they are taking the position they are taking).
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
For a start is it really lefty beliefs?
I believe that both the respondents and the Deputy Solicitor General are trying to represent beliefs that could be described as "lefty", by virtue of their respective positions.
If you think that the general zeitgeist is that addicts can be cured and it didn't used to be, you can just say that.
Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that addiction to drugs is immutable (to some extent; Evangelis is a bit less clear here). Evangelis thinks that this is a distinguishing factor from Robinson, thinking that the Robinson Court, at that time, also viewed it as some sort of immutable, which contributes to an argument of it being a "status". Corkran disagrees, thinking that the Robinson Court simply got the facts about addiction wrong, that they thought it was mutable (but it's really not), so they were thinking that mutable things could still be a "status". Thus, Evangelis thinks that Robinson supports mutable things being not a status and immutable things being a status, while Corkran thinks that Robinson implicitly supports both mutable and immutable things being a status (dependent upon some other features, apparently).
So, it appears that the general zeitgeist is moving toward the idea that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, and some portion thinks that it didn't used to be that way.
So the definition is "An addict is someone who has at any point in the past been addicted to X AND still has that desire."
Why wouldn't we short-circuit that to just "has that desire"? What is the AND doing, besides pointing to past conduct? Should "pedophile" be defined as "someone who has any point engaged in pedophilic conduct AND still has that desire" rather than "has pedophilic desires"? Should "homosexual" be defined as "someone who has at any point engaged in homosexual conduct AND still has that desire"? I honestly can't help but point out that this is feeling suuuuper epicycl-y.
According to this Twitter thing, race-IQ is the most taboo topic. It's more taboo than "are pedophiles harmful or not?"
In general, I find the outrage over this topic a lot more interesting than whether or not blacks have lower IQ than whites.
Speaking of which, what are the implications if blacks have lower IQ than whites? That doesn't tell you about the IQ of any individual standing in front of you. For that, you would just test them?
What's important about this finding? What policy would we change? Is this actually a proxy for acknowledging IQ exists and that improving society through education won't work in a meritocracy because some people will never be doctors no matter how hard we try?
Stated another way, I can't think of any policy we would change to address low IQ blacks that wouldn't also apply to low IQ whites. Race is almost irrelevant.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
The main issue is that he was a single issue poster, and after being told to knock it off, he mostly does the very bare minimum to try and skirt it.
As we've said before, Holocaust denialism is not a verboten topic here. Far from it, I struggle to think of any viewpoint we censor, we've got open pedophiles here, and in most places on the internet they'd get banned the moment they even hinted at it.
But his behavior is clearly in bad faith, while at the time @somedude contested the ban, I was the only mod up and checking, I did talk to the others and we're in consensus that his behavior is unacceptable.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Look, this forum doesn't ban content. Well, at least not officially, I'm sure if I posted furry porn and some ads I'd catch a ban for it. But we don't ban viewpoints. I'm OK with that, even if there's a few viewpoints I'd rather not have to deal with and would probably ban if I was dictator of the universe.
But the trouble is that there are a few viewpoints attracted to forums which don't ban viewpoints, which proceed to repetitively post the same thing in lengthy screeds over and over again. As you note, holocaust denial is one, pedophile apologia is another one, incel screeds are probably in that category these days, there's a few others I'm missing. And that just gets annoying, so at a certain point you have to have a rule against it. And one-issue posting is probably the best you can do in that regard; I can minimize a single 10,000 word comment supporting pedophilia but if it takes over the forum I would seek a new forum.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Skookum got banned for one issue posting, and I think we've had a pro-pedophile poster and the teen liberation guy banned under it as well. It's definitely not a common think to get banned for, but it's been used before.
Obviously the vast majority of medical marijuana users have no actual reason for using beyond wanting to get high. But to the extent that medical marijuana replaces opiates for chronic pain, this is a net positive. In all other ways, except maybe for the like three people who actually have the kind of cancer it works on, it’s a bad thing.
Disclaimer- I don’t like pot. I hate the smell of it, I find potheads annoying and contemptible in a way that alcoholics don’t affect me, and I Just Don’t Like Seeing It. If potheads would smoke weed in their living rooms I probably wouldn’t care very much, any more than the bottle of whiskey a night drinkers at home.
And I think that’s the real crux of my objections to weed. It’s the inability of our society to say, ok, this is a bad thing we don’t approve of, but it’s not worth really cracking down on. If it became legal advertising for it would be everywhere, public places would stink like it constantly, and heavy users would get a platform for bitching about discrimination against them. I don’t want those things, and they’re what happened in other states that legalized the stuff. I think there’s probably also some technical arguments about driving, and adolescent use, but they’re not my real reason.
But circling back to my second paragraph- our present society doesn’t recognize ‘stop celebrating things I hate, it’s really annoying and offensive, just get it out of my face’ as a legitimate complaint. There’s something missing there; if I went to a mosque and set up a booth entitled ‘Mohammed was a pedophile’, I would have no right to complain about getting my ass kicked and being physically removed(I’m given to understand that radical Muslims in the US tend to not actually go to mosque very often, so I wouldn’t expect a beheading). But that’s a general principle, and the need to promote things I hate is one of those annoying parts of modern society.
I remember a particularly hilarious example where they used a picture of a model and a bio that straight up confessed to being a convicted pedophile who can't get close to schools.
And they were still getting matches. And the women were thirsty even though the fake user kept reiterating the point. As someone with a far more handsome brother, I should have seen this coming, but still, bruh.
Sure, you quickly get into the Foucault's Pendulum type stuff, and I'm not going to argue for every insane theory. It isn't even necessary to argue for Epstein conspiracy theories truth value. But we're talking about the book here.
When we're studying "Why did QAnon rise right now?" which was the premise of the book, why would we not include this very suspicious and very public thing that happened, widely cited by the primary sources as proof? It seems a very odd omission. The author seems to want to place blame purely on the believers, that they are 100% responsible for choosing to buy into Q, but at that scale we have to look at it in terms of societal causes, and ask how we can prevent it. And part of that should be, hey our institutions need to regain credibility.
As I pointed out, in some ways to the human mind a pedophile cabal is less horrifying. "Lmao you don't know rich people" is a funny gag sure, but which is worse: that the current rich people are pedos and we need to throw them out, or that rich people just don't care that he was a pedo, that they're indifferent to it? An organized moral universe is a comfort, even if it is a dark one.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1yr ago
I took a pause on my War and Peace reread to read some other books. I realize the critique of the "finishing quantity of books" approach to reading, but I stick to it anyway, sometimes I just need the feeling of closure. I decided I wanted to read Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches to get more insight into War and Peace and Tolstoy's philosophy, then I saw a review of Day of the Oprichnik and thought it would be fun to dive into some modern Russian Lit, then I was traveling for Easter and wanted a light physical book to read so I grabbed my wife's copy of Trust The Plan a reporting book about the QAnon world. One of the reasons I think both E-Readers and physical print has a place in the world is because of social conventions. At a town meeting where I'm not actually working while they're handling other topics but I have to sit quietly for several hours, I can get away with reading on a tablet and no one will really question it, I can at least pretend I'm working or looking at material related to the meeting; while sitting on a tablet at the beach with my in laws is kinda less social and acceptable than sitting with a book.
All three were around 200 pages, and easy reads. Thoughts on them:
-- Sevastopol Sketches is fascinating, it really is Young Tolstoy. You can feel the immediacy of the work, Tolstoy served there. You can see how the rhythms of Sevastopol, of siege, really played into his portrayal of other military campaigns, and of military life generally. My feeling on this re-read of War and Peace has been that the core theme of the work is questioning what is real. There are all these parallel forms and spheres of life in the book going on at the same time: Russian high society, the Russian peasantry, the soldiers in combat, the General staff and their politics, the intelligentsia and the intellectual world, the Freemasons and other reformists. You can see the germ of this idea forming here, the focus is purely military, but you have the same passage of officers between the town and the batteries, between life in Russia and life at the front, and decisions being made to privilege one version of life or the other, and the work questions which is real. In many ways War and Peace takes that core conflict of Sevastopol and multiplies it in fractals, adding civilian life and intellectual life and politics and secret societies. If you wanted to read Tolstoy but didn't want to tackle 1400 pages, I'd recommend it, it's a quick easy read and the characters don't suffer from being impossible to keep track of, no character-web necessary here, just a quick tight military novella.
--Day of the Oprichnik I didn't really get. It felt a lot like reading bro-lit in 2024, like Christopher Moore whose recent work I got for christmas or Chuck Pahluniuk or (I'm gonna get in trouble here) Cormac McCarthy, with the gross-out aspect of the daisy chain orgy and the rape scenes feeling kinda unnecessary. I kinda rushed through it by the end, I was getting bored by it once I realized nothing was really going to happen. Reading the Wikipedia I guess there's strong elements of satire of other Russian works I hadn't read, and symbolism rooted in Russian literature and history I didn't get. There's an interesting aspect of "was this predicting the future of eg Prighozin?" but I didn't get a ton out of it to be honest.
--Trust The Plan was ok. I'm glad I read it, but it felt so cowardly. It reminds me of how critically I read most media compared to the average person. The book covers Q from birth to present day. I feel like the overview gave me a better understanding of the ecosystem, and the vignettes of some of the criminal shit believers have gotten up to gave me a taste of just how depraved and insane some of this shit is. I came out wondering at what point Q itself comes to court as a criminal conspiracy, what with all the fugitive harboring? But I felt like the author chickened out when it came to asking the Big Questions about conspiracy theorism. Epstein gets only a passing mention, how do you talk about conspiracy theories and not mention that? The orthodox theory of conspiracy theories I remember from a million history channel documentaries growing up was that people believed conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination because they wanted it all to mean something and not just be a coincidence. At the very least, even if you believe the official Epstein story, that theory fits right in: people want to believe in a pedophile cabal because it's actually in some ways less horrifying than a single pedophile conman who could just, you know, do that. Epstein also vastly undermined the arguments against Q: Jewish financial elites aren't abusing children on secret islands, except that one time they did, but it was a one-off. Or the rest of MeToo, while the author tries to both-sides a little on conspiracy stuff, the world was suddenly full of secret-elite rapists, and Q is in many ways just a mass-hallucinatory-expansion of MeToo. Or the War in Iraq, or the Great Recession and the Subprime Crisis, all cases where elites knew something was fake and gay and going to go horribly wrong and sold the American people a line of bullshit about it.
In other personal news, I successfully completed a side-quest new year's resolution: I went swimming in the Long Island Sound in March. Just under the wire. It was so cold at 6am that at first it felt like dying, but then I'd settle in and swim a half mile. On Saturday I was alone except for two golden retrievers and their owner, it took forever to get into the water because the dogs kept looking at me going into the water and going nuts. What the fuck are you doing you idiot, it's cold!
I'm still losing weight, surprisingly Easter at the in-laws didn't derail me. I brought a single 20kg kettlebell, and did a pentathlon Easter morning, I figured the best way to honor the season was to put some holes in my hands. Maybe I'll get back on that for another season, this time last year I really enjoyed it. Hope everyone had a happy Easter.
guesswho
1yr ago
I don't remember the full sequence of events now, but I thought the inciting incident had something to do with information about his rich and powerful associates being in danger of leaking to the public, and then he was disappeared and teh issue was hushed up? I could be wrong.
But, either way, yes this is a hueristic not an immutable law of physics. The fact that it takes being an incredibly high-profile pedophile and sex trafficker for decades, with the full knowledge and in full view of everyone on the planet, to face any consequences eventually, doesn't really disprove my point that the rich are insulated from consequences. It's not an inviolable shield, but it's a pretty massive one.
campfireSmoresEaten
1yr ago
Someone blatantly pointing out in the most public way possible that this has always been a fiction, that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals
I don't know if you're an American, but this is just not true. In non-US countries, people have been prosecuted for saying that the bible says that homosexuality is a sin in Canada and I think Finland, for saying that Muhammed was a pedophile, for telling jokes, for saying that Muslims girls are raped by their family members, for saying that Muslim girls are murdered by their family members in honor killings, for saying that Muslims want to kill us, for quoting someone else saying that Islam is a defective and misanthropic religion, for comparing Muslims to Nazis, for saying "Well, when one, like Bwalya Sørensen, and most black people in South Africa, is too unintelligent to see the true state of things, then it is much easier to only see in black and white, and, as said, blame the white."
More: For saying that white people pretend to be indigenous for political or career clout. etc etc etc
Or, per recounting by @stolen_brawnze above of NPR's reporting, one can place any attempts by people on the right to draw this connection squarely in the classic "Republicans pounce!" frame.
Edit: also add in comments like this one on Reddit, in keeping with Sailer's "frontlash" model.
And now I see Steve himself on X predicting such a frontlash.
Edit 2: Plus, among the many gems on Reddit — declaring this is a false flag by Trump to distract the public from his felony conviction/project 2025/the Epstein files/whatever; how it's oh-so-convenient that the shooter is dead; that this is just another example of how Trump "just attracts bad news", this is a symptom of "the rage he projects," that Trump "enabled this culture," and he's to blame for 'making politics dangerous in America'; that it's entirely understandable given that "people don't like pedophiles or rapists"; that if elected, Trump's going to use this as an excuse to silence the media 'exactly like Putin does'; how our priority must be stopping Trump from 'take his anger out on opponents'; how this is going to be our Reichstag Fire and we're about to become Nazi Germany 2.0; and so on, and so on, I'll specifically highlight this one in its (brief) entirety:
Edit 3: add in another proposed reason for it to be a "false flag" — so that Trump can drop out of the race without losing face:
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