Search for "domain:alexepstein.substack.com"

EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 3m ago

I said at the time and look to have been validated, that people have this idea of the USSS as a super competent organization. But at the end of the day they are still an organization, and are thus not immune to the common failure modes of organizations. As I understand the facts that we have, the communication failures (separate radio networks for the main detail and local support), the “good enough” problem (they had someone in the building, just not covering the roof), and “someone else’s problem” (bad or incomplete assignments during the planning phase) are absolutely classic organizational problems that crop up just as easily and pervasively in the USSS as they do in a large for-profit corporation. If anything, there’s less will to shake things up like a CEO might.

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SubstantialFrivolity I'm not even supposed to be here today 10m ago

Reciprocal relationships are not the same as obligation relationships, much as they are not synonymous with transactional relationships.

It seems like a lot of your argument hinges on this distinction. Can you elaborate? Because I confess that I can't see the difference you're trying to point to.

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FtSoA 21m ago

Frankly I hold Mossad in too high of regard to believe any of this shit on incompetence grounds.

The Israelis are less risk-averse than their US counterparts as a general rule, but they aren't bumbling fools orchestrating haphazard sex-based coercion like this.

Also, to correct the record on Acosta claiming Epstein was told to go easy because Epstein "belongs to intelligence":

The OPR report also looked into allegations that have surfaced in press reports over the years that Epstein may have gotten special treatment because he was some sort of “asset” to U.S. intelligence agencies.

“Acosta stated to OPR that ‘the answer is no,’” the report said.

Rich Jewish guy hanging out with rich Jewish guys, some of whom have ties with the Israeli government, is not exactly enough evidence to show anything. Is anything about Epstein's alleged ties to the "arms world" actually proven?

If any of this was true one would think Ari Ben-Menashe would be dead already for spilling state secrets.

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alsfhwe 24m ago

Likewise, the 2015 song Renegades was originally written for a commercial advertising the Jeep Renegade. After I learned that, every time I heard the song on the radio, I felt I was listening to a glorified advertisement.

In fairness, I believe artists "pour their soul" into their art, to some extent, even when it's made with strict guidelines for a paycheck. Even non-art professional software, as evidenced by Easter eggs and the occasional feature that is unreasonably clever and well-implemented for no apparent reason. Ideas that come from "goofing around" aren't much different from those that come from insight, both arise from spontaneous thought. The opposite side of "people create a retroactive narrative to explain their actions", is that people's actions are influenced by their past experiences and suppressed desires, sometimes in ways they don't consciously realize.

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EverythingIsFine Well, is eventually fine 25m ago

Just today I took note of this article in n case people are still on the conspiracy train: WaPo: The lingering mystery of the Trump shooting: Why did this young man do it?

After Trump took office again in January, his new picks to lead the FBI — Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — asked to be briefed on the investigative steps that had been taken before they arrived, they said in a televised interview. They personally visited the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, to view the evidence, including laboratory and ballistics evidence, and examined Crooks’s rifle.

Bongino, who in August had complained on his podcast that he didn’t entirely trust the FBI’s claim that Crooks had no political ideology, had a professional reason to be obsessive as he poked and prodded his briefers with questions.

He had served as a Secret Service agent for 12 years, including on threat investigations and on the protective details for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bongino had a deep knowledge of the Secret Service’s landmark Exceptional Case Study Project, which documented striking similarities among people who had tried to kill presidents and prominent political figures.

In studying and interviewing 83 people known to have attempted or plotted such an assassination from 1949 to 1996, the research found they were overwhelmingly White males who were relatively well educated. They were also deeply isolated, often friendless and suffering from a mental health disorder. Often, after a personal crisis or break, they began to fixate on assassinating a high-profile figure as a route to fame or affirmation.

After reviewing the evidence, Bongino firmly agreed with the conclusion of his FBI predecessors. Crooks was just “a lost soul” akin to the many would-be assassins interviewed for the Exceptional Case Study Project, he told colleagues. There was “no there there” to the conspiracy theories about an inside job or Iran.

In a Fox News interview on May 18, Maria Bartiromo asked Patel and Bongino why the public had almost no information about what led to the shooting in Butler as well as an apparent attempted assassination of Trump on a golf course in Florida. Bongino stressed that there was no “big explosive” evidence tying Crooks to an international conspiracy or any larger plot.

“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth. And whether you like it or not is up to you,” Bongino told Bartiromo. “The there you are looking for is not there. … It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.”

Basically you have a total expert, Trump supporter, and skeptic get full access and found nothing. Can’t ask for much more than that. Shockingly, the article claims that a lot of people were working on it:

It consumed FBI agents and analysts from half of the bureau’s field offices, nearly every headquarters division and some international offices.

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FtSoA 34m ago

Oh sure, it's definitely not something that could be totally ruled out.

The 180 is hilarious to witness after all that build up.

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FtSoA 36m ago

My apologies.

I was trying to specify the particularly looney part of the Left, not the whole Left.

Harder to make that distinction for the MAGA community, sadly.

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ChickenOverlord 40m ago

My favorite example of this is from the band Queen. I've often heard people say "Freddie wrote Who Wants to Live Forever after he found out he was diagnosed with AIDS" when the actual story is far more pedestrian: Brian May wrote it after viewing an early cut of the movie Highlander.

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MathWizard Good things are good 40m ago

I grew up in what I would consider a sane, earnest, evangelical church. Conservative-ish, but clearly more progressive than what you describe here.

We were taught about duties and obligations, but without the racism or sexism or inherent birthright class that you cannot escape from. Your role is determined by your talents. You should serve others in the best way you can based on what you're good at, because God designed each person to be unique and made them good at different things, therefore they naturally slot into different roles. The Parable of Talents was frequently taught, and metaphors were made to parts of the body, which each serve a different function but all collectively contribute to the whole. Another version of this was "Godly Gifts". Some people have the "gift of giving" which means they have a talent which allows them earn lots of money and donate to others in need (the church/missionaries, general charity, or just people who they meet who are struggling and need help). Some people have the "gift of leadership" which means they have social skills and can organize events or manage tasks. Some people have the "gift of service" meaning they are good at and/or enjoy doing tasks that help people like volunteering at soup kitchens or picking up litter or helping an old lady repair her house. Some people having "gift of caring" which usually means childcare, helping at a nursery or donating free babysitting. It's not your role as a man or a woman to do all of the things that society coded to be appropriate for your gender, it's your role as a Christian to love your neighbor as yourself, and to demonstrate that love in the best way you could based on your knowledge of yourself what the best way for you to effectively help people. If men and women statistically happen to have different talents most of the time, then most of the time the roles they filled would be largely gendered. But if you happen to be an outlier and be good at a role more typical of the other gender then that is something to be celebrated, not punished. I remember going with my Dad to help repair a fence and every single person on the repair team was male. One time we went to paint a house and everyone was male except one woman who came with her husband. 90% of the people on nursery duty during church were female, but ~10% were male, because that's the proportion of people who volunteered. When we were old enough my brothers and I were encouraged by our parents to volunteer in the nursery at least once so we could try it out and see if we liked it. We didn't, so didn't go back, but that's entirely the point. Your gender is correlated with your talent, but your talent and choice determines your role.

General duties and proscribed behaviors were similarly fair and general. Women should dress modestly and avoid tempting men into sin because everyone is supposed to dress modestly and avoid tempting others into sin, and everyone is supposed to resist that temptation as well. It happens to be the case that men are more prone to temptation and modern society normalizes women dressing less modestly to take advantage of this, but it is a shared duty and a man dressing immodestly is considered equally bad even if in practice the issue rarely came up. When the Christian summer camp I went to had issues with complaints about the teen girls wearing bikinis being immodest, and their attempts at mandating more modest female swimwear didn't quite work, they implemented a rule that everyone had to wear a T-shirt in the pool, because they didn't want to make an unfair rule that only affected the girls.

This is what social conservativism is supposed to look like. It's stupid and wasteful to force people into a mold that they don't fit. To take a man who loves taking care of children and tell them "you were born in the wrong body, you have to work instead" and take a woman who is intelligent, ambitious, and has dreams of becoming a lawyer and tell her "Careers are for men, go raise children." Just take both of them and suggest that they marry each other. They can collectively fulfill the role of creating a happy healthy family and contributing to society. The team is healthy. Why does it matter which genitals are held by the person doing each subtasks as long as the job gets done? As long as people consider themselves part of an organization (The body of Christ, or just society in general), are aware that their general role is to help that organization effectively, and make sure that they are contributing to those needs to the best of their ability, then the jobs will get done. Someone will grow the food because some people are born with the talent and/or desire to work on farms. Someone will clean the house and prepare food for the family because some people actually like those things, and some people just dislike it less than their partner. And usually that will be the wife because usually women like those things more, but if a husband and wife agree to do it differently then by all means do it differently. And if nobody genuinely wants to do it then one of you has to step up and do it anyway because it needs to get done and, if you both genuinely love each other and are being good Christians then you'll want to serve the other person.

I agree with you that conservative converts lack this. But it's not the gendered or class based norms that are missing, it's the authentic (and/or socially expected/pressured) love for others and your community. The team mentality. It's hard to devote your life to just take care of kids and not earn money if nobody else is giving you money, you'll starve. It's hard to work a bunch and leave your kids in daycare if the daycare is some faceless organization with 30 rotating and misbehaving kids rather than the local mom you know and trust from church with four kids of her own who your kids grow up with and become best friends with. It's hard to help the homeless man get back on your feet by letting him sleep on your couch for two months if he's a drug-addicted kleptomaniac who might shit under your sofa and rob you blind rather than the guy you know and trust from church who everyone vouches is hardworking but lost his job due to the economy. And then ten years later when you fall on hard times he hands you a check for $10,000 because he worked hard and got a job and is doing fine now and remembers how you helped him recover. You can't do that if everyone is always out for themselves and only interfaces through official, bureaucratic, profit-maximizing corporations. You have to have love.