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Epstein's Unanswered Questions
In a recent speech at the Turning Point USA conference, Tucker Carlson criticized the administration's recent closing of the book on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Carlson alleged that there was 'no answer' to his central question, namely how a "high school math teacher at Dalton" became a "billionaire" who owned the largest private residence in Manhattan "by providing accounting advice". Apparently, this is a question for which no answer has ever been provided. According to him, the truth is that Israel provided Epstein with his money.
In this comment, I will suggest
(1) By far the most plausible explanation for the source of Epstein's wealth
(2) Implausibilities in the Mossad agent theory
How Did Jeffrey Epstein Get Rich?
Jeffrey Epstein was born in the early 1950s to a working class family in Coney Island. He was an extremely smart student with a talent for maths and physics, and graduated high school two years early.
"He was just an average boy, very smart in math, slightly overweight, freckles, always smiling"
He pursued a major in math at Cooper Union and then at NYU (for just under three years), which he dropped out from, then took a job as a math teacher at Dalton aged 21. Dalton, which as I noted recently is the most progressive of Manhattan's old prep schools, was undergoing a time of transition. It had become co-ed a decade earlier, and - in the long aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s - liberalized in other ways too. Unlike the city's public schools, subject to the strict demands of NY's extraordinarily powerful teachers' union, private schools can hire who they want.
In the 1970s, with the city in slow-motion financial crisis, tuition at elite private schools was also much lower than today, in inflation-adjusted terms about a quarter of the price. As youth became prioritized above all else and the peak of the baby boom in education led to increased demand for teachers (the boom itself had peaked in the late 1950s, meaning the mid-70s were peak demand for high schools) hiring a 21 year old NYU math dropout as a math and physics teacher was less unusual than it might seem to us. At Dalton, Epstein quickly made an impression and a name for himself as an intelligent, charming and handsome man.
Epstein was at Dalton for around two years. At parent-teacher conferences, a parent who knew Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns (whose own children also studied at the school, but weren't taught by Epstein) was repeatedly impressed by him, thinking he was a smart and capable young man. When Epstein was fired by the school as enrollment numbers dropped, the city-wide spillover from the financial crisis continued to dent confidence in NYC and drive the UES wealthy out to the suburbs, he begged that parent for an introduction.
“This parent was so wowed by the conversation he told my father, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy,’ ” recalled Lynne Koeppel, daughter of the late Alan “Ace” Greenberg...Greenberg, son of an Oklahoma City women’s clothing store owner, rose from Bear Stearns clerk to CEO and had an affinity for employees he called “PSDs” — poor, smart and desperate to be rich.
As Bloomberg found, Greenberg offered Epstein a job - not as a trader, as has repeatedly been falsely alleged - but as a trading floor assistant, essentially a clerk to a trader. This was a clerical job that required no particular education, certainly not a degree (which wasn't necessary even for traders until the mid-1990s).
Epstein arrived on Wall Street in 1976 at an auspicious time, even though the decade was poor for equities. Options on securities had existed for centuries, but had always suffered from a fundamental problem with liquidity because they were largely specific bets made between individual buyers and sellers, with no standardized pricing, each arrangement a custom contract, traded over the counter if at all, with price discovery difficult. From 1973, the CBOE allowed the easy trading of options as a hedging tool which, coupled with the slow emergence of computerized valuation and ledger tools, allowed investment banks and brokerages to offer a much larger and ever more complex array of tools to their corporate clients. This tied into growing financialization that made intermediaries like Bear more important than ever after the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the oil crisis and growing globalization of American firms who wanted to hedge huge swings in fuel prices, FX rates and so on.
Epstein made partner at Bear in four years. This was not unheard of at the time for an exceptionally talented young man. Even today, while progression is much slower in most of finance, it can still be that fast in booming sub-fields for very smart people. I know of someone at a leading quant firm who made partner at 28, in his first job, after four years, in the early 2020s. In 1981, Epstein was asked to leave Bear for a violation of securities law, possibly for failing to register products with the CFTC. Avoiding an expensive revenge-driven regulatory case would have been the firm's overriding interest, meaning that even for Epstein's brief partnership and overall tenure he would likely have received a decent payout.
In the early 1980s, Epstein floundered as an 'independent' financial consultant. A huge amount of drivel has been written about his activity between 1981 and 1986/1987. He used his looks to embark on brief relationships with a couple of heiresses he ripped off, most notably Ana Obregon. Her father had been caught up in the collapse of a short-lived firm playing games in the reverse repo business; Epstein merely facilitated her family's addition to an already-extant lawsuit with Chase, who were caught up in the affair, and who eventually repaid most of those involved. Epstein took a modest cut for pretty much no work. At around this time, Epstein socialized with some moderately influential people in New York. This was hardly surprising; he had met many advising corporate executives at Bear Stearns. They were also usually new money or outsiders to NYC; not UES generational New Yorkers.
Epstein told some of these people that he was a secret agent for the CIA, and perhaps Mossad. He told others he was deeply involved with Adnan Khashoggi, the world's richest man at that time, who had made his fortune taking a cut of arms deals between the UK, US and Saudi Arabia. Epstein had a fake gimmick Austrian passport, likely of a low quality and kind you could order in gray-area magazines at that time, and carried around a fake handgun sometimes, to impress party guests. He claimed he was an arms dealer, and lated claimed he was involved in facilitating Iran-Contra. There is no evidence of any of these claims, which are regularly repeated by the credulous. Khashoggi was famous at the time and Epstein was a compulsive liar; Khashoggi was one of the most photographed men in the world, his parties and debauchery attracted the world's press, he loved the media and was happy to appear on TV shows about the rich and famous. Epstein does not appear to have been part of his circle, just a liar who pretended he knew him.
My guess is that the occasional cut of a deal with the poorly informed, his payout from Bear and his winnings from Obregon tided Epstein over through to the mid 1980s. According to Vanity Fair, he lived in a small one-bedroom apartment; other sources suggest that he had no office at this time other than a temporary space he occasionally rented. Not exactly the lifestyle of an ultra-rich international arms dealer man of mystery.
The true source of Epstein's fortune dates to 1986, and his meeting with Les Wexner. Wexner had taken over his parents' clothing store in Ohio and built it into a chain of discount stores, which he then leveraged to buy and found a number of other store chains, including Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works. Wexner didn't need to move to New York (he could easily have run the conglomerate from Columbus, as he now does), but he chose to, and chose to buy a series of ever more extravagant homes in Manhattan as his fortune grew. In 1986, Wexner was an almost-50-year-old billionaire who had never been associated with any woman, was unmarried, and was widely considered a 'confirmed bachelor'. He was on magazine covers as 'the bachelor billionaire', with all the implicit subtext. There was rumor in both Columbus and Manhattan.
That year, Epstein met an insurance executive named Robert Meister on a flight from New York to Palm Beach. The insurance executive was taken in by Epstein's charm and bluster (no doubt full of stories about Khashoggi, international deals, arms, scandal) and invited him to an event also attended by Wexner after Epstein repeatedly showed up to his racquetball games and begged to meet Wexner. Epstein charmed Wexner, and within a year they were 'business partners', with Epstein increasingly directing Wexner's investments. It is impossible to do more than speculate here, but Wexner's business partner's thoughts, followed by some other anecdotes from the Vanity Fair piece:
Robert Morosky, who had been the vice chairman of The Limited [Wexner's holding company], was surprised Mr. Wexner took to Mr. Epstein so readily. “Everyone was mystified as to what his appeal was,” Mr. Morosky said.
Jeffrey said, ‘See all this stuff? I don’t need any of it. I could live in a tent. But Les gave this to me for a dollar. Les would do anything for me.’ ”
“Les would defer to him in any meeting…. Les would put his hand on Epstein’s shoulder.”
Wexner's own friends, according to several sources, believed that Wexner and Epstein were in a romantic relationship, and referred to him as "the boyfriend". Epstein denied he and Wexner had a sexual relationship in a filmed deposition.
Wexner and Epstein soon became virtually inseparable. They were an odd pair. Wexner was in his late 40s, with a round face and big ears. Epstein was in his early 30s and dashing—from the right angle he looked like Richard Gere. Wexner’s public image continued to grow after hiring Epstein. A 1989 Boston Globe profile that detailed Wexner’s rise reported that his September 1 diary entry that year read: “I finally like myself". Wexner’s physical appearance changed. A former Victoria’s Secret executive recalled Wexner dyed his hair. He hired a live-in personal trainer and adopted a new wardrobe. “Les would wear the tightest jeans you saw. I don’t know how he didn’t cut off blood supply to his private parts,” the former executive said.
In the early 1990s, well into his fifties, and at the urging of his elderly mother (who abused him in company meetings and was his unspoken co-CEO) Wexner married a London-based corporate lawyer in her early 30s. Epstein wrote the prenuptial agreement. The couple moved back to Ohio and had four children. Wexner stayed close with Epstein, and gave him control over his finances and investments. Even very rich people regularly make terrible financial decisions, especially when love is involved. Anyone who has been in the presence of that rare, 99.9th percentile charisma knows that very few people are immune to it, no matter their usual sobriety.
Merritt recalled once asking Wexner why Epstein was so well compensated. “Les just said, ‘Because I got more money than I can ever spend,’ ” said Merritt. “Les gave him free rein over his checkbook.” In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported Epstein earned $200 million from Wexner. Merritt puts the number at $400 million.
The bond between an older and younger man, protege and elder, can be particularly strong in cases. Unlike some thieves, Epstein didn't even take all the money, because as will become clear, he didn't need to.
Behind the BS, Wexner was Epstein's only ever client. Which brings us, at long last, to the money. Epstein 'stole' $46m from Wexner according to Wexner, and made at least tens of millions more in asset management fees in which he was paid (as is common practice) a percentage of the money he made his client. Wexner’s business was already turning over $3bn a year by the early 80s, with exceptionally high margins for the already lucrative clothing retail business. Of course, Epstein didn't invest the money himself. Instead, he just handed it (as was made clear in the recent Jes Staley case) to JP Morgan and a handful of other banks and firms, who did the work for him. Fortunately for him, Epstein was again lucky. The bull market of the age mean that even an index fund for the S&P 500 would have returned almost 500%, meaning that Epstein's loot, plus his share of Wexner's own gains, could easily have amounted to over a billion dollars by the early 2000s in a 2-and-20 arrangement, without Epstein doing anything more than acting as a middleman between private wealth teams at a few big Wall Street banks and his dear friend Les.
Was Jeffrey Epstein an Agent for Israeli Intelligence?
It is important to be clear about the specific nature of this allegation. By the late 1990s, many of the social connections Epstein had fantasized and lied about the in the 1980s were real. He really did know Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah, and various other important and famous people. He was not the most well-connected man in the country, and there were social scenes in which he was less widely known, but the combination of his relationship with Maxwell, who had been raised into the British elite and had connections he didn't, in addition to Wexner's money, had been good for him. Now well-connected in Washington and internationally, in part because Wexner had introduced Epstein to his social club of Zionist activist billionaires (the Lauder family etc) who Epstein had tried and failed to pitch his 'financial advisory' services to, Epstein made friends with Ehud Barak, the Labor Prime Minister of Israel. Barak's influence in the Israeli state was already declining; he would be the final left-wing Israeli leader.
It is to me entirely plausible that Epstein trafficked gossip to Mossad, and likely also American intelligence agencies. It is possible, although unlikely, he was paid for it, and I suspect anyone who did pay would have found out, as so many of Epstein's associates did over the course of his life, that he was full of shit, but it may have happened. This is different, however, from the Israeli state being the source of his wealth and power. I will summarise some reasons here:
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The substantial majority of those alleged to have been victims of Epstein's supposed blackmail scheme were Zionist Jews. Consider this logically. You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel. They will do it for free. The idea of Israeli intelligence spending a huge percentage of their budget on destroying the goodwill of their number one supporters who already spend billions lobbying for Israel is absurd. Step One: Gather prominent people who already support Israel, often fervently. Step Two: Film them having sex with underage prostitutes. Step Three: Tell them to keep supporting Israel Or Else... Anyone who approves that operation likes burning money.
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Even the gentiles allegedly involved in the scheme had no natural hostility toward Israel. Most were old-school WASPs uninvested in either the socialist or Islamic angles of Palestinian liberation. Almost no Muslims were involved. If you were Mossad and wanted to blackmail people ambivalent or hostile toward Israel into supporting it, you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims, particularly in the Gulf. You would not target Alan Dershowitz. The blackmail argument betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic purpose of blackmail. It also betrays an understanding of diaspora Jewish politics and Mossad's influence over it. Most critically, those rich Americans who were more skeptical of Israel do not appear to have associated much with Epstein (likely because that isn't really their crowd). Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
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Epstein had no ingrained loyalty to Israel beyond that he was ethnically Jewish (like 7 million other Americans), and so there is no good reason for Mossad to trust him with one of the most expensive intelligence operations in history. There were and are plenty of charismatic Israeli-American businessmen, who have served in the army and who in some cases have connections to intelligence, that Mossad could would have prioritized for an overseas influence operation. Many were - unlike Epstein - actually successful on Wall Street or in other industries. A random conman and compulsive liar who had been fired from every real job he ever had isn't a good target for this kind of operation. It is telling that while "Mossad wanted to blackmail Americans into doing Israel's bidding" sounds like a clever plan, nobody can even present a compelling case for why Jeffrey Epstein's inviting of various influential pre-existing zionists into his social circle would actually serve the goals of that plan. Was there some great mass of principled Anti-Israel (largely Jewish, presumably) Americans just waiting to go full BDS if Mossad didn't have the sex tapes? A poor argument at best.
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Much of the argument for Epstein's supposed connections to Israel involves either Ehud Barak (whose influence in the country was again on the decline, who was PM for a very brief period, and who was 'collected' by Epstein as just another famous political or media figure to show off at events like the Clintons, Prince Andrew etc) or an alleged connection to Robert Maxwell. 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. Again, no photographs exist, no record of them being at the same social event or party exists (interesting given that there are tens of thousands of pictures of Epstein at big social events over the last thirty years; he didn't shy away from a camera, and neither did Maxwell). Maxwell was considered a hero by Israeli intelligence because he facilitated weapon and plane part shipments, illicitly, from the Soviet Union, France and elsewhere in the early years of Israel's existence. He was badly connected in America, such that his takeover of the New York Post was a desperate attempt to try to lobby for a bailout for his failing media empire, which collapsed upon his death.
I think modern right-wing converts are very different from people who actually grew up in socially conservative communities because they’re fundamentally not conservatives at all. They’re people who grew up in a liberal environment who want to rebel against it (often for valid reasons), by adopting the values the liberals themselves previously fought against. Paradoxically, to be a socially conservative convert, you need to be a non-conformist who’s not afraid of questioning the worldview they were brought up in.
If you were a conformist who respected and followed societal expectations, the behaviour that from your description is encouraged in conservative communities, you wouldn’t have converted at all.
By being a right-wing convert in a liberal environment, you’re joining a counterculture, you’re adopting certain views because they’re cool, edgy, based, provocative, you want to tear down the system… you’re obviously going to have a very different attitude to life than people born in a socially conservative bubble.
There was a commenter here who said women lacked "accountability" because they want to be able to f*** without risking being pregnant for nine months.
That was me, and as we discussed at the time that's a horrendously inaccurate and uncharitable take on what I was saying.
This is entirely typical of you. In my opinion you don't belong here and I for one will be much happier when you inevitably wear out the mods' welcome.
(And no; I won't be litigating this or anything else with you again, nor should others.)
TitaniumButterfly
16hr ago
Likewise. You'll note that I was happy to volunteer those links.
Hieronymus
10hr ago
A big change happens in the social environment when you achieve a critical mass of family, friends, and neighbors who will hold you to what you and they believe to be right.
If you are a social conservative in a progressive setting, you can expect that a majority of your friends are more liberal than you, even if they are very conservative by local standards; a majority of their friends are more liberal than they, and so on along the gradient until you hit the local norm. Difficult sacrifices are always difficult; but they get a lot harder when your friends don’t respect them, instead encouraging you to do the easier thing that they sincerely believe would be good for you.
An example:
A couple of my college friends got married. They weren’t a great match in terms of temperament, but they genuinely loved each other and could have made it work. They were on the socially conservative end of their church. They were gender egalitarian, but that’s true of almost their whole denomination, and it’s one of the rare churches where for historical reasons this is not a predictor of broader liberalism. The wedding was consciously traditional in a way that expressed the joy and solemnity of the occasion and acknowledged the givenness of the institution.
They had a kid. ADHD, and later a stroke, made it difficult for him to hold down a job. Eventually he found a crummy job that he kept for a long time. If you knew him, you would know that this reflected heroic effort on his part out of deep love for his wife and child, but most people just saw him being less flaky. It wasn’t enough to provide a middle class lifestyle on a single income as your family and I might prefer, but she didn’t expect it to be. She is very type A, and she made more money than he did in a customer service job, later landing a manager role until stress caused her to step down.
They fought. She obviously felt for years that he wasn’t doing enough for the family, but it’s not clear to me how much of that was fair and how much was his failing to carry out her orders; I suspect some of both. Eventually she left him and got a tattoo symbolizing it as a rebirth. She told him (as I found out later) that the divorce would be good for the kid. To her credit, she tried to follow through with good-faith co-parenting. Without his family, he lost his job and his living situation made joint custody impractical; child support has not made things easier. Now she is planning to remarry.
Now, I don’t know what concrete advice she got from her friends. Knowing some of them and knowing her actions, I suspect it was often, “You don’t have to suffer like this.” But I have to wonder: what if they’d had friends and a church that were more conservative than they were?
Maybe someone could have explained that the relationship dynamics that were cute when they were dating would keep them from communicating love and respect once they were married. (I wanted to beat this into them so badly for years, but I wasn’t close enough to either one that a bachelor’s unsolicited marriage advice would be listened to.) Maybe somebody could have convinced them of the goodness in headship and submission and shown how to apply it in a way that recognized her gifts while encouraging him to take a more active role in leading the family. Maybe a friend good with family finances could have run the numbers to see if she could work part time and invest the rest in ways they could live more frugally. Maybe a sympathetic business owner could have found work that suited his abilities and let him provide better. Maybe she’d have heard, “Divorce is not good for your child!” until she either listened or went deaf.
So, a couple of thoughts:
I don’t know how things are in your community. It sounds like they are by and large better off, and I am grateful for that. In mine, the friend gradient toward the norm makes this kind of thing sadly familiar. I hope to figure out what I can do to make the situation better.
Social conservative “converts” are usually in an even more difficult place than my friends when it comes to support. They don’t have the social encouragement to do the hard, countercultural thing; they don’t have someone to help them fit the pieces together in practice; and there is no one to explain the next step in muddling through. I suppose the exceptions are those literal converts lucky enough to find themselves in churches that can provide these things to get them reoriented while it is all fresh and new.
In some cases the possibility of child support can keep men from just cutting and running or give them some skin in the game. But in my friends’ case its function is to make it easier for a woman to leave her husband because she thinks he’s a drag on her, while still demanding some of the (modest but heroic) financial support he provided as her husband. I doubt that the availability of child support caused this divorce, but it has made things worse, and it’s patently unjust. I wonder what socially conservative child support reform would look like.
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.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
15hr ago
So far the only theory I've heard that makes sense is that important US interests are presently depending on the kompromat and none of this can see the light of day for reasons Trump wasn't privy to when campaigning or when he was president.
I'm leaning towards "any relevant evidence was destroyed by someone years ago". If there was damning evidence about Trump, I'm 99.999% certain it would have been "leaked". And if there still existed any damning evidence, I don't think Team Trump has the unified discipline to not have any actual leaks.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
16hr ago
That's quite funny, but if you can remember his specific quotes about Bill Clinton, Trump knew what the deal was and what people were objecting to pretty specifically.
That's what makes this 180 so conspicuous. It makes no sense: if you know you're compromised, you wouldn't have campaigned on lifting the veil, if you know you're not, what could possibly convince you to hesitate at the last second?
So far the only theory I've heard that makes sense is that important US interests are presently depending on the kompromat and none of this can see the light of day for reasons Trump wasn't privy to when campaigning or when he was president.
And yet still, why not just bury the story and say nothing? Or endlessly delay? This performative display of guilt is so stupid I'm almost willing to believe some insane cope about it being 4D chess.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
So they claim. But the king is unlikely to be willing to trade places with the peasant, so it seems this is an uneven bargain.
2rafa
19hr ago
Because there certainly was enough evidence to convict him of interstate trafficking of a minor for sex (with himself), which is the killer charge in all of these cases and which Epstein’s lawyers would have told him guaranteed he was going to die in jail given the salacious public attention to the case, the fact that federal sentences don’t have more than a small reduction for good behavior / parole, and grandstanding by the prosecutors on the case.
He had lived like a billionaire for 30 years, private jets, satisfying his sex addiction with teenage models, doing whatever he wanted, and now faced not merely the prospect but the certainty of spending the rest of his life in jail - and not only in jail but in jail as a chomo, the worst of the worst, where (like Derek Chauvin) it was inevitable at some point that the guards would turn a blind eye and he’d get beaten, stabbed and so on (maybe even sexually violated) by other inmates.
Many people would kill themselves in that circumstance. It’s one of the least suspicious cases of suicidal tendency imaginable. If someone in that circumstance told me they were thinking of killing themselves I would literally think “yeah, that’s unsurprising”. It’s common for people facing charges like this who are out on bail to kill themselves. As for how he did it, he may have had his attorneys bribe the security team at the jail so they didn’t stop him.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
I feel like this discussion is the missing ingredient to lots of the topics du jour. Let's take the leftward drift of young women- well social conservatism today seems to have, uh, not discussed what other people owe to them, only what they owe to other people.
Eh, I see this discussion a lot. One common line is that what other people (specifically, men, specifically, husbands) owed them -- mostly financial support and physical protection -- is something that they can now either provide for themselves or will be provided by the state, so they no longer need to offer anything.
But in general social conservatism is hierarchical, not reciprocal. Duties are owed to those higher up; parents, church, community. Even those things owed to another person of similar rank or lower down are not owed to them per se, but owed to them because it is ones duty to society to provide it. This is one of the reasons social conservatism is so stifling, especially to the young (who are low in the hierarchy).
Dean
Flairless
6hr ago
And rightly so. Please keep that link and reminder on hand. It is certainly a good example of AlexanderTurok's bad faith characterizations of past arguments.
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.
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.
cjet79
14hr ago
I've thought about this a decent amount. I rebelled against the norms around me in highschool and became a libertarian, but I often wondered if I was just an accidental encounter away from going the other direction and becoming communist or something.
Its easy to notice that many young men rebel against the norms around them, and it seems to drive their political, social, and cultural views. But this "rebellion narrative" has a glaring set of problems: it assigns little or no agency to the individuals involved, it ignores the power of ideas, and thus it lacks any explanatory power for why people rebel into a particular set of ideas.
Instead I think it is just that failures that are happening in the here and now are easier to notice than all of the successes happening, or the bad things that aren't happening. A political entity that is clearly in charge gets blamed for all those problems. People go looking for answers. Since we are in a two party system they often just go to the other side. But not always! The two party system isn't a rule of reality, just a quirk of how our system is arranged so people can and do find their ways elsewhere.
Quantumfreakonomics
17hr ago
You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel.
Sure, they "support" Israel, but do they love Israel with all their heart and all their soul and all their might?
The one thing that sticks out about English-language media coming out of Israel is that approximately all of it is aimed at Americans. Some of it is aimed at the general population with, "look how cool and based Israel is amirite?" but dig a little deeper and you discover a massive operation aimed at getting American Jews to support Israel even more.
You're right that the Little St. James project doesn't quite fit with being a blackmail operation. Perhaps it was the proverbial carrot rather than the stick?
I have a hard time believing there's any actually damning evidence against Trump or really anyone, or else someone would have leaked something by now. It's been a big issue for years, multiple administrations.
The common retort is that there’s stuff on Bill Clinton as well as Trump so they can’t. But this is a bad argument because
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They could just have published the Trump stuff and conveniently redacted the Bill Clinton stuff if they had wanted to.
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I really don’t think Bill’s grip on the party is so strong that they wouldn’t throw him under the bus to attack Trump if necessary.
Lots of duty based systems eg confucianism lasted long term. I'm not sure how well adapted they are to modern day life, where a lot of the scaffolding¹ that helps maintain the systems is crumbling. But these systems usually specifically have moral parables about people behaving virtuously — dutifully — even when they're reciprocated not just with nothing but with active ingratitude and disrespect.
Confucianism is an explicitly reciprocal duty-based system. It was often explicitly modeled both in terms of father-son relationships, where the son's obedience to the father is contingent on the father being a virtuous enough patriarch to be worth respecting, and between subject and sovereign, where a sovereign's failure to maintain virtue is the basis for losing the mandate of heaven and being replaced by someone else who will appriopriately fill the duties required.
Confucianism and deontological religions have a commonality in that the duty-based system is based on relationships that are reciprocal. Religious deontology works from the premise of virtue's relationship, and thus duty to, one's own god. Doing so brings you closer to your god / earns good karma / etc. from your metaphysical duty-obligator. More secular Confucianism works from the premise of the duty to natural relationship of [child] and [parent]. Doing so brings you more harmonious relationships with the other part of the relationships.
No major deontology system has ever worked from a premise of a duty towards an action outside of the context of the relationship. Even when the Christians preach charity to one's enemies, it is based from the premise of the relationship of the charitable practioner to their god. When the virtue-ethicists like Aristotle talk about balancing bravery between cowardliness and foolhardiness, it is in the context of its effects on, and the relationship of the practitioner to, others.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
7hr ago
If there was a blackmail info collection operation, I don't think the purpose would be directly "making Zionist billionaires turbo-Zionist" or something like that but more like "This info might come useful at some point. How? Who knows? Black swan events and all that" style.
Dean
Flairless
7hr ago
If you ignore a few millennia of cultural understanding of duty-as-virtue ethics, perhaps.
Duty-based ethics, aka deontological ethics, are highly reciprocal. This is especially true in the western tradition, due to the derivation of why there is a duty and to who. Namely- because God. Hence why deontological ethics and religious ethics are so intertwined across history, since the fundamental question of any duty-based ethical system leads to 'according to who?' whenever a secular authority demands dutiful obedience.
A god isn't required to be that 'who,' but it is the moral authority higher than any king to make those demands for obedience something more than arbitrary human with thugs and clubs. In turn, religious deontologies are incredibly reciprocal- you do your duty unto God, which can entail more worldly obediences as well, and you go to heaven. Defy your duties, and you are separated from God / go to Hell / bad karma happens. God's love may be unconditional, but the state of grace of being close to god is not. Your reciprocal gain for doing the right thing is that your soul will go the right place, no matter the worldly harm you may suffer. This isn't exactly unique to Christianity either, as a brief review of any karmic system metastructure can show.
But the element of God isn't required for reciprocity either. One of the most successful non-theistic deontological ethic systems about duty, Confucianism, is explicitly reciprocal. It appeals to a 'natural' relationship rather than a deific basis, namely the relationship of fathers to sons, but this duty system is obligations on both parties, the failure of which on either part can justify action by the other. A son who lacks filial piety may be disciplined. A king who lacks virtue loses the mandate of heaven and may be replaced.
The non-abrahamic reciprocal duty also goes back from east to west to the foundational civilizing force of western antiquity, Rome. In Rome, the patron-client relationship wasn't a brief transactional relationship of bribes or business, but a fundamental social institution. Patrons provided support and benefits to their clients, from nepotistic favors to representing them in court or assisting in arranging marriages, and in turn the clients owed loyalty, respect, and support... so long as the Patron provided. But if the Patron didn't, then another, more worthy, Patron could be shifted too. This was a bedrock arrangement of not only rome itself, but everywhere Rome dominated, as this was the relationship deliberately pursued between Rome and its clients/allies/conquests/etc. And it was part of a broader mindset that didn't limit this to the secular, but the religious practices as well, where Roman polytheism was part of a reciprocal 'if we don't show piety we will be punished' leading to 'show piety for divine favor' paradigm.
All of these duty traditions far, far, far predate any contemporary notion of 'rights-based mindset.' The Jews were in covenant long before millennia before any enlightenment philosophers were quibling over human rights. The enlightenment built from the corpse of the Roman reciprocity. The Confusicians and the Hindus and more didn't need their example to figure out their own thing.
Duty-based ethic systems are highly reciprocal.
DradisPing
7hr 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.
Corvos
10hr 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.
anon_
14hr ago
By being a right-wing convert in a liberal environment, you’re joining a counterculture, you’re adopting certain views because they’re cool, edgy, based, provocative, you want to tear down the system
Indeed. I'm always reminded of the evergreen Fukuyama quote:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.
I think this is probably an underexplored dimension of political belief: there are people that want a struggle and there are those that want to grill.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
he may have had his attorneys bribe the security team at the jail so they didn’t stop him.
It literally seems more implausible that he was able to pay his attorneys to bribe them than that the guards would have turned down this bribe. Prison guards are cheap to bribe and what are the gonna do, admit to committing a felony?
The guards letting it happen is the least implausible part of this story.
I grew up in an actually socially conservative bubble, in the hardcore twenty percent or so of Americans(so this would be the hardcore 10-15 percent or so of working age native whites, even in the Bush era). Going to church every Sunday was the right thing to do; Mohammedans and atheists were inherently untrustworthy. The blacks are racist too, and responsible for the problems in their community(I was of course warned not to repeat this in public). Fornication is bad, actually, but it happens and needs to be dealt with- and if an eligible man was known to be sexually active with a woman he had to marry her, even if she wasn't his preference or he had other plans. Homosexuals are (mental and sexually transmitted)disease ridden perverts. Gender roles and real and not optional. Women shouldn't be in the military. Marijuana is an evil drug, much worse than alcohol. The 'liberal elite' pushes bad values on purpose; I remember much bellyaching about how they had recently succeeded in making bikinis the overwhelming default, and when I was a bit older about themes in Harry Potter and Twilight. Better be spanked as a child than hanged as an adult(and few, if any, of the people around me had sympathy for criminals). A woman's father had the right- and in many cases, the responsibility- to veto a marriage, and maybe even a dating relationship. Ideally the woman should stay home with her kids, unless she was a teacher, but in either case the man was responsible for the bills. Society was going to collapse because the government uses our tax dollars to push bad morals which make people unproductive; that's why people are dumber, less virtuous, and grow up slower than in the fifties. You can't get a divorce just for falling out of love- the man has to be violent or not holding down a job, or the woman has to be an awful mental case, or somebody has to be addicted to drugs, or something.
I don't say these things so the motte can litigate them. I say them to point to the sine qua non which made the worldview work- different people have different roles in society, mostly due to their membership in various classes(age, gender, social class, maybe sometimes race). As a male youth it was my duty to protect my sister if we went to a social event together, and it was more important that my schooling focus on getting me into a good job which would one day pay the bills for a family. My sister had more household chores(well, in the conventional sense- I had to mow the lawn etc but lots of people don't count yardwork as housework) because it was important that she learn how to do ironing and baking and stuff that I wouldn't need. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I got a girl pregnant or lived with her I would have to marry her, even if I was in love with someone else or had other plans(and my male cousins have pretty much all followed this rule when they took concubines)- although the ideal was obviously a white wedding. And of course being that we were basically middle class I would have to provide a basically middle class standard of living- homeownership and stable employment and going places in cars and the like. My parents threatened to kick me out when I expressed my desire not to go to university, and only relented when I found an HVAC apprenticeship- because it was my job as a middle-class man to have a career, not just a job. These are of course an illustration.
I don't see this mentality from, shall we say, 'converts' to social conservatism. I see a lot of bemoaning about how someone else used to do better from e-trads. And I think this is a lynchpin that's missing which makes a bunch of it 'larping' or 'cargoculting' or whatever; the motte likes to talk about it from time to time. But y'know, social conservatism works off of 'who you are makes x,y,z your job and not doing it even when you don't want to makes you a bad person'. Lots of people like to talk about this- positively or negatively- about women's domestic or familial expectations. I don't think focusing on 'a man's role' or whatever is the missing piece I think you just... can't talk about it without talking about it intersectionally. 'How does everyone fit into society' is a question that needs to be answered and if you've already decided personal characteristics are the way to go about it, well...
I feel like this discussion is the missing ingredient to lots of the topics du jour. Let's take the leftward drift of young women- well social conservatism today seems to have, uh, not discussed what other people owe to them, only what they owe to other people. Is it any wonder that the victimhood narrative from runaway woke is more appealing? Or the disagreements over immigration; we no longer have a class of people whose obligation is to do manual agricultural labor(and most of the historical people who did this did it as an obligation, not a job; serfdom and the corvee is the historical norm). The modern American right seems to simply lack the actual difference between itself and progressivism; it differs only in accidentals(I'm pretty open about voting republican because they protect my right to be socially conservative, and not because they'll push social conservatism). I don't think this mentality can come back from the government, but only from intermediating institutions that democrats would like to punish for doing their job and pushing this. But this is the key difference; most adults have probably worked it out for themselves but nobody ever says it out loud.
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