domain:npr.org
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
12hr ago
We also dislike people declaring they have reported someone. "I'm telling on you!" is not any more effective or impressive here than it was in kindergarten. What is that supposed to accomplish? Put extra pressure on the mods? We can see your report. Submit your report and move on.
Apologies then, I will not do this in the future.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16hr ago
Turok makes the mistake of then coming to this forum of actual thoughtful people and assuming the conservatives here need to answer for the worst Trumpists the engineers of X can serve. The conservatives here don't recognize themselves in the criticisms he levels at them and drama ensues.
I am not a newcomer to the SSC sphere, I've been posting on ACX and DSL for years, and I've won DSL's Diadochus award for my posts twice. (I'm also currently banned from both places.) I'm not attributing the stupidity of Twitter to this place, I'm just reading what people here write, like coffee_enjoyer:
Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf. Picking fruit is so Edenic that it’s the first recorded activity of humanity. In what world would “picking fruit” be pathetic? I think you are having trouble dissociating the image you have of these things now, with what they would look like if employers didn’t have a semi-slave class. There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people. They work quite hard, then they drink in the evenings and dance and fuck and make music and so on. This is exactly what agricultural work was for nearly all of history. Not for the slaves, of course, but for the non-enslaved.
This, by the way, is what I mean by "poverty fetishism" and "third worldism."
The thing is, I think your argument is completely plausible and I allow for it in (2). Epstein exploited Wexner, but Wexner was and is a committed Zionist and was long close to the WJC and Lauder, who in turn were and are clearly very well connected in Israel, particularly the center and center left. If someone in Wexner, Lauder or Barak’s orbit (including Israeli intelligence) asked for a favor, an introduction, or information Epstein had acquired, there is every chance Epstein would have done it as you say on an ad-hoc basis, probably not for money but for influence and favor trading (useful given his sexual proclivities had put him under investigation from the mid-1990s).
It’s also obviously, clearly true that Epstein had powerful friends who ensured he was given a sweetheart deal in the early 2000s. They may have been ‘intelligence’, they may just have been very well connected Wall Street people who were close to the Bush administration for whom ‘belongs to intelligence’ was a convenient smoke screen for more naked corruption and favor trading (I think this is more likely; telling Acosta Epstein is intelligence is more likely to stop an investigation than telling him a top donor is friends with him). You don’t need Mossad to frustrate an investigation if you’re friends with a former president and very close to leading GOP donors, which Epstein was.
But crucially, this is all very different to the allegation, made explicitly by Tucker, that Israel and Mossad were behind his immense wealth and also behind a sex-trafficking elite kompromat operation. It is more likely that Epstein was a pervert who preyed on teenage girls (often from poorer backgrounds, in NYC, West Palm Beach, and via modelling world connections he had made through Wexner and the 1980s New York fashion scene from Eastern Europe, and before that his former and before that current students) his whole adult life. As he grew in wealth and power, he sometimes offered girls he was seeing to business associates, not as kompromat but as sweeteners for deals and friendship (Meister, Wexner’s ex-insurance man who introduced Epstein to him and regrets it, explicitly says that Epstein showed up to his house once with models and offered them to him).
Eventually, he used his seduction (likely romantic) of Wexner to catapult himself into the top echelon of NYC wealth, met Maxwell, fresh into exile after the scandal around the collapse of her father’s business, and joined the global elite. At this point he began to attract the attention of people for whom knowing what that elite is doing and thinking was and is important, and as he became aware of his victims reporting him more as the 1990s went on (before then, between ~1965 and 1990 or so no cops would have taken it seriously at all, but the early 90s saw the emergence of third-wave consent based feminism, modern workplace harassment guidance and law) he may have played those connections to try to stay clear of jail.
But no, I don’t think Mossad got a failed high school teacher a job at Bear Stearns. I don’t think they gave a billion dollars to a washed up, fired trader who was unhireable by any legitimate Wall Street firm because he violated securities law in the hope that he would Gatsby his way into the world’s elite and set up a sex trafficking blackmail operation.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
Also sounds more like a stalker who followed her during periods of activity and went inactive when she was inactive? There's a lot of crazy people out there, someone obsessed with Ghislaine Maxwell who persuaded themselves into a fantasy life version of her (see the movie Single White Female for a fictional version of this) isn't the most implausible thing.
CanofWorms
10hr ago
Great post. Can you finish the story through the present day? It feels like the story ended right when it was taking off ( I understand you’re not writing a biography of Epsteins life, but it would be a compelling read if you did).
FtSoA
11hr ago
The lowest circle of the Inferno, the ice is full of traitors. What has the US done, time and again? Turned spies against their country of origin. If the US government can find a reason to trust someone who commits the gravest sin below treachery to God, no doubt with as little slack as they're given, they can find a reason to trust a guy who lied at parties and fumbled around early in his career.
This is not how HUMINT agencies evaluate potential assets, no.
Most spies don't "need" to be "turned" against their country; they just need to be found.
Being a "traitor" is also very much an eye-of-the-beholder situation. Nathan Hale, patriot or traitor?
Personally, I'm very grateful to e.g. the "traitors" to communism in the USSR.
None of what you describe of his background is specifically disqualifying for his use as an asset.
Reliability and discretion matter quite a lot, in fact, for the value of an operational asset conducting sensitive missions.
They have reason to run a perpetual blackmail machine, including targeted those who appear to be on their side.
They also have reason to avoid ops that, if exposed, would cause major problems. Risk, reward.
I would ask, given what we know about his life and how often men like him skirt justice, is it probable that rather than torching literally any VIP he could draw from the list of flights, he instead just killed himself? It's not.
Well, he wasn't able to skirt justice, right?
There is also maxwellhill. Ghislaine Maxwell had a prominent hand in the general psy-opping of the giant psy-op that is Reddit. She was, maybe still is, an intelligence asset. What was Epstein, then?
You're just asserting that as proven fact? Somebody with her profile, especially if she was ever an actual intel asset, puts their fucking real name as their handle?
Come on. Be serious now.
HereAndGone
15hr ago
I agree that Epstein was a fabulist so we can't trust any claims he might have made. I think if there was any 'intelligence gathering' it was more akin to him trying to shop gossip around to anyone who would pay for it ("hey I have all these connections with rich and important people, you might be interested in what I can find out") because he was that sort of untrustworthy little toad, and that the best/only connections he had as contacts were Mossad or somebody who knew somebody who was connected to Mossad, and they might have bought bits'n'scraps because hey, why not? this guy might turn out to be useful sometime if he ever does stumble across anything important or we can finally find a use for him (I have no doubt, for instance, that they'd be happy to gather blackmail material on the Royal Family via 'Randy Andy' just because).
aqouta
23hr ago
JP Morgan has facilities in Israel and is one of the most important banks in the world. The idea that they needed a mossed connection to have some of their executives meet with the prime minister of Israel is just kind of silly. Jaime himself could have easily facilitated the connection. If it was with some lower level executive then you really shouldn't invoke the JPM name because lower level execs are just normal people with limited influence. I've met a number of executives of this level and if they were interested in this type of connection it'd just be mundane "can we cut the red tape on the construction of this thing we are underwriting the loan on" type of stuff, not insidious geopolitical shenanigans.
FtSoA
11hr ago
Well, Epstein was his friend.
It's totally plausible Trump participated in Epstein parties with those young girls Trump said Epstein liked so much. At this point, it's not very plausible that concrete evidence for such activities exists.
The Epstein Story is now an albatross around the Trump Admin's neck from their own supporter base.
It's not an unprompted reaction--there's a lot of strife in MAGA World right now over it. As I said in another comment:
"The MAGAtard Nation has just been spewing BS and is now the dog that caught the car while also driving the car." Including, of course, his present FBI director and deputy director.
FtSoA
12hr ago
I'm not debating whether Hoss was tortured.
I'm pointing out his gave a consistent account for a long time after that. Weird that his torturers allowed him to claim he had been tortured, but were able to force him to never recant his overall narrative.
Did you even skim the source I provided that discussed corroboration? Are you just gonna ignore the sources I provide and questions I pose and whine whine whine about how it's the mainstream that's incapable of engaging with reality?
But as I've already explained, the biggest problem of all is the lack of corroboration of these claims in the body of documentary or physical evidence.
What's funny is that when I provide such corroboration, or ask harder questions for you than you can ask of me, you seem to ignore it.
Were the camps merely for labor? If so, why destroy and bury them?
How would you expect the Nazis to conduct a secret operation and cover up?
This is funny, the tiles did not match witness accounts and the manufacturers logo would have been installed facing the structure, not installed with the logo facing outwards.
That's not what my sources say. Do you have better ones?
Why was the facility buried?
They claim 800,000 people were killed at the location they "investigate" but instead of excavating mass graves they find a clay tile and claim they have proven everything, while demonstrating their eagerness to overfit on the data by falsely interpreting a manufacturer's logo.
Well, as you love to point out, they haven't been allowed to do a full excavation. They found evidence of structures that matched accounts of the gas chambers and found tiles when they dug. What level of excavation would make you happy?
Revisionists claim that there were real sanitary facilities constructed in Treblinka II. This is supported by budget documents which explicitly have a line item for sanitation facilities to be constructed in TII. So a clay tile is also consistent with the Revisionist theory that this camp featured real sanitation facilities that were falsely claimed to be homicidal gas chambers.
Ok, so then why did the Nazis destroy and bury the structures? Do you expect the Nazis to be retarded enough to put: "Fake Sanitary Facility Actually Intended As A Means Of Mass Execution" in the budget documents? What level of evidence is actually reasonable to expect?
One funny anecdote from Colls scientific excavation is that she found a fossilized shark teeth from when Poland was a seabed millions of years ago! But if the cremated remains of 900,000 people were on that site, and each victim had an average of say 28 teeth, there would be over 25 million human teeth buried in this small area where she found fossilized shark teeth.
Not sure what your issue is. The human bones were ground up. The soil was disturbed/tilled, so a fossil could have been in the mix. If the shark tooth was so damning, you'd think that would have been covered up so clever Revisionists like you couldn't use it.
People believe the Holocaust narrative because of the media transmitted in popular culture and what they are told in school.
Did the media write Mein Kampf? Did it write the speeches Hitler made? Did it compile lists of Jews, make them wear stars, tattoo ID numbers on them, and put them into ghettos and camps?
Yes, the Holocuast is used to force guilt onto gentiles and subsequent "compensation" in various forms. But it's based on a lie.
Does any part of your mind wince a little bit when you notice that you can't stop focusing on the alleged gassing inconsistencies, and you fail to engage with what on earth were the Nazis up to with the Jews and where several million of them ended up? Do you cringe at all when you have to consider that the Nazis operated in a secretive manner with a cover up to hide and destroy evidence, such that imperfect evidence is what would be expected?
The "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews to Palestine, Madagascar, or territory in what was supposed to be conquered Russian territory.
Wait, the Nazis were supposed to be shipping the Jews out??? WOW WHAT A GIANT MISUNDERSTANDING THIS ALL IS.
Is that what Hitler meant by "annihilation"?
But the biggest question remains: WHERE DID THE MILLIONS OF JEWS END UP THEN??????????
Again, the biggest tell here is that you simply can't deal with the overarching facts that the Nazis hated the Jews, rounded them up, and then millions of them no longer existed. (The fact you haven't even tried to contend with this rather significant issue is pretty interesting. You have all kinds of ideas and sources re: Hoss and gas chambers and human remains, but not for Jewish population statistics apparently.)
You've also not addressed the false claims you've made about the COMINT/intercepts not having any evidence of the Holocaust. Do you see why people have a hard time respecting your views and the claim that actually you're just a no-nonsense realist concerned only with the truth?
So to sum up where I think we're at:
- Europe has a long history of negative beliefs towards and violence against the Jews
- Hitler wrote a popular book in 1925 that was highly critical of the Jews as significant problem
- The Nazis in general were highly concerned with identifying and controlling Jews in both rhetoric and action, before and during WWII
- Hitler "prophesied" a number of times about "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" and called them "enemies of the people"
- Hitler gave a speech to his senior leaders in late 1941 that led Goebbels to record in his diary: "Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they yet again brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a phrase. The world war is here, the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence."
- The Nazis had a "Final Solution" for the Jewish Problem
- The Nazis systematically rounded up a lot of Jews and put them into camps
- There is clear evidence the Nazis tried to destroy/bury several of these camps, particularly towards the end of the war when the tide had turned - The "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews to Palestine, Madagascar, or territory in what was supposed to be conquered Russian territory
- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
- The pre-war and post-war Jewish population of Europe, particularly Poland, has a gap of several million Jews
Where did the millions of Jews go?
Yes, the Holocuast is used to force guilt onto gentiles and subsequent "compensation" in various forms. But it's based on a lie.
Ah, is that why people hate the Jews so much? When they suffer, they deserve it, of course. But when they don't suffer sufficiently they have to lie about it?
Here's a joke I just came up with:
A Holocaust Revisionist dies and goes to Valhalla. He gets to meet Hitler.
The Revisionist says, "I tried my best to combat the lies they tell about you trying to exterminate the Jews."
Hitler responds, "Well thank you; we tried our best, but I'll always regret we didn't fully annihilate those bloodsuckers."
"Oh no, the Zionist propagandists got you too," cried the Revisionist.
I'll have to workshop it a bit.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
c'mon, 'shotgun weddings are trashy' is the lowest hanging fruit ever
Fantasizing about them is, it's not something that happens anymore.
FtSoA
5hr ago
https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-secret-reddit-account/
Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.
Even most of the time.
I agree that often duty based ethics is framed in terms of mutual duty. But @Clementine is still correct with the assertion that duty without reciprocity is virtue, not exploitation. You may not be required to discharge your duty towards someone who doesn't discharge theirs to you, but it's still praiseworthy to do so. For example, Judaism and Christianity both depict how God continuously acts benevolent towards humanity despite them not deserving it. This isn't framed as "God is a sucker", but rather as God being the exemplar of virtue whom we should strive to imitate. Not all religions frame things that way, of course, but when you have some 3000 years of one religious tradition which does, it seems fair to call that just as established as the reciprocal duty that you outlined.
edit: forgot to mention that your explanation of Christianity is very much not how it works, and is in fact a heresy! Salvation is explicitly not something that God owes us because we upheld his law, but rather is a freely given gift. Thus our only choice is to say "yes, I accept" (out of which comes trying to uphold God's laws, again not out of obligation but out of love for him), or to reject his gift (because we would rather do our own thing). Salvation as a gift rather than earned by our conduct is a core tenet of Christianity.
aldomilyar
14hr ago
If you're going to get a tattoo make it a commitment to an actual lifestyle or longterm bond. I'll respect the signalling of MS13 or Yakuza membership over random pop culture shit.
chooky
3hr ago
Hmm, an obvious failure mode to social conservatism sounds like it would be a state weighed down by elder care, which is not too far off from describing most of the world's advanced economies, and the problem is very much getting worse.
Elsewhere, someone else talked about a marriage needing to be in service of something greater than the marriage. To many social conservatives, it seems like the answer to this is a deity. To me, it seems like you should just be able to make the marriage in service of the children. On an overall societal level, I would criticize both liberals and conservatives as failing to prioritize the future, progeny, etc, and wish there was a way to get this to happen.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
It's pretty clear from multiple responses, including some of your own, that you don't simply lack willpower
Instead, you're trying to self-proclaim a lack of willpower, which is mostly contradicted by all available evidence.
?
I'm not sure anyone on this forum is in a better position to judge my willpower than I am. Just about the only people I would defer to in that regard would be family or close friends. My family, as much as they love me, still regularly sigh and tell me they wish I was less lazy or had more willpower.
Firstly, why would I lie about my willpower? What do I have to gain out of downplaying it? I can be accused of many things, but excessive humility isn't one of them. I don't like my relative lack of willpower, it's a curse.
One that I manage to work around, and still have a reasonably productive life and successful career. I'd be much more successful if I didn't have ADHD or laziness.
(One of the core criteria for ADHD is a lack of executive function, and trust me, my diagnosis is quite clear)
The things that George was kind enough to say were impressive about me are largely things that I am naturally inclined to do. I do them for free, as a hobby. Except medicine, which I kinda drifted into because I wasn't sure what else I'd do with my life, before eventually finding a passion for psychiatry.
There are many things which are far more important, which I don't do or put off till I can't anymore, which have major impacts on my life and wellbeing.
I'm not saying I've got literally zero willpower. I'm just saying that I probably have <25th percentile conscientiousness, which is an unfortunate failing. Every time I hear about people who made nothing of their lives, or the self-proclaimed "gifted but lazy", I shudder, because there but for the grace of God go I. That's while acknowledging that I have other strengths and talents.
ControlsFreak
9hr ago
I find this and the discussion below rather fascinating. It's pretty clear from multiple responses, including some of your own, that you don't simply lack willpower. And it's not at all like some folks would have you believe these conversations go down, where there's a bunch of folks (made of straw or something) telling you that you just lack willpower or are a stupid failure or something. Instead, you're trying to self-proclaim a lack of willpower, which is mostly contradicted by all available evidence.
And further, instead, you've not described almost any challenges that in any way really resemble any sort of lack of willpower. Most of the actual challenges you've described are just problems with a variety of known solutions that actually work... and, well, you've also proclaimed that you have an urge to find those sorts of things.
Frankly, as I put it:
There are a bunch of reasons why they don't do it, and that's okay.
I don't think you've quite hit the nail on the head yet for why you don't do it, but I think it's pretty clear that it's not a matter of willpower, and it's probably not really a matter of a couple minor challenges that have a variety of pretty well known solutions, either.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
13hr ago
Social conservatives in America decided to make that the centerpiece of their political project and then get mad when I bring it up in response to a thread about social conservatism in America.
FtSoA
12hr ago
Well besides any formal revelation of the documentation, I'd expect at least partial leaks of any juicy bits. Or at least semi-credible rumors.
For instance, there are allegations that there are never-released tapes of Trump saying very politically correct things on The Apprentice.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/alleged-trump-apprentice-tapes/story?id=57192712
For the Epstein stuff, I'm not aware of any specifics like that. Obviously, the typical person highly interested in Epstein is also pretty dang MAGA, and this tension has now been built in since Trump I. But it's not like the Looney Left hasn't tried to believe anything possible about Trump being a rapist. Or a Russian asset.* I loved BlueAnon believing the assassination attempt was faked.
So the simplest explanation is there's "no there, there." Can't leak what doesn't exist. The MAGAtard Nation has just been spewing BS and is now the dog that caught the car while also driving the car.
The whole "intel black op theory" at least theoretically explains why no one is revealing any further details (if they even exist). Of course, if Epstein was supporting highly controversial totally black ops, one would hope the relevant intel agencies would have spirited him away, or conducted some kind of much cleaner cover up much earlier.
*For the record, RussiaGate did in fact find a lot of pretty bad shit that would have been unthinkable. But claims and expectations exceeded evidence; so some can pretend Trump was totally vindicated and it was all a hoax.
Clementine
18hr ago
Duty without reciprocation is just exploitation.
No, that's precisely the kind of rights-based mindset that I'm describing as not being duty-based.
Duty without reciprocation isn't exploitation, it's virtue. That's the entire point of duty-based thinking. That you might not get jack shit in return and you do it anyway, because it's your duty. The entire concept is of having things you do simply because you are supposed to, not for other incentives.
It is, admittedly, a very traditional mindset. But it's a fundamental lynchpin to how the whole thing holds together.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
6hr ago
I talk about other subjects too like white nationalism and conservatism coding as low class.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
13hr ago
if you had launched into your impassioned screen in response to this
Would not be possible as that is a response to my impassioned screed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox
As an aside this is kind of confusing because "third worldism" has a different more common meaning related to anti-imperialism. It took a few times of you using and me scratching my head to realize you were using the term to mean something like sweatshop romanticism.
I'm repurposing it because the hero of the Online Right should be some unvaccinated Bengali peasant who drinks raw milk and does honest labor in a farm or factory rather than effeminizing fake email jobs and trusts religious authorities rather than scientists.
manually reposting links across Reddit to farm karma
To continue her work in the giant psy-op that is reddit. This isn't a trivial affair. Reddit a bastion of progressivism and a key component in their narrative machine.
For my money, I don't view Epstein as a Mossad op. I view it as a joint operation between multiple countries' intelligence services where they each found benefit.
You continue holding the idea of these people behaving in predefined ways. They don't. You think they wouldn't use an account with their own last name. Yeah, they would. I wouldn't even say it for the tin foil "Triple bluff." No, they just don't actually think about these things. Opsec is often comically bad, it just sort of works out anyway because nobody gives a shit and people are actually really good at keeping their mouths shut. Though for what it's worth, what you are describing is in fact perfect opsec, because you've convinced yourself it couldn't possibly be her.
It was. Your priors are wrong, probability has her dead to rights.
2rafa
15hr ago
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.
This is incorrect, Epstein joined Dalton 3-4 months after Barr left (which I believe may even have been before Epstein dropped out of NYU) and there’s no evidence Barr would have had anything to do with his hiring.
"According to Hoffenberg, it was Robert Maxwell who first introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s."
Hoffenberg was quoting Epstein, whom he knew since this would have been in late 1992 / early 1993 before the Towers Financial collapse. Your friend asks who how you’re dating an infamous tycoon and press baron’s daughter, saying that her father told you to look after her before his mysterious death is peak Epstein, peak drama, peak bullshit, just like telling them you were personally centrally involved in Iran Contra which he was also known to do.
Ghislaine’s friends at the time, not to mention her brothers (who were very close to her and to their father, and to whom he had actually entrusted her care) first heard of Jeffrey after she moved to NYC full-time and introduced him as her new man. Epstein’s narrative that Maxwell senior introduced him (a sleazy New York conman less rich, less influential, less powerful and less well connected than countless other rich and influential friends he had) to her as her ‘protector’ doesn’t make sense.
Trump on his assassination attempt:
Trump’s claims of stolen election have led to much recriminations that he is no mere crook or liar, but damaging to democracy. His supporters otoh, have ramped up the anti-elite conspiracy to include this assassination attempt, in order to show loyalty/outbid themselves, even here on the motte. This rejection by the principal actor/TV star sends a clear signal where the truth lies in this matter, whether you agree with Trump’s politics or not. Test is over, results are in, you can calibrate. If you bought the assassination conspiracy, consider that your brain may have been fried by the culture war.
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