pedophile
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
20hr ago
Scott Greer has a good article on this:
This issue is important to much of the Right due to the belief in “Critical Pedo Theory.” This notion imagines that the world is ruled by a pedophile cabal and “systemic pedophilia” is inherent to the current order. These elite pedos are evil by nature, which is why they use space lasers to cause forest fires and wield their weather machine against red states. These right-wingers hoped Trump would battle the cabal as president. QAnoners thought he did so in his first term, clinging to fake news stories about the admin secretly arresting and executing prominent child molesters.
The Epstein announcement came as a shock. Here’s their leader telling them that a core element of their worldview isn’t true. Rather than follow Trump’s advice and move on, they’re up in arms, with some threatening to ditch MAGA altogether. It illustrates how fundamental CPT is to a large cohort of conservatives. Trump bombing Iran and implying he may be open to some form of amnesty didn’t elicit anywhere near this kind of backlash from his base. For a significant number of Trump voters, the pedo cabal matters more than anything else.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
21hr ago
Maybe the reason Trump doesn't understand why it keeps going is because he doesn't have an inferiority complex about class that drives him into fantasy about elite pedophile rings.
Seething about people having an inferiority complex. That's the kind of irony I come to the motte for.
Maybe the reason Trump doesn't understand why it keeps going is because he doesn't have an inferiority complex about class that drives him into fantasy about elite pedophile rings.
This is funny because Trump's own VP's explanation for birtherism (and I suppose it applies even more to the demands to see his university transcripts) was a class-driven inferiority complex.
So, at the very least, Trump should know his audience at this point.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22hr ago
New poll on Trump and Epstein:
Republicans are split with 40 percent approving of the way the Trump administration is handling the Jeffrey Epstein files, 36 percent disapproving and 24 percent not offering an opinion.
This, along with Operation Warp Speed, is the only time they are willing to break with Trump. The heart and soul of the thing seems to be conspiracy beliefs.
“He’s dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody," Trump told reporters after being asked about frustration from his supporters over handling of the case.
"It's pretty boring stuff. It's sordid, but it's boring, and I don't understand why it keeps going. I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going. But credible information? Let them give it — anything that's credible, I would say, let them have it," Trump added.
Maybe the reason Trump doesn't understand why it keeps going is because he doesn't have an inferiority complex about class that drives him into fantasy about elite pedophile rings.
Slight overreaction by Reddit - but:
Data is schema and schema is data. The bigger deal for me isn't the change itself, but that they went forward with the change without publishing why or how - breaking data integrity processes. Transparency, even for mundane changes, is critical for maintaining confidence in data sets. Now I don't have the slightest bit of confidence for any sycophant that has been employed since January to realize the gravity of modifying data sets, especially if they didn't prompt the LLM that was helping them along the way to ask, "Is this standard practice / a good idea?" vs. "You are a woke destroyer, LLM, please find all instances of woke". Maybe it's gender<->sex today, but tomorrow it might be our glorious Minister of Health removing all adverse cases from the chelation therapy trials for autistic children because he's already shown an extreme disregard for evidence-based decision making.
I'll file this under my increasingly robust "Our cause is righteous, and therefore we cannot err." prior for this administration and pretty much everyone associated with it. Processes, standards, even facts themselves should not stand in the way in implementing their vision of the world, because they are morally correct. That's what's different about Trump 47 compared to Trump 45. To tie it in with other current events, it also explains the complete about-face on the Epstein topic. Republicans would rather cover it up and have it disappear because their cause is righteous, and even a pedophile-in-chief[1] should not halt progress towards whatever pet religious-ethnostate vision of America they have.
[1] Maybe Trump probably isn't directly implicated, but maybe it's double blackmail and we're witnessing a stalemate due to mutually assured destruction :shrug:. But honestly that would surprise me too because, as I said above, I'm not sure if anything would change the opinions of the 20% of Americans who view Trump as the avatar of their precise political alignment who (by the definition of the word avatar) could do no wrong, and maybe the 10% who hold their nose and vote for Trump as well. Maybe it's just literally that the people implicated in the files bought a bunch of $TRUMP shitcoins and now Trump is on their side. Who knows.
FtSoA
3d ago
The Malaysian man never cared about Malaysia, just US politics. Odd.
Ahahahaha, are you not on Twitter at all? There's a notorious guy with this exact gig, and tons of non-Americans are obsessed with our politics.
But he was pretty interested in global politics, not just American. /r/worldnews was his jam.
https://x.com/stillgray?lang=en
But at the end of the day you're approaching this backwards. Coincidences happen all the time. There's no substantial evidence it's her, and even if it were her, it doesn't even matter, right?
The Malaysia placename does check out btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukit_Larut
Donald Trump didn't even enter politics that much until 2015-2016. He was mostly just a rich celebrity business mogul. And if you know anything about elites, even the literal politicians, they tend to get along surprisingly well anyway. Maybe the writer has no concept of being friends with people of different political beliefs, but it's a common thing.
I don't think you understand the argument here. If this were Ghislaine, what is she doing here saying derogatory stuff about Trump, her friend? About COVID? To what end? Also the posting went on until 2020, so I really do not understand what point you think you're making about Trump's political timeline.
This is exactly the sort of nonsense I'm talking about! If they're perfectly willing to say "Oh my god the account is still active, just look at this private message" then why are they so unwilling to just make a real post?
The cited PM says the guy thinks this is all pretty funny. I would too, were I him. Or her.
"Large numbers of people" but can only name a single group, the Worldnews moderation team who is directly incentivized to lie, is making suspicious and contradictory claims already
Uh, you're asserting "can only name" but that's not actually true just because the author didn't provide an exhaustive list.
I trust the market: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7082/ghislaine-maxwell-confirmed-reddit-accout/
Man just skimming https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/comments/ shows it's very unlikely to be an elite socialite woman doing psyops on the internet. It definitely reads as someone who speaks pretty good Bri'ish Engrish as a 2nd language too, with slight verb, definite/indefinite article, and plural errors.
Examples:
Given the coronavirus situation in UK a couple of weeks ago, shouldn't the heir to the British throne canceled all those engagements? He is 71 years old.
Trump is a vindictive SOB and it’s scary to think that this unhinged US President is sitting on a pile of nuclear arsenals with the key code to unleash hell on earth.
Trump's behaviours such as this no longer tolerated by some European head of states.
WTF?! - how did a pedophile get a job in a children's detention centre in the first place? As this is one of several cases brought to light in recent weeks. So what's being done to prevent such incidents from recurring?
What do you think of the President Xi’s indefinite rule following the removal of presidential term limit? Is a good thing for China?
How would this change China’s foreign polices overal and in particular with the US now that Xi can focus on long term issues over a 10-20 years ahead. Knowing this how do you think Trump will manuever himself in order to cope Xi’s rising influence on the world stage?
So was Ghislaine trying extremely hard to consistently mimic the British English usage of a nonnative speaker spewing out median Reddit libtard views? Why?
I'm sorry if you read the comments from this account and think it's actually Ghislaine Maxwell instead of some Asian dude you have an incurable case of brain weasels. There's nothing but coincidences, tons of counterevidence, and it wouldn't even matter if true.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3d ago
Yes, pedophiles would prefer to live in a world where they don't have to hide their pedophilia, even if they're rich and powerful and currently getting away with it.
Is there any indication that the reddit account was trying to bring about such a world?
the Worldnews moderation team who is directly incentivized to lie, is making suspicious and contradictory claims already (like come on again, who "visits" a place they supposedly live?) and refuses to provide hard evidence that should be extremely easy to do if their claims were true and the account was still active, instead preferring easily faked and completely unable to be verified screenshots.
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Why are they incentivized to lie? If maxwellhill were really Ghislaine, they probably wouldn't know this. So what would have happened to the mods if they had not produced the evidence they have produced so far?
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it would be impossible for them to produce evidence that the account is still active without making public posts
This article makes some really terrible arguments
“Maxwell” is not a rare name; howmanyofme.com suggests there are 81,736 Maxwells in the United States. The number worldwide might run into the hundreds of thousands. My father’s middle name is Maxwell.
Not relevant, he's supposed to be Malaysian. How many Malaysian men have the name Maxwell? That they're even trying to use American names and not Malaysian names as an argument is silly, does the author themselves not even believe the "actually they're just a random Maylasian guy!" defense?
It’s hard to see why attending a party would mean you can’t post on Reddit for 24 hours.
Yep the posting correlating with "party times" was actually bad evidence, in part because anyone with a brain knows that scrolling social media on their phone is something plenty do at parties and public events anyway.
So one good actual point that doesn't disprove anything, just dismantles a not particularly strong claim.
But you can’t focus on this similarity and ignore the ways their interests differ. /u/maxwellhill mostly posted about US politics, from the vapid center-left “Orange Man Bad!” perspective that constitutes Reddit’s background radation. (click to enlarge).
The Malaysian man never cared about Malaysia, just US politics. Odd.
Ghislaine Maxwell is on record – literally – as claiming to be Donald Trump’s friend.
Donald Trump didn't even enter politics that much until 2015-2016. He was mostly just a rich celebrity business mogul. And if you know anything about elites, even the literal politicians, they tend to get along surprisingly well anyway. Maybe the writer has no concept of being friends with people of different political beliefs, but it's a common thing.
I’m sorry to tell you this, but /u/maxwellhill did post after the 2nd of July. Just not in public. He continued to perform moderator duties, interact with staff members, and answer private messages. Here’s a conversation between /u/hasharin and /u/maxwellhill that happened on the 9th.
This is exactly the sort of nonsense I'm talking about! If they're perfectly willing to say "Oh my god the account is still active, just look at this private message" then why are they so unwilling to just make a real post?
What kind of person when providing evidence prefers the super easily faked one of a screenshot of an easily edited webpage over hard proof that the account is still active of just making a single post.
You literally have to believe that the moderators are too stupid to realize how ridiculous that is, and trust that none of them would ever lie to cover up their connections to a sex trafficker. It just doesn't make any sense, the entire thing is made even fishier by the hilariously terrible attempt to disprove it.
Here’s a question for believers: do you think Ghislaine cared what the age of consent was?
Yes, pedophiles would prefer to live in a world where they don't have to hide their pedophilia, even if they're rich and powerful and currently getting away with it.
If she is, then large numbers of people (the /r/worldnews mod team, for a start) are lying and/or forging evidence in the most incompetent way possible. It would also require Ghislaine to be both insanely cautious and stupid at the same time, the equivalent of someone locking their front door with three deadbolts and leaving the house keys on the doormat.
"Large numbers of people" but can only name a single group, the Worldnews moderation team who is directly incentivized to lie, is making suspicious and contradictory claims already (like come on again, who "visits" a place they supposedly live?) and refuses to provide hard evidence that should be extremely easy to do if their claims were true and the account was still active, instead preferring easily faked and completely unable to be verified screenshots.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Texas does not threaten to secede. The far right in Texas threatens to secede regardless of who is in the white house and gets some measure of popular support when the white house has a democrat in it.
And that is, functionally, what Texas nationalists are- it's just the native far right. Some are russiaboos and some are white nationalists but all of them are goldbugs. Some are ruralists; none of them believe in global warming. Lots of them have conspiracy theories about pedophile rings controlling the federal government; none of them will countersignal those theories. Some are balanced budget hawks, most are christian nationalists, all of them think all gun control except maybe you can't bring a gun physically into a prison ground is unconstitutional. There's a lot of hyper-red tribe signaling about meat and pickup trucks and indie country and open carry. But the common threads in the movement are red tribe cultural supremacy(and this is, in their view, an explicitly assimilatory identity, Hispanics should learn American football and blacks should learn country music but they don't have to change their skin color), hyper-Austrian economics(this does not necessarily imply libertarianism), and extreme skepticism of the federal(not necessarily state) government. Lots of similarities to Ron Paul, but few if any of them would eg point to marijuana prohibition as government overreach. It's just a far-right movement and for much of it secession should be taken seriously but not literally. They really do have strong grievances on cultural, economic, or anti-federal overreach grounds. Daniel Miller really does believe these mean Texas needs to be an independent country, but his rank and file may not; lots of them are just there for the grievances. It's kind of similar to explicitly pro-militia sentiment in red areas of blue states.
We need to get to the bottom of this. Were there any pedophiles in the pedophile cabal, or was it wholly infiltrated by blackmailers with no authentic dedication to pedophilia at all?
Is there any gold in Fort Knox?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
Eh, if that post is the meat of the allegations, I would quite strongly lean towards it being a coincidence.
The evidence seems to boil down to:
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Alignment of gaps in posting with two big events in Ghislaine Maxwell's life. Just two events? Surely a person this public and active will have had more than two known events during which they could not have been on Reddit. Did the internet sleuths check for that? Why no mention? Seems like the potential for cherry-picking is great.
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The reddit user posted pro-pedophilia dogwhistles. Pedophilia absolutely mindkills normies, so it's not surprising they overindex on this (and preferring world models in which your enemies are a small number of individuals with many aliases is a curiously universal tendency: see the standard 4chan argument where all the disagreeing posts in a thread are insinuated to be by the same person, or more recently organised as a raid by some discord), but this in isolation is actually a fairy weak Bayesian signal considering that Reddit powermods are a famously degenerate bunch. Also, wasn't the narrative about Ghislaine Maxwell that she looked more like a case of someone who would (for whatever reason) do anything for Epstein, than like a proactive pedophile?
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The username.
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The reddit user stopped posting after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest. From what I understand, this happened well after the Reddit user started being dogpiled on the suspicion of being Ghislaine Maxwell; it is plausible enough that the Reddit user abandoned their account from the pressure (I imagine they were getting smothered in loads of hatemail, and there were probably some e-bloodhounds on the case who would have gotten to their personal email, phone number, address etc.).
Against this, we have:
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The low base probability.
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The extra low base probability that an active, put-together socialite would have the time and motivation to be a Reddit powermod. Again, Reddit mods are a famously low-human-capital bunch; is the amount of energy the job takes even compatible with normal functioning?
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The Reddit user, per the screenshots in your post, seems to have primarily posted tech and privacy activism news. This alone codes so heavily male that, if I saw it on some aggregator blog being linked from HN with a female name attached, I would pull the "I bet this person is a transwoman" card. (Fun game to play with tech blogs.) Am I supposed to believe that, on top of being a rich socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell also was a one-in-a-million unicorn nerd girl with male self-actualization patterns who is into privacy and free speech rights?
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All the other evidence that one would expect to be found under such a level of scrutiny but is conspicuously absent. Did the Reddit user ever insinuate insider knowledge of finance or high society, which Maxwell would have had? Reddit's status economy places a high value on "I have this uncle who has real insider information so let me explain to you plebs". Would the powermod have foregone this opportunity? What about the absolute standard things OSINTers do such as trying to infer time zones from posting patterns? Are we to believe that Maxwell had perfect opsec about this while being so conspicuously trash about other things?
In the end, "Epstein's manic pixie also secretly controlled Reddit and used it to spread hypnotic pedo propaganda" seems too much like the sort of appealing but unrealistic narrative that people with main character syndrome would fall for (like, "everyone's political archenemy once slighted me by deleting my edgy post on /r/offmychest; this is personal"), plus the QAnon tendency of yearning for the legible tropes of cartoon villains, and then confirmation bias would do the rest.
Clementine
7d ago
I moderated a forum once.
Like many forums it struggled with one of the basic problems of forum moderation — how much niceness do you enforce, which I'll explain by way of some endemic user types in any forum with enough people and anything but the most milquetoast topic.
A: Here's the troll who comes by only to post egregiously offensive "go kill yourself [list of slurs]",
B: Here's the more subtle troll, who keeps toeing the line as much as he can get away with.
C: here's the user who is not a troll. They actually do participate in discussion and are clearly trying to be a part of the community. They're also abrasive and/or obnoxious and/or inflammatory.
D: And then here's the final type of user that's problematic as a mod: They're a sensitive snowflake. Honestly they need to be sub-divided further, because some of them are just born snowflakes that can't handle any opposition to their viewpoint at all, and others are retaliatory snowflakes, because if I got a ban for three days for saying this opinion is dumb then that guy also needs to get a ban for three days for saying this other opinion is dumb.
The forum was one that was trying really hard to be heterogenous in terms of opinions and also to be nice and moderating it was a nightmare, not because of the obvious ban on sight trolls but because inevitably when you want to moderate niceness now 90% of your mod time — and the mod time becomes a balloon that expands to fill all available space — is spent on dealing with constant playground supervision of the snowflakes. Also you've been slowly but steadily banning your type C members when they eventually accrue enough complains from the type Ds, and because they're really annoying you initially don't miss them until you realize that conversation in your forum is drying up a bit and also some of the valuable forum members who were friends with type Cs also got pissed off and left and also mixed into the type Cs and their friends were, inevitably, some of the more useful members of the forum who knew a lot (and hence got into arguments that annoyed snowflakes).
Also it turns out snowflakes are basically never satisfied as long and are just a self eating death spiral of a forum culture.
After my experience moderating that forum and swearing off moderating ever again, I ended up lurking the notorious kiwifarms. It was full of people who engaged in what would definitely be termed elsewhere as hate speech against me. Now, I never actually made an account there, and I also stopped visiting a few years back so idk if things have changed, but at the time I remember being struck by how much less of a threat I felt reading kiwifarms, because yeah slurs were being thrown around but users were actually arguing, you didn't just have someone with the viewpoint that was the forum consensus and then everyone else against that consensus gets to tiptoe around what they can say or get banned. Everyone shared their most idiotic opinions and had other people arguing with them no holds barred, the forum also had reaction emojis so you could freely post your insane conspiracy theory but wou would get 50 "lol look at this insane conspiracy theory" reactions.
I remember a few years ago people were still making fun of t*kt*kers and how they would asterisk everything or use idiotic word substitution like "krill myself" because otherwise they'd get blackholed by the TikTok algorithm.
Meanwhile I took a long long break from reddit and only recently returned, to a forum dedicated to a game I play, and discovered that in the interim reddit has added some kind of probably AI based site-wide moderation against violent language (or actual human beings are being this dumb idk) and it's impossible to talk like a normal person there anymore, because if you say, in a joking and friendly fashion perfectly understood by you and the person you are talking to to be friendly, "you said my build was bad, I'm gonna have to shove you off a cliff" (this example is not great because I forget the actual exchange, but whatever, fill in something more normal) then you get banned from all of Reddit and the poor guy you were talking with gets to post your exit speech from the discord you're both in as well. It does appear to be a strike system where first you get warned, since I got my first warning for telling someone who posted about a pedophile moving into their neighborhood that hopefully the pedophile would die suddenly.
It's hard not to turn this into some kind of doompost about how the internet is turning into a horrible little hellhole where no one has a normal argument anymore just constant barricading themselves into their own opinions lest they be offended by the not niceness of having to hear someone else's opinions, each little forum and its own narrow band of acceptable ideology, all while the biggest social media sites are enforcing the most transparently fake bullshit kindergarten language upon us all. It brings out the free speech absolutist instincts in me, it really does.
But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?
Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.
Let's by analogy discuss locker room culture. I don't actually know if locker room culture is a real thing irl so I'm going to discuss hypothetical locker room culture.
It's a group of like fifteen guys in a guy's only space. They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug. Sometimes rapey Kenneth makes a joke about how some girl in the school really needs to be fucked into her proper place in society and Doug will make some follow up joke and everyone else is maybe thinking "c'mon man can we not do this" if it's been like too many times that day but usually you're just trying to finish getting dressed and maybe John also is like "that's not cool man" and pushes back. But like, the rest of the time the atmosphere is just a comfy men's only space plus the occasional rape joke or comment about how women suck or are all gold-diggers or are responsible for everything wrong with society.
Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.
Because there's just the microculture of what kinds of things are ok to say there and what aren't, and sometimes what's ok to say is anything negative about group A and what's not ok to say is anything negative about group B, and it's not really about an active policy one way or another it's just this is the overall culture of the social group, read the room and get out.
This is, unfortunately, the part where I admit that I've spent weeks now debating if I should just quietly show myself the door. I didn't mean to enter themotte under false premises, I just decided my first post wouldn't be some "here's all my labels and opinions" and would be an actual post about a controversial topic I wanted to talk about. And then before I had the chance to like, casually drop the relevant information about me and get it over with (I despise sharing personally identifiable information online, but it was nonetheless something that needed to happen eventually if I wanted to talk about any number of topics I wanted to discuss), my government did a surprise attack on Iran. I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).
And in the meantime I got to have the uncomfortable sensation of listening in on conversations I felt were very obviously not meant to include me. For several days now I've been debating doing a rip the band-aid off kind of post (how? What framing?) to get it over with and be able to discuss things again or to just... Leave.
Because of course the alternative is to figure out the correct, respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government/assassinated Kennedy, since we aren't doing kiwifarms style dialogue where someone talks about the kikes ruining everything and someone else responds by calling him a retarded autist, you've got to politely request sources and carefully have respectful mutually productive dialogue.
Or to just like ignore that the conversation is even happening? Stick to discussion of feminism and essentially continue faking being a normal non-Jewish mottizen...
Polite respectful mutual dialogue.
But only for some opinions, because others are an "immense pain in the ass".
Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave. Because it is actually really annoying, if I need to play nice with the neonazis and have polite and measured conversations — I am willing to do this, even though conversations with people who are (only theoretically!) interested in me and my family being dead are a "pain in the ass" to conduct civilly — and to then see someone else express some opinion that is more objectionable to the baseline motte culture, but expressed according to all the rules of the site, and get banned (temporarily) for it. Because it just means setting the lines around what kinds of people are in the locker room, which is pretending to be a co-ed discussion space, but isn't. And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards. I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
faceh
7d ago
Epstein‘s MO was to lie about his girls’ ages to collect blackmail material, theres no reason to believe these people are like actual pedophiles
I mean, sure. But you'd really hope that such people would want reassurances that the woman was there willingly and weren't coerced, drugged, or blackmailed into it themselves. I think most 'normal' people would be sketched out, even if they don't immediately go to the cops.
That he was able to get away with it for quite a while hints that people were willingly turning a blind eye. Not the same as being complicit, but it still reads like a moral failure.
And of course we can go AKSHULLY there's no pedophilia involved whatsoever b/c all the girls were post-pubescent and in their teens. I am sure some people think there's documented proof of like, children being raped or something.
Though of course the more conspiratorial element is that the really nasty stuff occurred on the jet or on the private island.
Do I think there was literal child sacrifice or something going on? No.
But my priors on someone who is involved in pimping underage women out being involved in even more depraved activities are... reasonably high.
It is genuinely harder for me to believe that almost all global elites diligently avoid taboo and socially abhorrent/illegal behaviors. Especially with the more recent dominoes falling WRT to P. Diddy and that whole circle. That said, I don't think they're going around consuming human flesh or bathing in virgin blood, I doubt the very worst of the theories are at all accurate.
What can I say, ensuring there are consequences for elites misbehavior is one of my pet issues.
hydroacetylene
8d ago
Most of those people are already old.
The most plausible theory remains that the Clintons/Mossad/whoever else wanted to kill Epstein destroyed thé evidence and the FBI would be chasing shadows to roll up a blackmail network that no longer exists(so far as anyone knows, Epstein‘s MO was to lie about his girls’ ages to collect blackmail material, theres no reason to believe these people are like actual pedophiles).
I’m not doubting that if you really wanted to prosecute some people for statutory, you could- but the FBI probably thinks this is beneath launching a major investigation.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8d ago
There's a difference between someone sharing all of your interests, and someone who is willing to tolerate all of your interests. Even if they don't share the same hobbies, you don't want to date someone who fundamentally is unwilling to accept a part of you. If someone is going to be scared off by me liking anime, I want to scare them off instantly, not 5 dates later when they find out. Now, granted, there is some middle ground where some people might be willing to accept anime in someone who they already know is sane and not a pedophile but would screen it off on a stranger, but that still indicates some level of judgemental that I personally would rather filter out too.
And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family. When given the choice, we usually stay home and play games, where we both want to be.
Positives and negatives are subjective and high variance. And ultimately are scored from the single unique perspective of the person you end up with. They are not averaged. Your value as a romantic partner is not the average value ascribed to you by women collectively, but the value from the perception of the one person you actually end up with. So if you have niche interests and traits with high variance, where rather than everyone slightly disliking them, some people strongly dislike them and other rarer people strongly like them, then you want to filter for and find the people who like them, and then they become positive traits.
Perhaps the next rich, famous man will update his priors accordingly:
“What’s the reaction from women for dating a fresh, childless young woman in her late teens or twenties?”
“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a groomer pedophile who’s exploiting power dynamics and taking advantage of someone whose brain hasn’t even developed yet because you can’t handle a woman your own age.”
“What’s the reaction from women for marrying a middle-aged divorced woman who’s already been around the block and had her fun?”
“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a trashy, shallow, classless bimbo-fetishist who’s too insecure to handle an intellectual woman.”
“Well then…”
A driver of the hate is that she presents as younger than she is, possibly passing as a thotmaxxing woman in her mid-to-late 40s and maybe even pre-menopausal (at least from afar). Thus, she isn’t decrepit-looking enough and is younger-looking than Bezos “deserves.” If she looks like she still might have eggs, she’s too young for the seggs.
I suppose, in general, progressive hate is likely to result whenever, wherever there’s a successful white man enjoying himself—from other tech bosses like Zuckerberg and Musk (including pre-Trump associations) to athletes like Kelce and Bauer. Modern progressivism: The haunting fear that some white man, somewhere, might be happy without benefiting women, racial and sexual minorities.
cjet79
19d ago
I think it's the same for most defenses of basic rights. Either defend the rights of scumbags or everyone loses the right.
Happens in free speech when it's Nazis that need defending. Happens in criminal law when it's pedophiles or rapists getting railroaded.
And of course the question gets asked why not just defend the right for "decent" people. But "decent people" always tends to start looking a little too much like "my political allies".
It would be nice to not have this slippery slope hanging over our heads for every basic right.
WhiningCoil
27d ago
They were a protected species. I spent some time googling the name, all the news articles conspicuously avoided his picture, except a particularly spicy one with copious use of N-Bombs, and then this one that finally gave me a mugshot.
There was some random black podcast clip that went around a few months ago where one of the guys on there was talking about his community needing to clean up it's act. He said something along the lines of "We all know somebody that is fucking kids". Everyone went conspicuously silent and started sputtering denials. But if you've ever listened to any black comedy, the family/neighborhood pedophile in the ghetto is an oddly consistent bedrock of bits.
aqouta
30d ago
Just asking questions is when someone is pretending to just be interested in a topic asks pointed questions designed to poke holes in some narrative, central example being a holocaust denier trying to make the holocaust seem implausible by "just asking questions" about how many train cars could plausibly carry how many ect ect.
I'd say there are two major distinctions.
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I just don't really think aella is a pedophile. She's not pretending to be interested in how people answer these questions. These are classic examples of "what's worse and why" questions. If someone really wanted to JAQ pedophilia I don't think they'd start with "is one instance of it better or worse than torture murdering grandma?"
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Hypotheticals aren't really the same structure as JAQing off. JAQ offs don't really give you open ended questions. They have a narrative that they want to drive down without variance. They aren't interested in your moral reasoning, they want to use pointed questions to force your to answer one way or the other. They're doing a kind of dishonest persuasion rather than trying to find understanding.
I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.
Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.
Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.
I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.
All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1mo ago
I don't think you have to normalize it if you make it legal. There's no need to put "literal toddlers" next to "teens", "mature" and "shemales" up on PornHub.
Just like in some countries addicts can get injected with heroin at government-run clinics, the same approach can be used there: pedophiles can visit government-run clinics, where a soundproof room with a PC securely connected to a government-run AI CSAM server is theirs for X minutes a week.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Elon Musk’s friends
Ah, the press. Always exaggerating.
Remember 2015, when Musk was unironically used by Scott as an example of someone who was doing good effectively?
Insofar as there’s no such thing as innate aptitude, I have no excuse for not being Aubrey de Grey. Or if Aubrey de Grey doesn’t impress you much, Norman Borlaug. Or if you don’t know who either of those two people are, Elon Musk.
Back then, it could be assumed that a Grey Tribe member would admire Musk, and there was certainly much to admire. By making EVs cool, he certainly made an important contribution to the decarbonization, and the SpaceX concept of recycling rockets certainly has decreased the cost of space flight a lot.
But since then, there have been few obviously pro-social successes of his. His social media persona was not very endearing, calling random people pedophiles will not make you look a great role model. Buying Twitter did not improve things. Openly supporting election denier Trump likely cost him most of his friends outside the MAGA bubble. Now this messy breakup with Trump likely cost him his friends within MAGA.
I am sure that he still has a following of loyal fanboys, self-interested grifters, and yes-men, who will sit in silence while he lashes out against them, but with his break with Trump, I doubt that anyone with an ego of a similar size as his is anywhere near him on a social graph.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1mo ago
Your categories are incorrect. The people you claim to be "conservatives" really aren't any more- there are elements of that in their policies since they're pushing in a pro-classical-liberal direction (which is itself a conservative idea just due to age), but the factions have realigned. Traditional conservatism, as you know it, is dead.
Right now, the Conservatives are in fact the Democrat-aligned faction [education-managerial complex, bureaucrats and white-collar workers, welfare state/make-work beneficiaries], and the Reformers are the Republican coalition [military-industrial complex, kulaks and blue-collar workers, welfare state/make-work maleficiaries].
They categorically reject any suggestion that he's corrupt.
There are suggestions that he's corrupt from Conservatives. Of course, because Conservatives are extremely butthurt because the Reformers got elected, they claim corruption at every turn and expect me to believe it because of some misplaced sense of social propriety (which is just a defense mechanism, and an especially womanly one, that Conservatives expect to work- but that only works on social credit, and their social credit card's been declined after they put their response to the uncommon cold on it).
serious criticism of Trump is inadmissible in conservative politics right now
Reformers have trouble criticizing Reformers. Conservatives have trouble criticizing Conservatives. That much is known. Reformers tend to form cults of personality a lot easier than Conservatives do; that's also because Conservatives are the faction with no ideas.
And I'd be perfectly happy to accept a Conservative claim that Reform is corrupt, if it had factual backing. But I'm still not seeing it; what I'm seeing is stuff like "the law's finally getting applied fairly for once" (laws that Conservatives fought long and hard for), "institutional human trafficking efforts by Conservatives are being addressed" (remember, it's "illegal immigration" when Conservatives approve of it and "human trafficking" when they don't), and "economic progress isn't getting unfairly impeded by regulators".
I've said this with regards to "the left are all pedophiles, look at all the groomer literature" before, so I'll say it again: if the strongest evidence opponents can muster is not actually what the word means, and they are incapable of coming up with a way to describe what's actually wrong beyond hand-waving and arguments from aesthetics, then their claims should be ignored by default.
So yeah, I have a hard time criticizing Reformers for ignoring "Trump is all corrupt, look at all the [aesthetically-repellent to Conservatives] things". Criticize his erratic governance, and the smarter ones will be happy to listen to you (because that is a factually-correct claim, and one that hurts his own faction), but that's also the best they can do because, again, the Conservatives are simply in the wrong here.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1mo ago
Merriam Webster definition of Cripple (Noun):
1 (dated + offensive) : a lame or partly disabled person or animal
2 (offensive) : someone who is disabled or deficient in a specified manner (eg. a social/emotional cripple)
Let's just keep that in mind.
I can be perfectly functional doing my job where I have to take needs and wants into account...
Sure. And a guy in a wheelchair can be perfectly functional doing working a desk job as an insurance salesman, and a guy born without fingers can probably with a bit of adaptation deliver for DoorDash, and a blind guy can live on his own with the right tools and education given to him. Those are pretty much central examples of Cripples, they are missing important parts of human life, and that they can live productively within limits doesn't obviate the existence of those limits and missing experiences.
Nor does it make sense to point to those limits and say they must be better people as a result: very few people in wheelchairs commit assault in bars, a man without hands is unlikely to strangle a woman, the blind are very rarely petty thieves. They are all, nonetheless, central examples of Cripples.
But more to the point, you're not beating the allegations when your understanding of human sexuality in this conversation is exemplified by:
the instinct to "me horny me gotta fuck"
I don't want to fucky-fucky like a rabbit in spring?
Well, when you figure that one out, tell me because I've been a woman all my life and I'm damned if I can work out why some women do what they do when it comes to men.
And a series of allusions to pedophiles and criminals.
That inability to empathize with the basic human erotic drive, one that has been identified by artists and philosophers and psychologists as the basis for so much of art and culture and human behavior, that is a crippling loss. The inability to fulfill, willingly, the duties of marriage; that is a crippling loss. The obvious difficulty in reproduction, that is a crippling loss.
A guy in a wheelchair might say, hey I'm still the top boat insurance salesman in Central New Jersey, and what's the big deal about "running" anyway amirightguys? But if he were offered a surgery that would allow him to walk and he said no I prefer the chair, we'd call that disordered thinking, we'd call it strange. We'd say he has an insane view of human life if he would prefer to be in the chair. And we'd certainly seek to censure, if not censor, him if he started advocating for healthy people to hop into wheelchairs and refuse to or prevent themselves from walking.
I clicked through and found:
That's really all. Just like leftists have to invent hate hoaxes because of the shortage of real violent white supremacists, there's a shortage of real elite pedophiles, so they have to make a scandal over some adult men emailing legal porn to other adult men. It's why they're always circling back to Epstein, the kernel of truth they use to support their worldview, even as he recedes further and further into the past.
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