domain:kvetch.substack.com
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
This part:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.
Is ridiculously selectively applied, e.g. basically any time people use "the establishment" as a foil they're guilty of this, but they don't get modhatted. As it stands, the rule is merely another cudgel to use against people making left-leaning arguments, although in this case I don't think an unbiased application of this rule would be particularly good either. It just makes it clunky to talk about subsets of a group that believe in specific ideas that might not be shared among the whole group.
Though I do agree the "I expect that RandomRanger will withdraw his claim" is fairly presumptuous here.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
Now, the biggest hurdle holding back the poor family in the story I've linked to is a simple one: the Overton Window. If, for some unfortunate reason, the number of women crazy enough to act that way rose significantly, society would probably develop memetic antibodies or legal solutions. This might, sometimes, become strong enough to overcome the "women are wonderful" effect, if such women are obviously being the opposite.
Ah ahahahahahah.
Hah.
Oh man, that's a good one. That's a really good one. You really aren't from around here. Our society's worship of women is downright pathological at this point. They can do almost anything and it's excused. I mean even in your own home away from home, there are plans to just get rid of Women's prison. Women are too good to spend time in jail for their crimes you see? In fact, their reasoning is that since more women are being sent to jail, something must be wrong with the legal system, since women are wonderful obviously. So we'd better start shutting down the women's jails so they can't be sent there.
Clementine
4d ago
"actually the survivors aren't credible and what happened is that they worked people to death for free labor but with no mass shootings, no mass gassings, no locking people into buildings and setting those buildings on fire, just very polite Germans extracting human labor until it dropped dead" is still holocaust denial actually.
Since the claim about the Holocaust is that Jews were targeted for extermination, not just abused as slaves and "incidentally" dying.
He also mixes in the claim that many fewer Jews died than is accepted by mainstream historians and that these numbers are inflated to suit the Zionist agenda, which is also holocaust denial.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Hmm, what can “we” learn by summing your entire outgroup up as one monolithic movement, then gaming out an elaborate social strategy?
Probably not much. Definitely nothing “optimal.” I think you’re overfitting a model, and in a way that just happens to bait agreement from a certain sort of ambiguously-autistic Internet commenter.
I suppose I also think you’re assuming the conclusion. Perhaps, for bait, that goes without saying?
Point is, your model kind of sucks.
Jiro
4d ago
Yeah when I wrote my original post it occurred to me that I was going to have to repeat myself ad infinitum about this, but, I'm not disputing that the holocaust happened or that millions died.
A common tactic of people questioning the Holocaust is to say "I'm not questioning the Holocaust but..." followed by things that are carefully worded to cast doubt on the Holocaust without explicitly denying it. And that's what you're doing. You're not disputing it, but you think the numbers are substantially inflated? That's disputing it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
If AOC says something and isn't broadly getting a lot of pushback from her party, that would be quite indicative that at least a major fraction of the left believed something, or at least doesn't disagree with her. This is not weakmanning.
I've wasted a lot of time here arguing with Holocaust deniers
The comment you linked is a good example for how much of the evidence cited of the Holocaust is not really responsive to the claims made by Revisionists. So according to Hannah Lewis, she and her family was deported to labor camps, her father escaped and joined the Partisans. Hannah almost died of Typhus but received treatment and survived the war- somehow; remember the claim is that the Germans were trying to kill all Jews so a Jewish girl getting sick of Typhus in a German camp and surviving is in itself incongruent with that claimed policy.
Immediately after a Partisan action, Hannah's mother is allegedly executed in a reprisal. The thing is that Revisionists/Holocaust Deniers do not dey any of this stuff happened: Jews being deported into labor camps, becoming sick with Typhus, reprisals. Yes, reprisals are ugly and tragic but they were legal at the time according to international law. The Germans were not even charged with crimes pertaining to these (real) reprisals for that reason, and it was remarked by some German defendants themselves that shooting a civilian in a reprisal is not exactly worse than firebombing civilians in a city.
This is kind of similar to Anne Frank, where everyone acknowledges Anne Frank as being one of the most iconic witnesses of the Holocaust. But her story is that she was deported to an alleged "pure extermination camp" Auschwitz-Birkenau but then became sick with Typhus and was transferred to a different camp, Belsen, where she died in a hospital. HNone of her family was gassed despite being deported to an "extermination camp." It's another example of how the fact of the matter for a story like this doesn't substantiate the most important claims made by Holocaust Believers and the fact pattern better aligns with the Revisionist interpretation of actual historical events sans atrocity propaganda like millions being gassed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
And then you have other prominent witnesses like Irene Zisblatt who was prominently featured in Steven Spielberg's award-winning Documentary The Last Days who do outright lie for a variety of reasons. Zisblatt claims she repeatedly ate and shat diamonds her mother gave her to hide throughout her internment in Auschwitz. Zisblatt also claimed she escaped a gas chamber and escaped Auschwitz by being thrown over the fence (Revisionist archival research proved this to be a lie, and there are records as to where she was sent and when). She also claimed her Auschwitz tattoo was surgically removed (to provide lore for why she does not have one). She claimed she was experimented on by Doctor Mengele by being injected in the eye in an attempt to turn her eyes Blue as part of the Nazi Aryan-supremacy medical research. She even claimed she was selected to be turned into a lampshade by Ilse Koch, and was deported to Majdanek for that purpose but for reasons unknown to her she was sent back.
This is the territory Revisionists have to navigate, Revisionists indisputably disproved Zisblatt's story with archival research but at the same time her lies were front and center in an Oscar-winning film produced by Steven Spielberg.
Witness testimony is understood as one of the least reliable forms of evidence. The Revisionist argument is that the well of physical and documentary evidence is so incredibly poor that the Holocaust Industry has to rely on propaganda-forms like Zisblatt and Steven Spielberg to make the story real to mass audiences, but the evidence is very unreliable in relation to the extremely unusual and unlikely claims made by Holocaust history.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
There is one guy who should have been, if what his wife says is true. (I am sceptical, but she is the blood relative, so I believe her in public)
I repeat
It's like either you've seen it, or you have some sort of mental blinders on that make what you've seen "not count"
So someone in your social circle has had that happen, despite your claims that nobody has.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4d ago
I don't know exactly what you've seen, but my guess is you've seen some of the more nuanced moderate Nazi-like posters who dislike Jews and/or Jewish Supremecists but don't call for their death. And are strawmanning/patern-matching them to the more classical Nazis. I think there's a really important distinction, because first and foremost, the rational Nazi does not want you to die. They might dislike, want you to have less power and influence, might want you to leave, but they don't want you to die and if they saw you on the street they would not attack you. Second, the rational Nazi does not necessarily hate you, personally, if you are not yourself a supremecist. They might not even be a bigot at all, in the same way that an anti-woke person is not necessarily a racist.
Eh... one of my gripes about our most dedicated Joo-posters is that, no, they don't literally say "Death to Jews, Hitler did nothing wrong!" (because that would be uncouth, and also against the rules), but when pushed about what solutions they suggest to the Jewish problem that they describe incessantly, they punt, they waffle, they evade.
"So, do you want to kill Jews?"
"How dare you!"
"Okay, so should they be, like, put in camps...?"
"I never said that!"
"According to you, Jews are bad and destroying our society, so should we disenfranchise them? Forcibly deport them? Just ostracize them? Isolate them in ghettos? What?"
"I'm not answering your stupid questions!"
Now, whether our resident neo-Nazis do in fact secretly wish that they could gas all the Jews, or just have a generalized impersonal antipathy towards Jewishness, I don't know. I'm sure in person they probably are capable of being nice to individual Jews, and wouldn't look our Jewish members in the eye and say "You should die." But clearly they think Jews, as a class, are collectively responsible for evil. It's hard to believe their preferred solution wouldn't eventually result in something bad happening to Jews as a class, including Jewish members here and Jews they know personally. I'm sure a lot of Nazis had Jewish friends and maybe even felt a little sad when their Jewish neighbors got put on a train. And yet.
I suppose they might argue that their preferred solution is that Jews renounce their Jewishness and denounce other Jews and "Jewish supremacy," and the "good Jews" who do this could be allowed to keep (some) rights, but the Joo-posters also tend to favor biodeterminism and argue that being insular, conflict-prone, and parasitical is intrinsic to being Jewish, which suggests that really, Jews Are Just Like That, and that hardly leaves a lot of peaceful solutions on the table.
So that's why I think "Dislike you and want you to have less power, but wouldn't literally attack you on the street" isn't really a compelling argument for believing that anti-Semites do not, in fact, want Jews to die. Maybe they wouldn't get their own hands dirty and would like it to happen out of sight (as most Germans did), but they won't object to it happening.
Astranagant
5d ago
The only thing beards correlate with nowadays is being ugly. Sorry, there is almost nobody who looks better with facial hair than without.
But yes, time was they were the domain of hipsters, and I'd wager that most of the people who are really into beardcare and styling are still pretty far left. Just having one isn't party coded but having it as a hobby probably still is.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Even if your claims of anti-white racism were true (the FAA hiring scandal is clearly an instance, and affirmative action can reasonably be described as both anti-Asian and anti-White, but that does not clear the "all levels of society" bar for me), I do not see how segregation would be the natural consequence.
The Black's response to facing racial discrimination was the civil rights movement, which was way more effective than any attempt to build a black-only community in the US or elsewhere would have been.
Even if you could convince the PMC that they were getting a Bad Deal wrt race in the coastal cities and that they should build their own White-only coastal cities in the middle of Arkansas with blackjack and hookers, I am not holding my breath for these cities to decide national elections. I would rather embark on a campaign of meritocracy and how racial discrimination is not cool even if it targets Whites or Asians.
At the moment, most people openly advocating for racial segregation are Neo-Nazis. I think I speak for the vast majority of Whites, HBD-pilled or otherwise, when I say I would much rather have a randomly selected Black person as a neighbor than a Neo-Nazi for purely selfish Bayesian reasons.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1d 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.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
2d ago
Now tell us her thoughts on the gays and coloreds!
Time moves - values shift.
No need to go too far in either direction.
The most unusual "extermination camp" in Holocaust lore is Treblinka. There was virtually no evidence on that camp for decades beyond a literary pamphlet written by an alleged Jewish eyewitness Yankel Wiernik. They tried to shore up this deficiency with Treblinka Trials held in the 1960s. Camp guards were put on trial, and while they didn't deny the extermination/gas chamber narrative they downplayed their own knowledge and participation. They received extraordinarily lenient charges. One of the camp commandants Franz Stangl died in prison while appealing his conviction.
The mainstream interpretation of this is that the lenient charges in the Treblinka Trials prove the attempt of West Allies to essentially sweep things under the rug and move on to more pressing matters with respect to the Cold War and posturing against the Soviet Union. But there are your confessions- decades later.
The Revisionist interpretation is that the Treblinka Trials were an intent to build a record on top of a pre-existing propaganda narrative, and lenient sentences indicate reward for cooperation. These trials took judicial notice over the gassings and extermination narrative, so denial of that narrative was not even a defense they could have used if they wanted to. But ultimately these politically motivated trials decades after the fact are a poor form of witness testimony because there was strong incentive and legal necessity for them to use the defense they did.
Josef Mengele remained unrepentant in Argentina and engaged in denial according to his son's account of meeting him. Josef Mengele's diary written in exile from 1960-75 was purchased by some Orthodox Jew and has never been published, I personally assume that there is denial in that diary because if there was an admission it obviously would have been published.
Some of the most key figures engaged in denial or denial of knowledge. Hermann Goering- flat denial at Nuremberg, he testified the "Final Solution" as such was what Revisionists say it was and was not an extermination policy. Hans Frank, the highest leader of the SS and Police in General Government denied knowledge, and his huge personal wartime diary contains no concrete reference to the extermination policy or extermination camps that were allegedly under the operation of his organization.
The most important confession in the Holocaust was the Auschwitz was the SS-commandant Rudolf Höss. His confession contains many details that are known not to be true, and it is now known that his confession was extracted under physical torture. Revisionists point out aspects of that confession which prove it was essentially planted by interrogators. For example, Höss's confession said he decided to organizing the gassing procedure at Auschwitz in the way they did because he personally visited Treblinka in the summer of 1941 and observed the extermination process there. But Treblinka was not open until a year later. So not only did this not happen- it could not have happened, there's no explanation at all for why this claim would appear in his confession other than it being planted by interrogators.
There's evidence for witnesses being threatened with having their families deported to the Soviet Union if they don't confess, torture, etc.
Himmler died in custody so we don't get his post-war account of things. His wartime rhetoric is often cited by Believers as evidence for the Holocaust, but Revisionists point to his meeting with Norbert Masur WJC in 1945, in which Masur reported:
Himmler continued: “Then the war brought us into contact with the Jewish masses of the East, who were mostly part of the proletariat. Because of this, many new problems arose. We could not tolerate such an enemy at our backs. The Jewish masses were infected with many diseases, especially typhoid fever. I lost thousands of my SS troops through these diseases. Also the Jews were helping the partisans.” ...
I tried very carefully to get him away from the unfortunate thought to defend his policies against the Jews in front of a Jew, because such an attempt would force him to add lie upon lie to his argument. But it was impossible to do so. It seemed that he had the need to express his defense to a Jew, as he probably let that the days of his life, or at least the days of his freedom were numbered. And Himmler continued: “In order to stop the epidemic, we were forced to cremate the bodies of the many people that died of the disease. That was the reason we had to build the crematoria, and now, because of this everybody wants to tighten the noose around our neck.” This was the most convulsing try by Himmler to cover up his deeds. I loathed this explanation of the crematoria to such an extent that I could only remain silent.
“The war in the East was unbelievably difficult,” said Himmler. “We did to want any wars with Russia. But suddenly we learned that the Russian had 20,000 tanks and that forced us into action. Either we prevailed or we would perish. The war at the eastern front made the most difficult demands on our soldiers. A terrible climate, never ending distances, an enemy population, and constantly appearing partisans. Only by being harsh could the troops prevail. Because of this, they were forced to destroy whole villages, if there was resistance and shooting from such a village. The Russians are not ordinary enemies, we cannot understand their mentality. In the most hopeless situations, they would refuse to capitulate. If, because of these difficulties in the east, the Jewish people suffered great casualties, one needs to remember that the German people also suffered severely.”
So Revisionists register this also as a Himmler denial, with Himmler's account here again aligning with the Revisionist interpretation of what actually transpired and evolved into a "mass gassing inside shower rooms as part of a top-secret extermination plan" propaganda-narrative.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4d ago
I think you're hiding the ball a little there. Hardly anyone disputes that Jews have an outsized commercial and cultural impact on the world. Just look at their presence compared to their numbers! What the Jew haters contend is that this impact is bad, and even malicious. If you ask me "Assume they are right about that" you're asking me to assume someone's most hostile description of their outgroup is correct. Uh, golly that would be pretty bad if this group you hate really is out to get me and destroy my civilization. Excuse me if I require more substance before I seriously indulge such hypotheticals.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3d ago
Tell me you have no idea what I think about Israel and Zionism.
The people I refer to as "Joo-posters" barely ever mention Palestine, because they don't care about anything but Jews. Yes, there are indeed people who separate Israel from Jews and criticize one independently from the other. Those are not people who go on about Holocaust denial and the Jewish war against white people.
This post earns you a tempban, not because I am a "Zionist," but because personal attacks are not allowed, even against mods. If you'd just written that you think I am a Zionist propagandist and a terrible mod, I'd have told you you're wrong about the first and that's just, like, your opinion man, about the second. But this level of antagonism and vitriol wouldn't be acceptable no matter who you're talking to.
I'm giving you three days, my standard timeout for someone whose previous record was mostly okay but who suddenly loses his shit in an unprovoked flameout.
(Normally I would leave it to another mod to decide how to handle someone who attacks me, but since we were not actually interacting previously, and this is pretty clear-cut and egregious, I'm going ahead and taking action myself. However, if another mod wants to overrule me either to lengthen or shorten the ban, I will not object.)
Clementine
4d ago
Yeah so I kind of was hoping that doing a post about being Jewish wouldn't immediately mean the replies would also include a bunch of "but Jews do rule the world" and "but the Holocaust probably is mostly fake"
I hope other mottizens can take the time to answer you.
For me, my great-grandfather was tortured to death publicly — we know because the local newspaper wrote about it, and after the war someone thought it would be a kindness to send this to my grandmother so she'd know what happened to him (...whether it was a kindness is a matter of opinion. Until that point the family had been attempting to maintain her belief her family might still be alive, even though everyone at that point knew everyone was dead)
All of the rest of her family simply disappeared, entirely. Aunts, uncles, cousins. Everyone except her (hiding in France) and one set of cousins (ardent Zionists, moved to Israel pre-ear). We had a huge family tree and then there was no one on it anymore. Our story is not unique, that's basically every Holocaust survivor story.
You dismiss the testimonies of both perpetrators and victims. Conveniently, because the crime was so massive, we still have additional testimonies left after that, photographic evidence of piles of bodies, photographic evidence of public humiliations and tortures, testimonies from the soldiers who liberated the camps, etc. But because there's a handful of fake accounts you then take alllll the evidence from perpetrators, victims, and bystander witnesses, the evidence submitted in trials, the research, and say "ok but since the opinion it didn't happen is taboo, maybe that opinion is true, because after all since it's taboo we'll only get cover ups because no respectable person will publish that it didn't happen". Which is the kind of argument you can immediately use for any belief you want to hold contradicted by piles of evidence.
functor
5d ago
China is likely trying to achieve world domination, and Europeans would much prefer the US as a hegemon,
Would we? How many refugee waves have China pushed into Europe? How many sanctions does China impose on the world compared to the US? China is on the other side of Eurasia and has little interest in countries outside of itself except for transactional trade deals. There is no historical animosity toward China as Europeans historically have had limited interactions with China.
Neocon elites pushed by the US to hate China are different from Europeans. Ursula von der Leyen would have been fanatically pro invading Iraq if she was around in 2003 and if the US was invading Fiji she would be ranting and raving about how it needs to be utterly destroyed. Americans start talking trans issues and the EU elite will be fanatically trans. If the washington establishment says grass is blue than grass is blue.
SSCReader
6d ago
Right, but those politicians are white themselves overwhelmingly right? 75% of Congress is white. Its not black people or Asians or whatever making those choices. They don't have the numbers or power. If you want to say elite whites are making different choices than non elite whites want then perhaps you have a point. But its still white people making those choices.
And even there i'll point again to the discrepancy that haunted the Tories, people say they want less immigration, but they also punish any party that oversees an economic downturn.
If you want politicians to really drop immigration you have to show you will vote for them when the economy tanks. And mostly people don't. That was our finding when I worked for the Tories. All our modelling showed that doing what people said they wanted, would lose us votes. Same with Brexit, as soon as the economic winds started to bite, voters turned on the Tories. What lesson does that teach your politicians?
We get the politicians we deserve. People may say they want lower immigration, but they are not prepared to pay the costs that involves. I'll bet dollars to donuts that in 2028, if Trump really has made a dent in numbers of illegal immigrants and the economy has suffered that Republicans lose, even if they did what most people wanted. And politicians learn that lesson.
More people rate the economy as their most important political issue than immigration. Therefore spending billions on immigration enforcement, driving up costs of food, cutting other programs for Americans to pay for it, is a losing proposition. Thats why even Trump was going back and forth on enforcement for illegal farm workers.
Its not that the call is coming from inside the building. Its that there are 300 million calls all saying contradictory things, reduce immigration, make my food cheaper, make American goods, make me able to buy a truck and a TV, and so on and so forth. Trump to his credit, is trying to stick to some of these, but even he admits it will make things worse in the short term.
That means you need to persuade people in 2028 to vote Republican even if, especially if! the economy sucks. If they do, then you are creating a new signal. If they don't then they are telling politicians what their revealed preferences really are.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6d ago
I'm always in an unenviable position in these discussions, because I'm always trying to bring people to a more refined and complex position than the one they currently inhabit, regardless of where they're starting out from. If I'm talking to stuck-up hipsters who say "well, there's obviously a divide between High Art and 'pop culture', the former being more valuable, more intellectual, etc" then I say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. But conversely if people say, "well art's just about having a good time, I know what I like, you don't have to make it complicated with all that fancy shit", then I just as forcefully say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. It's never supposed to be a direct denial of the starting position, but rather an invitation for us to walk the endless spiral of the Hegelian dialectic, together, as a team. But it always seems to come off as a direct denial. That's my fault; I need to work on my presentation.
Now, regarding my own capacity for "suspension of disbelief". I just finished up playing a VN recently. Fun game. I binged it as fast as I could, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for each plot twist, I got weirdly obsessed with one of the girls and wanted to waifu her, I cried when important characters died (yes I am a grown man who cries at video games). So am I incapable of enjoying stories like a "normal person"? Not at all! There's nothing I love more than a good story, it's basically what I live for. But, you know, you eventually want something more, you want to move the conversation forward. So you ask yourself: yes, I had this experience, this particular type of experience, but what of it? Well for starters, we can question the "naturalness" of this type of experience. We can ask ourselves if this type of experience might not be historically and spatially delimited. (Did the Iliad have "fans" in ancient Greece? How was their experience of the Iliad different from how we "experience" "stories" today? On the one hand, I think it may not be as different as some might suppose. But on the other hand, it might be utterly alien.) I had this experience, but what is this experience, really? What does it mean? What is it symptomatic of? Where did it come from, and where is it going?
It's as much about making your self and your own experience an object of critical inquiry as it is about inquiring into the artwork and the artist.
It is prioritising emotional connection over intellectual dissection
Not at all! Not in any way. Not that the two could ever be separated to begin with.
But, you know, this question about the connection between art and what might be called "emotion", it's a highly complex and fraught question. The way forward is not at all clear.
Adorno defined "kitsch" as "art that tells you how to feel". Genuine artworks don't tell you how to feel. Meaning, there's something fundamentally manipulative and coercive about an artwork that sets out with the explicit goal of inducing a certain emotional state. When the sad music plays and the camera zooms in dramatically and all the characters start crying, you know you're supposed to feel sad. The work is telling you to feel sad. We've left the domain of art and we've entered the domain of the "culture industry", the domain of pseudo-art and pseudo-emotion, the domain of mass market objects produced to fit utilitarian specifications. Or so this theory would have it.
Is this the same as saying that art should be "emotionless"? Not at all. Adorno was a great lover of Mozart after all, and Mozart's music could hardly be described as emotionless. But I do think he correctly identified a very real and very serious problem here, namely that an attempt to control the emotional resonance of a work too tightly can collapse into simple didacticism.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1d 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.
Celestial-body-NOS
Why should Man not rebel against Nature, when Nature herself is in rebellion against Justice?
2d ago
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
The contradiction is not as irresolvable as it may, at first glimpse, appear; it is far more common than one would assume that someone will be benevolent to their family or close associates, while displaying unbounded cruelty to those they have convinced themselves deserve it.
This cuts across distinctions of personal appearance; the same pattern, with substitution of variables, describes the Nazi concentration-camp guard ('he's a sub-human weakening the Aryan¹ Race'), the Soviet gulag guard ('he's a wrecker trying to derail the Revolution on behalf of the capitalists'), the United-Statesian ICE agent ('he came into our country rather than obey our command that he quietly starve or be murdered in his place of birth'), the person of hair colour and pronouns in the cancel-mob ('he's a cishet-white-male schistlord who used a term² on the naughty-no-no-word list') and the seller of disfavoured substances ('he didn't pay me the money he owed me, thus violating the Non-Aggression Principle').
Focus less on "Which personal aesthetics mean that this person is or isn't safe to associate with?" (cf. Goodhart) and more on the Parable of the Good Samaritan³, as interpreted by Fred Clark. (Patheos, April 2017)
¹...despite him being of Romani origin, and thus more Aryan than the Germans.
²...which was actually the preferred nomenclature five years ago.
³If Jesus were telling the story today, would it be the Good Palestinian?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
Buddy, have you seen humans?
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
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