domain:kvetch.substack.com
No_one
2m ago
"stupid burger country intentionally screws up procurement" story.
What else was M14 but a bad idea? Why didn't use adopt MG42 in 30-06, which, I recall, was attempted but somehow failed. Intentionality or not, screw-ups in weapons procurement abounded and proliferated ever more so. Today it's more of an exception than the norm for procurement to be basically fine.
aqouta
3m 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.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3m ago
that's a local minimum of negative outcome
I think it's interesting that you think negative outcomes is the natural function to look at. I'd be willing to bet you have some attachment to "harm reduction" as a concept.
But isn't it more natural to view the opposite or some sense of self actualization as a more natural metric of well, health?
Age doesn't make an argument correct
Sure, but it makes it mighty tricky for it to be "novel".
an appeal to an obscure academic
Ellul is one of the most influential philosophers of the 90s, I'm not sure what you're on about.
You lament the "complex drug" that relies on global supply chains while typing your screed on a device whose complexity makes a vial of semaglutide look like a sharpened stick. This isn't a coherent critique of "technique"; it's just selective, convenient moralizing.
Is this really your argument? That technology is immune to criticism so long as its critics use any of it?
I give you my blessing to assume that I'm not just a computer user but also a semaglutide user and even the most egregious of hypocrites if that makes you happy.
Now can we actually talk about implications of altering one's senses on willpower and liberty or was semantics and grandstanding the whole of what you had to say?
You say weaning off the drug should be the goal to avoid "slavery." For many, the alternative isn't freedom; it's a return to the biological slavery of a body screaming for food, a slavery that leads to diabetes, liver failure, and an early grave.
The caveat seems to agree with my contention insofar as for the few, it is strictly better to be freed both from natural cravings and from taking a drug their whole lives.
Now of course the real question is which is best if you absolutely have to choose between battling your urges constantly or being addicted, sorry, tied, to a drug forever.
Your contention appears to be that that this is a straightforward choice and that reflection on this matter is the domain of ivory tower intellectuals.
I disagree. I believe that these two situations offer tradeoffs that will appeal differently to the individual and that different lifestyles or ethics will demand different choices on this matter.
Moreover, and in line again with historical criticism of modernity, I am weary of how the availability of yet another therapeutic will affect the selection pressures of humanity in a way that may be pathological or detrimental to the freedom of the individual in the long term.
Epstein's Unanswered Questions
In a recent speech at the Turning Point USA conference, Tucker Carlson criticized the administration's recent closing of the book on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Carlson alleged that there was 'no answer' to his central question, namely how a "high school math teacher at Dalton" became a "billionaire" who owned the largest private residence in Manhattan "by providing accounting advice". Apparently, this is a question for which no answer has ever been provided. According to him, the truth is that Israel provided Epstein with his money.
In this comment, I will suggest
(1) By far the most plausible explanation for the source of Epstein's wealth
(2) Implausibilities in the Mossad agent theory
How Did Jeffrey Epstein Get Rich?
Jeffrey Epstein was born in the early 1950s to a working class family in Coney Island. He was an extremely smart student with a talent for maths and physics, and graduated high school two years early.
"He was just an average boy, very smart in math, slightly overweight, freckles, always smiling"
He pursued a major in math at Cooper Union and then at NYU (for just under three years), which he dropped out from, then took a job as a math teacher at Dalton aged 21. Dalton, which as I noted recently is the most progressive of Manhattan's old prep schools, was undergoing a time of transition. It had become co-ed a decade earlier, and - in the long aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s - liberalized in other ways too. Unlike the city's public schools, subject to the strict demands of NY's extraordinarily powerful teachers' union, private schools can hire who they want.
In the 1970s, with the city in slow-motion financial crisis, tuition at elite private schools was also much lower than today, in inflation-adjusted terms about a quarter of the price. As youth became prioritized above all else and the peak of the baby boom in education led to increased demand for teachers (the boom itself had peaked in the late 1950s, meaning the mid-70s were peak demand for high schools) hiring a 21 year old NYU math dropout as a math and physics teacher was less unusual than it might seem to us. At Dalton, Epstein quickly made an impression and a name for himself as an intelligent, charming and handsome man.
Epstein was at Dalton for around two years. At parent-teacher conferences, a parent who knew Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns (whose own children also studied at the school, but weren't taught by Epstein) was repeatedly impressed by him, thinking he was a smart and capable young man. When Epstein was fired by the school as enrollment numbers dropped, the city-wide spillover from the financial crisis continued to dent confidence in NYC and drive the UES wealthy out to the suburbs, he begged that parent for an introduction.
“This parent was so wowed by the conversation he told my father, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy,’ ” recalled Lynne Koeppel, daughter of the late Alan “Ace” Greenberg...Greenberg, son of an Oklahoma City women’s clothing store owner, rose from Bear Stearns clerk to CEO and had an affinity for employees he called “PSDs” — poor, smart and desperate to be rich.
As Bloomberg found, Greenberg offered Epstein a job - not as a trader, as has repeatedly been falsely alleged - but as a trading floor assistant, essentially a clerk to a trader. This was a clerical job that required no particular education, certainly not a degree (which wasn't necessary even for traders until the mid-1990s).
Epstein arrived on Wall Street in 1976 at an auspicious time, even though the decade was poor for equities. Options on securities had existed for centuries, but had always suffered from a fundamental problem with liquidity because they were largely specific bets made between individual buyers and sellers, with no standardized pricing, each arrangement a custom contract, traded over the counter if at all, with price discovery difficult. From 1973, the CBOE allowed the easy trading of options as a hedging tool which, coupled with the slow emergence of computerized valuation and ledger tools, allowed investment banks and brokerages to offer a much larger and ever more complex array of tools to their corporate clients. This tied into growing financialization that made intermediaries like Bear more important than ever after the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the oil crisis and growing globalization of American firms who wanted to hedge huge swings in fuel prices, FX rates and so on.
Epstein made partner at Bear in four years. This was not unheard of at the time for an exceptionally talented young man. Even today, while progression is much slower in most of finance, it can still be that fast in booming sub-fields for very smart people. I know of someone at a leading quant firm who made partner at 28, in his first job, after four years, in the early 2020s. In 1981, Epstein was asked to leave Bear for a violation of securities law, possibly for failing to register products with the CFTC. Avoiding an expensive revenge-driven regulatory case would have been the firm's overriding interest, meaning that even for Epstein's brief partnership and overall tenure he would likely have received a decent payout.
In the early 1980s, Epstein floundered as an 'independent' financial consultant. A huge amount of drivel has been written about his activity between 1981 and 1986/1987. He used his looks to embark on brief relationships with a couple of heiresses he ripped off, most notably Ana Obregon. Her father had been caught up in the collapse of a short-lived firm playing games in the reverse repo business; Epstein merely facilitated her family's addition to an already-extant lawsuit with Chase, who were caught up in the affair, and who eventually repaid most of those involved. Epstein took a modest cut for pretty much no work. At around this time, Epstein socialized with some moderately influential people in New York. This was hardly surprising; he had met many advising corporate executives at Bear Stearns. They were also usually new money or outsiders to NYC; not UES generational New Yorkers.
Epstein told some of these people that he was a secret agent for the CIA, and perhaps Mossad. He told others he was deeply involved with Adnan Khashoggi, the world's richest man at that time, who had made his fortune taking a cut of arms deals between the UK, US and Saudi Arabia. Epstein had a fake gimmick Austrian passport, likely of a low quality and kind you could order in gray-area magazines at that time, and carried around a fake handgun sometimes, to impress party guests. He claimed he was an arms dealer, and lated claimed he was involved in facilitating Iran-Contra. There is no evidence of any of these claims, which are regularly repeated by the credulous. Khashoggi was famous at the time and Epstein was a compulsive liar; Khashoggi was one of the most photographed men in the world, his parties and debauchery attracted the world's press, he loved the media and was happy to appear on TV shows about the rich and famous. Epstein does not appear to have been part of his circle, just a liar who pretended he knew him.
My guess is that the occasional cut of a deal with the poorly informed, his payout from Bear and his winnings from Obregon tided Epstein over through to the mid 1980s. According to Vanity Fair, he lived in a small one-bedroom apartment; other sources suggest that he had no office at this time other than a temporary space he occasionally rented. Not exactly the lifestyle of an ultra-rich international arms dealer man of mystery.
The true source of Epstein's fortune dates to 1986, and his meeting with Les Wexner. Wexner had taken over his parents' clothing store in Ohio and built it into a chain of discount stores, which he then leveraged to buy and found a number of other store chains, including Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works. Wexner didn't need to move to New York (he could easily have run the conglomerate from Columbus, as he now does), but he chose to, and chose to buy a series of ever more extravagant homes in Manhattan as his fortune grew. In 1986, Wexner was an almost-50-year-old billionaire who had never been associated with any woman, was unmarried, and was widely considered a 'confirmed bachelor'. He was on magazine covers as 'the bachelor billionaire', with all the implicit subtext. There was rumor in both Columbus and Manhattan.
That year, Epstein met an insurance executive named Robert Meister on a flight from New York to Palm Beach. The insurance executive was taken in by Epstein's charm and bluster (no doubt full of stories about Khashoggi, international deals, arms, scandal) and invited him to an event also attended by Wexner after Epstein repeatedly showed up to his racquetball games and begged to meet Wexner. Epstein charmed Wexner, and within a year they were 'business partners', with Epstein increasingly directing Wexner's investments. It is impossible to do more than speculate here, but Wexner's business partner's thoughts, followed by some other anecdotes from the Vanity Fair piece:
Robert Morosky, who had been the vice chairman of The Limited [Wexner's holding company], was surprised Mr. Wexner took to Mr. Epstein so readily. “Everyone was mystified as to what his appeal was,” Mr. Morosky said.
Jeffrey said, ‘See all this stuff? I don’t need any of it. I could live in a tent. But Les gave this to me for a dollar. Les would do anything for me.’ ”
“Les would defer to him in any meeting…. Les would put his hand on Epstein’s shoulder.”
Wexner's own friends, according to several sources, believed that Wexner and Epstein were in a romantic relationship, and referred to him as "the boyfriend". Epstein denied he and Wexner had a sexual relationship in a filmed deposition.
Wexner and Epstein soon became virtually inseparable. They were an odd pair. Wexner was in his late 40s, with a round face and big ears. Epstein was in his early 30s and dashing—from the right angle he looked like Richard Gere. Wexner’s public image continued to grow after hiring Epstein. A 1989 Boston Globe profile that detailed Wexner’s rise reported that his September 1 diary entry that year read: “I finally like myself". Wexner’s physical appearance changed. A former Victoria’s Secret executive recalled Wexner dyed his hair. He hired a live-in personal trainer and adopted a new wardrobe. “Les would wear the tightest jeans you saw. I don’t know how he didn’t cut off blood supply to his private parts,” the former executive said.
In the early 1990s, well into his fifties, and at the urging of his elderly mother (who abused him in company meetings and was his unspoken co-CEO) Wexner married a London-based corporate lawyer in her early 30s. Epstein wrote the prenuptial agreement. The couple moved back to Ohio and had four children. Wexner stayed close with Epstein, and gave him control over his finances and investments. Even very rich people regularly make terrible financial decisions, especially when love is involved. Anyone who has been in the presence of that rare, 99.9th percentile charisma knows that very few people are immune to it, no matter their usual sobriety.
Merritt recalled once asking Wexner why Epstein was so well compensated. “Les just said, ‘Because I got more money than I can ever spend,’ ” said Merritt. “Les gave him free rein over his checkbook.” In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported Epstein earned $200 million from Wexner. Merritt puts the number at $400 million.
The bond between an older and younger man, protege and elder, can be particularly strong in cases. Unlike some thieves, Epstein didn't even take all the money, because as will become clear, he didn't need to.
Behind the BS, Wexner was Epstein's only ever client. Which brings us, at long last, to the money. Epstein 'stole' $46m from Wexner according to Wexner, and made at least tens of millions more in asset management fees in which he was paid (as is common practice) a percentage of the money he made his client. Wexner’s business was already turning over $3bn a year by the early 80s, with exceptionally high margins for the already lucrative clothing retail business. Of course, Epstein didn't invest the money himself. Instead, he just handed it (as was made clear in the recent Jes Staley case) to JP Morgan and a handful of other banks and firms, who did the work for him. Fortunately for him, Epstein was again lucky. The bull market of the age mean that even an index fund for the S&P 500 would have returned almost 500%, meaning that Epstein's loot, plus his share of Wexner's own gains, could easily have amounted to over a billion dollars by the early 2000s in a 2-and-20 arrangement, without Epstein doing anything more than acting as a middleman between private wealth teams at a few big Wall Street banks and his dear friend Les.
Was Jeffrey Epstein an Agent for Israeli Intelligence?
It is important to be clear about the specific nature of this allegation. By the late 1990s, many of the social connections Epstein had fantasized and lied about the in the 1980s were real. He really did know Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah, and various other important and famous people. He was not the most well-connected man in the country, and there were social scenes in which he was less widely known, but the combination of his relationship with Maxwell, who had been raised into the British elite and had connections he didn't, in addition to Wexner's money, had been good for him. Now well-connected in Washington and internationally, in part because Wexner had introduced Epstein to his social club of Zionist activist billionaires (the Lauder family etc) who Epstein had tried and failed to pitch his 'financial advisory' services to, Epstein made friends with Ehud Barak, the Labor Prime Minister of Israel. Barak's influence in the Israeli state was already declining; he would be the final left-wing Israeli leader.
It is to me entirely plausible that Epstein trafficked gossip to Mossad, and likely also American intelligence agencies. It is possible, although unlikely, he was paid for it, and I suspect anyone who did pay would have found out, as so many of Epstein's associates did over the course of his life, that he was full of shit, but it may have happened. This is different, however, from the Israeli state being the source of his wealth and power. I will summarise some reasons here:
-
The substantial majority of those alleged to have been victims of Epstein's supposed blackmail scheme were Zionist Jews. Consider this logically. You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel. They will do it for free. The idea of Israeli intelligence spending a huge percentage of their budget on destroying the goodwill of their number one supporters who already spend billions lobbying for Israel is absurd. Step One: Gather prominent people who already support Israel, often fervently. Step Two: Film them having sex with underage prostitutes. Step Three: Tell them to keep supporting Israel Or Else... Anyone who approves that operation likes burning money.
-
Even the gentiles allegedly involved in the scheme had no natural hostility toward Israel. Most were old-school WASPs uninvested in either the socialist or Islamic angles of Palestinian liberation. Almost no Muslims were involved. If you were Mossad and wanted to blackmail people ambivalent or hostile toward Israel into supporting it, you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims, particularly in the Gulf. You would not target Alan Dershowitz. The blackmail argument betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic purpose of blackmail. It also betrays an understanding of diaspora Jewish politics and Mossad's influence over it. Most critically, those rich Americans who were more skeptical of Israel do not appear to have associated much with Epstein (likely because that isn't really their crowd). Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
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Epstein had no ingrained loyalty to Israel beyond that he was ethnically Jewish (like 7 million other Americans), and so there is no good reason for Mossad to trust him with one of the most expensive intelligence operations in history. There were and are plenty of charismatic Israeli-American businessmen, who have served in the army and who in some cases have connections to intelligence, that Mossad could would have prioritized for an overseas influence operation. Many were - unlike Epstein - actually successful on Wall Street or in other industries. A random conman and compulsive liar who had been fired from every real job he ever had isn't a good target for this kind of operation. It is telling that while "Mossad wanted to blackmail Americans into doing Israel's bidding" sounds like a clever plan, nobody can even present a compelling case for why Jeffrey Epstein's inviting of various influential pre-existing zionists into his social circle would actually serve the goals of that plan. Was there some great mass of principled Anti-Israel (largely Jewish, presumably) Americans just waiting to go full BDS if Mossad didn't have the sex tapes? A poor argument at best.
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Much of the argument for Epstein's supposed connections to Israel involves either Ehud Barak (whose influence in the country was again on the decline, who was PM for a very brief period, and who was 'collected' by Epstein as just another famous political or media figure to show off at events like the Clintons, Prince Andrew etc) or an alleged connection to Robert Maxwell. There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s. Again, no photographs exist, no record of them being at the same social event or party exists (interesting given that there are tens of thousands of pictures of Epstein at big social events over the last thirty years; he didn't shy away from a camera, and neither did Maxwell). Maxwell was considered a hero by Israeli intelligence because he facilitated weapon and plane part shipments, illicitly, from the Soviet Union, France and elsewhere in the early years of Israel's existence. He was badly connected in America, such that his takeover of the New York Post was a desperate attempt to try to lobby for a bailout for his failing media empire, which collapsed upon his death.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
27m ago
So far the only theory I've heard that makes sense is that important US interests are presently depending on the kompromat and none of this can see the light of day for reasons Trump wasn't privy to when campaigning or when he was president.
I'm leaning towards "any relevant evidence was destroyed by someone years ago". If there was damning evidence about Trump, I'm 99.999% certain it would have been "leaked". And if there still existed any damning evidence, I don't think Team Trump has the unified discipline to not have any actual leaks.
Goodguy
36m ago
Then, once in power, if it turns out there are reasons to not release that information, just do a 180 with no explanation and brazen out the short term consequences because they don’t matter in the long run.
He's not even doing this, though. A few days ago, he got really testy with a reporter who asked him about Epstein, and earlier today he went online and wrote a whole paragraph rant about Epstein totally unprompted. He could just lay low and let the whole thing blow over, but for some reason he keeps getting openly emotional about it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
A king has far, far more virtues to live up to and a far heavier burden to carry than a peasant.
And yet people regularly murder each other to become king and rarely murder each other to become a peasant.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
That's quite funny, but if you can remember his specific quotes about Bill Clinton, Trump knew what the deal was and what people were objecting to pretty specifically.
That's what makes this 180 so conspicuous. It makes no sense: if you know you're compromised, you wouldn't have campaigned on lifting the veil, if you know you're not, what could possibly convince you to hesitate at the last second?
So far the only theory I've heard that makes sense is that important US interests are presently depending on the kompromat and none of this can see the light of day for reasons Trump wasn't privy to when campaigning or when he was president.
And yet still, why not just bury the story and say nothing? Or endlessly delay? This performative display of guilt is so stupid I'm almost willing to believe some insane cope about it being 4D chess.
I think modern right-wing converts are very different from people who actually grew up in socially conservative communities because they’re fundamentally not conservatives at all. They’re people who grew up in a liberal environment who want to rebel against it (often for valid reasons), by adopting the values the liberals themselves previously fought against. Paradoxically, to be a socially conservative convert, you need to be a non-conformist who’s not afraid of questioning the worldview they were brought up in.
If you were a conformist who respected and followed societal expectations, the behaviour that from your description is encouraged in conservative communities, you wouldn’t have converted at all.
By being a right-wing convert in a liberal environment, you’re joining a counterculture, you’re adopting certain views because they’re cool, edgy, based, provocative, you want to tear down the system… you’re obviously going to have a very different attitude to life than people born in a socially conservative bubble.
jake
58m ago
I think a point you stake a claim on doesn't necessarily withstand scrutiny.
Epstein wasn't a pathological liar. He was a sociopath who lied when it suited him, that's not the same as compulsive lying. For your examples, he was lying to ingratiate himself with higher social circles. He also maintained his fortune, and as you said, he left it in the hands of professionals. That's proof that he had an honest assessment of himself, not one overblown as we would expect from other sorts of behavioral pathologies. It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.
You then stake on the idea of intelligence agencies not working with liars and conmen, that's exactly what they do. Treachery, betrayal, is considered the gravest sin. 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. It's an idea from how the world should be, or an idea from how the world operates in fiction about spies. None of what you describe of his background is specifically disqualifying for his use as an asset. The question is the link, whether his connections make sense, or the impact, whether blackmail makes sense.
Israel, as a state, knows history isn't over, and they act like it. They're operating from a timeline looking to the end of the century and the next. Having the US as an enduring ally is an existential requirement, just as is keeping every country around them unstable until they have enough of a technological edge to assert permanent regional supremacy. They have reason to run a perpetual blackmail machine, including targeted those who appear to be on their side. Appearing like it isn't enough when the game is whether your country keeps existing. It could be, as @Quantumfreakonomics wonders, that for some it was a carrot, and others a stick. It could be that the stick becomes a carrot. Once they've got you on tape fucking one 17 year old, what's ten more? And on that note, you think the sorts of guys hearing about Sex Monster Island aren't aware of the power of the jews in America? They'd notice if they never saw any other jew. I'm reaching here, but you've also reached in looking for benign explanations. Like with Epstein's death, you start with the frame of suicide, so you make the explanation for why. 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.
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?
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
@2rafa @SecureSignals @Goodguy It was a joint Mossad/CIA project. That’s why he was able to get the the earlier charges dropped on the basis of being intelligence. The way he got rich was by being a CIA money launderer. Trump can’t reveal the list because the American people would react badly if they found out that electoral politics is basically fake and they’ve been living in a dictatorship of the CIA for the past 60 years.
I don't know what he thinks because I've never seen him try to articulate it instead of making snippy comments at people who are trying to understand. At this point I don't really care what he thinks and frankly I interpret any apparent effort on his part as likely to be a trolling operation.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
12m ago
This is also dragging in another one of my hobbyhorses: "whaaat's the haaarm in a few druuuugs, bitta fun, should be legaaaal". Well, maybe legal drugs in this instance would indeed have kept the man from getting killed by the paranoid, possibly high, 'friend' who was claiming he owed a huge drug debt.
But the problem is the 'friend'. A junkie who was doing some minor dealing, probably dipping into his own supply, probably being leaned on by his suppliers (who are not nice people who think drugs are wonderful and everyone should have free access to them so we'll supply them) for the missing money, getting paranoid and trying in turn to lean on his customers with claims that they owed more money than they did. This was not somebody doing 'few druuuugs, bitta fuuuuun'. Drugs and guys like this don't mix well (neither does alcohol, I'll freely admit that). The drugs legalisers seem to push the idea that drugs are just harmless party fun and if legal nobody would ever have any bad outcomes.
This is just not the right case to be making this claim. If drugs were legal, this guy would probably not be a drug dealer (because pharma companies have standards) and wouldn't be being leaned on by his suppliers to such an extent (because pharma companies that threaten to kill people stop being legal in a hurry).
The cases that actually do still arise from legal drugs are "addict (i.e. end-user) runs out of money and becomes a career criminal to get his fix" and "stimulant-induced mania/psychosis". These are cases which are unambiguously "this is not due to prohibition; this is just due to drugs being available at all". This is why I'm against legalising meth, for instance, despite being generally in favour of legalisation, because it's fucking notorious for doing the latter (the former is somewhat more tractable in other ways). But this case is not actually one of them, and you do your position a disservice by trying to cram it into that mould.
You're ignoring his memoirs and remarks made long after the alleged torture session, which itself was reported in his memoir. If he were a compelled witness, this is a very strange way to go about it.
In revisionist Carlo Mattogno's work on Hoess's confessions the torture of Hoess was attested to by people involved in the interrogation:
“Mr Ken Jones was then a private with the Fifth Royal Horse Artillery stationed at Heidi [sic] in Schleswig Holstein. ‘They brought him to us when he refused to co-operate over questioning about his activities during the war. He came in the winter of 1945/46 and was put in a small cell in the barracks,’ recalls Mr Jones. Two other soldiers were detailed with Mr Jones to join Hoss [sic] in his cell to help break him down for interrogation. ‘We sat in the cell with him, night and day, armed with axe handles. Our job was to prod him every time he fell asleep to help break down his resistance,’ said Mr Jones. When Hoss was taken out for exercise, he was made to wear only jeans and a thin cotton shirt in the bitter cold. After three days and nights without sleep, Hoss finally broke down and made a full confession to the authorities.”
The "confession" consists of interrogation minutes signed by Hoess on March 14, 1946. You are correct that Hoess reported on his own torture, but you left out the fact that Hoess claimed to not even know what was in the interrogation protocol he signed that constituted his confession.
“I was arrested on 11 March 1946 (at 11 pm). My phial of poison had been broken two days before. When I was aroused from sleep, I thought at first, I was being attacked by robbers, for many robberies were taking place at that time. That was how they managed to arrest me. I was maltreated by the Field Security Police. I was dragged to Heide where I was put in those very barracks from which I had been released by the British eight months earlier. At my first interrogation, evidence was obtained by beating me. I do not know what is in the protocol, although I signed it. Alcohol and the whip were too much for me. The whip was my own, which by chance had gotten into my wife’s luggage. It had hardly ever touched my horse, far less the prisoners. Nevertheless, one of my interrogators was convinced that I had perpetually used it for flogging the prisoners.
This was his first "confession", and he was tortured into signing it even though he did not even know what was in it.
You can say that later iterations of the confessions, in which the fact pattern of those confessions so happened to evolve with the knowledge of his various interrogators (Mattogno documents this very well), were not extracted from torture but that's not saying much at all. It's built on a foundation of sand, there are many reasons why someone who was tortured into a false confession would maintain a confession later without actually being tortured.
Hoess was captured because his wife was threatened with having her and her children turned over to the Russians:
No physical violence was used on the family: it was scarcely necessary. Wife and children were separated and guarded. Clarke’s tone was deliberately lowkey and conversational.
He began mildly: ‘I understand your husband came to see you as recently as last night.’
Frau Hoess merely replied: ‘I haven’t seen him since he absconded months ago.’
Clarke tried once more, saying gently but with a tone of reproach: ‘You know that isn’t true.’ Then all at once his manner his changed and he was shouting: ‘If you don’t tell us we’ll turn you over to the Russians and they’ll put you before a firing-squad. Your son will go to Siberia.’
It proved more than enough. Eventually, a broken Frau Hoess betrayed the whereabouts of the former Auschwitz Kommandant, the man who now called himself Franz Lang. Suitable intimidation of the son and daughter produced precisely identical information.
A Nuremberg witness described a conversation he had with Hoess during the proceedings, from Mattogno's work:
At Nuremberg, von Schirmeister was a witness for the defense and was about to be released soon. In the car carrying him, he sat in the backseat together with Höss, with whom he could speak freely during transit; in particular, he remembered Höss’s following outburst (see Document 3):
“On the things he is accused of, he told me: ‘Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and a half million Jews. But I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not.’”
Von Schirmeister wrote that Höss thought it was his duty to help his “comrades” by testifying during the Nuremberg trial that only “very few knew about certain events,” but added that the future of his wife and children “was the only thing that worried him.” Although Höss was “treated well” in Nuremberg, meaning that he was no longer subjected to physical abuse, the threat that his wife and children would be handed over to the Soviets, which the British may have arranged already, “proved more than enough.”
And this is on top of all of the known falsities and contradictions laden in these "confessions." 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.
If you think about it, the fact the excavation pulled out tiles that matched eyewitness accounts is a little too convenient, right?
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. But this is a good time to consider how far the mainstream has to reach to substantiate their outrageous claims. 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.
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.
Also, using ashes for fertilizer, dumping them in rivers, or any number of reported ways to hide them would seemingly explain this problem away quite easily.
Ah yes, using ashes to fertilize cabbage was one of the claims. It sounds diabolical doesn't it? But human ash is toxic to plant life due to the high amount of sodium in human cremains. They have various claims for where the ashes were dumped, what they don't have is any physical evidence the remains were dumped where claimed.
At Treblinka II it's claimed the ashes were all buried on site. But they've never been excavated. Colls found a clay tile though! It gets more absurd the more you think about it. 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.
Instead what Colls did was excavate a small number of bones in a marked Christian gravesite south of Treblinka I (i.e. not where 900,000 Jews are claimed to be buried) and claimed to have found a mass grave.
No wonder people believe the Holocaust narrative so easily, right?
People believe the Holocaust narrative because of the media transmitted in popular culture and what they are told in school. The "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews to Palestine, Madagascar, or territory in what was supposed to be conquered Russian territory. Not gas chamber extermination. This is laid out in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, which was a 90-minute meeting of mid-level officials. It's the mainstream that claims the minutes of the meeting were forged to camouflage the undocumented discussion of some grand extermination conspiracy. The Revisionists claim the minutes of the Wannsee Conference are representative of the policy, it's the mainstream that disputes their authenticity because it contradicts their narrative of the German policy.
One might imagine we have wanted to compensate for that guilt a bit as time went on.
Yes, the Holocuast is used to force guilt onto gentiles and subsequent "compensation" in various forms. But it's based on a lie.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
I grew up in an actually socially conservative bubble, in the hardcore twenty percent or so of Americans(so this would be the hardcore 10-15 percent or so of working age native whites, even in the Bush era). Going to church every Sunday was the right thing to do; Mohammedans and atheists were inherently untrustworthy. The blacks are racist too, and responsible for the problems in their community(I was of course warned not to repeat this in public). Fornication is bad, actually, but it happens and needs to be dealt with- and if an eligible man was known to be sexually active with a woman he had to marry her, even if she wasn't his preference or he had other plans. Homosexuals are (mental and sexually transmitted)disease ridden perverts. Gender roles and real and not optional. Women shouldn't be in the military. Marijuana is an evil drug, much worse than alcohol. The 'liberal elite' pushes bad values on purpose; I remember much bellyaching about how they had recently succeeded in making bikinis the overwhelming default, and when I was a bit older about themes in Harry Potter and Twilight. Better be spanked as a child than hanged as an adult(and few, if any, of the people around me had sympathy for criminals). A woman's father had the right- and in many cases, the responsibility- to veto a marriage, and maybe even a dating relationship. Ideally the woman should stay home with her kids, unless she was a teacher, but in either case the man was responsible for the bills. Society was going to collapse because the government uses our tax dollars to push bad morals which make people unproductive; that's why people are dumber, less virtuous, and grow up slower than in the fifties. You can't get a divorce just for falling out of love- the man has to be violent or not holding down a job, or the woman has to be an awful mental case, or somebody has to be addicted to drugs, or something.
I don't say these things so the motte can litigate them. I say them to point to the sine qua non which made the worldview work- different people have different roles in society, mostly due to their membership in various classes(age, gender, social class, maybe sometimes race). As a male youth it was my duty to protect my sister if we went to a social event together, and it was more important that my schooling focus on getting me into a good job which would one day pay the bills for a family. My sister had more household chores(well, in the conventional sense- I had to mow the lawn etc but lots of people don't count yardwork as housework) because it was important that she learn how to do ironing and baking and stuff that I wouldn't need. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I got a girl pregnant or lived with her I would have to marry her, even if I was in love with someone else or had other plans(and my male cousins have pretty much all followed this rule when they took concubines)- although the ideal was obviously a white wedding. And of course being that we were basically middle class I would have to provide a basically middle class standard of living- homeownership and stable employment and going places in cars and the like. My parents threatened to kick me out when I expressed my desire not to go to university, and only relented when I found an HVAC apprenticeship- because it was my job as a middle-class man to have a career, not just a job. These are of course an illustration.
I don't see this mentality from, shall we say, 'converts' to social conservatism. I see a lot of bemoaning about how someone else used to do better from e-trads. And I think this is a lynchpin that's missing which makes a bunch of it 'larping' or 'cargoculting' or whatever; the motte likes to talk about it from time to time. But y'know, social conservatism works off of 'who you are makes x,y,z your job and not doing it even when you don't want to makes you a bad person'. Lots of people like to talk about this- positively or negatively- about women's domestic or familial expectations. I don't think focusing on 'a man's role' or whatever is the missing piece I think you just... can't talk about it without talking about it intersectionally. 'How does everyone fit into society' is a question that needs to be answered and if you've already decided personal characteristics are the way to go about it, well...
I feel like this discussion is the missing ingredient to lots of the topics du jour. Let's take the leftward drift of young women- well social conservatism today seems to have, uh, not discussed what other people owe to them, only what they owe to other people. Is it any wonder that the victimhood narrative from runaway woke is more appealing? Or the disagreements over immigration; we no longer have a class of people whose obligation is to do manual agricultural labor(and most of the historical people who did this did it as an obligation, not a job; serfdom and the corvee is the historical norm). The modern American right seems to simply lack the actual difference between itself and progressivism; it differs only in accidentals(I'm pretty open about voting republican because they protect my right to be socially conservative, and not because they'll push social conservatism). I don't think this mentality can come back from the government, but only from intermediating institutions that democrats would like to punish for doing their job and pushing this. But this is the key difference; most adults have probably worked it out for themselves but nobody ever says it out loud.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
But he married Robert Maxwell's daughter? That's a pretty big connection. It's not hard to imagine that Mossad reaches out to an influential American billionaire closely connected to one of their top people. Influencing American elites is one of their priorities. Epstein has all these connections and he's Jewish, Mossad relies on local Jews a lot in its intelligence work just like how Chinese espionage relies on Chinese people overseas. They're called sayanim, helpers, and usually do passive information gathering, safehouses, logistics, access, bureaucratic processes, introducing contacts - the boring but necessary stuff. But that's when they're low-ranking, low-profile people, rather than billionaires.
And Epstein seems like the kind of guy who'd love to be working with them, make himself more of an exciting international man of mystery, make more friends in high places who could give him stock tips or useful information.
I suggest that Mossad wasn't giving him huge amounts of money, they were exchanging information and providing some level of protection from the law, perhaps passively. The FBI investigated him once and he got off easy, somebody got him a get out of jail free card. Maybe that was Mossad, maybe it was somebody Mossad knew or introduced him to, maybe there was just a certain vibe floating around. Connections can enable the acquisition of wealth like you say, being connected with a billionaire is a lucrative opportunity if you have the skill to grasp it. Connections with intelligence can surely be just as lucrative and advantageous, if you don't bite off more than you can chew. Mossad or being connected to Mossad helped enable his weird sex parties with other elites.
But it seems he only got one get out of jail free card, there's a certain level of media attention that can't be squelched and a critical point where one's friends in high places turn their backs.
2rafa
4hr ago
Because there certainly was enough evidence to convict him of interstate trafficking of a minor for sex (with himself), which is the killer charge in all of these cases and which Epstein’s lawyers would have told him guaranteed he was going to die in jail given the salacious public attention to the case, the fact that federal sentences don’t have more than a small reduction for good behavior / parole, and grandstanding by the prosecutors on the case.
He had lived like a billionaire for 30 years, private jets, satisfying his sex addiction with teenage models, doing whatever he wanted, and now faced not merely the prospect but the certainty of spending the rest of his life in jail - and not only in jail but in jail as a chomo, the worst of the worst, where (like Derek Chauvin) it was inevitable at some point that the guards would turn a blind eye and he’d get beaten, stabbed and so on (maybe even sexually violated) by other inmates.
Many people would kill themselves in that circumstance. It’s one of the least suspicious cases of suicidal tendency imaginable. If someone in that circumstance told me they were thinking of killing themselves I would literally think “yeah, that’s unsurprising”. It’s common for people facing charges like this who are out on bail to kill themselves. As for how he did it, he may have had his attorneys bribe the security team at the jail so they didn’t stop him.
There was a commenter here who said women lacked "accountability" because they want to be able to f*** without risking being pregnant for nine months.
That was me, and as we discussed at the time that's a horrendously inaccurate and uncharitable take on what I was saying.
This is entirely typical of you. In my opinion you don't belong here and I for one will be much happier when you inevitably wear out the mods' welcome.
(And no; I won't be litigating this or anything else with you again, nor should others.)
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
Likewise. You'll note that I was happy to volunteer those links.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
23m ago
I often see right-wingers online virtue signalling about women with tattoos. They'll see a photo of a hot woman who has tattoos and start posting stuff like "eww disgusting" or "why did she ruin her body with that". I am convinced that 99% of these guys would fuck the hot woman without any hesitation if they had a chance, tattoos or not. It's just a big virtue signalling LARP to pretend to other guys that they care more about tattoos than they actually do.
"Ugly" doesn't mean "total deal-breaker". I've been in relationships when the woman got a thing for tats. I didn't care for them, but I wasn't going to end a relationship over it. The associated decline in decision-making quality... not that was something to walk away over.
I took my daughter to a concert this weekend, and there were a ton of women with tattoos. The daughter has been expressing some interest, and I got to point out to how crappy almost all of them looked, even using the "like a toddler slapped stickers all over you" line. We had some good laughs on the way home about some of the... bold fashion choices on display.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
29m ago
I know at least one doctor with full-sleeves, they were perfectly normal and worked in emergency medicine (which does have a bit of a reputation for wildcards).
I've got a single tattoo, that's usually covered up. It's really not a big deal.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
29m ago
The "Grok wants to rape Will Stancil" thing is still ongoing. Will even went on the local news about it. The memes and jokes are just spectacular. This is the funniest fucking thing that's happened on the internet since Trump put all the libtards in crystals.
But the thing that pushed me to share the unhinged, surrealist joy of the Dankest Timeline was this absolute bunker-buster of a post from Big Yud himself.
TheLoser
59m ago
A simpler explanation; transwomen are often formerly (still?) autistic men, who have difficulties with regulating emotions, especially emotions that arise from what they feel as personal attacks. This would explain the overly violent comics and memes; it's emotional dysregulation.
Quantumfreakonomics
3hr ago
You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel.
Sure, they "support" Israel, but do they love Israel with all their heart and all their soul and all their might?
The one thing that sticks out about English-language media coming out of Israel is that approximately all of it is aimed at Americans. Some of it is aimed at the general population with, "look how cool and based Israel is amirite?" but dig a little deeper and you discover a massive operation aimed at getting American Jews to support Israel even more.
You're right that the Little St. James project doesn't quite fit with being a blackmail operation. Perhaps it was the proverbial carrot rather than the stick?
Am I understanding this correctly?
Alex believes that the first world is better than the third world. And actually the racists who want to deport all the immigrants from the third world are somehow actually the ones making the first world into the third world? Meanwhile unlimited immigration from the third world is no big deal?
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