domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
That's only evidence against her doing it mostly as part of an intelligence operation scheme, not evidence against her owning the account.
If some random Maylasian man is apparently capable of spending all day posting random articles for years and years, why couldn't Maxwell also be the type of person to do that? Rich and famous people are not immune to having normal idiosyncrasies like that.
It could have just been a normal account of hers just like it supposedly is a normal account of random Maylasian guy visiting his own country.
There's a shit ton of weird coincidences and connections, including the major evidence of "they suddenly stopped posting very shortly before public knowledge of Maxwell being arrested even came out" that all fall together to point to it being her account, and is disproven in an incredibly simple way that they refuse to do for no good reason, only resorting to an easy to fake roundabout method that doesn't make any good sense to do unless it's for the purpose of faking, and their official explanation contradicts prior comments by the very account in question.
hydroacetylene
25m ago
There's lots of people who make moral judgements of tattooing. Older women do so quite regularly.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
While I agree that Turok is a one trick pony, attitudes towards abortion are germane to the topic. I did grow up with the attitude that a woman seeking an abortion was not just a murderer but also a shirker(just like a boyfriend who didn't marry her when he found her with child). I don't think fetal personhood is, though.
ControlsFreak
34m ago
I find this and the discussion below rather fascinating. It's pretty clear from multiple responses, including some of your own, that you don't simply lack willpower. And it's not at all like some folks would have you believe these conversations go down, where there's a bunch of folks (made of straw or something) telling you that you just lack willpower or are a stupid failure or something. Instead, you're trying to self-proclaim a lack of willpower, which is mostly contradicted by all available evidence.
And further, instead, you've not described almost any challenges that in any way really resemble any sort of lack of willpower. Most of the actual challenges you've described are just problems with a variety of known solutions that actually work... and, well, you've also proclaimed that you have an urge to find those sorts of things.
Frankly, as I put it:
There are a bunch of reasons why they don't do it, and that's okay.
I don't think you've quite hit the nail on the head yet for why you don't do it, but I think it's pretty clear that it's not a matter of willpower, and it's probably not really a matter of a couple minor challenges that have a variety of pretty well known solutions, either.
hydroacetylene
37m ago
It was recommended on SSC, which I read for the deep dives, eg 'X: much more than you wanted to know'.
erwgv3g34
37m ago
But Quirrell can't cast spells on Harry. That's the whole narrative reason why the resonance mechanic exists; if Quirrell can just confound Harry or erase his memories, the plot becomes unsolvable.
hydroacetylene
38m ago
It seems notable that libertarians and communists are very different kinds of people- I don't think this is entirely assimilatory in nature, I think this is more selection effects. EG you see very few female libertarians.
Now she is planning to remarry.
Just to clarify, is this because she met someone new, or is that her vague expectation on how she'll proceed?
I wonder what socially conservative child support reform would look like.
The money goes into an account handled by a third party who is in charge of ensuring the money is spent on the child's needs.
None of it goes into an account the mother controls. When the child turns 18, we can either give the child full control of the account or (here's a thought!) refund it back to the father.
hydroacetylene
45m ago
If electoral politics is fake and we're living in a dictatorship of the CIA, how'd Trump get elected?
hydroacetylene
48m ago
Having someone killed in prison and leaving the motives undiscoverable is child's play. 80 IQ hood gangs do it all the time. This seems more than within the competency of the Clinton's or Royal Family's fixer.
hydroacetylene
51m ago
I also don't think anyone would care if Bill was partying too hard with 16 year old girls. He's, uh, not exactly a current figure these days and nobody sane was going to trust him with their daughter anyway. Probably most of this stuff is beyond the statute of limitations or otherwise not prosecutable too.
hydroacetylene
53m ago
if you know you're not, what could possibly convince you to hesitate at the last second?
The Epstein data has been released. There is no intact 'list'; it was destroyed at the same time as Epstein died, or shortly thereafter. Trump thinks bullshitting about how it's no big deal is a better move than coming clean that they don't actually have much data.
hydroacetylene
57m ago
The one thing that sticks out about English-language media coming out of Israel is that approximately all of it is aimed at Americans.
Well who else would it be aimed at? Israel has plenty of people who know English but the most common native languages are Hebrew, Arabic, and then Russian. No doubt Hebrew and Russian language media coming out of Israel is aimed at actual Israelis.
CanofWorms
1hr ago
Great post. Can you finish the story through the present day? It feels like the story ended right when it was taking off ( I understand you’re not writing a biography of Epsteins life, but it would be a compelling read if you did).
faceh
1hr ago
Didn't he explain that in parseltongue, which is the language that allegedly prevents the speaker from lying.
Of course, the reflexive reliance on the killing curse is indicative enough on its own.
Oh, I also remember that my other theory was that Harry himself had been specifically confunded to be unable to make any direct observations about Quirrel's true nature, which is why he was seemingly unable to make basic reasoning/connections about the guy even as evidence mounted.
And then there's a moment in Chapter 104, right before the finale pops off for real:
"Wait!" Harry blurted.
The Potions Master's hand hovered about his robes. "Why?" said the Potions Master.
"I... I just think you probably shouldn't call them..."
In a blur, the Potions Master's wand was in his hand. "Nullus confundio!" A black jet darted out and hit Harry, striking in the direction Harry had already started to evade. There followed four other spells, containing words like Polyfluis and Metamorphus; and for those Harry politely stood still.
Snape literally hit him with a spell for dispelling confusion caused by another spell, and then SHORTLY THEREAFTER (mere minutes later) Harry puts together the entire puzzle of Quirrel's role in everything.
Just really interesting timing, that.
I think EY intended Harry's issue seeing Quirrel for evil as an example of a massive failure mode for rationalists (I really don't want this thing to be true so I will purposefully avoid accepting information that would make me update that way). But it also makes sense that Quirrelmort might take the extra precaution of screwing up Harry's thought processes just enough to avoid catching on too quickly.
I find it funny how they think "we're imposing another, different burden on men" somehow "cancels out" the burden they want to impose on women and means women (and me) aren't allowed to say anything about it or have a problem with it. Judging by the fact that the pro-life side can't even with abortion referenda in Kansas and Missouri, it's not a very persuasive argument.
ETA: on second thought, perhaps my original comment was too sneery and I should be arguing to understand instead, in which I'll state that from what I've seen the pro-lifers seem to have NO plan to change people's minds other than double-down on the same things they've been doing for decades. But maybe I'm just ignorant of the facts here.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
Somebody with her profile, especially if she was ever an actual intel asset, puts their fucking real name as their handle?
Ross Ulbricht was arrested for a similar OPSEC failure, so I don't think it's completely implausible. Per Wikipedia, "[t]he connection was made by linking the username 'altoid', used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname 'altoid', asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name." I won't discount parallel construction here, but I think there is a certain point in an effort like this when you realize "this is for real", but you can't easily scrub the account history: a new account would itself look pretty suspicious and probably point right back to the original -- "DM'd all the other mods and asked for a new account to be blessed" is itself suspicious if you don't trust all those mods, and it's visible to users that a brand new account was given mod access. Satoshi seems like an exception here, but I think it's hard to leave no trace in these sorts of situations generally.
Early Reddit also strikes me as a place where a power-user could steer the conversation more broadly in ways that would be useful to more than just intelligence agencies, or could just be a personal power fantasy. Bots weren't believable conversation partners a decade ago. Observably, various political activists have gotten a lot of mileage out of moderating default Reddit subs, so even if maybe the impact of that is fading today, I think "digital conversation influencer" might have been a playable role that would get one into real conversations in the halls of (non-digital) power.
faceh
1hr ago
Well this explains a lot about your stated positions.
Makes me realize that I probably turned out as weird as I did because I kind of had a one-foot-in-one-foot out upbringing, where half my family was churchgoing patriotic traditionalists and the other was more... bohemian? And both sides seemed pretty happy with their lives and had things mostly held together.
'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...
We've talked about basic life scripts before, and in general I think that demolishing those scripts has made life harder, scarier, more uncertain, less fulfilling for most people. Becoming an adult is difficult enough when there IS a direct example to follow. Now you have to do it while explicitly being told there is no one 'right way' to go about it.
When every single day, month, year of your life feels like you're having to hack through uncharted wilderness, and determine your location via a hand-drawn map and dead-reckoning, then yeah you're going to keep second-guessing a lot of decisions and live in constant fear of bear attacks, vs. staying on a well-beaten, marked, and lit pathway. (I overstate the analogy just to make a point).
And as you note, people who LARP Conservativism don't really push a RETVRN to such life scripts, or have a plan for bring those scripts back. Because telling your viewers "go to church, follow the bible, and accept your given place and role in life without much complaint" is so utterly uncool and, for an influencer, self-defeating. If the audience does that they will start listening to their pastor more than you, right?
In fact, now I think about it: the term "Conservative Influencer" is almost a contradiction.
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.
Agreed. But both the right and the left seem to have converged on the idea that the government ought to be the single wellspring from which all morality and practical guidance comes. What to eat, what to wear, how to arrange your affairs.
Again, overstating the case. I have spent a good portion of my adult life groping around for SOME institution, group, maybe even (ugh) ideology that would give me a provably reliable path towards a better life. But very explicitly not wanting to fall into a cult.
The only one that hasn't let me down in some egregious way, and has remained a steadying force in life is, no shit, my martial arts gym.
The gym I teach at provides the following:
- A strong routine. The schedule for classes has been the same for years and years.
- A curriculum of new material to learn (I've mastered basically all of it, but that just lets me reach out and find new stuff)
- A great social group of generally good, reliable people. (If they weren't good and reliable, they wouldn't stick it out. This stuff is HARD).
- A certain amount of moral instruction: "We are teaching you to inflict physical harm on your fellow human, here are the conditions under which you can do so or should do so."
- A system for advancement (there are tests on a regular schedule, and you earn higher belts as you go).
- Which also allows for a benevolent soft hierarchy. Higher belts are more experienced (and theoretically more dangerous) and thus command some respect, but they have a reciprocal duty to help lower belts learn faster. And nobody thinks, for example, a blue belt has the authority to ORDER a yellow belt to do something.
- Also fun.
I'd guess this checks a lot of the boxes for people who want to be able to follow instructions and see improvement in their life circumstances and be rewarded for the progress. There was a period of time where I think Corporations tried to sort of provide that to employees to make them more productive, but the underlying loyalty that requires has dissipated.
Church is still there, but good luck picking one that isn't compromised by political activism or that is mostly full of LARPers.
That seems to leave most people with joining up with political activism or getting into politics. Which tends to make everything worse.
Goodguy
1hr ago
Revisionist theories are not much worth engaging with unless they offer an explanation of what happened to Eastern Europe's Jews. For example, the 1926 USSR census records about 2.6 million Jews. The 1931 Polish census records about 3.1 million Jews. What happened to these populations? The current European population of Jews is estimated to be about 1 million total. Is there evidence for a post-war migration of such a large number of Jews to America, Israel, and so on? As far as I know, there is not. There was substantial migration, but from what I understand, not enough to explain the collapse of Europe's Jewish population size. Revisionists, to be taken seriously, should not just pick holes in mainstream theories - they should present an alternative theory that accounts for the evidence. If the European Jewish population collapsed through emigration rather than killing, let's see evidence of the emigration in quantities enough to account for the population changes. Disease, famine, and so on are not good explanations, because they do not explain why the Jewish population collapsed so much more than the populations of other affected ethnic groups.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
1hr ago
About those nurses, apparently they get tattoos to help manage their “trauma” which is presumably excreted from an organ somewhere within their bodies.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
History is full of men who wanted nothing to do with it. And rightfully so.
Wars of succession are rarely fought to get the other guy to take on the, ah, "curse." There never seems to be a shortage of men ready and willing to take the top job.
It's only redeeming quality is that in the hands of your enemies, it is even more terrible than in yours.
These people have "enemies" because they wish to gain power and subjugate their rivals. If they didn't want to do those things, nobody would give a shit about them.
The vision of the reluctant ruler is a very romantic fantasy for the armchair philosopher, or for those with zero power in their personal life, but has very little, if anything, to do with reality.
FtSoA
2hr ago
What's the probability vs Ghislaine they would name themselves "maxwellhill?" Let's say indeterminate.
Ahahahahahahahahahaha.
Bayes doesn't work if you don't accurately evaluate the evidence.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
Thank you for that. But human memory, while capacious, isn't infinite, and I wonder if I'll ever want these neurons back.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
I appreciate the detail. Ah, would life be nearly as colorful if there weren't so many lolcows mooing out of desperation to be milked?
Not quiiiiite true.
The actual solution to the final exam involved Harry casting a spell directly on Quirrell, for example. If the spell effect were small enough I'd guess its something that he could actually do without triggering a major problem, OR he could have someone else do it for him, which is his MO for almost all the other stuff he pulls outside of the Azkaban rescue.
And Quirrell's initial motivation was to create a worthy opponent to play with so he wouldn't be bored in eternal immortality. And that only changed once he learned of a Prophesy that would DIRECTLY threaten that immortality, with Harry being the trigger.
Adjusting Harry's thinking so that he wouldn't discover Quirrell's secret before Quirrell had won him over is well within bounds of that motivation.
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