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The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

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Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

#251

Post by prawn »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #221
actionfromafar wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on a different axis to stupid. These people play another kind of game, like scammers, they filter away people who can see through their bullshit. To them, actually learning a "normal" topic is a distraction. Their game is finding and exploiting weaknesses.

It's literally a marketing funnel for corruption. Having Smart People™ at your "parties" adds a layer of legitimacy and social proof you wouldn't get if you were Bubba from Nowhere Town. Some people will be attracted by the menu, some people won't realise what's happening until they see the video they're starring in. Either way, you own them.

It's seemed to me that he was a habitual/obsessive networker. Someone up-thread described it as an urge to collect smart/impressive people, with the advantage being as you described. I suspect if you took away his horrible other interests, he'd still have been extremely sociable. Maybe aspects of blackmail/control are near-inevitable at the conjunction of criminal behaviour and power?

Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

#252

Post by veunes »

soperj wrote: post #6

> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief. Doubt it would have changed anything for Bill. There's a pattern there and this is just a piece of that pattern.

But it might've changed one decision, one meeting, one normalization step

Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

#253

Post by veunes »

stein1946 wrote: post #138

While I understand that once one attains those short of connections, certain intelligence agencies will reach out offering lucrative opportunities for your co-operation. Disgusting nature aside, I can't help but be amazed as to how someone can be so well connected. What sort of skills did Epstein have that managed to have so many people on speed dial? How do you get in a position to correspond with presidents, royals…

But less about personal brilliance and more about how social power actually works when money, status, and weak accountability intersect

Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

#254

Post by keepamovin »

I think it's obvious Epstein was engineered as a "control theory lever" over a global financial/political system, that despite the best wargaming/simulation, could never be perfectly predicted. The system was simply too complex. So, real politik, and Machiavellian necessity required elements of control to be injected into this system to provide definiteness where ambiguity dared reign.

Ne pas comprende? That means that the blackmail was used to ensure definiteness of otherwise variable elements. If we were in Ancient Greece, it wouldn't be pedophilia (then, a "good") it would have been "chthonic excess"- or "ideological heresy"- based blackmail. The architects of this twistedness merely used the tools available that leveraged the age we live in.

So, that bacchic excess (beyond such needed for blackmail)? Human nature in secret succumbed to unchecked desires, itself a predictable outcome. The OG plan was not "evil" per se (ensure predictability of unpredictable system), it was pragmatic, but the implementation, necessarily became evil and the evil was normalized and justified by the "importance" of the plan to the stability of the playmakers.

The banality of evil, eh?

Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

#255

Post by veunes »

martythemaniak wrote: post #39

> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief. The actual lesson is not "listen to your mom", but "character matters". It doesn't matter how much someone agrees with you, how smart they are, how rich they are, how many great ideas they have etc etc. A rotten character will eventually rot everything around it. Techines/nerds/geeks get so enamou…

Character matters but so does having people around you who are willing to call it early, before you've rationalized yourself into ignoring it

Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

#256

Post by clownpenis_fart »

EFreethought wrote: post #9
moralestapia wrote: post #5

Excerpt from one of the related emails (written by JE): "great proposal„ however, it needs to be more around deception alice -bob. communication. virus hacking, battle between defense and infiltration.. computation is already looked at in various fields. camoflauge , mimickry, signal processing, and its non random nature, misinformation. ( the anti- truth - but right answer for the moment ).. computation does not inv…

When he was alive a lot of people said Epstein was really smart. But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

[dead]

Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

#257

Post by TimorousBestie »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #216
sgentle wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A curiously frivolous way to frame the decision to get involved with a notorious sex trafficker. Nothing to do with values, integrity or culpability, just some boys missing their mommies.

He's strangely breezy about the whole thing. '...a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.' Uh. Really?

Scott’s experience burning most of his friendship bridges over Israel/Palestine has left him with a cynical image of academia.

“Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.

Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

#258

Post by alphazard »

whatever1 wrote: post #150

Power corrupts, end of story. Democracy (limited terms), taxation and anti-monopoly regulation are examples that show a path to cure the disease. Nobody should be trusted with too much power for too long.

Taxation is the mechanism that moves power from the people to the government, and increasingly politicians and their specific interests. Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power? Every government goon doing authoritarian dirty work collects a paycheck and wouldn't do their job without it.

Re: The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

#260

Post by arjie »

moralestapia wrote: post #5

Excerpt from one of the related emails (written by JE): "great proposal„ however, it needs to be more around deception alice -bob. communication. virus hacking, battle between defense and infiltration.. computation is already looked at in various fields. camoflauge , mimickry, signal processing, and its non random nature, misinformation. ( the anti- truth - but right answer for the moment ).. computation does not inv…

Well, it's a prompt to his assistant. It's more short-hand communication than anything else. My self-notes often look like that. They're just phrases to bring to mind some ideas rather than others or direct towards something.

Someone[3] mentioned how he sounded in an interview and I went and found his conversation with Steve Bannon. My daughter just went back to sleep and I'm not one for listening to stuff anyway so I sent it through Voxtral and put it through a visualizer[1] so I could read it and I can see why someone might want to listen to him.

He name-drops famous people a lot, definitely farms those connections and so on, but the things he mentions do reveal a systems-level comprehension of many concepts and how they affect each other. And he does it by describing these things in a simple way that must have been easy for them to understand. Personally, I think it obscures a lot of the detail but it has the flavour of the insight porn genre that was once popular.

A few of the examples are that he describes the subprime crisis as originating in Clinton-era home-ownership reform that pressured government lenders to essentially back many subprime mortgages (expanded during the Bush-era). Then he talks about mark-to-market accounting and how that accelerated (maybe even was one of the causes) of the 2008 crisis. That is sort of true, which is why new rules allow for some kinds of assets to be valued differently[2].

Anyway, unlike others here I don't think he's incoherent or stupid or whatever. The crimes he was convicted and about to be convicted for are pretty horrific but I think people are treating him like some kind of moron when I don't think that's accurate. I'm not saying this to praise the guy or defend him. I just don't think it's true.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWEc-LMT10

1: https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epste...

2: https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/loa...

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911540

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