Jack Blanchard in the Politico podcast (almost as good as Odd Lots if you're fine with listening to stuff at 2x speed on commutes) remarked that one of the most important aspects of the response to the publicization of the first 2% of the Epstein Files is that it may be a watershed moment where the better parts of citizen journalism have become completely competitive with institutional journalism, due heavily to the faster turnaround times of the former.
It's hard to see conventional pipelines doing a faster job of parsing scattered mentions of rare phrases like 'jerky' across a million documents than the competitive environment of individual entrepreneurialism could.
The amount of breathless conclusion jumping from citizen journalists has been completely bananas as well. I had to tell a friend of mine to take a break from it.
The level of tinfoil hat theories (example: cannibalism) which people are now taking as the truth off of which to build more theories is really something. The unfortunate thing is - in our current environment, the crazy speculation and knowingly dealing in just shit you made up seems to actually pay off when pressuring public officials.
I am glad the files were released. A lot of people have a lot of explaining to do. I don't actually think this ends up going anywhere, but we'll see.
> The amount of breathless conclusion jumping from citizen journalists has been completely bananas as well.
I saw a video on Instagram claiming (or at least insinuating) that Epstein had access to all of Lifetouch's photos, because "the company is in the Epstein files!". Turns out, it was a single line item for $109 in what looked like banking records. In comparison, that same selection of files mentioned Whole Foods ~250 times.
For those outside the US, Lifetouch does school photos for about half the schools in the US (or something like that) so you can understand how that's a thread that conspiracy theorists can pull on. But there's nothing there. Just a single payment to the company in a sea of thousands and thousands of normal, every day purchases.
There is a book “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible” which you might want to consider before deciding truth doesn’t matter anymore. It describes an explicit strategy by the Kremlin to poison the information landscape with lies, half truths, and conspiracies. And amplify conflicting narratives.
Eventually people stop caring about what is true anymore.
> It describes an explicit strategy by the Kremlin to poison the information landscape with lies, half truths, and conspiracies. And amplify conflicting narratives.
For someone who wants an intro to the subject, this 2016 paper by RAND is pretty good; 'The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model':
> The experimental psychology literature suggests that, all other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive. Quantity does indeed have a quality all its own. High volume can deliver other benefits that are relevant in the Russian propaganda context. First, high volume can consume the attention and other available bandwidth of potential audiences, drowning out competing messages. Second, high volume can overwhelm competing messages in a flood of disagreement. Third, multiple channels increase the chances that target audiences are exposed to the message. Fourth, receiving a message via multiple modes and from multiple sources increases the message's perceived credibility, especially if a disseminating source is one with which an audience member identifies.
nixosbestos’s comment was in response to a post about how an arbitrary brand new conspiracy theory didn’t have compelling evidence in the emails. It seems like saying “who cares” to what kind of reads like “technically there’s an infinite amount of conspiracy theories that aren’t proven in the emails” is saying the opposite of “truth doesn’t matter”
Kind of. Corporate propaganda (ads) are very much still in the old Bush-era paradigm of “repeating a lie until it becomes true”. Coke and Pepsi don’t want you to believe “nothing is true”. They want you to believe their cola is superior. Coke isn’t going to waste money creating confusion about that topic.
The Kremlin will amplify conflicting opinions. Even critics of the government. Later it will come out that those critics were sponsored by Putin, undermining any critics by association.
Also btw just in case: This volume could provide approximately 2,600 to 3,500 individual pH adjustments for a 15,000-gallon pool. The main pool-house on the island has about 20'000 gallons of certainly-clean water in it, as far as I can reckon. The hypothesis for the other option: a complete acid wash of the pools, implies approximately 22 to 33 average-sized residential pools were to be washed that day, a dangerous process requiring a professional staff, that stuff is nasty. You do not want to scrub your pool every day, week, or month, you will need to redo the whole surfacing soon enough after a few scrubs. You also do not want that super dangerous liquid in large quantities around to save on bulk-purchase costs, storage and safety make this a no go as far as cost-savings are concerned.
No trace of contracts with pro pool cleaners coming for a scrub in the files, but I did not look hard. This is a cop's job.
The theory that Sulphuric acid would have been used for cocaine production also does not pass muster: you would need to have a large quantity of raw leafs on ships inbound to the island for that volume, and some serious breaking-bad type setup there. This kind of dangerous activity is best done far away from billionaires enjoying the final product.
Good luck asking your friendly SOTA LLM any questions of the form: "how many gallons of sulphuric acid to fully dissolve 40 kg of organic matter?"
> (example: cannibalism) which people are now taking as the truth
I haven’t seen any indication of “people that didn’t previously believe in cannibal elites now believe in cannibal elites after reading the emails” being a phenomenon that actually exists.
I’ve yet to interact with anyone that has seriously said “I didn’t believe they ate babies on Tuesday but it is Thursday and now I believe they were eating babies.” but people are posting like that’s a thing that happens frequently now. It’s almost like the tinfoil hat theory I’ve seen the most isn’t “pedophile cannibals” but rather “reading the emails will make you go crazy and start believing in cannibal pedophiles” like they are an actual real-life Lovecraftian hazard, which is a much more outlandish idea than… kooks and hucksters continuing to be kooks and hucksters.
If it helps explain where my comment was coming from, my friend I advised to take a break from the files was neck deep in every single new speculation because he himself was a survivor of CSA. He sent me a lot of stuff and was on the "believing in cannibal pedophiles" track for sure, and by the videos I was sent, lots of other people are on that track too.
It was especially bad for his mental health, all of these new speculative theories.
I don’t doubt that. I’ve read a lot of the emails, had to tap out myself, and seen a lot of people tap out as well. What I haven’t seen is some sort of contagion where the cannibalism stuff is all of a sudden being embraced by a new group of people. It’s pretty much just been people that have had the Clinton’s adrenochrome theories and blood libel etc. in the stuff they that they read for a while that are talking about it.
I’ll put it this way: if somebody believes that it is more likely that people were eating babies than the fact that it’s actually somewhat common to refrigerate beef jerky, it’s because they’ve already been primed to think that way; there are several leaps in belief that have to take place before that becomes an even acceptable notion to consider let alone something to earnestly take as gospel.
I’ve seen 20x more people have to stop after reading about Leon Black than the cannibalism/“he’s still alive” stuff (because there aren’t actually that many people that believe in cannibal elites, they’re just very vocal). Heck, I’ve seen quite a few more people have to step back after reading about Epstein funding the bitcoin devs than after reading the more kook stuff. If there’s any sort of general “hazard” in the emails it’s not the things that aren’t true, it’s the things that are.
I have read the jerky emails, and watched a long discussion of them between a bunch of folks, and I still don’t know a single person that went from not believing in cannibals to believing in cannibals.
The range of responses I ultimately saw was “this proves my existing belief that they were eating babies” to “wow that guy’s colon must’ve been a disaster”. The “I already believed they were eating babies” crowd lost a lot of steam and went quiet as soon as someone pointed out that there are several reasons why people refrigerate jerky (high-fat jerky, lack of nitrites in the recipe, humid conditions, etc.)
I'm absolutely on board that "jerky" may mean something else.
But on balance - he kept on staff a professional chef of some acclaim who was known for selling amazing jerky at his restaurant. That restaurant incidentally included the word "cannibal" in the name.
I'm on the fence between "jerky" literally meaning jerky and something else (the discussion sure is weird), but I'm going to need a lot more to think it is human meat.
> I'm on the fence between "jerky" literally meaning jerky and something else (the discussion sure is weird), but I'm going to need a lot more to think it is human meat.
Oh absolutely, I agree. That aside, given what I’ve read I’d expect to see something more like
“lo=v d th hu=mn babme,et . can u sed mro baby meat ,, th stuff from hunam b.by that we at on my ranch in New Mexico on March 3rd of this year? got a guy @ fedex can do human baby meat shiping sez just declare it’s a h=midor and itl go thru.
Not shocking that this is downvoted around here. On X and the amount of anti-semitic content this is fueling is scary.
As a Jewish person, I can't help feel that the magnitude of the outrage is because Epstein and quite a few of his associates were rich Jews.
Not to downplay what they did as it was horrible, but I don't recall similar levels of outrage about all the scandals in the Catholic Church.
Epstein isn't the first person to be involved in sex trafficking. Every big city in the world has it and it is even legal in some countries, not to mention that Pedophilia as the term is being used in the Epstein case is basically legal in most European countries with the age of consent at 15 and even 14 in some cases.
It's hard not to feel like a lot of people want to paint a picture that Jews are especially depraved and amoral.
>It's hard not to feel like a lot of people want to paint a picture that Jews are especially depraved and amoral.
That is because it is true, a lot of people do want to paint all Jews like that. People would probably find the catholic church stuff even juicier if the vatican was running an intelligence agency that brokers with most other western intelligence agencies with these same rapists.
The thing with Epstein is that he really seems heavily connected to intelligence. Maxwells dad is alleged to be a Mossad agent. There are pictures of him in meetings in his office with a map of Israel, gaza, and the west bank on the wall. There are FBI documents that allege epstein himself was at least at one point a Mossad agent.
So you have this compelling israeli intelligence angle. The fact that global elites genuinely partied with this man. All the history of the case from the sweetheart plea deal in 2007 that stopped the federal investigation at the time in its tracks and granted immunity for potentially involved parties, the fact he was never actually convicted before he died (even that is suspect), the fact that outside Maxwell no one has been arrested.
I mean it really quacks like a tin foil hat global elite conspiracy. That is what makes this story so damn juicy and compelling. It isn't just a couple priests getting their rocks off with some alter boys, but an entire systematic thing where its looking like this guy was not only trafficking girls but running some sort of Bene Gesserit esque breeding program impregnating teenagers he thought had good genetic traits.
You couldn't even write this stuff into a movie it is so wild and hardly believable if it wasn't coming from DOJ evidence respositories.
1 The Epstein story has an interesting Mossad angle, maybe they contacted him or even paid him
2 Lunatic antisemites (and probably many bots) are overrunning the internet with medieval-style antisemitism in which Epstein is still alive, babies were eaten, etc.
I am not Jewish, and must be lucky to hang out in the parts of the internet where I haven't seen it. (Except for Breitbart comments - I pop in there when I want to know the subtext of what right wing politicians are saying. There's plenty of anti-semitism there.)
> Every big city in the world has it and it is even legal in some countries, not to mention that Pedophilia as the term is being used in the Epstein case is basically legal in most European countries with the age of consent at 15 and even 14 in some cases.
I have no interest in dying on this hill, but there's 3 different technical terms which describe distinct kinds of attraction people have to children in relation to puberty, and that term does not describe 14-15 year olds. For whatever that is worth, with regards to the legality in parts of Europe indeed age of consent can vary widely across nations, and even states within nations. But let's be clear - what Epstein did was illegal even if it was done to adults. That's human trafficking.
I am not trying to rehabilitate Epstein. He was a vile and disgusting sex trafficker, rapist, pedophile, whatever you want to call him. I am all for going after anyone else who can be proven to be involved.
He is also dead. I just don't think there was anything particularly exceptional/unique about him as a story other than his wealth as human trafficking is a global problem.
You aren't taking into account all of the effort the Republicans spent ginning up conspiracy theories about Satanic pedophile cults within the Democratic Party and how Trump's base made that and "releasing the Epstein files" their entire identity, or the absolute clownshow debacle of the Trump administration trying to stall, prevaricate and memory-hole the entire thing after it became clear how implicated Trump himself was.
Also the number of celebrities and powerful people (including the sitting President) involved makes it a bigger story.
That said, yes the antisemites have come out in force around this, just as they did around Palestinian activism, and just as they always do. But I think most people's outrage is focused on systems of privilege and power and on the Trump administration in particular, not anything about "the Jews."
Thanks for the perspective. It could be that I am being overly sensitive to the discourse around this.
As someone who avoids forums where these ideas are promoted, it's hard to know when people are talking about things like "Satanic cults" whether that is some code word for Jews.
> it's hard to know when people are talking about things like "Satanic cults" whether that is some code word for Jews.
That came straight out of /pol/ so it definitely was, although I suspect that as with "cultural Marxism" it got diffused enough within the right wing that the antisemitism got obscured for most people, but the roots are still there. Trump tweeted this image of Hillary Clinton in 2016, after all[0].
But I think that it's important not to mistake online discourse for societal norms. All of that is intentionally engineered by social media platforms and political interests to maximize the effect of radicalism and extremism, and Twitter explicitly for right-wing ends. I think in the real world, most people don't fall in for that sort of thing.
> What a fucking joke. This site is a joke. This discourse is a joke. The entire pretense of these bullshit conversations are a joke.
Don't take it out on me. I am outraged. I can't be outraged every minute of every day, and certainly not at the very-unlikely-to-be-true worst theories from the files. I am so sorry my post did not live up to your expectations.
You're right about something:
> you know, than remarking on the fact that once again, nothing will happen.
Any kind of pretense that justice ever got served to Epstein and his co-conspirators is a joke. We all know it. The system is a joke - a joke that's on us.
Sorry, I regretted this pretty much after I wrote it. I'm upset, didn't need to be at you. I'm having a bit of a hard time compartmentalizing? all of this, despite my default cynic attitude.
You were right the first time, the holier-than-thou sanctimony is a bit much, especially as it relates to these developments.
Nearly half the potentially responsive files still withheld (per reports of ~6M pages collected but only ~3.5M released, plus heavy redactions and privilege claims), and HN top commentary is about not rushing to judgement and conspiracy theories... maybe it's because the government is literally running an active cover up on a child abuse scandal that involves the billionaires, the elites, and threatens to take down entire governments.
Institutional journalism has done everything in its power to kill this story for 7 years. You don't need a fast turnaround time when the fourth estate is also busy protecting the wealthy. Note how we have all the goods on Matt Gaetz and everyone just conveniently forgot about him because daddy knows who to buy off. DOJ has all the time to pursue rinky dink charges against Letitia James for what would be at best a losing civil case by her lender but we can't go after a known sex trafficker with good connections.
Journalists have been on it from a long time ago. It's a Florida journalist who managed to 'get' Epstein.
The issue is that the line between 'opinionist' and 'reporter' journalists is blurred, while the difference between an investigative journalist and reporter journalist grow. I think it's due to a bigger personification of reporters (they are now filmed doing stuff, involving themselves instead of listening and taking notes/pictures in the background). The profession is split in two. And for sure, on part of the split seems to have sided with opinionist (mostly in televised media. Somehow written journalism is still good)
The degree to which this is true is I think still underestimated, and comments like these need more upvotes.
You don’t need to appeal to shadowy cabals to explain why media professionals have been desperate for this stuff to not be true (and why, every day these days, you can still read examples of them absolutely writhing as they are obliged by public outrage to continue to report on it).
All you really need is to remember that a) they have mortgages to pay, too, so why rock the boat, and b) the people who end up writing for the WSJ and the people who end up in Jeffrey’s rolodex are by and large the same class of people. They went to the same colleges, they consume similar culture and media, they play the same games of keep up with the joneses, they read the Economist on their days off and fret over Gen Z slang and wonder whether the Chase card or the Amex will get them enough airline miles to fly to London for free with their spouse etc etc. They recognize themselves in the “Epstein class” — not in their crimes, but in their manners. So why would they be party to showing the world that class is so profoundly rotten? It’d give the lie to their whole lifestyle.
(And yes, to anticipate a critique here, of course there’s a difference between a producer at NBC and a billionaire! Not denying that. But they are cut from the exact same cultural and social cloth. The best proof of this is in the Epstein files themselves: not in the creepy or criminal bits, but in the mundane stuff. How he talks, what’s on his mind, the advice he gives, etc. It’s all American upper middle class humdrum stuff.)
You'd think this would be the story of the century, and that every news outlet would be running it 24/7 and falling all over each other to scoop new information. Child sex trafficking to wealthy and/or well known celebrities and government officials, including the actual president of the US! What news agency in the world wouldn't be salivating for something like this?
Yet, here we are, no media wants to report on it, and they all wish that we all just forget about it and go back to buying khakis.
That's an interesting point in general. On this particular topic I would go so far as to say that the citizen journalists are far more than what professional journalists are producing. I would guess that this is more a function of the idiosyncrasies of this particular data source. Most journalists are experts in tracking down hearsay and getting specific people to talk. The house Epstein email releases are just a massive pile of open data where someone with a more data-centric background can walk in and apply their skills.
Massive piles of documents, released erratically and possessing apparently random and sloppy redactions with inconsistent formatting rules are a common tactic in some corporate cases as well, since they intend to wear down opposing counsel through exploitation of reptile theory.
AFAICT it's not well considered by DoJ that this works roughly in proportion to the technical aptitude of opposing counsel. The public has excellent technical aptitude when motivated and none otherwise and this is clearly a situation of motivation.
1) The slow and steady institutional journalists who are reporting on the government
2) The fast and loose citizen journalists who are reporting on the government
3) The government who is saturating the attention of both of them while they look for something that exists in the 98% portion of unreleased documentation about government wrongdoing
I mean who’s the idiot? Maybe it’s the government interns who need to read 100% to release 2%.
Respectfully, you also said that "we now know" that taking the COVID19 vaccine could have killed you earlier today, which is completely false. I don't think you are getting your news from reliable sources, and I see this comment as further evidence of that. I'm sure there's lots of information on 4chan about the identity of mass shooters, and that some of it is accurate, but most of it is probably wild speculation, outright trolling, and mistaken identity. Like when Reddit pinned the Boston Marathon bombings on a series of innocent people who were standing on a rooftop or missing because they had killed themselves.
To be honest, my working heuristic for over a decade now has been to assume that if someone openly admits to reading 4chan without any hesitation, caveats, or embarrassment, they can quite likely be lumped in with a general basket of deplorables.
Is it totally fair? No. Is it reasonably high probability? IMO, yes. Is there likely information value on 4chan that could be difficult to find elsewhere? Probably. Is it worth my time and aggravation to sort through it? No.
It's hard to see conventional pipelines doing a faster job of parsing scattered mentions of rare phrases like 'jerky' across a million documents than the competitive environment of individual entrepreneurialism could.