I’m sure people can still tell, but Former People by Douglas Smith makes the case that by the slow opening up of Soviet society in the 1970s the actual, titled aristocracy had been so totally destroyed as an identity by so many successive periods of purges, internal transfers, re-education, the gulag, the war and intermarriage that it didn’t really exist any more outside of maybe some early emigrant families who left in 1917-1921 that keep or kept a vague recollection of it as a cultural thing. Kulaks and gentry (and to some extent minor urban and provincial bourgeoisie) were obviously much greater in number and their descendants are still relatively powerful and disproportionately overrepresented in the Russian and Chinese elite. And Smith does end with an anecdote about the descendant of one princely family whom he meets in early 2010s Moscow making a fortune in the oil business or something like that.
Hereditarily upper middle, although not truly in the fifth or whatever generation continental European way (a little less common in the Anglosphere, where the haute bourgeoisie has a more fluid cultural and economic relationship with the more mobile upper middle class).
My father grew up small town upper-middle class and my mother something slightly above (or maybe just more urban than) that, although both families had a lot of rises and falls. On my father’s side a big industrial fortune was lost in the Great Depression; his own grandfather was a husk the rest of his life, a New Jersey accountant and business manager for other people when he had been groomed to be a Manhattan titan of industry, always struggling with money and in debt. There are no famous rabbis or scholars in my lineage, so on the Ashkenazi bloodline hierarchy we’re pretty mediocre, a mix of Latvian, Ukrainian and German-Swiss Jewry maybe.
My parents went from NYC upper middle class to wealthy when I was in high school, which was interesting, and I think I’ve written about that before. In England all professional Americans without specific signifiers (very strong Southern yee-haw accent, for example) are grouped into the same social class status, which is about as good as it gets as a foreigner other than the special privilege afforded to Kiwis and Aussies. Your accent, politics and culture will get made fun of, but you are considered competent, professional, relatively intelligent and are a viable dinner guest or party invite most of the time.
2rafa
1d ago
Opera house, high school sports facility or small events room at a local church?
Right, and @FiveHourMarathon says there’s no precedent. There are examples of billionaires handing over their fortune to be managed by others, although the small number of billionaires and fact that these kinds of private financial affairs would usually never be reported on unless there was either a famous legal case or high profile scandal / crime surrounding the arrangement affects visibility.
But if you look more generally, Epstein had been around super rich people to some extent for more than ten years when he met Wexner in the 80s. He had met a large number. All he needed was one. And he had a very good record of charming rich people. He charmed Ace Greenberg as a teacher. He charmed Bear Stearns’ rich clients. He was very good at charming even wealthy women, obviously.
Lauren Sanchez married one man who became a billionaire, then seduced (as a middle-aged woman!) one of the richest men in the world, convinced him to leave his wife in an extremely costly divorce, had herself made the figurehead of his yacht, and got a nine figure wedding out of it all. In total she cost Bezos dozens of times what Epstein made from Wexner.
99.9th percentile charisma people exist, you’ve probably met one or two. Most are harmless and most of the harmful ones are relatively powerless, but coupled with intelligence a few standard deviations above the norm and extreme personal ambition (as noted by Greenberg and others) and what Epstein is alleged to have done with Wexner really isn’t so impossible.
2rafa
2d ago
There is plenty of evidence regarding Wexner, but because he is still alive, un-charged and very, very rich, and because much of it is hearsay, it is rarely laid out explicitly. In any case, it is hardly unsurprising for even extremely sophisticated, highly intelligent investors to be duped, seduced (platonically) by charismatic con men and adventurers for fortune, and Epstein was both. Here’s a great story about one of the most sophisticated, intelligent fund managers of the last twenty years getting conned by an already-notorious conman just because he was charismatic. And the victim in the above story, unlike Wexner, was actually in finance. Madoff had plenty of intelligent victims. Wexner didn’t even ‘lose’ his or his clients’ money unlike the above, he just made less than he might otherwise have. There are countless private bankers, macro hedge fund managers and late stage VCs who likewise spent the last 15 years (and the 1990s before them) getting fat off the bull run with minimal effort other than client relationship management.
This is before you go into the other aspects of the case, like Wexner’s previously confirmed bachelorhood and various 80s and 90s NYC rumors that are hard for any legitimate journalist to discuss without getting sued. (Nick Denton, who is obviously gay and was in the NYC scene through the 90s, hinted toward it many years ago).
I personally think that Epstein's finances were above board and he simply wasn't as rich as he claimed to be (his lifestyle was consistent with the amount of money he could have made scummily but legally by charging Wexner 2-and-20 without providing alpha). But if I was the Feds I would have been going over his finances with a fine-tooth comb.
Indeed, and that also explains why the banks (in particular JPM) were so keen to maintain his business, because he did nothing with the money except hand it to them to ride the booming 90s equity market, so everybody got their cut. The private wealth division at JPM was making huge fees from Wexner (the kind of billionaire who would usually have a more shrewd family office) for pretty much nothing.
In Maxwell’s recent testimony they asked her about the house (legally transferred for almost nothing) and at last there was an answer there, too, namely that it was in lieu of “fees”. Epstein seduced Wexner, “invested” his money (unlike the Madoffs of the world for the kind of boring, safe returns best suited to that task) and then charged hedge fund fees. Why didn’t Wexner measure his returns against the market? Hard to say, maybe he was in too deep, didn’t care, assumed Jeffrey was a genius, liked the attention and friendship, was a little in love, or was just under the thumb of an overbearing and domineering mother (which is the historical record) and didn’t really think of it much.
But either way, a combination of a couple hundred million in fees from Wexner, reinvesting his own money, some shrewd early-90s real estate purchases in Manhattan (a few apartment buildings, as I recall) and the $170m from Leon Black (Epstein’s only other “client” even though he never managed his money and the one case where I suspect blackmail is possibly central) and his fortune is easily explained even with some blunders along the way.
@DaseindustriesLtd and @Bingbong are both partially right but a big reason is actually just that after the dotcom bust in 2001 the dollar had a decade of extremely, uniquely, ahistorically poor performance against pretty much every other currency (both EM and developed market) that distorted nominal dollar-denominated GDP figures.
For example, the pound went from being $1.45 in 2000 to $2.01 in 2007. The British economy wasn’t hugely stronger and this was a low point for Silicon Valley stocks, the cause was a bunch of investment and trade flow stuff, reallocation out of the US toward emerging markets and big commodity producers, the Australian and Canadian dollars did very well, US equity markets had a lost decade. The Euro also did well. That kind of thing. The GFC was the beginning of the end of this process but it didn’t really finish until after the oil boom finally ended in 2014.
After 2014, trillions of dollars in speculative capital flowed into American capital markets from the entire world because of the tech sector. That wasn’t unprecedented - the same thing happened in the 1880s and 1890s with European money headed for railroads and some other American industrials. But the reverse flows boosted the dollar artificially, exaggerating although not inventing comparatively more advanced American prosperity. Those capital inflows boosted every aspect of the American economy in comparative terms, making for a tighter labor market and therefore higher wage growth, more consumer spending etc in a virtuous cycle.
But European weakness doesn’t date back to 2014 or even 2009. If anything, there’s probably some kind of macro story around the unfathomable economic costs of German reunification and early Eurozone labor market distortion in the late 90s and early 2000s that was obscured by that asset reallocation discussed above but I don’t know enough to tell it.
2rafa
4d ago
I don’t think it would certainly result in US military action against China. If they were willing to let the US save face and said it was an overzealous action by a rogue general and made trade concessions they might even get away with it.
2rafa
4d ago
Zelensky has traveled to the United States multiple times, if the Russians blew up his limo would that be acceptable? What about the reverse, if Ukrainian nationalist psychos had shot down Putin's plane over Alaska?
Both parties are at war; killing the opposing leader is militarily acceptable, they are commander in chief after all. Doing so on someone else’s territory is impolite but whether you can get away with it depends on that country’s own position and power.
As others noted, Putin has regularly and publicly assassinated defectors in Western Europe for 20 years, this was tacitly accepted by everyone involved; serious sanction only happened after Crimea in 2014.
2rafa
6d ago
In postwar South Africa and Rhodesia, it was often noted by visitors that the (white) working class lived better lives than even the upper-middle class in Europe and North America. Even a mailman had a pool, a gardener/pool boy, a nanny, a maid. You would walk down a jacaranda-lined street in Salisbury, immaculately swept, the kind of place that would house doctors and bankers anywhere else, and the average resident would be like a high school teacher or the guy calling out departures at the railroad station.
Of course the foundation of that material affluence was cheap black labor. And it was that very labor that prevented - when the time came - white South Africans from migrating to the Western Cape (where they might have been a permanent supermajority). After all, in that scenario, they’d live just like other Europeans in European-majority countries, and to have a maid and a pool boy and a nanny in Denmark you need to be (well into, the threshold won’t cut it) the 99th percentile of income.
The Thais, of course, don’t have that specific racial hierarchy (although the Chinese, like everywhere in SEA, are still a market dominant minority), and so labor costs are mediated by actual supply and demand without artificial restriction. The best way to think of the Thai economy is as a highly unequal middle income country in which the top 5% are relatively affluent and everyone else is relatively poor. In a way, that makes it like Brazil but with a lower crime rate (for the usual reasons). Things are cheap in Thailand because labor costs are low. The rest of the story has been discussed elsewhere below.
2rafa
18d ago
The union has a veto over the style guide that no doubt mandates specific pronouns (or at least a big say in it), and I highly doubt the style guide has carve-outs for sufficiently evil criminals.
2rafa
19d ago
All demographic groups (including whites, including Anglo-Saxon whites) have much lower homicide rates in England than they do in America, which is usually the point the gun control advocates were making, no?
2rafa
19d ago
Fuentes has a much younger audience, but even among media figures Bannon has a huge audience on his podcast, it’s just mostly boomers.
2rafa
20d ago
The public aren’t interested in the nuance of trade policy. Vance can be pro-tariff in the primaries and then after taking office sign various “incredible deals” that lower rates.
2rafa
20d ago
Perhaps he hopes viewers will become better informed about trade, to dissuade them from voting for the presumptive GOP nominee, that being JD Vance, who supports tariffs?
I don’t think tariffs are a central Vance belief at all. If you oppose them it would be easier to lobby him personally in 2028 as presumptive Republican nominee than to convince people to oppose any Republican candidate on that basis.
My guess is that this is an entirely personal project in which Ballmer, who is a centrist liberal, wants to ‘make an impact’ for the usual combination of civic and personal pride reasons, and has possibly been conned by one of the usual media grifter types into pouring a huge amount of money into it (but a pittance for him). The producers or other organization producing these can claim a comfortable $250k salary for “video production” or whatever, which Ballmer personally probably doesn’t know or care about, and do some light work and get taken out to lunch and invited to parties by cool ad agency people who want the spend.
The videos also star him personally, which again is less “influence operation” and more “I want the people to know who I am and feel like I’m sharing my wisdom with the world”.
World of Warcraft is bound up in so many memories of my young childhood, friends I used to have, playing with my dad, my brother, returning to it feels like going back to a city long after everyone you knew there moved out or passed away. And Classic feels (or at least did at the start) like you’re surrounded by so many other people for whom the same is true, trying to get back something that time has taken from them, irreversibly.
Still a great game though.
2rafa
23d ago
As I recall he sold it well below what he’d have received in an open bidding process because thought Disney and Iger would be better stewards of the brand.
2rafa
23d ago
In 2020 there were reports that they were making $3bn a year in Star Wars retail merchandise, and plastic toys, T-shirts etc are an ultra-high margin business. They were making 25% of revenue from licensed games, and in 2021 EA suggested that had been $2bn between 2019 and 2021 alone, and that’s pure margin. They spent $2bn on the Star Wars parks but parks revenue has grown since 2021 (or 2019) even if it slowed recently. Money was very cheap through the 2010s, so they may well have made out fine.
2rafa
26d ago
This has clearly been done with MAGA, and Vance is their candidate.
Vance’s central supporter is Thiel, who is gentile German. Thiel seems broadly sympathetic to zionism (hardly uncommon) but is more of a libertarian and was apparently pushing Trump against involvement in the Iran Israel flare up a few months ago.
2rafa
27d ago
Not really. Assuming the maximalist realistic interpretations of both events are true, there is:
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Epstein was part of an Israeli kompromat operation targeting powerful people that was covered up by the US government / CIA etc.
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A senior Israeli official was caught in a sting operation and avoided a lengthy jail sentence because the US government let him go home under pressure from Israel.
It is doubtful that the sting op targeting some (other than this guy) randoms in Nevada involved targeting part of the same kind of operation as that alleged to be run by Epstein, although I suppose more will be revealed.
The second is a diplomatic incident where a senior foreign official is caught and then allowed to leave (like the Harry Dunn killing case), the first is an allegation about a blackmail scheme run by someone supposedly working for the government that employed the official in the second allegation. That they both involve sex crimes doesn’t really link them together.
2rafa
27d ago
tl;dr: his posited comparison is that in both cases, the USG had a tradeoff between "help Israeli intel" and "prosecute pedos" and chose the former.
Only if the former case was Israeli intel, which is the point under discussion.
2rafa
27d ago
To be fair that is a particularly grim example. There are people who travel for work in finance who mainly shuttle between 5* hotels in London, NYC, Hong Kong. There are people in marketing, media, fashion, conferences who mainly travel to luxury resorts to attend events where they mostly stand around. There are people who do go to more boring places but who travel mainly locally, 1-3 hours by plane or train from where they live. And besides, even if you’re in manufacturing going to Shenzhen every month for a few days, you can go Monday-Friday and “work” a grand total of 15 hours over the week with the rest spent travelling, in hotels watching TV, or drinking with your coworkers which, while work, is something a lot of people find more enjoyable than Excel or writing emails.
In my experience travelling for work is something naturally conscientious people struggle with and naturally lazy people love.
2rafa
27d ago
It’s disappointing now that every time I write something interesting at work my coworkers ask if it was written by ChatGPT.
There is currently a big push by Nick Fuentes against a rising JD Vance on the accusation that the MAGA movement has been compromised and appropriated by Israeli influence.
Fuentes pushed voting for Kamala (on some kind of nebulous basis that she was anti-Israel) and the Groypers are now spamming pictures of Gavin Newsom’s blonde family compared to Vance’s “brown” family (and pictures of both men as teenagers) and declaring their intention to vote for Newsom in 2027. Amusingly, libleft Ezra Klein / Destiny fan types post the same comparisons regularly too, albeit without the overt racial angle. You might also mention the Loomer - MTG court harem bitchfight, which while vaguely related to Israel is more longstanding than that and primarily revolves around two aging whores insulting each other on social media while claiming they alone represent the true will of the leader, who should immediately stop listening to the other woman.
The whole thing has taken on an increasingly ridiculous energy, like when Vance’s supporters responded to the Newsom groypers by saying that Newsom’s wife was was actually Jewish (as far as I know she isn’t). The Groypers, in turn, said that no, because Newsom’s wife was allegedly raped by Harvey Weinstein she surely actually disliked Jews more than most, and was therefore likely basedTM.
If 2rafa were right, I think the feds would to a damn good job proving it to the entire world.
Why? This seems like a pretty random comparison. Your theory for Epstein is that his operation was an Israeli intelligence plot to gain kompromat. What does that have to do with an Israeli official getting arrested in a sex sting (with 7 other people, who have a mix of Anglo, Hispanic and South Asian names) unless you’re suggesting that the sting was also an Israeli intelligence plot (in which case why was he arrested and his arrest publicly announced)? The Israeli government obviously used diplomatic pressure for his release since a senior intelligence official under serious felony charge is highly vulnerable to interrogation, not only by the US but by anyone else who can get to him in jail or on bail. They may have traded something, they may not, but Shaun King certainly doesn’t know.
“Reservation Dogs” is a Hulu comedy about modern native life that was largely written and performed by native americans. It’s largely an “early 2020s woke” show politically with some exceptions, but many on the native subreddit seem to have found a lot of the background details to be very accurate and it doesn’t shy away from depicting the squalor, alcoholism, reliance on welfare, single motherhood etc that a lot of people mention.
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