MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
17hr ago
A secondary question: Perhaps, much like the mainstream media, I am omitting important context from my summary. Are there additional facts I should consider which would (or should) change the way I see this lawfare business?
The critical point you are ignoring is that Trump was guilty, but James appears to be innocent. The behaviour she has been indicted for is applying for a mortgage on the basis that the house on Peronne Avenue would be a secondary residence when she was in fact intending to rent it out. James claims that she allowed a family member to live in the house in exchange for a small contribution to utilities and maintenance, and that she accurately described her plans to the bank. If James is telling the truth, then no crime. The evidence that would allow me to determine who is telling the truth here is not public, but we do know that the career AUSAs assigned to prosecute the case declined to do so, and that the Trump-appointed US Attorney resigned rather than overruling them.
AFAIK, no President of the United States has previously ordered the malicious prosecution of someone they should have known was innocent.
Normally in situations like this, the mortgage applicant is not prosecuted.
As an entirely separate point, this is a problem. Primary residence fraud is not victimless - among other things it defeats the homeownership-promotion mission of Fannie and Freddie. But because it is almost never prosecuted it appears to be common.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
18hr ago
I'm not sure if "unprovoked" is quite the right word, since (as far as I know) Trump et al had not engaged in that sort of lawfare previously.
From the anti-Trump perspective, the attempts to prosecute Trump were provoked by his committing crimes - they were not intended to be a tit-for-tat lawfare campaign. Letitia James' decision to prioritise bringing that particular civil fraud suit was motivated by animus, but the type of fraud Trump was charged with was something he was in fact guilty of (Trump's successful appeal was about the size of the fine, not guilt), and which you or I would be prosecuted for in the unlikely event that we (a) did it and (b) got caught. The federal and Georgia election-related cases and the documents case were prosecutions for egregious wrongdoing of which Trump was unquestionably guilty - any functioning justice system would have prosecuted in the absence of a clearly established immunity bar. I'm happy to admit that the Stormy Daniels false accounting case was basically pure lawfare - I think Trump was technically guilty, but it wouldn't have been prosecuted against someone who wasn't a political opponent.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
20hr ago
One thing that a lot of analyses leave out is that the inquisition and it’s excesses in both Europe and the New World were the result of Christendom being besieged by Islam for 500 years.
I don't think this is true. The periods of peak inquisition activity were around the time of the Albigensian Crusade (which happened during a period of temporary respite for the Holy Land Crusaders because the Muslim states of the Middle East were being ravaged by Genghis Khan) and the Spanish Inquisition (which happens after the Reconquista is complete, in the country that was about as far as you could get from the Ottoman Empire). It is almost like the absence of an external enemy causes the search for an internal enemy.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
20hr ago
In the UK, fish in school (including explicitly C of E schools) and workplace canteens on Friday had been the default since well before I was born, and I am reasonably sure that it became the default back when anti-Catholicism was still part of the national identity. I grew up associating it with Christianity generally, not Catholicism.
Of course, the traditional English fish and chips is not exactly an abstemious meal - and indeed the English Catholic hierarchy has warned the faithful that eating a huge plateful of fish and chips defeats the purpose of the Friday fast. I remember playing bridge on Friday evening against a man who was some kind of Catholic lay minister, and as we stuffed ourselves with fish he explained that his parish was pushing the idea of "eat what you want on Friday, but only 2/3 as much as you normally would".
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
21hr ago
I don't think the US culture war is Law vs Chaos - the "Red = Law, Blue = Chaos" and the "Red = Chaos, Blue = Law" narratives are roughly equally easy to write. "The real problem is that the Blues want total control of everything down to your kids' innermost thoughts while the Red just want to grill" seems to be the most common narrative on the Motte and is of the Red=Chaos variety.
The Blue tribe has room for the hippies and the HR ladies, with which of those groups is winning the intra-Blue conflict switching from decade to decade. Similarly the Reds have room for the Gadsden-flag waving hillbillies and the father-knows-best authoritarians. In both cases homo sapiens hypocritus leaves space for both in the same person depending on which is convenient.
In so far as there is a deep underlying conflict behind the US culture war (mostly, it is pure tribalism), it is elves vs dwarfs. Reds think that wealth comes out of the ground and that cities are parasitic on farmers and miners, Blues (and Greys, who are just dissident Blues) think that wealth comes from the application of human ingenuity and that rural areas are parasitic on productive cities.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
There is a lot of female-coded service work that is either not being done, or being done in the middle of the night by resentful women who also work a full-time job in the productive economy, because the market-clearing price for it is too high for the middle class to afford (either directly or via a service-sector business). If you solve for the equilibrium where a lot of female-coded bullshit jobs disappear and middle-class married couple households are significantly richer, there would be a lot more nannies, housekeepers, personal assistants, waitresses, receptionists etc. than there are now. They would also be better off (due to lower personal taxes) unless they were single mothers.
That society is one in which middle-class women who are still mostly getting married eventually and staying married may feel more pressure to marry rather than girlbossing as a spinster, but the working-class women who are currently driving the decline of marriage won't feel any more pressure to marry a schlub in preference to waiting tables.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
Critically, 18 is the age at which normie parents - and particularly normie red tribe parents - stop thinking "What if this was my daughter?". Of course the reality is that Mirpuri rape gangs, Jeffrey Epstein, your local street corner pimp etc. all preferentially go after kids without high-functioning, involved parents, so it was vanishingly unlikely to be your daughter. But I don't think normies get this.
If it was your teenage daughter, the age of consent in your jurisdiction wouldn't be relevant to your desire to wreak terrible revenge against the sleazebag.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
Plus, somebody is going to get his dying endorsement, and that will count for something. I don't think enough that it can win anyone the presidency, but probably enough that it can keep any other Republican from winning it.
Trump is sufficiently popular with the GOP base that anyone he endorses will sail to the nomination in 2028 (with the possible exception of family members). For there to be an effectively open primary, you need one of three things:
- Trump loses his base by late 2027 - I think this is unlikely, even if he loses the rest of the country.
- Trump is visibly too senile to govern but is retained in office Biden-style by his family and/or his core White House team - such that his endorsement is worthless but Vance can't run as an incumbent.
- Trump can't make an endorsement because he is still acting like he is running for a third term (it doesn't matter whether he is serious or trolling).
In all three of these scenarios the 2028 election should be a walk for the Democrats, although the Democrats have got very good at blowing winnable elections lately.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
Scott made a post in 2016 called You are still crying wolf.
You are Still Crying Wolf is specifically about claims that Trump is racist/white supremacist, and arguably about the even more specific claim that Trump is openly racist (which Scott correctly points out he isn't). The Rightful Caliph considered Trump utterly unsuitable for the position of Grand Vizier in almost every other respect on grounds of character.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Interesting - I wondered where EON got the idea that he was an Oriental Studies major from.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
We don't disagree on substance here - my spin would be that
- There is no meaningful heterogeneity between film-Wakanda and film-rest of Africa because we don't see Africa outside Wakanda onscreen - it is represented memetically by scenes of Black America.
- Wakanda is a collection of bad tropes of "darkest Africa" with a veneer of technological civilisation that the locals explicitly didn't build the hard way - the way the story is told implies that niggas who act like niggas could and did build technological civilisation if they had access to vibranium (memetically, if YT hadn't stolen Africa's natural resources). So culturally it is intended to be part of blob-Africa.
Wakanda's decision to start their outreach in the US was so egregiously bad it broke my suspension of disbelief. Even if you accept the assumptions of the universe, it isn't plausible.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
They take over the number, but not the name. In No Time to Die Bond (now retired, but called back for one last mission) and 007 are different characters.
In so far as the filmmakers bother to maintain long-term continuity, Bond from Dr No to No Time to Die is a single character played by multiple actors, who never retires before being de-canonised. Casino Royale is a reboot, with Craig's Bond being a different character in a different continuity, who has a career of a realistic length before retiring and being replaced as 007. There is no suggestion that either Bond was a pseudonym, although it wouldn't be surprising given the nature of spycraft.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Tangential to Black Panther and the genre of Afro-futurism?
No more African than Kwanzaa - Marvel is a US company targetting an audience of Black Americans and their simps. The picture of "Africa" in Black Panther is of a culturally homogenous blob whose spiritual capital is South Central Los Angeles.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Not just chauvinistic, solipsistic.
The old joke is that the British overconfidence is thinking everyone secretly wants to be British, whereas American overconfidence is thinking everyone secretly already is American.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
It doesn't affect the substance of the argument you are making, but James Bond did speak Japanese.
James Bond read Oriental Studies at Cambridge, which requires you to study two Middle Eastern or Asian languages to fluency, and given his known interest in Asian culture and lack of interest in Middle Eastern culture, I suspect Japanese was one of them. On-screen translation convention means we can't be sure, but there are scenes in You Only Live Twice which only make sense if Bond is speaking Japanese. This isn't in Fleming, but it's been in the films consistently since long before Japan was a threat to take over the world in the 1980's.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Humanity Peaked When I Was In High School.
Most people think that. Regardless of when they were in high school. The exception is the people who were losers in high school, who think humanity peaked slightly later when they stopped being losers. Compare "50's" (actually early 1960's) nostalgia among high-functioning Boomers and "60's" (a period that started in 1968 and continued well into the 1970's) nostalgia among left-idiotarian Boomers.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Musk is the real deal - obviously a very different paradigm, but Bond-tier apparently-superhuman talent. If James Bond shitposted for 20 hours a day when he wasn't saving the world from Spectre, I don't think he would have the reputation he does.
Trump played a superhumanly-effective CEO on TV, but he was a replacement level CEO in reality, both of his dad's company and of USG as a first-term President. Suggesting Trump as the answer to @Iconochasm's question makes as much sense as suggesting Lashana Lynch or Idris Elba as the next James Bond - they replace Craig, not Bond.
On the other hand, there is a possible mistake here. James Bond is employed on His Majesty's Secret Service. If he was real, we wouldn't know about him. The current C ("M" in the Bond movies) has previously been an elite athlete, a counter-terrorist field agent in the Middle East and served as Q immediately before taking over as C. We crossed paths at Cambridge and she also came across as someone who could hold her own in a poker game against Le Chiffre. She is exactly the sort of person who could win, perhaps even has won, the respect of a double-0 agent working for her. The culture that supposedly produced James Bond and the Ms he worked with still (just about) exists - it just produces talent which points in a direction other than tech entrepreneurship. (Bond, notably, was never a leader of men, a businessman, or an inventor).
Even when Fleming was alive, the idea of a Bond who also built his own gadgets was not plausible.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
Even by the standards of 1950's Cambridge, Watson was obnoxiously sexist. When I was an undergraduate, this was still the sort of thing that was considered an unfortunate but excusable flaw in a great scientist - both at the time and in the 1990's it was considered less embarrassing than John Maynard Smith's communism, for example. And accordingly most people didn't feel embarrassed about it - anecdotes about Watson's sexism were part of the lore of Cambridge molecular biology.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14d ago
Very much India. The stereotypical nabob was upwardly-mobile from a middle-class background, but it was very much on the accepted career list for younger sons of the landed gentry (who I suspect are what you are referring to as "minor nobility" - the younger sons of the actual peerage had access to better options).
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14d ago
Applying the same logic Walsh and other MAGA voices apply to non-white, non-Christian minorities with left-skewed voting patterns and possible dual loyalties (and particularly to members of said minorities who hold positions of power and influence) to a particular white, non-Christian minority group whose members enjoy non-renouncable de facto foreign citizenship, are disproportionally involved in left-wing activism, and use their considerable access to positions of power and influence to cancel anyone who suggests that their commitment to lobbying on behalf of their foreign homeland might possibly constitute dual loyalties, even when individual members of said group (cough, Sheldon Adelson, cough) are entirely specific that their primary loyalty is to their foreign homeland, gets you to something like Nick Fuentes' views on Jews.
More locally, there are regular posts complaining about "rootless cosmopolitans" on the Motte by people who think they are talking about Blue tribe Yankee elites and don't know that the expression started out as an antisemitic slur. It is unsurprising that a political movement that sees "rootless cosmopolitans" as the enemy will come for the OG rootless cosmopolitans eventually.
If you hold the (entirely mainstream on the right) viewpoint that people who self-define as hyphenated-Americans should be excluded from positions of power and influence, deciding that this applies to people who act like Israeli-Americans is a matter of Noticing things. And frankly, things that are easier to Notice than the black-white achievement gap. "America is for everyone who plays by the rules and lets of fireworks on 4th July" is intellectually coherent. "America is for heritage-Americans" is intellectually coherent. "America is for heritage-Americans plus Jews" is not.
Judaeo-Christian is an obvious crock of shit to anyone who actually believes in either Judaism or Christianity. (Basically, letter vs spirit of the law). A substantial minority of American evangelicals believe that scripture requires Christians to be unrequitedly nice to Jews, but conservative Catholics (who have been the brains of the operation for decades now) don't read it that way.
You can do right-populism in way which is explicitly anti-Muslim and sees Hindus and Jews as part of a big-tent anti-Muslim coalition. In European countries where most of the unwanted immigrants are Muslim you see this happening - Hinjews were a big part of the British Conservative Party's right-populist turn under Johnson (which admittedly turned out to be fake) and are part of the coalition behind RN in France and PVV in the Netherlands. But in a country where the majority of unwanted immigrants are Hispanic, that isn't the way MAGA is doing right-populism. Given the natural alliance between Hindus and Jews as market-dominant minorities (in the West) whose principal enemies (in their home countries) are Muslims, I wouldn't be surprised if American Jews see MAGA anti-Indian racism as a warning sign.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
Spain is already a Great Power under Ferdinand and Isabella, who unite Aragon and Castille in 1479 and complete the Reconquista in 1492, a year in which they also play venture capitalist and sponsor a Genoese nutcase who has the wrong value for the circumference of the Earth and thinks he can sail west to China without running out of fresh water for the crew.
Charles V consolidates the Habsburg Empire in 1519 including Spain, Austria and the formerly Burgundian Netherlands, and then goes on to conquer large parts of Italy (some of which is badged as a reconquest of historic Aragonese territory). When he abdicates in 1545, the Spanish half of the Empire is clearly the senior one, although it includes the now-Spanish Netherlands, which were not part of the Spanish inheritance. But even without the Netherlands, I think Spain including the old Aragonese possessions in Italy is a strong candidate for 2nd-strongest country in Early Modern Europe (after France).
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
18d ago
American Jews used to be much more ideologically diverse and spread across both parties. Now they are like 98 percent Democrat and very very far left.
Modern Orthodox Jews mostly vote right, including Republican in the US, but are not particularly politically engaged in countries other than Israel. Haredi/Hassidic Jews vote for the Rebbe's corrupt political machine, and in the US the big ones are mostly nominally Republican.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
18d ago
· Edited 18d ago
Dutch elections happened on Wednesday.
The background is that the cordon sanitaire against the populist right broke after the November 2023 election. After protracted negotiations, Dick Schoof became an independent Prime Minister in May 2024, leading a coalition of the PVV (right-populist, led by Geert Wilders), the VVD (right-liberal), BBB (agrarian populist), and NSC (Christian Democrats LARPing as populists). Schoof's background was as a career civil servant working on internal security - his last job before becoming PM was as secretary-general (the top career bureaucrat in a department, equivalent to a UK permanent secretary) at the Ministry of Justice and Security - he was acceptable to the PVV because he had previously become controversial as the head of the unit responsible for infiltrating mosques and spying on suspected Islamist terrorists. The Schoof cabinet collapsed after less than a year in June 2025 after a row over refugee policy (there were many disagreements, but it looks like the critical one is that the PVV wanted to start deporting Syrian refugees back to Syria on the grounds that the civil war was over), leading the early elections.
The UK MSM has focussed on the legally irrelevant but news-generating (because close) question of which party "won" by getting most votes nationally - the left-liberal D66 are 15,000 votes ahead of PVV with about 30,000 still to be counted. (At points yesterday they were only 2,000 ahead). But this doesn't matter - the Netherlands uses list-based PR and both parties will get 26 seats (out of 150). D66 leader Rob Jetten is the de facto Prime Minister-elect.
We are smarter than the MSM, so lets take a less retarded perspective. This was a throw-the-bums-out election, with all 4 governing parties taking a bath. PVV are down from 37 to 26, VVS are down from 24 to 22, BBB down from 7 to 4, and NSC down from 20 to zero (oops!). So 36 seats lost by former governing parties.
The other loser is the main centre-left list (a de facto merger between the Greens and the PvdA, which is the Dutch equivalent of UK Labour) is down from 25 to 20.
The gainers are D66 (up from 9 to 26), the Christian Democratic CDA (up from 5 to 18, mostly from NSC voters returning to their traditional party), and two smaller right-populist parties. FvD (further right than PVV - they support an EU exit referendum and don't kick out actual brownshirt-and-swastika Nazis) are up from 3 to 7 and JA21 (who split from FvD after FvD leadership refused to kick out some youth activists who publicly stanned Anders Breivik, but now claim to be less right-wing than PVV) are up from 1 to 9.
What are the possible takeaways?
- Coalitions between right populists and non-right populists don't work well for anyone involved. Many such cases - this isn't the first.
- The right populist vote is robust at just over 25%. The total number of seats for right populist parties went up from 41 to 42. Even if individual right populist parties beclown themselves, the phenomenon isn't going away.
- Pasokification is contagious - the merger has Pasokified the Greens rather than reviving the PvdA.
- Fake populists get found out
- Liberal parties cand turn votes
My non-expert guesses about coalition formation (48/150): Parties that will definitely not join a D66-led coalition: PVV/FvD/JA21 - right populist - 42 seats total Socialist Party - far left, basically commies - 3 seats SGP - Protestant fundamentalists - 3 seats Parties that are very unlikely to join a D66-led coalition (13/150): BBB - Agrarian populist - 4 seats Christian Union - Christian Democrats, but more explicitly Christian than CDA - 3 seats PvdD - single-issue animal rights - 3 seats 50+ - single-issue pensioner rights - 2 seats Volt - IAmVerySmart online liberals - 1 seat Parties that might join a D66-led coalition (89/150 with 76 needed for a majority) D66 - left-liberal - 26 seats VVD - right-liberal - 22 seats Centre-left - 20 seats CDA - Christian Democrats - 18 seats Denk - anti-racist, led by assimilated Muslim immigrants - 3 seats
So the only possible majority coalition is the one that combines all four traditional major parties (D66, VVD, PvdA and CDA). A coalition including right-populists is unlikely after what happened last time. It is also hard to form - the total for left and liberal parties that wouldn't touch right populists with a bargepole is 58 seats leaving the right needing to get 76 out of a possible 92 votes while dealing with the bad blood between the former governing parties, and also the rival right populist parties. A left-wing coalition can similarly forget about the right populists, SGP, CU and VVD meaning they need 76 out of 80 available votes while dealing with the People's Front of Judea.
I predict a minority government. D66 historically prefer to work with VVD and PvdA, leaving them 8 seats short of a majority and with plenty of places to go looking for them on a vote-by-vote basis. But the 4-way Grand Coalition definitely could happen.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
18d ago
I have no idea what is happening in Pokrovsk, but I note that it isn't somewhere where a Western MSM outlet is going to be able to maintain a full-time reporter, and someone has been briefing the Western MSM that it is about to fall on-and-off for about a year now.
The BBC's sources here are a lying Russian general and a lying Ukrainian general. I don't need the MSM to know what lies the lying liars want to tell me. If they can't their own reporter into Pokrovsk, they could shut up. I know it's expensive and dangerous - that's what I pay my licence fee for, and it's why war reporters have the status they do.
The other point is that this was economically a second home transaction, not an investment - James's motives for buying the house and allowing her relative to live in it were personal and not commercial, and she was paying the mortgage out of her own resources, not the rent. The business reason for charging a higher interest rate on investment mortgages than second homes is that
The first of these is the key one - in the UK you get "second home" pricing on a mortgage if you can qualify based on non-rental income, regardless of who is occupying the property. This doesn't change the fact that James is guilty if she misrepresented her plans for occupancy, but it is relevant to the plausibility of her story that she was honest about what she was doing with the lender and they agreed to underwrite the loan as a second home anyway.
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