Ok. So we don’t trust Acosta, but we trust the Daily Mail who literally just counted emails to Russians and then says anonymous sources told them so?

Law makers take bribes as low as $20k

Well, Hotz is an obvious shill, paid or merely rabid, but someone has to counter the propaganda

Yes, totally not up for debate. Which is why it’s incredibly suspect that he would be able to maintain ties to Soviet intelligence and Israeli intelligence simultaneously and then maintain those ties sufficiently for Ghislane’s subsequent child sex trafficking operation to become a joint operation of Mossad and GRU while the CIA just sort of let it all happen and could do nothing to stop it for literally decades (or that the CIA knew nothing about it, which is even more delusional) despite him working with the top VIPs to the intelligence circles like Gates and the royals, etc.

It’s sort of ridiculous to try to tie all of this to a Russiagate-like phenomenon. The CIA was all over this operation, they were protecting him (Acosta testified this to Congress), and they were aware of what it was doing. The idea that somehow Epstein was a double agent and allowed to live is also ridiculous. The most likely situation is that this was a CIA operation, fully in line with their previous honeypot operations, and that this had almost nothing to do with Russian intelligence, except possibly for the operation deliberately leaking specific information to Russian intelligence for counter-intelligence purposes.

Mossad is not Russian…

Lol, what I’m doing is a distraction?! Man, you are such a fucking propagandist Hotz.

Did you not read what was written? The claim is that Maxwell’s family was collaborating with Mossad and KGB in the 1970s when those two countries were fully antagonistic towards each other.

Yes, today Russia and Israel are on much better terms. But the claim itself should make us all suspicious of the author for making such an obviously false claim.

But more to the point, see my other comment. The only way this could have been a Russian op would require the CIA to be so incompetent it would strain all credulity

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou, plenty of interviews (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tes2ZsAobxU)

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/jeffrey-epstein-cia-ties/

Alex Acosta said he was told that by the DOJ. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/i-was-told-epstein-belonged-to-intelligence-and-to-leave-it-alone

Also, the fact that the Epstein was working with all of the usual suspects of intelligence in America - top universities, top tech firms, top financial groups.

But also, the CIA would have to be fucking incompetent for it to not disrupt a human sex trafficking ring that included dozens of VIPs that were critical to national security, and for it to be a honeypot of an adversary, and for it to be going on for how fucking long and for it to be openly organized via unencrypted email that we already know the NSA has been gathering and analyzing for decades…

The idea that collaborating with Mossad and KGB in the 1970s even makes any sense is ridiculous. But to imagine it was an effective Russian op under these conditions for this long is just delusional.

LOL. The USSR and Israel were enemies by the 1970s, with the USSR cutting all diplomatic ties in 1967.

It’s far far far more likely that Epstein and everything he was doing, which was deeply tied to US business interests at the highest levels, was a CIA operation and that all of the program’s ties to Russian intelligence was under the auspices of CIA intelligence, counterintelligence, and disinformation.

According to the US, the role of government is to protect to the opulent minority from the will of the majority. That’s what Madison argued for in the Federalist Papers. He then proceeded to explain how to achieve this with the design of the Senate. And then that is exactly how the Senate got designed in the Constitution.

The role of government, essentially forever regardless of system and country, is to manage power struggles between all the possible sources of power.

TLDW - they came up with a way to install large scale flat land solar farms with minimal labor

Correct. The only solution is to invest in domestic production for decades and attempt to catch up to China while China is constantly advancing ahead of us. And to do that would require the government to spend the money because it wouldn’t be profitable for years and years and years. And even then it might only be profitable in combination with tariffs. And tariffs raise the price of inputs to the economy, which makes the economy unprofitable.

It’s almost like capitalism is failing.

China wasn’t circumventing them. Buyers circumvented them. Middle-men emerged in response to the tariffs because there was margin to be made. China just sold to whoever was buying

Beyond the Great Famine, other notable periods included severe shortages in 1304, 1305, 1310, 1330–1334, 1349–1351, 1358–1360, 1371, 1374–1375, and 1390.

Your system would obviously exacerbate it because you’ve described individual subsistence farming.

That would be the least efficient system possible. In the middle ages, there were famines every few years. It is not a standard by which we ought to build a society.

You’re not even talking about primitivism. You’re talking about a world governing system that essentially atomized every single human being into a disconnected island that must fend for themselves. It’s utterly ridiculous.

What would immediately happen is a group of people with a modicum of basic foresight would pool their resources together to achieve economies of scale. This would happen hundreds of times all over the world. A few of them will decide to start coercing their neighbors into subservience the first time a famine hits. Then some people will deliberately cause crop failures to drive more people to their service. They would have sufficient economies of scale that a portion of them could become warriors and go out and steal from others. The best of these would build defenses to prevent others from doing it back to them

Congratulations, you just recreated the exact conditions of the middle ages.

You know what comes after that? Capitalism!

Yes, absolutely. Liberalism is a political philosophy and it is inherently contradictory. Liberals, therefore, as people have to cope with this contradiction and the evidence we have is that liberals cope with it by leaning heavily into one side of the contradiction and psychologically downplaying the other. Hence we get two camps.

However, the naming scheme we have today is deliberately confusing. It obfuscates instead of clarifies.

To say one set of liberals are liberals and the other set of liberals are conservatives is a corruption of language so severe that it reduces the language to utter nonsense.

For example, the liberals who we call liberals have zero idea that private property is the seat power in liberalism, while simultaneously being anti-communist in large part because it abolishes private property. But if you tell a liberal that they have no idea what you’re talking about and instead talk about “democracy”.

The liberals who we call conservatives are abundantly clear about the role of private property and they’re position on it. They openly state the private property is how liberty is achieved. But tell them that private property as a regime is a minoritarian dictatorship that flies in the face of the values of liberty and justice and they have no idea what you’re talking about and instead talk about the moral failings of the poor and how only the potential for liberty and justice matter and that we can’t use authoritarian government to ensure liberty and justice when it means limits on private property owners.

Not a single one of these people believe in the return to aristocracy under a monarchy. They both understand that private property and markets are the foundations of their society and that these things are in opposition to the tyranny of kings and nobles.

But they refuse to acknowledge that they have this common ground. That’s why Ds and Rs in Congress and in the Whitehouse have like 80% overlap in actual actions and yet the voters think the two parties are living in different universes. When GWB’s government identified a bunch of countries to invade, and then those invasions get carried out by GWB and by Obama and by DJT no one talks about the continuity. They are totally lost in their ability to analyze because they don’t see the 80% overlap, they only see the 20% difference and think “we are fundamentally different, you and I”.

That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in. Because liberalism is the only social form from which fascism has ever emerged. And communism is the only social form that has ever defeated and sought to fully destroy fascism. It was the USSR that marched all the way into and out of Berlin and purged every Nazi they could find during their administration of East Germany. It was the US and the Vatican that helped 10k Nazis escape justice and planted them all over the Americas. It was the US that insisted on putting Nazi officers in charge of NATO. It was West Germany under the administration of the Allies that allowed former Nazis to hold office mere weeks after the war.

Liberals are confused, because Liberalism is contradictory and those contradictions are now overwhelming the social system.

People cope with that by making up artificial categories and reusing the language to make it fit. It’s like a No True Scotsman fallacy. Socially liberal, economically liberal, classically liberal. It’s all an attempt to cope with the fact that Liberalism says “universal liberty” and at the same time “private property defended by all potential forms of violence, both from the government and from the owning class”.

That’s not a real thing. Liberalism is a political philosophy. It has a meaning. What Americans call liberals are just liberals. And what Americans call conservatives are also liberals.

Conservatism is also a political philosophy. It’s a philosophy that supports the maintenance of the monarchy and aristocracy.

Since there’s no monarchical movement in the US, there are no Conservatives. There are only liberals.

One camp of American liberals think that making Liberal values more inclusive is worth sacrificing some other liberal values and particularly truncating the liberal power structure of private property ever so slightly.

The other camp of American liberals think that protecting the values of individualism and private property are more important than expanding the number of people included in those values.

They are both Liberals. They both reject monarchy. They both support the government-enforced regime of private property. They both believe that idealized values are as important or more important than actual outcomes. They’re both anti-communist.

Liberalism is internally contradictory. Liberals didn’t so much “go wrong” as much as Liberalism successfully solved a contradiction (feudal society facing rapid economic growth) with another contradiction (universal human rights constrained by private property).

Liberalism was doomed to this fate from the beginning. Honestly the failure of liberals is that they didn’t abandon liberalism and adopt communism sooner.

You supported DRM dude. Self critique, renounce your mistakes, and if you really want to go after ICANN, give me a call. I’ve got the anti-trust suit waiting for you.

Yes. Observation is a natural phenomenon. As such, it is a “property” of the thing being observed, that is to say, observation is self-referential. Therefore even the concept of an objective anything is fundamentally suspect.

There is no evidence to support the existence of “objectivity” - it is a leap of logic, and when I say leap I mean it is a claim that stands apart from evidence and is disconnected from the evidence. It is a presupposition, an axiom arrived at by choice not by reasoning from first principles.

And there is empirical evidence to support that the claim of objectivity is in fact a choice driven by a motivation (as all choices are). If we assume it was a choice, then we would assume there’s a motivation for that choice of creating separation, and we should see that choice being repeated in multiple domains. Lo, where do we find objectivity emerging but in the pre-Socratics of Ancient Greece, the same place we find choice-driven separations in aesthetics (arthroi), metaphysics (waves hand at everything), ethics (virtues), medicine (body as parts instead of body as system), the natural world (biological taxonomies), epistemology, etc.

Objectivity is belief first and then is rationalized post hoc. And we have evidence to support this claim as well. What does psychological research tell us about the behavior of individuals who have post hoc rationalized beliefs when they encounter disagreement? They respond emotionally to protect their psyche. What happened when Europeans - who built their entire civilization integrated with the objectivity of the Ancient Greeks, layer by layer with religion, philosophy, science, politics, and social mores - what happened when they encountered any other civilization that did not center objectivity and instead had more relative, relational, and subjective philosophical approaches to their entire lives? They killed them. They denigrated them. They outlawed their ideas. They ridiculed them and anyone who thought seriously about studying them. They barred people as unfit to practice professions. They suppressed research that was actually sound. In short, they reacted emotionally to protect their individual psyches (and we can go further as say their collective psyche, but some will object to that language).

So, yes. We cannot be certain an objective world exists. It’s not a rejection of the world, but rather a rejection of objectivity. It is those who are emotionally attached to the choice of objectivity via their post hoc rationalization and their deep social insecurity for going against their society’s deeply held beliefs that say “denying objectivity denies the external world”. That’s a non-sequitur. An external world can exist and also not be objective.