While I want to agree, getting it into the zeitgeist and public debate has value. This has the potential to get some of her “I didn’t really care about Musk before” fans to look into it further, which can only help sway opinion against him. It won’t sway his supporters, but that’s not really the point. The point is to target the fence-sitters, and to engage those who haven’t engaged yet.

It’s not news for people who already like or dislike Musk. It’s news for those who don’t already care.

To use this court case as an example, the issue wasn’t that the drugs were addictive. The issue was that the company lied through their teeth about it. The company already knew from the medical studies that the drugs were horribly addictive, but decided to lie to doctors and tell them that the drugs were perfectly safe. They had massive advertising campaigns aimed at doctors, to get them to prescribe increasingly high dosages, and to write prescriptions for much longer periods of time. The company actively worked against any kind of safety nets or support to help people come off of the addictive drugs, in order to keep a lid on the addictive properties as long as possible. Because the company wanted to sell more drugs, and the executives realized that getting people hooked would sell more in the long term.

That doesn’t mean the drugs should be illegal. Criminalizing the drugs only pushes them underground, where addicts will be left without any kind of support or safety nets. Instead, they should be available in controlled environments, with drugs that were manufactured in regulated lab settings to ensure purity/avoid lacing. They should be administered by staff who are knowledgeable about the full suite of potential side effects, overdose symptoms, and withdrawal effects. Staff who can monitor the addicts and ensure they don’t overdose, while also being able to provide resources, support, or even alternative medications (to control the withdrawal effects) for those who are looking to quit.

The drugs you mentioned are actually a great example, because very few people started with those. Those aren’t something that the first-time user sought out. They likely got a laced batch of something else, (because the drugs are illegal, the production is not done in controlled lab settings with guaranteed purity), which fucked them up hard.

Donald Trump owned teen beauty pageants and you think hes just an end consumer of Epstein’s child sex trafficking?

We also know that multiple girls were recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell while working for Trump. My theory for a while has been that Trump actively used his properties to scout potential victims. He’d find girls he wanted, and use their job to give them a small taste of how the rich lived. He’d let the girls see him and his rich friends living it up on his private resorts, and start dropping breadcrumbs that they could join that same class of elites if they remained loyal. He’d make them feel welcomed, but not comfortable. He would ensure they remembered their place at the bottom of the hierarchy, but he gave them a glimpse of what they could have in the future… All you need to do is remain loyal, and you’ll get your shot.

Then Trump would pass their info to Maxwell, so she could get to work grooming them. The girls would obviously have their walls up around Trump and co. After all, they’re a bunch of creepy old men. Having a woman as part of the recruiting team would normalize the situation and cause the girls to lower their walls. “Oh hey, this rich woman is really nice and understanding, and she seems to be on my side. And if she isn’t creeped out by the gross old men, maybe I was overreacting? I don’t want to miss a good opportunity just because I was overthinking things…”

Maxwell would eventually start the “you’re still young, so you have some time to figure your life out… But opportunities don’t wait, and you don’t want to be a beer girl on a golf course forever. Have you ever considered where you’re going to go from here” type of stuff. The girl has had a taste of wealth, and she’s wondering how to get it for herself. “I just need to be given a chance to prove myself” would inevitably be running through her mind on repeat. Maxwell would leverage that, and start pivoting them towards alternate lines of work. As if she were just helping out a friend. “You’re really pretty. Do you work out? Have you ever thought about modeling? I know some people who would pay a lot of money to have you in a Levi’s ad.” And eventually, Maxwell would invite them to the island for something that sounded benign, like a massage, modeling gig, cocktail waitressing for a party, etc…

When they arrive on the island, Maxwell will continue to normalize the overly sexual nature of the work. If Epstein is naked, Maxwell won’t even flinch. This is just how the rich live, right? He owns this private island, after all. He can be naked wherever he wants, right? This may be your only shot, so don’t mess it up by getting offended over some wrinkly skin.

If you read Virginia Giuffre’s account of how she was originally recruited, it pretty much matches my theory directly. She was initially hired to work on Trump’s property, then got approached by Maxwell. Maxwell was the one who actually recruited her and invited her to the island. And once Virginia was on the island, Maxwell was right next to her, acting completely unfazed and ensuring she didn’t panic when she saw a naked man on the massage table.

But the important part is that it all started with her getting hired by Trump. Trump was the one who scouted the girls and tipped off Maxwell. Trump even joked about Epstein stealing “his” girls, because so many were recruited from Trump’s properties. Trump was the opener, and Maxwell was the closer. Epstein was just the logistics, inventory, and scheduling manager

Remove the laugh track, and Ross is a full blown narcissistic sociopath… The only person he seems to genuinely care about is his son, Ben… But even Ben seems to vanish in the later seasons. There are fan theories that Ross completely abandoned Ben (or that Carol and Susan took full custody because Ross was always such a prick) after Emma was born.
Phoebe is a manipulative bitch who uses quirkiness as an excuse to toy with people.
Rachel is a spoiled disorganized mess, whose need for attention compelled her to constantly keep Ross on a leash without letting him get too close. She broke up with a dude, got her feelings hurt when he had a rebound, then constantly held it over his head after they got back together. When he got tired of it and found someone else, she crashed their wedding in the hopes that he would leave his fiancée at the altar.
Chandler regularly uses sarcasm to poke at his friends’ insecurities and belittle them, and masks all of his insecurities with self-deprecating humor instead of actually working to better himself.
Monica’s obsessive need for control regularly leads her to manipulate or bully others, and consistently overshadows her empathy.

Joey was too good for the rest of the characters. His only real emotional flaw was that he never really had any deep romantic connections. But that was largely because he was more into the hookup culture, and he reserved his attempts at deeper romance for the few partners he really got along with. He never tried to hide the fact that he was a playboy, even around the women he was sleeping with. He was an idiot, but he at least cared for and about the other main characters, in a way that none of them ever seemed to reciprocate.

Also, the show was ultimately about six rich white people, who occasionally cosplayed as relatable lower middle class folk. In a city as diverse as NYC, you would have to work to find a city block so completely deprived of melanin. The series was 10 seasons long, and black people only had speaking roles in like 25 episodes… And a lot of those were because Ross and Joey dated the same black woman for like 10 episodes in the last season. They also very clearly lived in a nice part of the city, (some have estimated that Monica’s apartment would run for ~$3-4M when the show was airing) and their financial struggles were only ever superficial to make them more relatable.

Yeah, instant ramen and Hamburger Helper sales have exploded in recent months, which is extremely concerning. But don’t worry guys, the TV told me the economy has never been better!

I’m calling it now: There will be a non-zero number of MAGAts who briefly go gay to own the libs.

I mean, this is a textbook example of statutory rape. He paid an underage girl $400 to show up to a party with the implication of sex, gave her cocaine and ecstasy, and then had sex with her. The state recognizes that rape can occur even if the victim was otherwise willing. The “statutory” part of statutory rape means the prosecutor is required by statute to assume a rape occurred, even if the victim does not agree with the prosecution.

The state acknowledges that there are circumstances where a reasonable person would determine that a victim wasn’t capable of consenting. To be able to prosecute these cases, the state passes statutes to assign a penalty on the assaulter for statutory rape. This statute allows the prosecution to charge for rape, even if the victim was enthusiastically consenting and/or does not feel like they have been assaulted.

For example, if a cop detains someone, then has sex with them in the back of their cruiser. A reasonable state would recognize the unfair power dynamic in this situation, and a reasonable jury member would acknowledge that the detainee was under duress when the sex occurred. Even if the detainee was enthusiastic and willing, they were legally unable to consent because of the power dynamic that was present during the sex. There’s no way of factually proving if the detainee was/is actually willing, or just playing along because the cop held an inordinate amount of power over them. And thus a reasonable state would assume the latter, and statutorily assign a penalty to the person who held the power (the cop, in this example). And this statutory penalty would be enforced by prosecuting the cop for statutory rape.

And “being too young” is one of the biggest and most (in)famous reasons that someone can’t consent. The state sets an age limit on when children can begin consenting to sex with adults. Otherwise willing children below that age are assumed to be groomed (like a 30 year old “dating” a 15 year old) or under some other kind of unfair power dynamic.

If you’re trying to say that it’s unfair that Gaetz was tricked into sex with a minor, that’s a separate discussion. He took that risk when he knowingly paid a homeless person for sex. He knew there was an inherent power imbalance. If he wanted to avoid the power imbalance, he could have used a legal brothel that has a hiring and vetting process designed to preclude underage children from being hired. Hell, he could have worked as a lawmaker to decriminalize sex work and make brothels legal in his area. He could have ensured that people (including himself) didn’t feel the need to pay streetwalkers for sex, because legal brothels were accessible.

But he didn’t do that. He sought out a sex worker who looked young, fully knowing and accepting that there were no systems in place to stop her from lying about her age, and he was willing to take on the risk of statutory rape by choosing to sleep with her.

Depends on the amount of compression you’re trying to achieve, the water’s temperature, and your definition of “easy”. Near freezing, ice is compressible. Because the increased pressure causes the freezing point to rise, which causes it to melt. And liquid water takes up less space than ice.

We need to find out how to raise boys that cant even conceive of this kind of conduct

While I agree with the sentiment on the surface, naïveté doesn’t solve the root issue. We need to raise boys who violently reject people who inevitably conceive of this kind of conduct. Sociopaths and misogynists will always exist. That’s why it’s important for a healthy society to root them out as soon as they show their true colors.

This was the very first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. I literally thought to myself “oh so she sounds like a pedophile.”

Yeah, I run my 4k monitor in 2k for scaling purposes. Menus work better, old games don’t fuss as much due to incompatible resolutions, etc… There’s also no appreciable reason to use 4k on an monitor-sized screen unless your face is three inches away from it.

As a professional email reader, these all read like typical boomer emails to me. And Jeffrey was, in fact, a boomer. I wouldn’t read too hard into his capitalization, because he probably didn’t even know where his account settings were to change that.

Yup, by step-dad is in the second group. It’s honestly wild what kinds of mental gymnastics he has gone through to justify his vote. We had a surprisingly calm discussion about it the other day, and he genuinely doesn’t believe Trump was involved in any of it.

He thinks Trump was, at worst, just running in some tangential social circles. He believes a lot of the revelatory stuff (like in this post) has been faked from other heads of state to try and discredit him. Like all of the “yeah the DOJ confirmed this is real. The FBI has been sitting on this for literal years or even decades now, as part of their international child trafficking investigations. Multiple news sources have also independently confirmed the validity of the sources” stuff doesn’t matter to him, because he simply chooses not to believe any of it.

God Himself could descend from the heavens with a choir of angels, bust through my parents’ living room window, and slap my step-dad around while screaming that Trump is a pedophile who raped children on Epstein’s island. And my step-dad would defiantly look God in the eyes and tell Him that He’s wrong. There is no threshold that will make the proof believable for him. The goalposts will always be moved to require some new criteria before proof can be valid. And anything that does manage to meet the strict criteria for proof is too perfect, and obviously had to be manufactured in some grand worldwide conspiracy to discredit Trump. As Orwell wrote, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

But what if bias was not the reason? What if your face gave genuinely useful clues about your probable performance we just agreed to redefine “bias” as something else, despite this fitting the definition of the word perfectly, just so I can claim this isn’t biased?

Cool. Literal Nazi shit, still powered by IBM.

Yeah, the malicious compliance was what should have been regulated instead. Ban the annoying cookie popup and require sites to make it opt-in by default. At most, sites should be allowed to have an option in a burger menu to allow cookies, and clicking that button would open the popup to specify which cookies you wanted to allow.

Hell, one of the first things you can look into hosting is Obsidian, (or maybe AnyType? I have seen some people recommend it for better sync integration, but I haven’t personally used it), with SyncThing to keep your notes synced across devices.

Yeah, the first movie pretty clearly lays out why he didn’t want to call the cops. Also, IIRC, the snow storm knocked out the phone lines. His parents mention that they can’t get ahold of him because the lines are down. So he couldn’t have called them even if he tried.

The second movie though? He was a predator stalking his prey. He wasn’t just a victim of a break-in. He actively lured them to his twisted funhouse, and didn’t call the cops until the very end when he wanted them to get caught red-handed.

Welp…

Yeah, this article was really poorly timed. They posted this just before it was announced that those 8 would vote to end the shutdown.