I have never watched a full episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, because it's too chaotic for my heart, but I really like watching mash-ups on YouTube. I watched one recently about Charlie's stupidity, and a reoccurring theme on the show is how good Charlie is at making other people doubt the facts.
Re Katie telling Ana Kasparian (in absentia) that she doesn’t have to turn Epstein into a devil or a monster: Yes she does, Katie. Ana does have to turn Epstein into a monster, because her entire raison d’être at this point is to be a deranged, foaming-at-the mouth hater of Jews. What Epstein actually did just isn’t good enough for her. The opportunity to tie an allegedly satanic baby-fucking Jew to the demonic, world-historic arch-villain Israel is too good for any professional antisemite to pass up.
Yeah, I can only hope that Katie hasn't listened to Kasparian on The Fifth Column admitting that when it comes to Israel she absolutely loses her mind. It's hard to hear her admit that she can't think logically when it comes to Israel and still have any respect for her.
Continue to comfort yourself by writing off all good faith criticism as unhinged Jew hate. It won't stop public opinion from continuing to turn against Israel.
I'm so glad Katie brought up community colleges (CCs) at the end. As a community college philosophy professor, I couldn't agree more that hiring from CCs would help to bring more diversity to those professions. It's been fascinating to watch my college become woke in terms of faculty and admins since 2020, while my students have remained politically diverse. And I teach in California! Students at CCs are generally a mix of classes and backgrounds, some of whom are upper class who will transfer to top schools and others who will drop out and end up working in the local community.
I would say in most states even hiring from regional comprehensive universities would help. Like I teach at regional university in Michigan and it’s a lot more diverse than the flagship university. I think part of the problem is that people are always looking at about 20 schools that have the majority of the money and not thinking about the rest of higher ed.
I was introduced to philosophy at CA CC 45 years ago by a good teacher who challenged us. I'm a 4-year CA public school now. I've noticed the same divergence between the faculty and students although I don't know how much it affects teaching.
It is also you need to pay attention to a lot of the framing because you spend a lot of time correcting people who are overreacting on one end, but paying not a ton of attention to people who are using this argument to dismiss what is happening.
The satanic panic thing is also not a very good comparison because the problem with the satanic panic is that it was completely based on this whole investigation that had very little understanding of how to interview children and the problems with suggestibility. This is an issue with real problems and real exploitation and if you want to parse it out, find another comparison because it’s just making it sound like you don’t take it seriously. You can’t just have one metaphor for thing where you feel like people overreact because it’s not the same situation.
Yeah, that’s the thing that really bothers me about Michael Tracey, who frames Epstein’s “massages” as consensual sex work. First of all, the age of consent in Florida is 18, but even if it were 15 or 16, the idea that teenagers lack the faculties to vote or drink, but can still consent to prostituting themselves, is absurd.
exactly. I mean some of his stuff is kind of similar to how trauma survivors used to be discredited in courts because they were so inconsistent in terms of how they talk about it. He talks about believing people that are more “normal” as if the idea of being trafficked, wouldn’t kind of psychologically mess you up. He gets into this really gross lack of understanding of like power dynamics, and becomes this thing about how women be bitches looking for money.
What does "power dynamics" even mean? It seems like a stock condemnation, really. There are power differentials everywhere in our society, yet sexuality is supposed to be the one place where there's perfect equality? I guess I'm not buying it.
what the fuck are you even talking about? There are power dynamics between a 16-year-old girl and a 45-year-old billionaire and if that’s not something you should like consider when looking at trafficking, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t think you wanna believe that people are being exploited at then.
In that case you're talking about an extreme difference in power, to the point of being coercive. I'm seeing the term "power differential" thrown around much more casually, including for adult women in situations where they could easily refuse. That turns "sexual exploitation" into a free floating concept that doesn't mean much. And, no, I don't believe that every commercial sex act is or should be treated as a form of criminal exploitation.
It all reminds me so much of how the victims of the Rochdale grooming gangs stuff were so neglected and dismissed for so long. They were not good victims- often troubled girls in care, of the wrong social class. There was and is such an undertone of 'slags do be slags, eh, even when they are pubescent'.
Exactly this. The process is called "adultification" and it's often used to describe the process whereby children are rhetorically stripped of their childhood in order to implicate them in their own abuse, or to downplay the severity of crimes committed against them.
I thought that is a slightly different mechanism? Like the young people who are seemingly sometimes prone to being unchallenged in gender transition seem to be seen as 'truth-speakers', or higher level divine beings. I feel like A TONNE of the lower class girls, and the foreign trafficked ones belong in the 'well who cares she is a slag anyway' class. I can see the word works well in both cases, but they feel a bit different? What do you think?
You're right, it's a slightly different mechanism, but in both cases the ability of children to consent to things they cannot possibly understand is overstated. Adult levels of cognition and responsibility are ascribed to someone who is still a child.
Nice- I didn't know there was a term - I thought it was just the endless grind of the class system. I know some girls aged 12-16, and I was one, and they are absolutely not adults, and they absolutely do not have the same reasoning and sense of self one needs to be classed as an adult.
Adultification isn't mentioned here and is mostly used in the context of how black children are often seen as more responsible for their actions than white kids, but it often is applied to vulnerable kids from care backgrounds as well, and these are the children usually targeted by predators looking for victims to groom.
Other than the fact that, yes, Epstein did real crimes, while the Satanic panic had no basis, I do think the comparison is valid. The claim that there's a widespread pedophile conspiracy based on non-existent evidence and tea-leaf reading-level interpretations ("grape soda"? Really?) is getting into 80s-90s Satanic panic territory, with the same potential to ruin lives. I think it's only a matter of time before we see West Memphis or Wenatchee-style prosecutions coming from this unless people get a grip.
But on the topic of the WM3. The general online narrative on the West Memphis three is a joke.
That wasn't really a "satanic panic" prosecution. The authorities didn't bring that to the case. Damien literally courted that image and talked about satanic shit ALL THE TIME. It became a focus of the case because it was something the actual defendants were fond of talking about and accusing each other of.
Now I do think that nationally and in that community maybe the case lead to some "satanic panic". But the narrative in a lot of the documentaries on the case is basically an outright lie.
You can't be like "the devil made me do it", and one of your friends says "yeah it wasn't us it was this creepy guy we used to meet for satanic rituals in the woods" (not the exact details but more or less what went on), and then be like "woah woah woah woah, why are the cops bringing satanism up as a possible motive?"
I was with you all on the epstein stuff. But I am surprised that katie was surprised to hear Anna kasperian support epstein conspiracies. Anna is a conspiracy theorist
Her anti Isreal sentiment often crosses into conspiracies and anti semitism. She has pretty well aligned herself with the Tucker Carlson side of right wing populist, which has made for lots of strange bedfellows. A great example horseshoe politics
I also felt in that section that Katie said it was breaking people's brains, and then she started name-checking some very active shit Twitter people as if two years ago they were respected historians focused on the most academic of subjects.
I know i thought her examples in general were pretty funny. Everyone she brought up has had broken Twitter brain for the last several years. I hope she is not just now realizing these individuals have credibility issues
"Am I 100% sure that Epstein wasn't dissolving bodies on his island? Yes, because that's psychotic."
Thank you, Katie, for not splitting hairs about the trillionth decimal place of your certainty. 100% is the correct number to assign to this confidence, and I think you are brave for saying so, even though that's silly of me to say.
I went and read the Atlantic article. What a great article. I didn't know about the Mellon foundation. I also didn't know there was only 70 million in government humanities funding in the entire USA. That's wild, that's less than the UK. It's probably less than a country like Austria.
Maybe if someone actually funded scholars to do sensible research, they would magically start doing it. Money is money, it changes what happens. A lot of scholars are very woke indeed, and I don't think that's all down to the Mellon foundation, but the funding schemes could gradually change the emphasis and change the kinds of people who do PhDs in the humanities. Tyler seems like an interesting guy, and his vision of the humanities is not something anyone would have disagreed with very recently indeed, like even ten years ago. It's not a conservative vision, it's just normal professional scholarship of all political stripes.
More generally it would be good for there to be more people in academia who have spent time doing other things. The majority of people have never left a University, they have no experiences to round out their characters. Many journalists seem pretty similar.
To me, the most frightening/fascinating aspect of Epstein was his incredible ability to gain the friendship and trust of people one would think would be the most hardened, cynical, and perceptive readers of human motivation. These weren't lonely old widows he charmed, these were the sharks of our society--Trump, Dershowitz, Black, Wexner, Clinton, Summers--or guys like Chomsky whose worldviews should have put them wise to Epstein's grift. But they all became sycophants. This is a Luciferian intelligence on display here, the ability to charm, shapeshift, dress up the corrupt as acceptable, the monstrous as excusable. Is it any wonder so many people are now going to the next iteration, that this man with Luciferian acumen was the full-on phenomenon of Satan himself?
All this has revealed to me is that “the elites” are just as basic and dumb as anyone else. Having money and a willingness to share it is a big attractor.
Katie, I live on the Olympic Peninsula and I have dealt extensively with carpenter ants and other wood eating insects with our own home. They're a common pest out here, especially when you live near old logging forests with lots of rotting stumps and logs left behind to rot. The thing with carpenter ants is they will only eat damp wood, which indicates you might have some moisture issues. I would definitely to track down where they're nesting around your house and see if you're having any rot issues. Maybe around your windows or anywhere that might be letting moisture in contact with wood.
We had professional come out and spray as well, since they are able to get to the good poison, but we also purchased some of these ant traps http://www.kmantpro.com/. That worked well. I would also look for vegetation growing close to your house and knock it back, including tree branches growing over your roof. Also make sure you have good drainage around your house. And can grinding down or ripping out old stumps near your home that might be housing ants and other pests.
If you haven't already done so, I would treat the impacted wood with borate. This won't take care of the ants, but it is very effective against other wood eating insects like powder post beetles or termites. We like the boracare product. I don't know what type of structure you have, but if find you extensive rot damage I would recommend using permachink products for their epoxy fill products.
We bought and moved into old 1970s timber framed cabin that was previously owned by hoarder. It has had every pest imaginable living in it and I have to with deal of shock uncovering things frayed wires chewed by rats and framing so rotten that I could stick my finger through it. I am sure your place is no one near this bad. There are lots products and resources for dealing with wood eating pests and its not the biggest issue to have to confront. But it is a good thing you all aren't just ignoring the issue
Good summary and advice. I'll add one thing; depends on sun exposure, how tall are trees around the property and which side(s). A house can sometimes be more susceptible to wood rot on the north-facing side of the house, less so on the south-facing side. Because after getting wet, sunshine will dry out the east, south, and west facing sides, but the north-facing side will stay damp longer, due to less direct sun exposure. (also depends on how humid / dry the climate is overall)
Good point. But in western washington things will stay damp much of the year, regardless of southern exposure. People in other parts of the world will talk about things like moss growing on the north side of a tree. That doesn't apply here. We grow moss everywhere
I disagree with Katie about the pizza code, but not because I’m a pizzagate truther (I’m not even totally sure what it is). I think the pizza/grape soda thing is code because speaking in code is actually a pretty normal thing to do. Drug dealers, mobsters, and gang members all use code, but so do teenage girls and 4chan-ers. Is “mogging” or “unaliving” not code for something else? The pizza references may not be about girls, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t code for something. If anything, I think it’s probably related to drugs, given the context.
As for the Satanic Panic, is it really a fair comparison when almost no one has faced any consequences, at least in the US? That one professor didn’t have his contract renewed, and a former Obama staffer was let go from her job. But politicians aren’t being forced to resign, no one has been arrested or had charges pressed against them, most of the people implicated haven’t even been forced to talk about it beyond an initial statement. Maybe that’ll change, but so far it’s been confined to the online bubble.
Of course people speak in code. But the Pizzagate types had very weak explanations for why John Podesta was talking about satanic ritual pedophile abuse and child trafficking and not about a less salacious illegal thing like, say, money laundering, bribery, or drugs.
My main argument against the Pizzagate code was always that it relied on the septuagenarians in the highest American social class be using the same lingo as the downwardly mobile 20 year olds of 4chan.
That said, now that we know Jeffrey Epstein was an avid 4chan user, my calculation has somewhat changed at least within his specific operation.
That’s kind of what I’m saying. I don’t think they were BBQing children but “pizza and grape soda” was probably still a reference to something else (i.e. getting high).
K&J's surprise about Tyler Austin Harper leaving academia surprised me. He didn't have tenure yet. His success with public-facing writing could present a problem for getting tenure (yes, academics dismiss academics who write for regular people). His heterodox views could spike his chances at tenure. Getting tenure is all about having colleagues vote for you--totally political.
Professor salaries are absurdly low--even at private colleges. He was at a small college with few research resources. Higher ed is facing so much retrenchment on every level--it's a sinking ship.
I bet his salary is higher now. He's getting to write about what he wants to write about. They want him to be public-facing. And if worse comes to worse, he'll find other outlets, just as J&K have done.
Having read a decent amount of academic humanities writing in college, my impression is that a lot of it is boring and poorly written in part because that's what's expected. (Academic science writing is almost always boring and there isnt' much incentive to write well so I"m not just picking on the humanities.) Moving from academia to The Atlantic gives him an opportunity to write interesting articles. Tyler Austin Harper is a good writer and that wouldn't be as appreciated in the academic world. Now he has a job that pays him for writing well and communicating clearly.
Yes, there’s a bias against clear writing in academia. If it’s easy to understand, then it must not be intellectual enough. Jargon, tangled syntax, and abstraction are seen as signs of serious intellectual writing. This is how Judith Butler became influential. No one was sure exactly what she meant. That she was hard to understand made her more important. Having to work at understanding meant one was doing intellectual work.
One of my grad professors criticized one writer who wrote clearly and praised another who used jargon and complex syntax. I pointed out that both were making a similar point. He conceded that but said he just preferred the writing style of the second writer. I think it made him feel more intellectual.
If someone started talking in the same manner as academic writing, I would probably be concerned that they had some sort of brain disease. I might even ask if they'd asked their doctor if they might have a brain tumor. It still befuddles me that that kind of writing is considered good. I had a humanities professor in college tell me that it was nice to read my writing because it was actually fun to read. I knew then that I had no shot succeeding in the humanities.
I always loved how I had professors who would lionize these succinct beautiful papers that were short and to the point. (Say the Gettier paper). But god help you if you submitted something short and to the point.
Nope bloat bloat bloat for word count and page count is the order of the day. We train academics to write like that and a lot of them never unlearn it.
Why make you point in 3 pages when 300 will do? Sometimes that is necessary, often not.
I'll raise my hand as being in the market for nuanced takes on Epstein! I hope we can stop talking about it soon though, this was a ridiculous own goal by the Trump administration but some democrats are driving this bus off the cliff, especially Ro Khanna.
I'm a little sick of Katie being sick of Epstein conspiracy-mongering. I have several reasons for this (my) sickness. The first and most obvious is that what we know is horrific and what we don't know is likely worse and we know there's a lot we don't know. We know this because Pam Bondi and her team know that an unredacted release of everything they have would mean the ballgame's over. (Do I KNOW this? No. I'm going with the odds.) The second is that Trump is a mafioso with a fuck-ton of shit in his past (and his pants) (there's a pretty grounded theory about the fatal crash of one of his planes carrying executives scheduled to be deposed) (and wtf Ivana? She fell down a staircase? Only slightly more believable than Epstein committing suicide...) The third might be the most important. You don't need to be a conspiracy nut to see how a bunch of billionaires and billionaire wannabes and oligarchs and oligarch wannabes are wantonly wrecking this country. They are dismantling it and selling its parts and pocketing the profits. They are worst-case-scenario social-contract busters. So, the rumored horrors of Epstein Island and the Lolita Express are a damn good metaphor--IN ADDITION TO being true (likely). IT'S A DAMN FUNNY TIME TO STOP BEING CONSPIRACY MONGERS. (PS: We landed on the fucking moon and if anything's buried in Roswell it's a dead weather balloon. But I really don't think Jack Ruby hit Oswald because he was so so sad about JFK. Oh, fuck this why do I even bother....)
Yeah well I haven't even mentioned how the questionably literate man from Stratford traveled, like, nowhere, as opposed to Edward de Vere the Earl of Oxford, whose world travels could be superimposed on top of a map of a bunch of well-known plays.
I would have said the Satanic Leaf Tailed Gecko was misnamed due to the lack of satanic activity in the species. However, I'm pretty sure there is coded language in the Epstein files that now justify the name.
Everyone right now
“Adolf Hitler killed Princess Diana”
“Well, no, he was a bad guy and all, but he died in 1945”
“Oh so you’re defending Hitler? Weird hill to die on, bro”
"Also when people say killed they don't necessarily mean LITERALLY killed, stop being so pedantic"
There’s never a bad reason to call a BARPod bro pedantic ✌️
Hitler wasn’t all bad. I mean, he killed Hitler. No one else managed that
"How do you know that he's really dead??"
I have never watched a full episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, because it's too chaotic for my heart, but I really like watching mash-ups on YouTube. I watched one recently about Charlie's stupidity, and a reoccurring theme on the show is how good Charlie is at making other people doubt the facts.
We are dealing with a lot of Charlie's lately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJakywBLaJ0
Yeah a lot of this going on.
Re Katie telling Ana Kasparian (in absentia) that she doesn’t have to turn Epstein into a devil or a monster: Yes she does, Katie. Ana does have to turn Epstein into a monster, because her entire raison d’être at this point is to be a deranged, foaming-at-the mouth hater of Jews. What Epstein actually did just isn’t good enough for her. The opportunity to tie an allegedly satanic baby-fucking Jew to the demonic, world-historic arch-villain Israel is too good for any professional antisemite to pass up.
Yeah, I can only hope that Katie hasn't listened to Kasparian on The Fifth Column admitting that when it comes to Israel she absolutely loses her mind. It's hard to hear her admit that she can't think logically when it comes to Israel and still have any respect for her.
This is such an excellent point! I've been saying the same thing to my husband, but you beat me to it on the thread.
Continue to comfort yourself by writing off all good faith criticism as unhinged Jew hate. It won't stop public opinion from continuing to turn against Israel.
I saw this take on Reddit but the quote was specifically about Isreal. Have you any quotes where she says ‘Jews’ not Isreal?
(Spoiler: no.)
I'm so glad Katie brought up community colleges (CCs) at the end. As a community college philosophy professor, I couldn't agree more that hiring from CCs would help to bring more diversity to those professions. It's been fascinating to watch my college become woke in terms of faculty and admins since 2020, while my students have remained politically diverse. And I teach in California! Students at CCs are generally a mix of classes and backgrounds, some of whom are upper class who will transfer to top schools and others who will drop out and end up working in the local community.
I would say in most states even hiring from regional comprehensive universities would help. Like I teach at regional university in Michigan and it’s a lot more diverse than the flagship university. I think part of the problem is that people are always looking at about 20 schools that have the majority of the money and not thinking about the rest of higher ed.
I was introduced to philosophy at CA CC 45 years ago by a good teacher who challenged us. I'm a 4-year CA public school now. I've noticed the same divergence between the faculty and students although I don't know how much it affects teaching.
Refreshing take on Epstein. The response is giving 1980s “Satanic Panic” vibes big time. Glad I was not the only person to notice this.
Oh, man. I don’t think I can survive another pedophile vs. hebephile debate. . .
Now I'm imagining a moderated debate between those two camps. I don't think I'd survive that either.
It is also you need to pay attention to a lot of the framing because you spend a lot of time correcting people who are overreacting on one end, but paying not a ton of attention to people who are using this argument to dismiss what is happening.
The satanic panic thing is also not a very good comparison because the problem with the satanic panic is that it was completely based on this whole investigation that had very little understanding of how to interview children and the problems with suggestibility. This is an issue with real problems and real exploitation and if you want to parse it out, find another comparison because it’s just making it sound like you don’t take it seriously. You can’t just have one metaphor for thing where you feel like people overreact because it’s not the same situation.
Yeah, that’s the thing that really bothers me about Michael Tracey, who frames Epstein’s “massages” as consensual sex work. First of all, the age of consent in Florida is 18, but even if it were 15 or 16, the idea that teenagers lack the faculties to vote or drink, but can still consent to prostituting themselves, is absurd.
exactly. I mean some of his stuff is kind of similar to how trauma survivors used to be discredited in courts because they were so inconsistent in terms of how they talk about it. He talks about believing people that are more “normal” as if the idea of being trafficked, wouldn’t kind of psychologically mess you up. He gets into this really gross lack of understanding of like power dynamics, and becomes this thing about how women be bitches looking for money.
What does "power dynamics" even mean? It seems like a stock condemnation, really. There are power differentials everywhere in our society, yet sexuality is supposed to be the one place where there's perfect equality? I guess I'm not buying it.
what the fuck are you even talking about? There are power dynamics between a 16-year-old girl and a 45-year-old billionaire and if that’s not something you should like consider when looking at trafficking, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t think you wanna believe that people are being exploited at then.
In that case you're talking about an extreme difference in power, to the point of being coercive. I'm seeing the term "power differential" thrown around much more casually, including for adult women in situations where they could easily refuse. That turns "sexual exploitation" into a free floating concept that doesn't mean much. And, no, I don't believe that every commercial sex act is or should be treated as a form of criminal exploitation.
i’m talking about a specific situation so I don’t know why we wanna talk about other things
It all reminds me so much of how the victims of the Rochdale grooming gangs stuff were so neglected and dismissed for so long. They were not good victims- often troubled girls in care, of the wrong social class. There was and is such an undertone of 'slags do be slags, eh, even when they are pubescent'.
Exactly this. The process is called "adultification" and it's often used to describe the process whereby children are rhetorically stripped of their childhood in order to implicate them in their own abuse, or to downplay the severity of crimes committed against them.
Adultification has also been a big factor in the youth gender medicine scandal too
I thought that is a slightly different mechanism? Like the young people who are seemingly sometimes prone to being unchallenged in gender transition seem to be seen as 'truth-speakers', or higher level divine beings. I feel like A TONNE of the lower class girls, and the foreign trafficked ones belong in the 'well who cares she is a slag anyway' class. I can see the word works well in both cases, but they feel a bit different? What do you think?
You're right, it's a slightly different mechanism, but in both cases the ability of children to consent to things they cannot possibly understand is overstated. Adult levels of cognition and responsibility are ascribed to someone who is still a child.
Nice- I didn't know there was a term - I thought it was just the endless grind of the class system. I know some girls aged 12-16, and I was one, and they are absolutely not adults, and they absolutely do not have the same reasoning and sense of self one needs to be classed as an adult.
here's a better resource which talks a bit more about adultification in group-based sexual exploitation (ie grooming rings) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-audit-on-group-based-child-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse/national-audit-on-group-based-child-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse-accessible
Here's a bit about the same subject with regard to the UK grooming gang scandals https://www.mmu.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/story/uk-failed-grooming-gang-victims-not-seeing-children-children?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Adultification isn't mentioned here and is mostly used in the context of how black children are often seen as more responsible for their actions than white kids, but it often is applied to vulnerable kids from care backgrounds as well, and these are the children usually targeted by predators looking for victims to groom.
God, this is a gruelling read.
Ok grape sopa has to be drugs or something. When you guys texted your dealers in college did you use code words? Of course you did.
I’m a boring person who doesn’t do drugs, but that was my thought too. “Getting some pizza and grape soda” sounds like a euphemism for “getting high.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_(drug)
Other than the fact that, yes, Epstein did real crimes, while the Satanic panic had no basis, I do think the comparison is valid. The claim that there's a widespread pedophile conspiracy based on non-existent evidence and tea-leaf reading-level interpretations ("grape soda"? Really?) is getting into 80s-90s Satanic panic territory, with the same potential to ruin lives. I think it's only a matter of time before we see West Memphis or Wenatchee-style prosecutions coming from this unless people get a grip.
I agree with your general point.
But on the topic of the WM3. The general online narrative on the West Memphis three is a joke.
That wasn't really a "satanic panic" prosecution. The authorities didn't bring that to the case. Damien literally courted that image and talked about satanic shit ALL THE TIME. It became a focus of the case because it was something the actual defendants were fond of talking about and accusing each other of.
Now I do think that nationally and in that community maybe the case lead to some "satanic panic". But the narrative in a lot of the documentaries on the case is basically an outright lie.
You can't be like "the devil made me do it", and one of your friends says "yeah it wasn't us it was this creepy guy we used to meet for satanic rituals in the woods" (not the exact details but more or less what went on), and then be like "woah woah woah woah, why are the cops bringing satanism up as a possible motive?"
it’s a big difference
I found Ryan Broderick's takes over on Garbage Day illuminating.
https://www.garbageday.email/p/a-singular-theory-for-the-epstein-network
I was with you all on the epstein stuff. But I am surprised that katie was surprised to hear Anna kasperian support epstein conspiracies. Anna is a conspiracy theorist
Yeah, doesn’t she support Candace Owens’ theory that Charlie Kirk was killed by Israel or Turning Points or whoever?
Yes, she endorsed Owen's doing the investigation because we can't trust our own FBI and in her mind it's a reasonable question.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1ox2j5k/introducing_new_candace_owens_super_fan_ana/
Her anti Isreal sentiment often crosses into conspiracies and anti semitism. She has pretty well aligned herself with the Tucker Carlson side of right wing populist, which has made for lots of strange bedfellows. A great example horseshoe politics
I never listened to AK before, but this is a good enough reason to never attempt it
I also felt in that section that Katie said it was breaking people's brains, and then she started name-checking some very active shit Twitter people as if two years ago they were respected historians focused on the most academic of subjects.
I know i thought her examples in general were pretty funny. Everyone she brought up has had broken Twitter brain for the last several years. I hope she is not just now realizing these individuals have credibility issues
"Am I 100% sure that Epstein wasn't dissolving bodies on his island? Yes, because that's psychotic."
Thank you, Katie, for not splitting hairs about the trillionth decimal place of your certainty. 100% is the correct number to assign to this confidence, and I think you are brave for saying so, even though that's silly of me to say.
Enough god damned Epstein for a while.
I went and read the Atlantic article. What a great article. I didn't know about the Mellon foundation. I also didn't know there was only 70 million in government humanities funding in the entire USA. That's wild, that's less than the UK. It's probably less than a country like Austria.
Maybe if someone actually funded scholars to do sensible research, they would magically start doing it. Money is money, it changes what happens. A lot of scholars are very woke indeed, and I don't think that's all down to the Mellon foundation, but the funding schemes could gradually change the emphasis and change the kinds of people who do PhDs in the humanities. Tyler seems like an interesting guy, and his vision of the humanities is not something anyone would have disagreed with very recently indeed, like even ten years ago. It's not a conservative vision, it's just normal professional scholarship of all political stripes.
More generally it would be good for there to be more people in academia who have spent time doing other things. The majority of people have never left a University, they have no experiences to round out their characters. Many journalists seem pretty similar.
To me, the most frightening/fascinating aspect of Epstein was his incredible ability to gain the friendship and trust of people one would think would be the most hardened, cynical, and perceptive readers of human motivation. These weren't lonely old widows he charmed, these were the sharks of our society--Trump, Dershowitz, Black, Wexner, Clinton, Summers--or guys like Chomsky whose worldviews should have put them wise to Epstein's grift. But they all became sycophants. This is a Luciferian intelligence on display here, the ability to charm, shapeshift, dress up the corrupt as acceptable, the monstrous as excusable. Is it any wonder so many people are now going to the next iteration, that this man with Luciferian acumen was the full-on phenomenon of Satan himself?
All this has revealed to me is that “the elites” are just as basic and dumb as anyone else. Having money and a willingness to share it is a big attractor.
Katie, I live on the Olympic Peninsula and I have dealt extensively with carpenter ants and other wood eating insects with our own home. They're a common pest out here, especially when you live near old logging forests with lots of rotting stumps and logs left behind to rot. The thing with carpenter ants is they will only eat damp wood, which indicates you might have some moisture issues. I would definitely to track down where they're nesting around your house and see if you're having any rot issues. Maybe around your windows or anywhere that might be letting moisture in contact with wood.
We had professional come out and spray as well, since they are able to get to the good poison, but we also purchased some of these ant traps http://www.kmantpro.com/. That worked well. I would also look for vegetation growing close to your house and knock it back, including tree branches growing over your roof. Also make sure you have good drainage around your house. And can grinding down or ripping out old stumps near your home that might be housing ants and other pests.
If you haven't already done so, I would treat the impacted wood with borate. This won't take care of the ants, but it is very effective against other wood eating insects like powder post beetles or termites. We like the boracare product. I don't know what type of structure you have, but if find you extensive rot damage I would recommend using permachink products for their epoxy fill products.
We bought and moved into old 1970s timber framed cabin that was previously owned by hoarder. It has had every pest imaginable living in it and I have to with deal of shock uncovering things frayed wires chewed by rats and framing so rotten that I could stick my finger through it. I am sure your place is no one near this bad. There are lots products and resources for dealing with wood eating pests and its not the biggest issue to have to confront. But it is a good thing you all aren't just ignoring the issue
Good summary and advice. I'll add one thing; depends on sun exposure, how tall are trees around the property and which side(s). A house can sometimes be more susceptible to wood rot on the north-facing side of the house, less so on the south-facing side. Because after getting wet, sunshine will dry out the east, south, and west facing sides, but the north-facing side will stay damp longer, due to less direct sun exposure. (also depends on how humid / dry the climate is overall)
Good point. But in western washington things will stay damp much of the year, regardless of southern exposure. People in other parts of the world will talk about things like moss growing on the north side of a tree. That doesn't apply here. We grow moss everywhere
I disagree with Katie about the pizza code, but not because I’m a pizzagate truther (I’m not even totally sure what it is). I think the pizza/grape soda thing is code because speaking in code is actually a pretty normal thing to do. Drug dealers, mobsters, and gang members all use code, but so do teenage girls and 4chan-ers. Is “mogging” or “unaliving” not code for something else? The pizza references may not be about girls, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t code for something. If anything, I think it’s probably related to drugs, given the context.
As for the Satanic Panic, is it really a fair comparison when almost no one has faced any consequences, at least in the US? That one professor didn’t have his contract renewed, and a former Obama staffer was let go from her job. But politicians aren’t being forced to resign, no one has been arrested or had charges pressed against them, most of the people implicated haven’t even been forced to talk about it beyond an initial statement. Maybe that’ll change, but so far it’s been confined to the online bubble.
Of course people speak in code. But the Pizzagate types had very weak explanations for why John Podesta was talking about satanic ritual pedophile abuse and child trafficking and not about a less salacious illegal thing like, say, money laundering, bribery, or drugs.
My main argument against the Pizzagate code was always that it relied on the septuagenarians in the highest American social class be using the same lingo as the downwardly mobile 20 year olds of 4chan.
That said, now that we know Jeffrey Epstein was an avid 4chan user, my calculation has somewhat changed at least within his specific operation.
That’s kind of what I’m saying. I don’t think they were BBQing children but “pizza and grape soda” was probably still a reference to something else (i.e. getting high).
K&J's surprise about Tyler Austin Harper leaving academia surprised me. He didn't have tenure yet. His success with public-facing writing could present a problem for getting tenure (yes, academics dismiss academics who write for regular people). His heterodox views could spike his chances at tenure. Getting tenure is all about having colleagues vote for you--totally political.
Professor salaries are absurdly low--even at private colleges. He was at a small college with few research resources. Higher ed is facing so much retrenchment on every level--it's a sinking ship.
I bet his salary is higher now. He's getting to write about what he wants to write about. They want him to be public-facing. And if worse comes to worse, he'll find other outlets, just as J&K have done.
Having read a decent amount of academic humanities writing in college, my impression is that a lot of it is boring and poorly written in part because that's what's expected. (Academic science writing is almost always boring and there isnt' much incentive to write well so I"m not just picking on the humanities.) Moving from academia to The Atlantic gives him an opportunity to write interesting articles. Tyler Austin Harper is a good writer and that wouldn't be as appreciated in the academic world. Now he has a job that pays him for writing well and communicating clearly.
Yes, there’s a bias against clear writing in academia. If it’s easy to understand, then it must not be intellectual enough. Jargon, tangled syntax, and abstraction are seen as signs of serious intellectual writing. This is how Judith Butler became influential. No one was sure exactly what she meant. That she was hard to understand made her more important. Having to work at understanding meant one was doing intellectual work.
One of my grad professors criticized one writer who wrote clearly and praised another who used jargon and complex syntax. I pointed out that both were making a similar point. He conceded that but said he just preferred the writing style of the second writer. I think it made him feel more intellectual.
If someone started talking in the same manner as academic writing, I would probably be concerned that they had some sort of brain disease. I might even ask if they'd asked their doctor if they might have a brain tumor. It still befuddles me that that kind of writing is considered good. I had a humanities professor in college tell me that it was nice to read my writing because it was actually fun to read. I knew then that I had no shot succeeding in the humanities.
I’m not sure it’s considered “good” but it’s considered more “intellectual.” A kind of snobbery!
I always loved how I had professors who would lionize these succinct beautiful papers that were short and to the point. (Say the Gettier paper). But god help you if you submitted something short and to the point.
Nope bloat bloat bloat for word count and page count is the order of the day. We train academics to write like that and a lot of them never unlearn it.
Why make you point in 3 pages when 300 will do? Sometimes that is necessary, often not.
I'll raise my hand as being in the market for nuanced takes on Epstein! I hope we can stop talking about it soon though, this was a ridiculous own goal by the Trump administration but some democrats are driving this bus off the cliff, especially Ro Khanna.
I'm a little sick of Katie being sick of Epstein conspiracy-mongering. I have several reasons for this (my) sickness. The first and most obvious is that what we know is horrific and what we don't know is likely worse and we know there's a lot we don't know. We know this because Pam Bondi and her team know that an unredacted release of everything they have would mean the ballgame's over. (Do I KNOW this? No. I'm going with the odds.) The second is that Trump is a mafioso with a fuck-ton of shit in his past (and his pants) (there's a pretty grounded theory about the fatal crash of one of his planes carrying executives scheduled to be deposed) (and wtf Ivana? She fell down a staircase? Only slightly more believable than Epstein committing suicide...) The third might be the most important. You don't need to be a conspiracy nut to see how a bunch of billionaires and billionaire wannabes and oligarchs and oligarch wannabes are wantonly wrecking this country. They are dismantling it and selling its parts and pocketing the profits. They are worst-case-scenario social-contract busters. So, the rumored horrors of Epstein Island and the Lolita Express are a damn good metaphor--IN ADDITION TO being true (likely). IT'S A DAMN FUNNY TIME TO STOP BEING CONSPIRACY MONGERS. (PS: We landed on the fucking moon and if anything's buried in Roswell it's a dead weather balloon. But I really don't think Jack Ruby hit Oswald because he was so so sad about JFK. Oh, fuck this why do I even bother....)
I’m going to take a wild guess and say that this comment isn’t going to make Katie less sick of conspiracy mongering.
Yeah well I haven't even mentioned how the questionably literate man from Stratford traveled, like, nowhere, as opposed to Edward de Vere the Earl of Oxford, whose world travels could be superimposed on top of a map of a bunch of well-known plays.
First I’m hearing about an Ivana conspiracy. Old people die by falls all the time. Most recent famous one was Ace Frehley, I believe.
Is there a more misnamed animal than carpenter ants? Carpenter ants don't build anything, they just chomp their way through wood and destroy it.
I would have said the Satanic Leaf Tailed Gecko was misnamed due to the lack of satanic activity in the species. However, I'm pretty sure there is coded language in the Epstein files that now justify the name.