Video footage "accidentally" deleted and the backup footage also lost due to "technical errors."
His death and a cleanup so slovenly and brazenly done in front of the public eye is a mockery of America as a nation of "liberty and justice for all."
The world is not fair. There is little justice. But it's more fair and just than it's ever been before, by far. Maybe we've taken a step back in the last 10 years. It's hard to say. But compared to even 50 years ago, we are so far ahead it's unbelievable. 100 years, and it's basically a different world.
Germany today definitely seems better than Nazi Germany -- copy that for almost all of Europe.
Japan today is definitely better than Tojo.
Russia today is probably better than Soviet Russia. Maybe it's worse. It's still bad.
Copy that for China, but I can't imagine it's worse than Mao. South East Asia seems a lot better off without the Khmer Rogue running around.
Isis is fucking up the middle east and MBS is terrible, but at least women have some rights and their courts aren't an absolute complete joke anymore.
I don't know much about India -- but it definitely seems like it's improving vs the recent past.
I don't really know anything about South America or Africa or Australia -- but if you think there was more justice in the Aztec or Inca Empires than there is today, you're mistaken.
Sure, things are way worse in some pockets I guarantee -- see Syria.
The world as a whole is getting better and fairer. And if you think anywhere in the world wasn't killing people on a regular basis for political motives and getting away with it Scott Free, I think you should read about Kingdoms and Empires and Slavery and Feudalism -- you know, the things civilazation ran on until relatively recently. And if you think "Modern Day Slavery" is anywhere near as bad as "Real Slavery" -- again, you're completely mistaken.
Go back 300 years, and you could kill your wife almost anywhere for almost any reason. Nevermind "Royalty" being able to get away with anything.
Meanwhile we had to drop a lawsuit against the NPD because the most vocal and hateful all turned out to be law enforcement. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, especially with the AFD reaching a nice 14% support.
> Copy that for China, but I can't imagine it's worse than Mao.
Blindly killing and starving your population for a rebuild from "scratch" vs. systematic eradication and organ harvesting. I am not sure if that counts as improvement, of course we get cheap crap from it so you might count it as a win.
> Isis is fucking up the middle east and MBS is terrible, but at least women have some rights and their courts aren't an absolute complete joke anymore.
Now if only some weird self styled world police stopped starting wars every few decades under the pretense of bringing peace. There are decades old pictures where the smoking ruins still looked a lot more western then they do now.
> Go back 300 years, and you could kill your wife almost anywhere for almost any reason.
And yet at least in Germany there were explicit laws covering "self defense against ones wife"[1]. While parsing that text hurt my brain (old German spelling + old German letters) the law text itself doesn't seem to paint the man involved in a good light from the start. So one attempt to find a law text in a language I can read and one success vs. "almost anywhere for almost any reason" - maybe I should play the lottery.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutio_Criminalis_Carolin...
There's a difference between what is law and what's enforced.
I.E. it was illegal to mistreat your wife in Germany 300 years ago, but how often did the women win against the man compared to today? How often did they even bring up a case vs today? We don't know. But I'm skeptical it was even close to as fair as today.
There were way more socialist and right wing dictators in the 1970s. Even in the early 90s than today.
Extrajudicial killings, independent courts, poverty via failed economic ideologies or resistance to adopting modern industry/markets, etc has all significantly declined and conditions have improved.
The world will always need constant maintenance and good things stagnant and need reforming. History has a habit of repeating itself but rarely to the same degree of failure as lessons do get learned and quality of life always increases.
A lot of corruption in the rest of the world serves the American government interest of the interest of American corporations. America "is in it" as much as everybody else.
Like, to be blunt, Americans are snorting most of the cocaine from Latin America and having sex with most of the children in Thailand. That doesn't mean those children will wrap themselves in American flags or shoot guns after being fucked, but if you follow the money the trail ends in America and no one is doing anything to stop this. People get killed and raped in the trafficking and cocaine business all the time and I would call that pretty corrupt.
Really? You know this how?
> Only 2 generations ago, stuff like this was happening on a daily basis everywhere in the world.
And it magically stopped?
> This was basically what justice used to be.
As opposed to justice now being what money can buy?
> But it's more fair and just than it's ever been before
I disagree. The world is just as fair and just as it's ever been before. This is just recency bias like how the enlightenment crowd painted the period before them as the "dark ages" where no learning or progress was made.
> But compared to even 50 years ago, we are so far ahead it's unbelievable.
Maybe if we cherrypick some parts or aspects.
> 100 years, and it's basically a different world.
Humans are still humans.
Things aren't as terrible as you think they were. Things aren't as terrible today as some think. Things aren't as great as some think they were. Things aren't as great today as some think.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-jail-cell-video...
Especially because the case disappearing is clearly convenient for people personally connected to the AG, or to whom the AG owes a favor.
Epstein was in Barr's custody.
Corruption seems like an easier explanation though.
If I want a conspiracy theory involving Epstein's power here, it's going to be that this is how you disappear if you're powerful enough, and the phrase "Epstein didn't kill himself" is correct not because his death wasn't a suicide, but because it's not his death.
What is the best, least crackpot looking resource to dig into the _facts_?
The chances of this happening on a high profile case are infinitesimally small. So on the contrary the great claim requiring evidence is that this was a completely normal suicide in prison. Where is the evidence this video was deleted by mistake?
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/01/10/us/09reuters-peop...
I'd like links to sensible aggregate sources and discussion. I don't want to have the discussion here.
I'm always so dissatisfied when I ask for evidence for these things.
But there are also serious questions that need to be answered - a very, very long list of serious questions about very important and influential people involved in some very suspicious events that culminated in some very rare and unusual security lapses.
Linking anyone asking those questions to "crackpots" is simply disingenuous.
A classic denialist position is to require a social process and specific outcome in order to challenge their beliefs, in the face of context. Not that it will change our society, in either case.
In this case, there may not be any bulletproof evidence, but everything around the case that could've gone wrong has gone wrong, to the point where it's no longer statistically plausible to be a mistake. Everything in the system had redundancy yet every part of the system "failed".
There were two guards, yet they were both "asleep". They were supposed to check him every 30m yet they didn't check him for hours exactly when he killed himself. He had attempted suicide yet he wasn't on suicide watch. His cell mate was taken away. All the footage and backup were lost.
I guess the closest evidence so far is that the autopsy shows more homicide than suicide, but that isn't much.
Yes, it is indeed a conspiracy theory at this point, but unlike what the internet will have you believe, "conspiracy" != "crackpot theory".
"Hours" means at least 4x longer than the normal period Epstein would have waited for the guards check in on him. Even at the 45 minute point it would be clear to Epstein that the guards were late.
Basic logic would dictate that a guy desiring to commit suicide would make an attempt exactly when it seemed likely to him the guards weren't going to show up for awhile.
So we have two options-- either Epstein was intent on committing suicide (in which case the timing is unremarkable) or he wasn't (in which case the timing is highly suspect). Given that we don't know Epstein's state of mind, and as you point out we don't have much of anything as corroborating evidence, we cannot make heads or tails of the timing. And this is the problem with conspiracy theories. It's simply too tempting to overlook that and jump to the branch that adds more intrigue to the conspiracy.
I find it useful to build a simple gate before jumping to unlock further contemplation. For example, perhaps I read about a statement from a guard claiming they were told not to check on Epstein during that time. Or even a report of some suspicious activity or event at the location that happened around the same time the regular checking procedure got interrupted. Having that gate there ensures that I don't accidentally let unrelated yet intriguing facts fill in for the corroborating evidence I desire.
Further, if someone powerful was worried he'd implicate them, killing him is a terrible way to keep the secret. With him dead, his effects and possessions are now no longer subject to Constitutional privacy protections and the FBI can go over them at its leisure to string together a case against his accomplices or any who used his "services" to arrange illegal sexual encounters.
(... civil trial burden of proof is mere "preponderance of evidence," and IIUC his estate is seeking civil trial, so they may win that case, make of that what one will).
https://www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2019/08/13/computer-r...
That's a nice, more-memorable riff on Russell's Teapot [0].
Do you have any explanation for that?
It's a matter of probabilities. Surveillance video was prematurely destroyed, twice in a month, in separate incidents and in different ways. Oh and both of those incidents involved the same subject. That is statistically improbable, similar in category if not in actual magnitude, to getting struck by lightning twice. At the very least that should justify and support an investigation kicking into overdrive mode to find direct evidence. And if no such evidence is found, it may nonetheless end up being used as part of a prosecution. Interesting coincidences are always pretty persuasive.
You're claiming that the chances of this are infinitesimally small comes off a bit tautological. It kind of feels like you're /saying/ it's infinitesimally small because /if/ that were in fact true, it /might/ help your claim.
How do you know that?
To me, this is like saying "backups of important data do not become unrecoverable by accident." Except backups (and CCTV footage) is routine, high data volume, and very usually uninteresting, so something going wrong can very easily be missed. And things can go wrong with relatively high frequency--I would not be surprised if most attempts to restore from backups failed.
Even if they are ([citation needed] on the claim that the high profile nature of the case decreases the odds of mechanical accident), infinitesimally small events can still happen once. The fact they happened at a time most inconvenient for holding a wealthy man accountable doesn't change the nature of probability.
Also if you missed the latest news stories, they did save the footage for one of them but were given the wrong cell number so they had footage for the wrong floor.
This is just the general level of disorder and incompetence you can expect when you decide not to give a thing the level of funding it needs.
All have noted how tight the security is (its often referred to as the "Gitmo of the East"), how so many failures would have to occur for him to be able to do what he did without anybody seeing it happen, or not have someone realize he was trying to kill himself and stop it.
I remember an interview with a high level jail admin and when asked about Epstein and what happened, he just laughed. The host asked why he was laughing and he basically said, "I worked there for 15 years, no way this happens with the security they have there. Someone was paid off or it was an inside job. There's no doubt in my mind when I consider the kind of people Epstein was linked to."
https://nypost.com/2019/08/10/suicide-supposedly-nearly-impo...
That he was in deep with very, very powerful people for a long time that are in the public eye we now somehow have to apply greater scrutiny to the evidence. Just, gobbledygook.
Perhaps we should realize that there really isn't much difference between the Mafia and generational political families.
It's interesting how conspiracy theories seem to always have a very particular... 'conservative' bias.
At best, the doctor can affirm that Epstein died. Little more. Suicide is associating a storytelling, a blatantly lying storytelling in the face of the public as long as no proof of intent was even available when the suicide was affirmed. We basically know nothing on the circumstances of his death, so the suicide word was more than unfounded.
One toss, you couldn't really detect much smell. But 8? Does it stink?
Any one of these things, camera footage x2, cell mate, suicide watch removal, plea deal, guards asleep x2, association with the current president, Bill Clinton, actual royalty, just for starters... and we can keep going with these coincidences.
Any one, fine, happens. Any three, ok, weird, but not totally outside expectation. But we're kind of beyond that. It just stinks. If it's all just a massive coincidence that all these independent things "just happened" that needs support because it seems the assumption that all those events are independent is shaky, at best. Shaky by occam's razor heuristic.
0.9^8 is less than 50%
So it should be looked at closely on principle. With or without support from occam's razor.
For a lot of us, HN is a big part of our lives, it's our water-cooler place where we come to chat and wind down. I was myself curious to hear what folks here thought of the "Epstein didn't kill himself" trope.