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Comment by cnst | Hacker News Reader

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Was Seth Rich either politically influential or high net worth?

> I think you're forgetting at least Jeffrey Epstein, Seth Rich, the Boeing whistleblowers, and probably many others?

Even if we assume all of those are nefarious, that is much fewer people over a much longer period. If you have to add "probably many others", it feels like you are just extrapolating in your favor without evidence.

Aren't you just proving the point, though? You automatically assume all conspiracies from one set of countries to be unsubstantiated, yet all the other ones from a different set of countries to suddenly be substantiated and requiring no further proof? And don't even bother to refer to the latter ones as "conspiracies", whereas, in polite company, all the former ones, must explicitly be referred to as "conspiracies".

For a lot of these cases, there's really no way to definitively prove either way, so, the fact that with the same set of basic facts, different conclusions are reached, using different words, doesn't instil objectivity to the process.

To be fair, "Russian lawlessness" is a concept that predates the entire nation of America, even between Russian authors. People immediately leap to accusations of corruption because the USSR and Russian Federation are both well known for sending agents to kill dissidents living at home or abroad. The modern world has never known what Russia would look like if they embraced global accountability and tried to uphold basic decorum and due process for their convicted criminals.

Comparatively, faith in American institutions was only recently shaken by Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair, neither of which were even that bad in a relative sense. If the Clintons were tried and prosecuted for murder then you wouldn't have to label your words as a conspiracy theory, but for now that's exactly what they are. And to be honest, the evidence today doesn't feel any more convincing than the same shtick I heard 15 years ago...

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