One of the things I've noticed is that the grand conspiracies often get the "shape" of things right, just the particulars are wrong. "Pizzagate"/QAnon are, at least as of right now, somewhat distantly correct in the sense that, holy cats there maybe really is a bunch of rich and famous people who are connected to a child sex ring.

Of course QAnon et al turn it into some crazy nonsense involving a relatively meaningless hormone and a reality TV star as conquering hero.

Or Bohemian Grove. They're doing Satanic rituals! All those rich and famous people are doing horribly corrupt and satanic! They're conspiring to control our lives with evil magic!

Well, _no_, they're actually just engaging in some _very tacky_ theatre followed by the usual rich-person networking, and they'd rather not have you know that a bunch of important events in government and business maybe started there. I mean, heck, that's _the Masons_ too. It was facebook/linkedin of the analog era. join up, "culture of secrecy", but mostly you meet people for business contacts and whatnot.

I think people have a massive misperception of how law enforcement & politics, and reporting by the media on such matters really works.

On one hand, most everyone seems to get it that bad behavior and corruption is rife, but on the other hand any specifics ideas will generally be dismissed as conspiracy theories. I sometimes wonder if the widespread strong beliefs that "everything's a conspiracy theory unless it's been reported on" is completely natural, or if it has been partially socially engineered.

This is a good podcast to listen to for an example:

> Common Sense 276 – Past Transgressions

> https://podtail.com/en/podcast/common-sense-with-dan-carlin/...

> Description: Imagine celebrities from the 1960s and 1970s who were involved in sexual conduct with minors in their heyday being called to account for it today. It’s currently happening in Great Britain. Dan has some thoughts.

How many incredibly famous rock stars from the past were sleeping with underage groupies in plain sight of hundreds of people? And what have we heard, beyond a few rumors?

Has no one here witnessed criminal behavior worthy of prison sentences in the workplace? I certainly have, and my career has been nothing special, at all. People underestimate how easy it is to cover things up when money (people's jobs) are on the line. And if that looks to be failing, there's always cold hard cash or other forms of persuasion, and if the stakes are high enough, "suicide" (which will inevitably be classified as a conspiracy theory).

For more examples of broad daylight corruption that never makes the news, I highly recommend listening to the Common Sense podcast, and even sticking one's nose into /r/conspiracy now and then, for those who are able to think unemotionally about such things of course.

I think the issue is that people forget to account for the massive SCALE of human activity in their lives. We mostly only know a few hundred people in our circles, and for a lot of us, not a large precentage of that circle is criminal, or engaged in unethical/immoral behaviour.

But when you scale things up - at massive quantities - you have to account for the illegal/immoral/unethical behaviour scaling up as well. It may be completely inconceivable that criminal behaviour occurs in circles of power - but when you are dealing with people who are involved in the lives of millions, upon millions - literally tens of millions of humans, or even hundreds of millions - criminality at scale starts to become a thing.

And yes, a group of a few thousand no-good types can hide their activities in the realm of humans-at-scale. This has been proven time and again throughout history, and anyone who thinks 'its impossible for people to be that well organized' are fooling themselves.

Humans are incredibly good at organizing themselves to get things done - nefarious or otherwise - and anyone thinking otherwise is just manifesting a form of personal anti-social neurosis. If its unreal to you that conspiracies could form at scale, you need to read more history and pay attention to how so many of our cultures and societies throughout the world have been constructed. Heck, even the American state began as a conspiracy that nobody could believe would result in anything much ..

One of the magazines that were indeed reporting on people like Epstein was Gawker, it’s actually mentioned in the article. We all know what happened to Gawker but people in the Valley are too afraid to speak up against pretty despicable guys like Thiel.

What "people like Epstein" was Gawker reporting on? Unfortunately I only know it from Theil-related stories, i.e. reporting that Theil is gay and the sex tape issue (neither of which seem "Epstein-worthy").

Not so much "people like Epstein" but actually Epstein himself. To my understanding, Gawker (well, Nick Bryant really) was actually one of the few who actually reported on him in detail back in the day. E.g., here's this[0] from 2015. Some of the links are broken now so I can't link to other of Bryant's stories about it.

[0] https://gawker.com/here-is-pedophile-billionaire-jeffrey-eps...

Epstein himself, for once, and that would be enough. Also, one of their magazines/websites was reporting on some crazy parties, travel-trips and weddings carried out by SV owners, things that nowadays will definitely raise a few eyebrows in terms of economic inequality and conspicuous consumption, but those article were very badly received by the employees of those people the articles were writing about (so including people on this website) so that not a lot of tears were shed when Gawker went down.

I’m not equaling Marie Antoinette-way of living to the despicable things Epstein did, I’m just saying that in today’s political climate it would have been very interesting to still have access to articles detailing how the Google or FB owners were throwing out their money.

I don't really see a difference between "these evil rich people are spending money / living if ways that we don't approve" and "these evil rich people are having sex in ways we don't approve" (i.e. Thiel is gay!!!1). Both are a needless distraction from progress/living happily and encourage a hostile political climate.

Here's an Epstein explainer they published in 2015: https://gawker.com/billionaire-pervert-jeffrey-epstein-and-h...

Peter Thiel was entirely justified for every one of the actions he took and funded against a magazine that outed him as gay, while he was in Saudi Arabia.

I fail to see Thiel as the bad guy here. What Gawker does to people is pretty horrid, and they got what they had coming to them.

Maybe outing people and putting up sex tapes isn’t the same category as sex trafficking?

Thiel is despicable for co-inventing the abomination that is Paypal. Not for destroying a business that made millions from destroying reputations (particularly through the use of homophobia).

And in fact there have been a number of people trying to blow the cover up. Unfortunately they are the (marginalized) victims themselves.

I guess we're looking for someone more credible to be blowing open these coverups?

Sad state of affairs…

Without notice? Really everybody inside certain industries knew about Epstein and much more prominent figures whose names may not be mentioned. There's much more going on with pedo-related blackmailing, usually related to Intelligence services. New Orleans, Europe, Asia.

As intelligence services are protected, you won't hear about it.

Remember Dennis Hastert? Remember how quiet the media was about that scuzzbucket? You notice how quiet they are about the fact that this convicted child molestor is now ... a respected congressional lobbyist?

It's probably worse than we know.