Search results

it's not about whether "the deep state" murdered the president. it's about believing someone is in control. it is not a lazy point. it is borne out in essentially all major conspiracist thinking, from 9/11 to QAnon to whatever else. not sure why your tone is consistently insulting in this...

shooters, people giving orders to those shooters, an entire infrastructure to then frame Oswald or at least make him a sacrificial goat the ability to suborn or subvert the Warren Commission etc

No Rich, I'm sorry but you are wrong, point blank. The distinction is the opposite of trivial. JFK conspiracy theorizing is only what it is bc it involves these seemingly large, powerful, nefarious entities.

as a film, it's entertaining as history, it's not only absolutely terrible but dangerous, bc it's the defining view for so many people and it perpetuates so many myths and outright inventions. Stone wanted to have it both ways - sell an entertaining fiction while presenting his film as a truth...

@IdleRich I mean look bud yr OPs are full of the Mafia, the CIA, Russia, etc. like JFK theorizing virtually always is. if Lee Harvey Oswald and a group of poker buddies or whatever hatched a plot, no one would care the conspiracy theories have juice specifically bc they involve the deep...

it is not an error in my claim I said every massive conspiracy theory, bc JFK conspiracists don't traffic in any other kind or please by all means someone point me to the theories about Oswald's anonymous friend who died a week later

the interesting part of the JFK assassination isn't who did it (once again, it was Lee Harvey Oswald) but its afterlife as the ur-text of postmodern conspiracy theorizing when belief eclipses fact you eventually reach a place where all sources of information is equally invalid and thus equally...

Lee Harvey Oswald Is this a serious question? It was Lee Harvey Oswald Every massive conspiracy theory, besides being full of holes, would require a coverup lasting decades and involving an enormous number of people

one of my favorite things in the Sequoia profile - and there are so many, it is a truly amazing document - is its description of FTX's Bahamas office, which sounds like Jonestown for crypto nerds, and its living space at a resort called Albany, which sounds your typical fortified ultramodern...

both of the Forbes pieces are solid, as well as the piece @luka posted about the extremely shady relationships between FTX, Celsius, and Tether the fawning in-house Sequoia Capital piece linked in the Ellison profile is a fascinating look into SBF/FTX at their zenith/the moment before its total...

Just a pull quote saying it was the worst corporate/accounting malfeasance he'd ever seen or something like that

Its main philosophical issue I see, and what causes that Reformation style split between do gooders and prevent existential threat AI types, is how do you decide what the goal of optimization should be? Greater human happiness presumably, but what is that, and who are you or I or anyone to make...

Effective altruism is like the best case scenario for that worldview bc it's at least, if sincere, well-intentioned

It's very closely tied, no surprise, to rationalism, i.e. the people who believe that if you can just get rid of your cognitive biases etc you can make more "correct" decisions. Which is both a crazy premise - how can you ever discover all your cognitive biases from within a subjective...

I don't buy shell-shocked for a minute btw Brass tacks I think these people got in way over their heads, realized at some point it was irretrievably fucked, and decided to steal what they could of what was left and either flee (Ellison) or plead ignorance/incompetence (SBF). Either way they've...

Dude that Caroline Ellison article links to an archive of the now infamous fawning genius profile of SBF that Sequoia Capital published...on its OWN website...6 weeks before the collapse of FTX. Can't make this shit up.

The problem with those colorful grifter details is that they rapidly progress from colorful to ugly. Very ugly.

And in another extremely on-brand plot twist it turns out that Caroline Ellison wrote a Mencius Moldbug-inspired blog back in college full of musings on all the greatest Dark Enlightment hits like racial "science" and IQ, redpilled based anti-feminism, etc...

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy If anyone hasn't read the SBF Vox interview btw it's fucking wild. He comes off like a singularly enormous piece of shit. His view of ethics is...

I mean yeah that's completely bonkers The idea that people were fine with that is even more bonkers