Epstein’s “day job” was being a socialite. He was the guy who knew everybody. If you wanted an introduction, he could do it. He was the guy who made sure that the riff raff stayed out, even if they were rich.

I’m pretty sure that everybody knew he was always around “young women”, but I strongly suspect that most of the people he interacted with didn’t know about the child sex abuse. They were there for his “rolodex”.

But, the end result is that because he was the guy who knew everybody in a position of power, his network shows who has the power. My guess is that at least half the people he had in his network were not into child sex abuse, and didn’t know that he was involved in that. But, I have only the world’s tiniest violin to play for those people. I think they’re guillotine-worthy because of their abuses of power, and how they hoarded obscene amounts of wealth. For far too long, the ultra rich have had a good public image in the US. People should have been furious with them just for hoarding all that wealth. And, the Epstein folks are the ones who not only hoarded the wealth, but spent it to gain power, which they used to warp society to benefit themselves. So, now everybody’s disgusted with them and hates them, it’s for the wrong reasons, but at least they’re hated.

My crimes will be explored in as much depth as possible in any extensive biography

Probably not. Without any investigation it will all be speculation. Biographies are written for a commercial audience. Who’s going to buy a biography of Andrew? People who like the royals, not people who hate them. If he’d actually appeared in court, the biography would have to address it. But, with it all just speculation, they can mention the speculation and move on.

It’s possible that some of the people who met with Epstein did it because they knew he could introduce them to other rich and powerful people. They might not have known about the child sexual abuse. Or they suspected something, but thought that Epstein was always seen with barely legal 18-year-olds, and that that was the extent of it.

I personally don’t think that Epstein introduced himself to billionaires by saying “Hi, I’m Jeff Epstein, I rape children, are you interested in raping children too?” I don’t believe that being a billionaire automatically means you not only enjoy raping children, but are excited to share that hobby with other people. Epstein probably sounded them out, investigated them, and only went into details with the ones who weren’t going to expose him. And, most likely, he got blackmail material on anybody who he did share his “hobby” with. He probably kept anybody who he thought might expose him at arms length, and he only let them see him with girls who were 18+.

So, while that plausible deniability exists, I’m sure Andrew wants to be able to claim that he was buddies with Epstein, but was so clueless that he never knew about the child sexual abuse.

Wait, this is about physical appearance?

Shakespeare comes from a time before cameras, obviously. But, not only that, there were no portraits of him painted in his lifetime. And to add to the confusion, there were no physical descriptions made of him during his lifetime. The only information we have on what he looked like come from about a decade after his death. One is an engraving, the other is a (IMO) low quality bust from his funerary monument. In addition, Shakespeare is such a generic-looking guy of his time that there are portraits of other people that were misidentified as being portraits of Shakespeare because they feature slim white guys with goatees in a ruffle collar.

Compare that to Sonic. He’s a character that was designed to stand out visually, and one where the company that makes Sonic games is still, to this day, generating new media with photos and videos of him.

So, if an actual portrait of Shakespeare were discovered and shown to Shakespeare experts, I think even then there’s a decent chance they’d more easily recognize Sonic. After all, a “Shakespeare expert” isn’t an expert on what he looked like. They’re an expert on his writing.

I think Trump assumed he’d already set up a puppet government. He made a deal with the VP, she got bumped up to president when Trump took out her boss. So, she’s a puppet, right? But, it doesn’t seem like she ever had any intention of becoming a puppet, and Trump has no leverage to force her.

Unfortunately, even if they didn’t succeed, it would be horrible for everybody involved, especially the invaded country. Trump is definitely the type who would wipe Winnipeg off the map if some Winnipegger killed someone important.

Yeah. Let’s say this extremely unlikely thing does happen. There’s some kind of false flag attack, like a person wearing a Canadian flag does a suicide bomber attack on the US congress or something. An event that riles up Americans enough that there’s enough support for an invasion of Canada that Trump could get away with it.

Now imagine the result of invading a country where almost none of the locals want you there, and all of the locals can pass for Americans. European countries might be too cowardly to actually send their armies against the US for doing that. But, they would almost certainly find a way to fund and train Canadian freedom fighters. The Canadian / American border is completely indefensible. It’s simply too big to ever be properly guarded.

So, you’d have Canadians slipping into the US easily, they’d be trained and armed by Europeans, Australians, Japanese, Koreans, and all the other former US allies. And, once in the states they’d have no problem finding support networks to help them attack American targets.

Just because Trump would be insane to try this doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do it. With their massive propaganda networks in place, they might get a fair number of Americans to support it, at least at first. But, the most they could ever hope for is a Pyrrhic victory.

I get the cynicism, but there was something to the “Rules Based International Order”. In the past, the US trade representative might have strong-armed countries into certain deals, but when the deals were signed, they were generally honoured. When Germany and Mexico had a dispute over tariffs or something, it was accepted that the way to resolve it was with communication, mediation, and maybe courts. It wasn’t to use violence, bribes, extra-judicial killing, espionage, etc.

The change under Trump just shows how much of the system was taken for granted. Now, the world is having to adjust to the fact that treaties signed by the US are meaningless, and that we’re back to a world of bribes and military force.

The FIFA thing is so strange. They have such a long history of obvious corruption that I don’t think anybody has a positive impression of them. If they actually gave a real award to an actually deserving group, I think most people would wonder what the catch was.

So, when a massively corrupt organization like FIFA gives an award for peace to a warmongering autocrat, who exactly do they think they’re fooling? Why do they even bother going through the motions? Are there people out there that think “Wow, FIFA is a credible organization, and they specialize in peace, so this must indicate that Trump is a force for peace in the world!” It doesn’t even work with the MAGA faithful, because they have no idea what FIFA is.

For those countries it’s not soft power. Seriously man, if I have to point out the difference between soft power and hard power to you like this, this conversation isn’t worth continuing.

That’s a little more than soft power

It’s soft power until they start using it.

This stopped being the yardstick for influence around WW1

And that was a mistake. Population and resources is key to a nation’s power. It’s a large reason why the US is so powerful. Per capita a lot of European countries have similar levels of wealth, but the US has nearly 350 million people, which is only slightly less than all the states in the EU combined. If the EU were more centralized it would be a single state with a power to rival the US. But, as a collection of 27 countries which only surrender some of their power to the EU government, it’s not able to match the US.

I don’t know that they aspire to bring Hanification to me here in California.

Only on a limited basis. They definitely don’t want you to talk about Taiwan and how Taiwan is an independent country. Right now, because the US is strong, you’re free to talk about Taiwan all you like. But, as China gets stronger, they may require that their trade partners have local laws enforcing the one-China policy. They’ve already managed to push that onto the Olympics. And after they get that rule everywhere, what’s next? Maybe laws forbidding people from using Winnie the Pooh to mock their leader?

The US deposed democratically elected leaders all over South America

That’s not really about free speech. That’s about who holds power in various countries.

the US losing standing will immediately lead to total Chinese dominance around the globe

The US didn’t have total dominance around the globe either. They just had a lot of soft power, a lot more than any other country.

There was a time we feared Japan in the same way

Sure, but Japan was always relatively small. It was a country with a low population and few natural resources. China is a huge country with nearly 10% of the world’s population and is one of the largest countries in the world. There are no guarantees that it will still be a major force in 10 or 20 years, but it’s different from Japan which was a relatively small country that had a temporary niche in manufacturing certain kinds of goods.

The biggest issue with China is that they don’t believe in the right to free speech and free expression. While the US has been more of an outlier in allowing unfettered free speech until recently, free speech and free expression is pretty central to European identity.

Will it really be a multilateral future though? Or will it be a Chinese future?

A multilateral future would be great, but multilateral alliances aren’t very stable. Just look at how Orban is disrupting what the EU wants to do, even though Hungary is a relatively small and weak country in Europe. Or, look how toothless European regulations are when Ireland just refuses to enforce things like the GDPR, so the tech companies just declare themselves as Irish.

Meanwhile China seems very unified and their mixture of a command economy and a market economy has been very effective so far. I don’t think the Chinese model is all bad. They’ve been massively effective at doing things like building high speed rail, developing and deploying solar panels, etc. OTOH, the Great Firewall and CCTV state is not how I would like to live.

Without the US, I don’t know how well the rest of the world will be able to resist China. I think Australia might be the canary in the coal mine. I think China considers Australia to be in its sphere of influence and will try to put more and more pressure on it. Australia’s outlook on the world is much more similar to Europe, but it’s geographically really far away.

Maybe the US won’t become fascist. Maybe the democrats will win in a landslide and reform things so that no rogue president can do what Trump did ever again.

But, even in that unlikely scenario, the trust the world had with the US has already been burned, and isn’t coming back easily. It’s obvious that other countries might try to avoid doing deals with a corrupt, fascist USA. But, what’s less obvious is that thanks to Trump, countries also won’t want to do deals with an apologetic, democratic, tolerant, liberal, honest USA. That USA can get voted out of office and replaced with a fascist in just one election cycle, and all the deals mean nothing when that happens.

Yeah, trust has been burned and it’s not coming back quickly. Maybe reform the systems and trust will eventually be built back. But, by that time the US won’t be a major power anymore, so it won’t matter as much.

It’s more than changing just the electoral system too. It’s reforming the way that justices are chosen for the supreme court, and how long they serve. It’s reforming the power the president’s office has over entities like the department of justice. It’s massive reforms over money in politics.

Basically, to have any chance for meaningful change, the US would have to undertake a system of massive constitutional amendments. And there hasn’t been an amendment in more than 50 years… and that last one was a fairly benign change to the voting age.

I find it interesting how this is just assumed by many people as an eventuality when we’ve already seen a failed coup attempt last time an election ousted the Republican regime.

Oh yeah, I think there’s a solid chance that the democrats will never get back in power again. That, even if they win the popular vote by a massive margin, Trump will pull the developing country dictator trick and declare the results invalid and refuse to leave office. And that’s assuming that people are even allowed to vote. What I was suggesting was the best possible outcome for people who still believe that this whole thing can be rescued. Even under those circumstances, I think you’re going to see countries trying to pivot away from the US because the idea that the US can commit to anything that lasts more than maybe 2 years is obviously untrue.

I’m specifically talking about Americans thinking that the rest of the world will get over this. I think that trust has been broken.

Like you talk about broken guard rails. The US has been lecturing the world on how the US system of democracy is the best for decades now. There’s always talk about how there’s a system of checks and balances, and how US democracy can be messy, but in the end it’s a system that works. I don’t think anybody believes that anymore. The guard rails were always an illusion, and even if all of Trump’s changes were rolled back, the rest of the world would know that the guard rails, and the checks and balances are all just an elaborate delusion.

Why any nation would bother to negotiate with the US right now is beyond me

It’s because they don’t really have a choice. If it were say, Australia, that had gone off the rails, they could just be ignored. But, the US is still such a central part of the world’s economy, and there are so many important companies based out of the US, that it’s not possible just to pull the plug. In addition, if countries didn’t negotiate with Trump he might see it as a slight and send in the navy to interdict “drug boats” or something.

This also makes things look like they’re better than they are. People see trade deals being negotiated and think "well, if that’s happening, then things aren’t that far gone. The reality is that countries used to negotiate trade deals with the US because, even when they felt they were being pressured to cave to US demands, they could at least count on the US to more-or-less honour the terms of the deal when it was done. I think countries are now dealing with the US because they have to, but they’re really just going through the motions, not expecting that the result will actually be a binding agreement.

The real shock to Americans will be when they discover this can’t be fixed.

Americans want to believe that relations will return to normal once the democrats are back in power. But, they don’t understand that the loss of trust in the US is permanent. Sure, if the democrats take back power and want to negotiate trade deals, other countries may sign them. They’re just not going to believe that the US can be trusted to honour the terms of those trade deals, and will structure the deals accordingly. Trump’s 2 terms show that a treaty signed by the US is meaningless, because a president like Trump can come along and just rip it up. They’ve also showed that support for someone Trump-like is close enough to 50% that it can easily happen again.

The momentum of international trade, and the vast power the US wields means that there won’t be a sudden cutting off of the US. But, bit by bit, even former staunch allies are going to start slowly pivoting away from the US whenever possible no matter who’s elected and how big a landslide it is.

Do you think in feudal times things were better?