You are describing NYC here. Minus small things like not being able to move out. But in practical purposes may be the same. Anyways I bet if you ask someone from Moscow, Paris and LA may also agree with me. This rent seeking scheme has penetrated everywhere because it is so transparently easy. It is like describing a mugging and claiming it is some special sort of problem in your local area.

Default position of our society is degenerate. This is why it is failing. That does not have to be your private position. Which I am glad it is not.

And yes it seems to be a world wife disease. This is why I have been looking into Christianity lately. Christianity seems to go it’s own way without relying much on authority of state or local church for christian to uphold morals.

Epstein was based in New York and Florida, no? Admittedly also the USVI.

This isn’t just legal but also cultural. In the 1970s it was culturally acceptable for teenage girls to date adult men. Today it’s not, but the sexual revolution wasn’t reversed. And of course these teenage girls themselves are trying to look and act older.

…is anti-Hong Kong for no reason

You are providing reasons to be anti-Hong Kong.

The majority in HK you describe does not want more integration into CCP-run China, but they are also seem to be incapable of solving HK’s problems.
They cannot have it both ways.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3019854/chinese-military-can-be-deployed-hong-kongs-request-contain

Only about a dozen US States have 18 as age of consent, albeit including our three of our four most populous (#1 California, #3 Florida, and #4 New York).

Texas (#2), New Jersey (#11), and about six other States at age 17.

The great majority of the States, and probably about half the country’s population, have age of consent at 16.

So your swipe at US age of consent laws was somewhat off base.

Very informative posts.
Thanks.

Also I forgot to add that the local Hong Kong government is still largely unchanged from the colonial days. This means that it can be inept, wieldy, and tone-deaf, more so than the CCP itself. This means that they aren’t capable at all with effective communication with the masses, and a lot of power is in the hands of the private sector instead, who as we know have a vested interest in asset inflation and excessive dependence on the service sector.

Such poor ability to deal with the masses and breakdown in communication is also what causes the protests. The moderate pan-Dem politicians managed to organize those protests in the first place after getting tired of them not getting their voices heard. As I mentioned earlier, the Pan-Dems also have an issue of not having a working alternative governing policy of their own and inability to reign in the radicals.

And housing prices isn’t just the only reason why Hong Kongers are angry. That’s the single largest and most pressing reason, but that isn’t even the majority of reason. It doesn’t explain Hong Kong people’s psyche that’s the rest of the puzzle causing people to take to the streets.

1. Many Hong Kongers fear the CCP. Many see it as an unknown, all-empowering, dark Communist govt with sinister plans. They don’t trust it at all.

2. Many Hong Kongers resent the Mainland. They’re tired of Mainland tourists, especially the hated parallel traders, expensive cross border infrastructure projects that don’t benefit them, competition for university spots and white collar jobs.

3. Hong Kong has stagnated while the rest of the Mainland is blazing ahead economically. Hong Kong simply doesn’t stand out from the Mainland as it once did. This means that the shadow of the Mainland is increasingly dragging Hong Kong into its economic and political orbit. This is something middle class HKers find it difficult to accept. With the current economic set-up, they have the most to lose getting dragged into the Mainland orbit.

The working class is unaffected by Hong Kong getting dragged into the Mainland’s orbit: Its incredibly difficult for a working class Mainlander to immigrate to HK without family ties and the police implement immigration laws harshly towards illegal working class Mainlanders. The rich can directly reap the economic benefits and ride the Mainland economic boom wave, while armed with Anglosphere passports and real estate in case Hong Kong gets drawn too close to the Mainland or sh*t hits the fan.

4. The average protester doesn’t have the assets or skills to be skilled immigrants to the West. They also don’t possess the skills or connections to thrive on the Mainland. Plus their views towards the Mainland preclude them from moving there in the first place. As I’ll explain below, patriotism towards Hong Kong-only is starting to form among the youth, and many of the protesters don’t want to immigrate either. They want to fight for Hong Kong.

5. Hong Kong is also a very stressful place. The sheer density, crisis-level real estate prices, and extremely long work hours is a giant pressure cooker. Pretty much every single restaurant has a long wait time, waitstaff is incredibly rude and throws your plates onto your table, and sharing tables with other diners is almost mandatory at many restaurants. Sidewalks can still be packed at 2 am. Some people protest just to relieve stress.

6. As familial ties to the Mainland wanes, and an entire generation brought up entirely in Hong Kong’s education system, a separate identity has formed. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the gulf in terms of boots-on-the-ground experiences between Hong Kong and China is so wide that they feel like separate countries, not to mention what’s essentially a formal international border between the two. Its difficult to cultivate any type of PRC patriotism in an environment like that.

For example, English is still an official language in Hong Kong. On street signs, English tends to take the precedent of Chinese. Hong Kong websites end in .hk instead of .cn. Hong Kong is not subject to the firewall so people don’t really use Chinese websites. Hong Kong school uniforms are still British standard. Hong Kong drives on the left and uses British license plates. Of course, average young Hong Kongers will be loyal to Hong Kong-only, instead of the PRC.

The extradition law was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The issues I just reached a boiling point and got amalgamated into Hong Kong’s worst political crisis since 1967. A crisis big enough that the way Hong Kong is ran likely needs to be changed to address all of these issues.

Yet another Mainland fanboy who doesn’t truly understand Hong Kong’s social situation, and is anti-Hong Kong for no reason.

Yes, most major cities have horrible rent situations, but Hong Kong’s is especially bad: Its artificially inflated for several reasons:

1. The property developer tycoons’ wealth literally depends on artificial asset inflation.

2. Too many powerful interests preventing land development.

3. Too many people (both Hong Kongers and Mainlanders) put their assets into real estate.

4. Hong Kong is a city-state: There’s no where for Hong Kongers to just up and move out of the city “domestically”. And no, Mainland China and Hong Kong have very different systems and for all intents and purposes function as separate countries complete with a heavily patrolled border, thanks to the Two Systems part of 1C2S. At this point, the difference between two EU countries is smaller, a lot in fact, than the difference between Mainland and Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is the world’s single most expensive housing market with nowhere else coming close. Apartments in 50 story anthills also look like jail cells in how small they can be.

No, I am not okay with such degeneracy.

But all modern societies clearly are.

In the United States and a few other countries, an arbitrary line is drawn when one of the parties is a sexually mature teenager.

This is ridiculous.

The default position of our age is that it’s bad for a teen girl to get porked by Jeffrey Epstein and get paid for her trouble but it’s absolutely wonderful for her to get banged out by a skateboarding drug dealer her own age.

Does this make any sense at all?

Put your self in place of a father of any type of young woman. The way you would want your daughter treated should be the norm. Any deviation should be punished mercilessly.

Now if you are ok with your young daughter being groomed by degenerates there is nothing to discuss here.

It’s all about what you accept for your self. I reject all forms of degeneracy and welcome when ever it gets stomped out.

Man you fantasise bs.

Between you thinking US has military superiority over mainland China to now somehow thinking protesters numbers translate to fighter numbers.

Just throwing out this casual observation here, but anyone else notice the link between rassenschande and China hawks? Like 3 out of 4 times, it'll be some dufus who lives in Washington DC with a Chinese wife. I cant help but wonder if there isnt some wierd passive aggressive

— Duke of Qin (@qin_duke) May 23, 2019

Not everyone who has casual sex with girls is as much a dishonest sleaze as Epstein is. It’s natural to feel disgust at such a creature. People who do not should be regarded with suspicion.

Seems odd, usually going out with a foreign girl makes me like the country less

I haven’t followed the case closely, but yes as far as I know it generally started with his agents hiring teenage girls as masseuses, personal assistants, gophers, etc.

From there it escalated. I’m not aware of him having straight up raped a girl, though of course I would not be surprised if that turned out to be the case.

Seduction generally involves sleazy, shameless escalation and increasing states of intoxication from pretenses that may be false, though extremely high value men can succeed with completely direct approaches (and Epstein probably did employ such approaches at time).

This is all considered totally acceptable unless the girl is one day under 18 or later regrets the experience.

And yes, Epstein certainly knowingly violated the law. But setting age of consent at age 18 as in many American states is simply ridiculous to begin with.

My admittedly superficial understanding is that Epatein would have his “finders” procure for him girls that were underaged, maybe on the false pretense that they were just going to be giving him massages? One of the rumors is that Epstein’s whole business may have hinged on his ability to blackmail wealthy men with incriminating photos/videos, in which case the “I assumed they were all legal!” defense wouldn’t seem very plausible.

I’m generally averse to moral panics (especially of the #MeToo variety) but Epstein seems so mired in sleaze that I’m willing to believe he’s actually as nefarious as they’re making him out to be.

Is this another one of those undersexed 20-something males who grew up in middle-class comfort in a liberal country and now seeks surrogate “Daddy” figures in foreign strongmen? These far-right Twitter trolls are all starting to run together for me…

This is bullshit.

1. Nobody with a fetish for Asian girls distinguishes between Taiwanese, Hong Konger , Overseas Chinese or Mainland Chinese girls.

2. Said fetishes do not impact political views. I like beautiful Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese girls equally and I am a rabid Japanophile, moderate Sinophile and Koreaphile(?) and neutral on Vietnam.

I feel confident the U.S. Armed forces could defeat China in almost any other context, but on Chinese soil? I think our guys would get slaughtered. And the fools who’d’ve sent them would deserve to die in their place.

Their peice.

…the HK govt has to find a way to lower rent without angering the tycoons or the Heung Yee Kuk, give the pan-Dems an active say in the government, including direct communication with the CCP, and come up with sound economic policies to give the average non-hooligan radical a future.

I don’t know what’s going to happen…but I’m pretty sure it won’t be that.

In THE CURRENT YEAR #LoveIsLove and certainly something like ethnic and racial identity should never get in the way of anyone’s sexual pleasure.

And were any of the girls actually raped?

It seems like his pattern was simply hiring them for work and then slowly escalating sexual contact, generally in exchange for remuneration.

If we accept the sexual and civil rights revolutions, then there appears to be no problem with what Epstein did other than the bizarre age taboo in America and a few other countries.

Your objection is to a Jewish pervert having sexual intercourse with white girls, not that they were teenagers.

And, of course, alleged rape. But did anyone ever accuse him of rape and file a police report?

wtf I love Jewish perverts raping white girls now

The CIA is enjoying this. Whatever they payed the triads it was cheap.

If /worldnews is really the “world’s forum” then there is no help.

Hong Kong is riddled with the CIA.

Where have young people not been priced out of the housing market? Hong Kong’s housing prices are quite egregious indeed, but so are those in any global cities and (besides Paris) I don’t see anyone running an organized violent revolt.

As for me being partial to Mainland Chinese women: guilty as charged. Wouldn’t call that a “fetish” though. But then again I’m not a bitter Asian man.

If we accept that fornication, promiscuity, and prostitution are acceptable, then I too do not see the problem with fornication with teenage girls. It’s not like Epstein was kidnapping these girls off the streets.

People will make the claim that teenagers, not having reached the age of majority, are not mentally competent to make sexual decisions. But all women regardless of age are mentally retarded, and most men have trouble not being enslaved to their own sexuality. And in any case these people usually have no problem with teenagers fornicating with each other.

And then you have the bizarre American (mostly) crowd which claims teenage girls aren’t attractive. Bizarre what brainwashing can accomplish.

Personally I don’t think that fornication, promiscuity, or prostitution are acceptable. And preying on younger girls is at least somewhat more reprehensible then adult women for the simple reason that adult women are probably already whores, whereas Epstein might’ve actually ruined the virtue of some girls. But let’s be honest–they were going to ruin themselves sooner or later anyway.

I read his blog, he just has been living in China for a long time. Quite a smart thinker in my opinion.

Seriously, what’s the big difference between Mainland Chinese girls and other Chinese girls?

So this is the Galaxy Brain of AK. 😉

Comparing to Ukraine people vs gov on the eve of color revolution, what is the situation between HK people and the local gov? I think AquariusAnon gives us a good impression of HK people vs China central gov, but what about the local gov. Other than they misjudged the people’s attitude toward central gov.

if they black shirts do rally, they will likely massively outnumber the white shirts by like 20 to 1, and the black shirts are also willing to use violence, and will be heavily armed, and last I heard the white shirts are not Ip Man.

So far, it looks like the black shirts are just angry students/youth. No way for them to get guns. I don’t even think the triads own that many guns based in HK.

Yet another Asian fetishist who shall be deported.

I’m noticing a lot of white China-cheerleaders nowadays. This is the fallout from Asian fetishism.

Those with a fetish for Taiwanese, Hong Konger or Overseas Chinese girls become hardcore unhinged China bashers. Those with a fetish for Mainland Chinese girls become hardcore unhinged China apologists.

Fetish for girls of another race leads to “comprador nationalism” for said country.

From the galaxy brain Chinese bootlicker who brought the world this take

I don't want to overdo this as some people get sensitive… but I find it very hard to see how 15 year old girls dress during summer and think Epstein did anything wrong.— Spandrell (@thespandrell) July 13, 2019

“Alleged” is the right word here, indeed. ^_^

The black shirts have money to buy firearms as a last resort? Even a puny 9mm handgun > 2 buy fours?

This sounds about right, although the way the police handled the white shirts seemed fishy to most. It’s also possible that the law enforcement-triad dynamics present in say, Kowloon Walled City in the 1970s is still present today with the Yuen Long villages but on a tamer scale.

Yuen Long villages, their HYK leadership, and the triads are definitely in cahoots though. The Yuen Long New Town itself is a fairly pro-Beijing working class area that the average person doesn’t have a reason to go unless they live there for cheaper rents, but even for regular HKers and expats/tourists, the toughness/sketchiness of Yuen Long villagers and their very deep links to triads if obvious if you go to Jordan or Mong Kok, another hotspot of triads and the center of Indian/Pakistani immigration in Hong Kong: The single, and probably by far, the largest red top public light bus route in Hong Kong is Jordan/Mong Kok to Yuen Long. Red top minibuses are 100% controlled by triads, with drivers either obvious low ranking triad members themselves or the equally rough vatniks who paid a protection price to triads. Those minibuses also have a tendency to be overloaded, drive dangerously at excessive speeds, and many times unroadworthy.

On cross border smuggling, I’ve always thought parallel trading is centered around Sheung Shui, but like anywhere in the New Territories with a high indigenous population, the population dynamics are probably almost identical.

If the Black Shirts are really serious about protesting in Yuen Long on Sunday, shit can really, really hit the fan this time. Last thing we need is for protesters to face off the villagers and knife-wielding South Asian gangs bused in from Jordan or Sham Shui Po, with varying levels of triad involvement in both groups.

Unlike the police who are by and large professional when dealing with the black shirts, the aforementioned groups can be indiscriminate and escalate violence really quickly.

I mentioned WHITE shirt because they all dressed in White shirt in the attack.

There is so much misinformation here.

Where do I start?

A pregnant woman had a miscarriage as a result of the beatings.

No name, no age. No record of this particular woman visiting any hospital. Just another rumor.

AA points out that the beatings occurred 20 miles from the protest site, almost at the Chinese border, i.e. where I would assume that the HYK has the greatest influence over the police (who apparently coordinated with the titushki.

HK is a small place, but each district or neighborhood has its own flavor. The beatings took place in a district called Yuen Long. How do I describe Yuen Long? Think of South Boston while Whitey Bulger was running the neighborhood and Bulger’s brother was the state senate president.

Yuen Long people are tough and not hesitant to use violence against outsiders due to their history. Unlike most people in HK, Yuen Long villagers have been in HK for generations and are considered the indigenous people of HK where they can claim their ancestor owned a large chunk of the land. And they wield a lot of political power because of their unity and the HK voting system.

I knew something bad was going to happen in Yuen Long. Not because I had inside information, but because words were already out on the street that Yuen Long people would kick their ass if the protesters came back to Yuen Long. The protesters went into Yuen Long last week and there was already a confrontation and some fights took place. The confrontation had nothing to do with ideology or political leaning. It had everything to do with money. Yuen Long smuggles a lot of goods into China, from American cigarettes to meat to iPhone, and it also caters to many mainland Chinese tourists. Also there is a land issue as your linked article points out. The protester went into there telling them what to do. I knew this wasn’t going to end well.

And they are not afraid of going to jail either, these people. Many of them had a history of confronting the HK police and breaking the laws. After the beating they didn’t go hiding. Hundreds hung around outside of the villages in their WHITE shirt for hours, and surrounded the police and tried to block them from entering the villages when the police came for investigation. No violence took place there, and the police did arrest 6 people from the villages.

No coordination between the HK police and HYK. Just good old Yuen Long people being Yuen long people like they have always been.

I do not think it was right to support the callow, unprincipled “student leaders” of Tiananmen Square. I’ve heard them, including Wang Dan, in person. They are just jerks. It’s really obvious, but they were speaking in Chinese and people didn’t know what they were saying.

Now I am more sympathetic if we’re stirring things up in HK, because China has been trying to undermine our own government and our own society. They were spying under Clinton (Charlie Trie) and they helped put Obama in as our president. They are continuing operations to subvert common sense and morality in our country through the media companies they have bought. The theft of intellectual property has gone from outrageous to astronomical. This all ramped up under the coldblooded killer Xi Jinping. They are doing all they can to destroy the USA.

So I wish doom on the Chinese regime. As soon as they get some decent government in there again, I’ll wish them well.

Probably because the people around, in THIS particular case, find the question irrelevant.
They tend to focus on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction.

Just seen the above. I stand corrected.

The answer to this is no.

Alleged RCS of the B-2 and F-22 is 0.0001 square meters, which suggests the Su-35 can detect one from a distance of just 20 nautical miles.

And China has few Su-35s. J-11 Sinoflankers are mostly equipped with old fashioned NIIP Tikhomirov N001VE Myech pulse doppler radars which are even less effective.

The J-11D variant has an indigenous AESA radar which is likely more advanced than the PESA set in the Su-35, but performance improvement is unlikely to be dramatic and I’m not sure any are even in service.

Counter-VLO engagement relies on using ground-based low frequency radars to vector interceptors into the general area where fighters can pickup VLO aircraft at short range (whether through radar, infrared, Mk I eyeball, or simply getting shot at first).

And the B-2, owing to its size and design, is also harder to pick up with low frequency radar.

Fortunately for China, not only has it strongly invested in counter-VLO low frequency radars but the USAF has relatively few VLO aircraft owing to the very big brains at the DoD not anticipating Chinese modernization. And it doesn’t necessarily need to engage them to defeat them. Attacking their basing and supporting assets would reduce sortie generation.

As AK also noted, in the Hong Kong area its doubtful the USA could effectively project power. There is no allied basing in the area, and the USN probably cannot operate effectively in the South China Sea.

I’m not very familiar with these cities, but among these 3 cities, I would rank them as Kunming > Harbin > Lanzhou.

Keep in mind that while the provinces might be way below average in wealth, their provincial capitals might actually be prosperous, average cities. Its just that poverty in China is concentrated in the rural areas, completely out of sight, out of mind of your average urban dwellers and foreigners. Maybe you can catch a glimpse of it as the bullet train passes by, but that doesn’t show you the full picture.

Sichuan is a great example. Poor province overall, but with a rather wealthy and prosperous provincial capital (Chengdu).

Also China’s entire economy is the construction industrial complex. The vast, brand new, infrastructure and brand new apartments and shopping malls do make cities, especially provincial capitals and other cities with over say 3 million, look much better than they would have in other countries. To accurately gauge a Chinese person’s standard of living, look at their wages, what the stores are actually selling, and the quality/prices of restaurants. I’d say the overall urban quality of life is in between provincial Russia and Poland, definitely closer to provincial Russia than Poland. The tier 1 cities’ quality of life is a little bit ahead of Moscow.

Informative.

I bought a few white t-shirts the same day I saw the videos and took it as a sign from God that I should pick up a wooden stick and start beating liberals.

Because Taiwan will become much less Chinese than it is nowadays.
The steady increase of non-Chinese minorities is something the separatists want to happen.

“The impact of immigrants in Taiwan is entirely positive,” Minister of the Interior Hsu Kuo-Yung said in an interview. He says that the steady influx of Southeast Asian immigrants is natural for Taiwan “because we have been an immigrant country since ancient times,” adding that Taiwanese can trace their ancestry to Austronesia and Japan as well as mainland China.

Yet for the Tsai administration, the outreach to Southeast Asia also has a strong political dimension. During Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency, Taiwan focused on building ties with China. Concerned with Taiwan’s heavy dependence on China, the Tsai administration has revamped former President Lee Teng-hui’s outreach to ASEAN as the “New Southbound Policy.”

The Tsai administration has deepened Lee’s initiative by focusing as much on the inbound side as outbound investment. Alan Hao Yang, executive director of the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation and National Chengchi University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, notes that there will soon be 1 million “New Taiwanese” immigrants in Taiwan (including their children), a huge portion of them from Southeast Asia. In Taiwan’ K-12 schools, there are already 80,000 students with a Vietnamese parent and 20,000 with an Indonesian parent, according to the Ministry of Education.

As Southeast Asians grow in number here, “Taiwan is no longer just the southernmost point of Northeast Asia, it’s becoming the northernmost part of Southeast Asia,” Yang says. “This is a significant paradigm shift for a society that has historically identified most with its Chinese heritage.”

https://topics.amcham.com.tw/2018/11/taiwan-embraces-southeast-asian-immigration/

North Korea solution for Taiwan’s defence?

So apparently the Hong Kong authorities have had the Galaxy Brain idea of unleashing their equivalent of titushki against the Hong Kong demonstrators.

Are ‘antifa’ the Anglospere’s titushki?

China can just wait as the Taiwanese population ages and dies off.

That will be happening rapidly soon, given that Taiwanese have a total fertility rate of only 0.9 to 1.1, even lower than the death-spiral TFRs of white European peoples.

Taiwan has one of the oldest median ages in the world, over forty and still climbing. The tiny increase in their population in recent years has come entirely from migration and births by the non-Chinese minority, who comprise less than three percent of the population but have lower median age and higher TFR than the majority.

Why try to forcibly reintegrate a nation of 23.5 million people with median age forty, when they can wait three decades and simply take a nation of, say, 9 million people with median age fifty-two. Because that is coming, and fast. Taiwan had better be working on defensive military ships and planes operated by robots, even on robot ground troops, because there won’t be many men or even women aged 18-40 to mount such a defense.

Places like Harbin, Lanzhou, and Kunming, which are below the average Chinese standard of living, seem to have a decent standard of living as it is, so maybe fully participating in woke capitalism is not worth it, and if they take take the Benedict Option while maintaining present standard of living, that maybe something worth considering,

Are Chinese radars capable of detecting B-2s at useful ranges, with weapons quality lock? I still haven’t received a straight answer on this.

On engament distances by themselves, and there will be long-distance coverage from the land to assist.

Regarding F-22 the whole point is more or less moot, because it will have to carry external fuel. And B-2s in Diego Garcia are probably monitored at all times as well.

The prevailing sentiment in HK seems that people want everything to go back to normal. Having weeks of protests and societal polarization takes a toll on HK’s image, economy, and the mental health of the people. But the Yuen Long metro station incident have likely angered a lot of people. Everything about it is a scene straight out of the 1960s and 1970s.

When things go back to normal in HK, which will likely be after the elections later this year, it will be a new normal. It seems that the CCP have decided that the Liaison Office and the HK govt have completely failed to judge the prevailing public sentiment. You have pro-Beijing heavyweights writing opinion columns in the South China Morning Post addressing the issue, and also criticizing the HK govt for being tone deaf to the actual issues with HK society.

On the other hand, the Hong Kong civil service government has always been inept tracing back to the colonial days. An oligarchic, immobile private sector is what dealt a blow to this system.

In the long run, the woke capitalism seeks to achieve the demographics of South Africa, the end result of this goal is predictable.

What if the central gov does not step in?

In 1989, it seems most everybody tried to stay out. Except for a small core on either side. Which, unfortunately, decided the outcome eventually. But HK is not Beijing, there’s hardly any direct threat to central gov, and it looks like there’s enough local force to want everything back to normal.

What will China and its standard living be like if it chooses the Benedict Option and shuts itself away from woke capitalism?

Can Chinese radars of Su-35 radars now detect B-2s and F-22s?

The crowd that fears, but accepts, the Chinese government was out on the streets in June and are home now. That had about 1 million people attend at its peak. This is not to say that they are angry against the establishment and have a long list of grievances.

The crowd that resents China is completely fearless. They can muster up about 200-300K per protest and are backed, but not actively joined, by the earlier 1 million-strong crowd.

My take is that the Chinese probably didn’t quite approve of this titushki move. The titushki are probably mobilized by local pro-Beijing interests (looks like a combination of triads and Heung Yee Kuk to me). It was poorly executed and ineffective: Randomly violent enough to hurt innocents and likely permanently damage HK’s reputation, but nowhere near effective enough for people to actually submit in fear.

Especially after the hooliganism in Sha Tin last week, the tide was starting to turn towards the establishment. This titushki incident probably instantly ruined their support and have likely turned apolitical people pro-protester.

While it is still too early to tell, this incident might have marked the beginning of the HK government truly losing the plot. Had the HK govt been sovereign, it would’ve been a significant step towards a successful color revolution. Now the CCP is left with a headache of likely being forced to actively step in to clear the mess without scaring away both the tycoons and Woke Capitalism: A very difficult feat indeed.

In any case, 2019 will be an important year in Hong Kong history. The aftermath solution will be pivotal to the fate of Hong Kong for the next several decades with significant effects on China and the rest of East Asia.

You would have been spot on had a similar public sentiment distribution and resulting protests occurred anywhere in Mainland China.

But keep in mind that Hong Kong, while under Chinese sovereignty and has about 6,000 PLA troops stationed in the territory, is a Special Administrative Region under the One Country Two Systems model. It uses a separate currency, has separate laws, a completely separate education system, and everyday politics is pretty much completely autonomous. There’s actually a border between Hong Kong and the Mainland with a massive wall, passport control, and the 2 systems become really obvious when you cross the border. All planes to/from Mainland China are treated as international flights requiring customs and immigration.

This is probably the single largest reason why Hong Kongers have a separate identity from the rest of China.

If China cracks down on Hong Kong, it would immediately lose its advantages it gains (e.g. money laundering, testing products on the international market, transit hub for shipping etc.) from having Hong Kong on a separate system and foreign companies would flee: HK is the Asia-Pacific HQ of many global corporations. Woke Capitalism might be an issue, but China still wants to participate in the international economy, which means having to deal with Woke Capitalism.

In fact, from a Chinese history perspective, deleting Hong Kong’s special status would do much more harm than good: As long as it doesn’t fully open up and has geopolitical hangups with its major trade partners, it always needs a back door as a 2 way gate to the rest of the world. For most of history, that has been Guangzhou: Hong Kong is literally just that but shifted 100 miles to the south. Having 60% of the population not fully on your side and espousing/debating other ideas is a side effect of having such an autonomous back door. Its much more productive to convert system bugs into features than to stamp out the bugs.

The Pan-Dems should have no say on how China is run obviously, and in the current conditions where they don’t have an alternative working solution for HK, having the CCP listen to and then promptly address their fears and resentments is the way to go. The Pan-Dems have zero power in the Mainland anyways as their “ideology” is irrelevant for China anyways. If I can summarize the average view of pan-Dem supporters, its just a mixture of fear and resentment towards China while accepting that China has suzerainty of HK.

Crushing the pan-Dems won’t really make or break the gay virus situation. Woke Capitalism’s Asia-Pacific HQ is already Hong Kong, something the CCP itself is actively onboard with and would encourage more. Many of the Pan-Dems are also devout Christians, which means zero support for globohomo. The crowd that wants to drive out Mainland immigrants tend to be equally against South Asian immigration.

I have a different take. I think the Chinese side are raising the stakes. So many people are going to these protests because they lost all fear. HK protests were massive by anyone’s standards. So I think Chinese are betting on the fact that they have more fighters. It seems the other side has full control of optics even without titushki beating people. Now we need to see in the following weeks how things develop to see if this take is correct at all. If protests become less attended but more violent I think that is evidence there is some truth to this.

Btw from 4gw warfare optics victory is not the same thing as moral victory.

Of course. The reasons for that are extremely obvious.

Anyone who is smart enough will easily be able to find the reasons as to why that is the case.

These protests were obviously “encouraged”, to put it mildly, by the USA and west.

For some reason there has been a lot more about the HK protests on TV here in Sweden than about the Yellow Vests.

Well, all of that amounts to nothing more than mild annoyances for the Chinese. The negative effects of those things can easily and quickly be overcome with time. The Tiananmen Square negative effects have clearly been overcome as we can see 30 years later. The probability that any short term negative effects from current events in Hong Kong will be overcome in the long term is also very high.

For the Chinahawk of the West, it is not so much about the independence of Hong Kong than worsening China’s situation and for that the HK protests can make a difference.

You said that the Tiananmen place protests failed, but they did make the PRC look worse and even resulted in some sanctions.

The events at Tiananmen grabbed the American public’s attention and seemed to shift Americans’ views of China within a short period of time. Just months before the massacre, a Gallup poll found 72% of Americans expressing a very or mostly favorable view of China, but this plummeted to 34% by August 1989. About half of Americans in a July 1989 Times Mirror survey said they had seen the now iconic photo of a lone demonstrator standing in front of a column of tanks on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue.

The next national election in Taiwan will happen soon and the events in HK could influence them and ensure an outcome that is not favorable for Beijing.

why riot now?

You seem to forget that there’s a fuse this time around.

In anycase the exact timing of those eruptions often seem strange or in no small part opportunistic.

I have a very shallow understanding of Chinese history, but it seems that in a nutshell that dynasties rise and fall because of the sheer number of people living in the land, order is the highest priority. Allowing chaos to grow seems to lead to even more of it, the Taipeng rebellion was one of the bloodiest conflicts in history as a good example. These “democrats” (basically demanding to be run by the international jew) must be crushed, literally crushed by tanks if that is what it takes, to let these people have a say means chaos and very possibly the end China if it becomes another globo homo run regime.

S-400s and Su-35s. 35s are even deployed in the region already.
Plus, any kind of bombing of China mainland invites total war by default. Anglo can`t control escalation for shit, so nothing of the sort will happen.

I’m frankly not an expert on the military situation in South East Asia. I only mentioned that China has effective military presence in Hong Kong. Nothing much can politically change unless China’s military occupation over Hong Kong becomes impossible to maintain. That’s why comparing the Hong Kong scenario to the Ukraine protests/revolution scenario is invalid.

The Chinese have nukes. I assume that the Chinese would be willing to use them in a scenario where they would be in danger of losing control over their airspace. They would have no choice to do so, because if they lost control over their airspace, they would cease to be sovereign.

It would be reasonable to assume that the USA wouldn’t be willing to go to war with China over Hong Kong, after all, Britain and the USA approved of Hong Kong’s transfer to China. Then again, given how the USA behaves all over the planet, this assumption may be incorrect. It’s possible they really may be willing to fight a conventional war against China over Hong Kong.

Isn’t the US capable of winning an air war over Southern China, or at least maintain air superiority over the airspace over the Pearl River Delta in this scenario, which is a necessary condition in order to land Marines and ground troops into Hong Kong and set up a defence perimeter and also evict local PLA forces from Hong Kong and its environs? Do the Chinese have anything that is capable of preventing B-2s from strategically bombing Beijing or the 3 Gorges Dam?

I don’t think these protests will lead anywhere.

The CCP has effective PLA military occupation in Hong Kong. I believe they have a whole military barracks with thousands of soldiers at minimum in Hong Kong, unless i’m mistaken. The Hong Kongers don’t have the willpower or resources to fight an armed insurgency against China. Some may consider this ridiculous to even think about, but it matters, because no other form of pressure that currently exists right now is capable of coercing China to leave Hong Kong. That’s assuming the protesters actually want that to begin with. The USA and West most probably do.

Of course, beating civilians randomly and needlessly is horrible optics. It either happened because someone in the CCP or an ally of theirs lost their nerves and thought this would be smart, or it was deliberately staged by the opposition and their sponsors. Things like that don’t happen for any other reason.

These protests were obviously “encouraged”, to put it mildly, by the USA and west. The thing is that they can’t really do much of anything to China beyond this. Plus, the USA and west are knee deep in their own problems including Iran and internal issues anyway. Tiananmen Square in 1989 failed, so this will as well.

At most, these “protests” will probably just succeed in delaying China’s integration of Hong Kong. They’re incapable of doing much more than that.

Housing problems and stagnancy have been a problem in HK for decades, why riot now? The young are always going to lean liberal, this is true all over the world. The wealthier, influential young people on the mainland are also more liberal than the older generation.

Since HK is developed already, you’ll have a hard time to instilling an entrepreneurial spirit to distract young people from revolt. That’s my point, at a certain level in development the people will stop being satisfied with wealth and want more things like rights or freedoms.

The CCP needs to understand this and start providing a mix of carrot-and-stick approaches to prevent China from being taken over by the liberal world order.

Oy vey! Most of the supposed pogroms were found by British investigators to be made up or vastly exaggerated.

The very word “titushki” sounds uniquely retarded.

PS. I sense a new theme ere. You demonized working class in your previous post as well. Apparently they swear too much in the town where educated Moskovites, like you, send their garbage. If normal rule of politeness are somehow suspended, you should still remember that mocking the “deplorables” is counterproductive in a democracy.

No democracy for you!

If you think of it, Hong Kong does have a history of rioting by its largest, most vulnerable class. Its where the 1967 riots occurred after all. In fact, the timing is also very similar:

1967 occurred 18 years after 1949, and 30 years before 1997.

2019 is 22 years after 1997 and 28 years before 2047.

It’s just that in 1967, the majority Hong Kong youth were vatniks living in third world conditions and being exploited in poor working conditions. Fast forward today, the majority of Hong Kong youth are middle class facing a decrease in quality of life and lack of opportunities.

Some type of entrepreneurial culture has to be encouraged among the youth. It is very telling that in all of the pro-China counterprotests, the youth were glaringly missing. Unlike across the border in China, there are almost no wealthy, influential younger people in Hong Kong.

It is bad optics, although part of me thinks liberal activists need a good beatdown, so they never try to pull this democracy shit again. Or some other method of long-term demoralization.

Completely disagree with the housing reasoning. Young people are prone to regressive idealism even without economic problems. The overall mood in HK feels like giant rumor mill with idiots panicking over ‘random extraditions’ of anyone the CCP doesn’t like.

It’s a critical lesson for the CCP. If Beijing still thinks “getting rich” will placate the populace, they need to look at HK now and realize this could happen on the mainland.

And to add, its not just the Heung Yee Kuk who priced them out. They are the ones who control the rural land in the New Territories and have strong connections to the triads. If anything, the property developer tycoons whose wealth depends on land value asset inflation are just as much, if not more, to blame. Which means Hong Kong has multiple interests opposed to affordable housing.

At this point, the HK govt has to find a way to lower rent without angering the tycoons or the Heung Yee Kuk, give the pan-Dems an active say in the government, including direct communication with the CCP, and come up with sound economic policies to give the average non-hooligan radical a future. The HK govt are largely civil service administrators, not politicians or nation-builders, with a mindset left behind from the British colonial days, which means that the CCP will have to play an important role. This will in fact be a tough project to implement and probably one of their greatest tests on their grip on power since the end of the Cold War.

After all, while poor conditions and an almost hopeless future outlook for the middle class fueled these protests, what actually started the protests was the moderate pan-Dems, with a good steady 40% of societal support, not having a say in how Hong Kong is run.

More active direct CCP correspondence with the pan-Dems would also soothe many of the fears and resentments that HKers have of the PRC and its economic/geopolitical weight inevitably actively affecting Hong Kong.

Yes, I would say that this is mostly on-point. Life can be very tough and stressful for middle class youth in Hong Kong, sometimes unnecessarily so. And they have nowhere realistic to move to with Hong Kong functioning on a separate system from the Mainland.

One small point I’d like to add is HK-Mainland relations:

About 40% of the population is pro-Beijing, 40% are moderate pan-Democrats, and 20% are radical anti-PRC separatists. This has been static for a while and won’t change anytime soon barring massive demographic changes.

The large scale protests in June that had up to 1 million people attend are largely organized by the moderate pan-Dems. These people are not ideologically opposed to the PRC in the sense that they recognize PRC sovereignty over HK, and want Hong Kong to remain a Chinese SAR. Most want to have a working relationship with the CCP in fact. However, they are extremely paranoid CCP and actively fear/resent the PRC’s influence encroaching on their everyday lives. This means vehement opposition to anything that even suggests implementing anything resembling CCP law on Hong Kongers: this is a fear that some tycoons in the pro-Beijing have too.

Most are also opposed to Chinese mass tourism, especially zero-dollar group tours clogging up certain neighborhoods and parallel traders: this is something that parts of the pro-Beijing camp, namely the working class living in those most-affected neighborhoods, are equally opposed to.

The radicals, well we know who they are: Angry youths who want to overthrow the govt. Although their anger does stem from lack of opportunities, the authorities, whether its Beijing or the police, is their release valve. These are the people with the British colonial flags. They are actually more anti-British than you’d think: None actually wants to go back to the UK, but they fly the colonial flag as a big middle finger to the authorities. In fact, they even doxxed the British expat officers in the June 12 clash. Right now, they have taken the lead over the protests, replacing the pan-Dems.

While they are vehemently anti-China and won’t change anytime soon, the majority of that 20% can be expected to mellow out under favorable circumstances, just like how most the 1967 pro-Maoist anti-British rioters have mellowed out as the economic situation improved and the British “localized” the governance of HK. Of course, just like 1967, a not-so-insignificant minority of those rioters are indeed hooligan vandals and the law will deal with them appropriately.

Interesting sidenote: One of the student leaders in the 1967 riots, Jasper Tsang, probably the single most well-liked pro-Beijing politician.

I recommend checking Joseph Wang’s Quora for a balanced view on this topic.

This titushki act hasn’t come at a worse time and at a worse place. First of all, they attacked a metro station in their own neighborhood, and attacked anybody not wearing white: This means that not only protesters are injured but also many innocent bystanders so happened to take the train; given how train-dependent Hong Kong is, and it happened around 11 pm which is not late at all for HK standards, its a big deal.

And those attacks can’t have occurred at a worse time: Active support for the protests are just about to taper with the violent hooliganism exhibited by the radicals at the New Town Centre Mall in the previous week, and the public is just starting to grow tired of the 7th straight week of protests: The immediate anti-extradition bill has already been suspended, which was an acceptable enough temporary victory for the moderate pan-Dems. With innocent bystanders getting beaten by triads, including those unrelated to the protests begging the triads to stop, and a bystander pregnant woman directly having a miscarriage, and on top of that the police did nothing at all to help the situation, this has turned the clock back to the 60s/70s, and will likely cause many apolitical people to support the protests again. Especially Yuen Long being a highly populated lower middle class/working class suburb close to the Chinese border.

If violence was directed strictly at the radical protesters defacing government buildings at the protest site itself, it would’ve looked not as bad.

I think it was 2010 when BBC and NYT reporters were frothing at the mouth about Nashi. Time has passed, and we saw that 1. few Russians care about Western media, 2. few Westerners have been swayed in particular by the Western media (negative “approval” of Russia is pretty much the same since Putin recovered Chechnya), 3. there is no better alternative for Russia.

This is 2010 squared. There is no better alternative for PRC and HK than the Communists. Even the people of HK have more freedom, and even better representation, compared to before 1999. Few people in the West give a fuck about HK, even fewer will be swayed by the latest incident, and all those tens of concerned Westerned can’t do squat. Most importantly, nobody in China gives a fuck about why three hundred anonymous Reddit autists foam at the mouth in their antipodean mom’s basement.

That being said, congrats for rehashing this titushki thing. I never heard of it, which sort of suggests it must be as true as the “Quisling”, the “Balkanization”, or “Chemical” Ali. That is, what is true is of such insignificant proportions, that more than 99% is filled by lies.

All are learning from the best and brightest, the Russian Empire.

The Black-Hundreds, with the support of the police, openly manhandled and murdered politically advanced workers, revolutionary intellectuals and students, burned down meeting places and fired upon assemblies of citizens. These so far were the only results of the tsar's Manifesto.

— History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (@partyhistoryOOC) July 20, 2019

Mao’s Great Leap Forward built the infrastructure that China depends on to this day.

It killed noone–though the US embargoes grain shipments to China during the drought in hopes of starving the population into submission.

Here’s the CIA reports from the two worst years:

The Agency reported[1]:

4 April 1961: The Chinese Communist regime is now facing the most serious economic difficulties it has confronted since it concentrated its power over mainland China. As a result of economic mismanagement, and, especially, of two years of unfavorable weather, food production in 1960 was little if any larger than in 1957 at which time there were about 50 million fewer Chinese to feed. Widespread famine does not appear to be at hand, but in some provinces many people are now on a bare subsistence diet and the bitterest suffering lies immediately ahead, in the period before the July harvests. The dislocations caused by the ‘Leap Forward’ and the removal of Soviet technicians have disrupted China’s industrialization program. These difficulties have sharply reduced the rate of economic growth during 1960 and have created a serious balance of payments problem. Public morale, especially in rural areas, is almost certainly at its lowest point since the Communists assumed power, and there have been some instances of open dissidence.

2 May 1962: The future course of events in Communist China will be shaped largely by three highly unpredictable variables: the wisdom and realism of the leadership, the level of agricultural output, and the nature and extent of foreign economic relations. During the past few years all three variables have worked against China. In 1958 the leadership adopted a series of ill-conceived and extremist economic and social programs; in 1959 there occurred the first of three years of bad crop weather; and in 1960 Soviet economic and technical cooperation was largely suspended. The combination of these three factors has brought economic chaos to the country. Malnutrition is widespread, foreign trade is down and industrial production and development have dropped sharply. No quick recovery from the regime’s economic troubles is in sight.

Private investigators confirmed the CIA’s findings. Ridiculing the Great Leap Forward as ‘The Great Leap Backward,’ Edgar Snow[2] saw no famine either.
Were the 1960 calamities actually as severe as reported in Peking, ‘the worst series of disasters since the nineteenth century,’ as Chou En-lai told me? Weather was not the only cause of the disappointing harvest but it was undoubtedly a major cause. With good weather the crops would have been ample; without it, other adverse factors I have cited–some discontent in the communes, bureaucracy, transportation bottlenecks–weighed heavily. Merely from personal observations in 1960 I know that there was no rain in large areas of northern China for 200-300 days. I have mentioned unprecedented floods in central Manchuria where I was marooned in Shenyang for a week..while Northeast China was struck by eleven typhoons–the largest number in fifty years and I saw the Yellow River reduced to a small stream. Throughout 1959-62 many Western press editorials continued referring to ‘mass starvation’ in China and continued citing no supporting facts. As far as I know, no report by any non-Communist visitor to China provides an authentic instance of starvation during this period. Here I am not speaking of food shortages, or lack of surfeit, to which I have made frequent reference, but of people dying of hunger, which is what ‘famine’ connotes to most of us, and what I saw in the past.


[1] Prospects for Communist China. National Intelligence Estimate Number 13-4-62.
[2] Snow, Edgar.  Red Star Over China, Victor Gollancz 1937. p.120

Read the full account of the Tiananmen incident here: http://www.unz.com/article/tiananmen-square-1989-revisited/

On behalf of the author and Mr Unz, yes. The BBC is making it up. Read this http://www.unz.com/article/xinjiang-update/#new_comments

There are thousands of US Corporations in China and two-thirds of the largest exporters in China are foreign-owned.

That is footage of a BBC reporter talking, not a massacre.

The author is not wrong. There are 34,000 NGOs registered in HK and many are fronts for Western governments. Foremost amongst them is the National Endowment for Democracy, NED.

The NED was founded in 1983 following a series of scandals that exposed the CIA’s blood-soaked covert actions against foreign governments. ‘It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,’ NED President Carl Gershman told the New York Times in 1986. ‘We saw that in the Sixties, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.’

Another NED founder, Allen Weinstein, conceded to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’”

The NED has four main branches, at least two of which are active in Hong Kong: the Solidarity Center (SC) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). The latter has been active in Hong Kong since 1997, and NED funding for Hong Kong-based groups has been “consistent,” says Louisa Greve, vice president of programs for Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. While NED funding for groups in Hong Kong actually dates back to 1994, 1997 was the year the territory was transferred from control by the British.
In 2018, NED granted $155,000 to SC and $200,000 to NDI for work in Hong Kong, and $90,000 to HKHRM, which is not itself a branch of NED but a partner in Hong Kong. Between 1995 and 2013, HKHRM received more than $1.9 million in funds from the NED.

Through its NDI and SC branches, NED has had close relations with other groups in Hong Kong. NDI has worked with the Hong Kong Journalist Association, the Civic Party, the Labour Party, and the (Hong Kong) Democratic Party. It isn’t clear whether these organizations have received funding from the NED. SC has, however, given $540,000 to the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions in the course of just seven years.

The coalition cited by Hong Kong media, including the South China Morning Post and the Hong Kong Free Press, as organizers of the anti-extradition law demonstrations is called the Civil Human Rights Front. That organization’s website lists the NED-funded HKHRM, Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the Civic Party, the Labour Party, and the Democratic Party as members of the coalition.

It is inconceivable that the organizers of the protests are unaware of the NED ties to some of its members. During the 2014 Occupy protests, Beijing made a big deal out of NED influence in the protests and the foreign influence they said it represented. The NED official, Greve, even told the U.S. government’s Voice of America outlet that “activists know the risks of working with NED partners” in Hong Kong, but do it anyway.

Martin Lee, founder of the Democratic Party, a member organization of the Civil Human Rights Front met with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the protests. Pompeo expressed support for the protests at the meeting. If the protests are in fact serving a progressive end, they would not be supported by the reactionary leadership of U.S. imperialism, the very force attempting to carry out a coup in Venezuela, threatening Peoples Korea and trying to start a war with Iran.
Hong Kong’s independent judicial/legal system is a relic British colonialism. Nowhere else in the world does a city have independent extradition laws, with authority above that of a sovereign country.
Despite decades of multi-million dollar western funding Hong Kong has a poverty rate of 20% (23.1% for children) compared to less than 1% in mainland China. In the past 20 years poverty in Hong Kong has remained high while mainland China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Recent protests, much like the ‘Occupy Central’ protests in Hong Kong in 2014 have not raised this issue. The protests have been directed at leadership connected to mainland China while ignoring the U.S. connected banks and ultra wealthy capitalists based in Hong Kong who clearly show no interest in addressing poverty or other desperate needs.
The U.S. claims to be concerned with free speech and politically motivated extraditions, while it aggressively pursues the extradition of Julian Assange for exposing the crimes of U.S. imperialism.
The corporate media in the U.S. and Europe have enthusiastically reported on Hong Kong protests, in stark contrast to the meager, often critical coverage of mass protests in Gaza, Honduras, Sudan, Yemen, France or the recent general strike in Brazil. The difference in coverage exposes a difference in the forces behind the protests, a difference in who stands to benefit from them.
U.S. imperialism has a long history of ‘color revolutions’ in which protests with a progressive, even revolutionary patina are used as cover for a reactionary, pro U.S. agenda.
The world finance capital forces in Hong Kong are allied with U.S. imperialism and opposed to  socialist ownership and the leadership of China by the Chinese Communist Party.

Good luck with your lawsuit.

I also think he has some type of Mossad connection. There’s a lot of evidence.

-He dated Ghislaine Maxwell (whose father Robert Maxwell was “outed” as a Mossad agent by Seymour Hersh). She helped entice all these girls into prostitution.
-He has a very close relationship to Lexlie Wexner, who apparently gave him a Manhattan mansion for free.
-Alan Dershowitz is his lawyer. Dershowitz very recently did an interview in which he admitted to have gotten a “massage” at Epstein’s home.
-When Acosta was being vetted by the Whitehouse, he claimed that he was told to give Epstein a light sentence because Epstein was “intelligence.”
-Today it was revealed that Epstein has a “fake” Saudi passport. One wonders from whom he got that item.
-Netanyahu’s son keeps tweeting about how Ehud Barak and Epstein have a connection that needs to be looked into.

The whole thing really demonstrates how totally corrupt our society has become in so many different ways.

You once made the point that micro corruption is fairly rare in American society, but the level of macro corruption is absolutely appalling. I think this seems accurate.

It’s stunning that a college dropout somehow taught at Dalton (where he apparently partied with students and walked around with a big gold chain around his neck). Then he worked at Bear Stearns and made partner in just a few years. Then he managed the assets of billionaire Lexlie Wexner. How does that happen in real life?

It’s even more stunning how Epstein surrounded himself with such a large collection of prominent politicians, media personalities, socialites, royalty, entertainers/celebrities, intellectuals, and even scientists. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Donald Trump, Katie Couric, Stephen Hawkings, Alec Baldwin, Prince Andrew, Chris Tucker, Kevin Spacey, Kenneth Starr, etc. It seems like everybody hung out with him.

Despite constantly surrounding himself with extremely young girls in public places, Epstein was considered a perfectly normal guy. In most of the articles written about Epstein, usually either one of his friends or a journalist comments on Epstein’s intelligence/charm/suaveness/handsomeness. Even after his arrest for prostitution, he continued to maintain many of these relationships with important people.

This tends to suggest 3 interesting things.

1. Epstein’s shady history, sexual perversion, and prostitution arrest weren’t considered especially remarkable in elite circles. To them, that’s normal behavior, perhaps even common place.
2. Epstein seemed to have an easy time bribing lots of powerful people, such as famous scientists and the good folks of Harvard University.
3. A lot of Epstein’s friends (such as Bill Clinton) probably were taking part in his prostitution ring. That’s likely why Epstein, who had no accomplishments in life or any real fame or power, was able to endear himself to everybody. A lot of these people probably had no need for money, but they might’ve needed a pimp who could traffick girls to them.

I asked you this question before. Given recent developments, I’ll ask it again.

What do you think of the whole Epstein case?

Very simply put, democracy is the enemy of people everywhere.

Good for you! The difference between democracies and dicatatorships (monarchy or oligarchy), is that it’s much more difficult to tell who’s pulling the strings in democracies. Democracies have technically passed power to the people with one hand, while obscuring elite machinations with the other.

It makes me think that rotten boroughs were a good thing after all: at least the interests behind their operations were obvious.

Weaknesses of mass politics used to be discussed a lot, especially by fascists, so you don’t find much of it since WWII, and only recently, in more nationalist eastern european countries. Discussion of this angle, like so many issues, has become another third rail which should be touched now and again just to see what color sparks fly off.