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minime » Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:38 am wrote:Whatever truth lies in the details of Pizzagate and other conspiracy theories...
I've never understood the saying Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It seems to me the corruption comes first, and the power follows by necessity.
Grizzly wrote:Why no discussion of this?
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
JackRiddler » Wed Jun 26, 2019 9:05 am wrote:minime » Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:38 am wrote:Whatever truth lies in the details of Pizzagate and other conspiracy theories...
I've never understood the saying Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It seems to me the corruption comes first, and the power follows by necessity.
I lean toward that.
Context of famous quote.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/214
.
Jeffrey Epstein Documents Could Expose Powerful Politicians, Businessmen
Jul 3, 2019, 02:31pm
A federal appeals court Wednesday ordered that 167 documents in a lawsuit that alleges famously well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein participated in a sex-trafficking ring should be unsealed—and that many of his powerful friends could be named.
In its 27-page decision, the court cited the public’s right to access the case information outweighed the privacy of certain individuals, “including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well‐known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”
Virginia Guiffre (now Roberts) filed the lawsuit against Ghislane Maxwell, alleging that she had used her as part of a sex trafficking network of underage girls to Epstein and a number of his famous friends, including his lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew. Both men denied the accusations.
Dershowitz has supported unsealing the documents, according to the Daily Beast.
The documents will not be immediately available, as anonymous individuals involved in the case have two weeks to file appeals.
The court advised the documents be read carefully. “We therefore urge the media to exercise restraint in covering potentially defamatory allegations, and we caution the public to read such accounts with discernment,” wrote the court in its decision.
Key background: Epstein had previously been charged in 2007 in a 53-page indictment. As the Miami Herald revealed in its investigative series “Perversion of Justice,” Epstein managed to escape all federal charges through a plea deal that gave him and all of his co-conspirators immunity, with all documents being sealed. Epstein ended up pleading guilty to one state prostitution charge in Florida. He then registered as a sex offender and paid unspecified restitution to three dozen victims identified by the FBI.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2019/07/03/jeffrey-epstein-documents-could-expose-powerful-politicians-businessmen/#409cd8395ac9
barracuda » 29 May 2017 17:26 wrote:tapitsbo » Fri May 26, 2017 9:35 am wrote:The venerable ISGP weighs in:
Elvis » 10 Mar 2017 21:39 wrote::thumbsup
Olympia, WA has always had some very cool creative & counterculture scenes, not least around Evergreen state college.
I can't remember if this interview was posted somewhere, but here's a bit of a conversation with Dionyso:After being dragged into one of 2016’s strangest news stories over a mural he made six years ago, Arrington de Dionyso took a public stand against far-right extremists’ mob censorship.
Blair Murphy
Blair Murphy: You’re an artist and a musician, and it seems that many of the people who have been targeted by the right wing extremist trolls and paranoid conspiracy theorists who latched onto Pizzagate are artists. Does it seem like that’s an accident?
Arrington de Dionyso: I think it’s a very deliberate assault, which will eventually be a coordinated assault on all forms of free expression. But I think they’re starting with artists who might be exploring themes of queerness or resisting dominant paradigms in their work or artists who, there may be aspects of their work that might already be inviting a certain kind of controversy. And they’re definitely running that really hard through this very fictitious link to these occult themes and reading quite a lot into it.
BM: It seems like the conspiracy probably started with people writing on a message board who knew it wasn’t real and were making it up to troll people, but it took off from there.
AD: This may not be part of this specific story, but I lost some people in the Ghost Ship fire, [INTERESTING COINCIDENCE] people who were very vital to our community here in Olympia, Washington, people who had grown up here who were living in Oakland. So there was this horrible, horrible tragedy, something that is affecting everyone I know. Within a day of that news coming out, I found YouTube videos by two different people that were not only using images of my artwork, but also using images taken from my social media sites of me, of friends, using images from a MySpace account from 2006, so really going back. And these videos were just picking out the most open-to-interpretation images and giving them very specific perspectives, analyzing me for connections to Satanism, which is completely false. [SEE BECAUSE HE'S INTO A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT KIND OF RITUALISTIC LUCIFERIANISM OR WHATEVER] They were posting pictures of an ex-girlfriend who I had barely seen in eight years or so but who looked a little bit like Chelsea Clinton, so they were trying to use it to argue that I have some intimate connection to the Clinton family. I mean, they have the same hair color. That’s not Chelsea Clinton.
So when it got to be such a bizarre violation of privacy, I started to get a little louder about this. And then, within a few days, I wrote a couple of people and I realized the extent to which some of the female musicians and performance artists have been getting very violent and sexually graphic types of messages on a daily basis, whereas the kind of targeting I was getting up to that point was really mostly about the artwork, along with some speculation about who I might be. But when I realized how deeply personal and threatening to their safety these other harassing messages had been, I felt that, at least, I had maybe less to lose by getting louder and reaching out to my community and letting people know what was going on, creating a statement that could be sent to the press and have it be something we could be a little more open about the fact that this was going on and has been happening for a while.
BM: So that’s when you decided to write the statement on Medium?
AD: I had written a statement on my personal Facebook that I also put on Instagram and a friend reached out and said, “We can edit this down a little bit and we can put it on this sharing platform that reaches a different audience.” He helped me work on some edits for it and the response has been really amazing, I think it’s been read 20,000 or 30,000 times and I only put it up a week ago.
BM: You mentioned earlier being worried that this is potentially a precursor or a sign of things to come as far as trying to quash dissenting voices. Instead of having the government tell people what they can and can’t say, you have this group of people online who are willing to essentially harass other people into silence. Do you have any thoughts on how to resist that going forward, as someone who has been trying to deal with it and speak out about it?
AD: For as much as we talk about the echo chambers and bubbles we’re living in, every time I’ve made any kind of statement about the harassment I’m experiencing, the support has been thunderously loud and unanimous. And I really do believe that we who reject this type of flagrantly immoral witch hunt and spread of misinformation, those of us who oppose that are clearly in the majority. I think no matter what happens we really have to keep reminding ourselves of that. We are in the majority.
I make art because I want it to be viewed; I make music because I want people to hear it. I want it to affect people, I want it to have an impact. And I’ve been getting nothing but support not only from my immediate networks but also from people who have seen the Medium story who are reaching out, telling me: “I’ve never heard of your art, I’ve never heard your music, but now I’m checking it out, it’s great, I want to hear more, don’t let these people stop you.” I’m getting so much affirmation and I really hope that there’s some potential for the spirit behind that affirmation to become an organizing principle for people opposed to this kind of mob censorship.
http://hyperallergic.com/347458/artist- ... ry-speaks/
I really like this “Woman with Two Tigers” (2016, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on paper):
barracuda » 23 Dec 2016 14:10 wrote:guruilla » Fri Dec 23, 2016 11:48 am wrote:The notion that those you term "skeptics" (e.g., barracuda) are more responsible than those of us who see something real (re: pedophilia at CPP) and who want to explore that is also evidence of a bias. The so-called skeptics (debunkers, mostly) at this thread have been consistently abusive, vicious, mocking, and defensive of abuse-culture as part of their strategy. I'd say that's quite irresponsible. As an example, the Giuliani letter, which I rashly shared as a bit of incoming data: I stated that, even if it was fake, it was still evidence of something, even maybe useful for those arguing that PG is all a smear tactic. Barracuda then made the usual snark-response about what an idiot I was for saying that the letter was evidence even if it was fake. It didn't occur to him that I might be trying to get to the truth and not simply trying to win an argument. That's what I call a lack of response-ability.
Naw, I wouldn't ever call you an idiot. I find your writing to be cheerfully clever. However, at the time you posted the Giuliani fake, it had already been exposed as surfacing from a fake twitter account on /v/pizzagate. Were you not aware of this? If you were, and didn't accompany the letter with that information, then that is... I dunno, maybe irresponsible? That's one word for it. Because - as you somewhat cryptically pointed out - you know personally a group of lurkers watching this thread and presumably reading your blog, where you still have not definitively identified the letter as bogus. So how, exactly, are you helping to understand the issue at hand? By disseminating disinformation with a "gee, who knows?" shrug of the shoulders?
I think I've identified some of the prime sources of pizzagate as white nationalists, but because that doesn't fit your narrative, you skim past without comment. Okay, that's fine. But don't be quite so self-righteous. There's plenty of blame to go around - you might as well share in it.guruilla » Wed Dec 21, 2016 6:30 pm wrote:"People usually try to veil it, if that helps you to identify it when you see it. They're not going to come right out and say, "It's wrong of us to judge people for sexualizing children," because then they would look blatantly bad. Instead it is usually along the lines of, "These people may have some weird stuff on their instagrams, but that doesn't mean they are guilty of anything." That weird stuff is imagery and jokes sexualizing children, and they are guilty of creating and promoting it. Ethically guilty."/
I'm sorry, but this board's history of relentlessly following and discussing the threads of child abuse networks predates the concern-trolling of the pizzagaters by about a decade. Put away the broad brush.
(editing typos)
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