1232
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
1232 points (99.5% liked)
News
23320 readers
2989 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because powerful people were his associates. I'm surprised it is being unsealed.
I'm not surprised it was ordered to be unsealed. I'll be more than a little surprised if an accurate list is actually unsealed. But, anything's possible I guess.
“Those on the list were allowed to redact whatever parts they liked”
Deborah Jeane Palfrey has entered the chat. ~~I swear I remember seeing news stories at the time saying that she'd specifically told family members: I'm not planning to kill myself, but I am threatening to release the identities of powerful men who made use of my services. If I die it's because they killed me.~~
But now, all I can find is that it was clearly a suicide. Oh well.
Edit: Someone argued with me enough about it that I actually tried to read up on it, and I think what I was remembering was that Alex Jones said that if she died it's because they killed her, and some people reported on that, along with some carefully cherry-picked quotes from her interview on his show. She did say that she wasn't planning to kill herself, but only because he directly asked her as part of his normal Alex Jones shtick, and of course she said "no." But she never said that on any other program, as far as I can tell, and everyone reliable who investigated concluded that the suicide was probably real. So the mystery is resolved. Sounds like she killed herself. 😢 At least I learned something today.
She actually said the exact opposite. From your link:
Emphasis mine.
Yes, I read the sources I linked to. Here's what I said about it:
What did you think I was talking about, what I said that? If not that the stories I can find now all say it was a legit suicide?
Maybe my memory is faulty, or maybe the suicide note is fake. Which it is, I have no idea.
Seems very unlikely that two handwritten suicide notes could be plausibly faked that well when there are many examples of her handwriting
Wait. So you're evaluating the theory that powerful people in the US government killed a woman, faked two (...) suicide notes for her, successfully coerced her lawyer into not divulging her client list (which he has, and desperately wants to divulge), and put down the memory hole all the original news stories that talked about her being afraid she'd be killed for threatening her clients with exposure... but the fly in the whole ointment of the theory is that they'd have to find someone who could write similar to how she writes?
Honestly, I think I'm probably misremembering, and I'm mixing her up with some other person that powerful people actually did have killed. Not because the note was handwritten; I just think there would be places on the internet that were pretty readily findable where would be published the original stories I read back at the time.
I wasn't trying to get into all of this, tbh, because like I say I'm just sort of talking and have no idea. I was just relaying my (maybe faulty) memories and letting people be their own judge.
Edit: Oh fuck, the plot thickens. I found what I was thinking of. According to randos on Reddit, she explicitly talked about not having any plans to kill herself on an episode of Alex Jones which is no longer easily available. Make of that what you will 😃.
Well if it's on Alex Jones it must be true. He's famously a very sober and serious reporter.
Also it's fun how you mix conspiracy theories and foreign nationals in your links, as if that somehow makes your case.
Conspiracy theories make conspiracy theorists look like idiots. You don't want to be that guy.
Dude why are you talking down to me so aggressively?
I guess we're arguing now 🤷. That honesty wasn't my intent here; IDK how you got so much of "making my case" out of me saying so repeatedly that I was just saying what I remembered and don't really know the facts. I'm just sort of talking. I'm such a dickhead that I'm listening to another interview with her right now looking for something relevant that I can use to "make my case" so I can know what I'm talking about, if you're gonna get rude with me about it.
I'm aware that Alex Jones said a lot of things about her, and I agree that that doesn't mean anything at all. What she said in his interview is relevant. Where she said it doesn't change that. Would you agree with that? I haven't seen anything she's been quoted as saying in the interview that really means all that much, so maybe the "if I die it was the government" stuff is Jones's creation. In which case, yeah, it's garbage. If she said that on the Alex Jones show, I'd consider that pretty significant. Right? Or no?
(Edit: She was quoted in the normal-person press as saying she wasn't planning to kill herself, but that was in response to Alex Jones directly asking her whether she was, so if that's all she said, that means nothing. Whatever she was thinking at that point or later on, I wouldn't expect her to say "oh yeah, it's funny you ask, yes I am" when he asks her.)
(Edit: After skim-listening to an interview with her somewhere else and reading some of the Wikipedia talk page where people are arguing about this subject, I think you're right and it was all just an Alex Jones creation. Oh well. I updated my original post to reflect my learning.)
Which of the people I listed do you think are conspiracy theories? Gary Webb was an American killed by Americans in government. Jamal Kashoggi was a naturalized American who was killed by the Saudis with tacit approval by the US government. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a non American killed by non Americans, so maybe that's not that relevant, no. They were literally just random examples I picked out to show that it's not a totally outlandish idea. People kill each other for various reasons every day; if it never happened when one of them was powerful, that would be weird. What out of all that do you consider to be a conspiracy theory?
I wasn't talking down to you at all. You mixed real things and fake things to support a claim you yourself acknowledge is probably nonsense.
That is indeed a bad look, and people should be warned lest they fall into conspiratorial thinking, because it is neither healthy for the person nor an effective way of looking at the world.
This is exceedingly unlikely.
Yeah. Shot in the head. Twice. He just wasn't successful with that first shot and had enough bearings to fix it with the second. So said the CIA and we should all believe them just like the totally-not-a-pedophile-priest.
His ex-wife said that she believed he'd killed himself.
Here's a story from a local paper which is the cite. Unless the details reported are purely made up, it seems like an actually pretty compelling set of facts leading to the suicide being genuine. I literally just learned this; until yesterday, I thought they killed him too.
There's plenty of criminal behavior by the US government adjacent to Webb and his reporting without needing to exceed what's actually true about it.
No, really. The other guy is playing ignorant. Telle me, for real, how much does the CIA pay you to play stupid and ignorant to defend them against the obvious.
I mean for real, I'll just skip the cash and take the cocaine itself. Not a fucking problem.
Yeah, sure. The CIA pays me to bring Gary Webb's name unprompted into random internet threads because they feel like promoting his story is an important part of their PR.
I never really knew that much of the story until the other guy started arguing with me about it, so I spent some time at breakfast reading about it. I think he killed himself. That said, there's plenty of malfeasance by the government. Among the things that jump out at me:
See, this is what I'm talking about. Just tell me if they're cutting the shit too or if you got the real shebang
They're actually paying me in pure adrenochrome. I won't say where they get it; all I can say is you should get in on this. They have openings.
I was thinking about that but the other one said he's got better than that schitzo and it's from some European labs. Some analog from a khat derivative. Says it like mixing coke, X, & meth altogether but totally different a neurofunction. Something about serotonin instead of dopamine?
Yes the first bullet passed through his cheek and it is not difficult to fire a gun.
So said his wife.
Yup. I believe her just like I believe the fucking priest. CIA had nothing to do with manipulating anyone.
Correct.
Do they pay that well too?
What?
I mean, will they just skip the cash and pay with the coke itself?
My god, are you this pleasant to deal with in real life? I didn't "acknowledge is probably nonsense." I said, hey this is what I think, but I don't really know. Your right answer to that is something along the lines of: Hey there's a lot of evidence that this is how it happened, here it is. Instead you concocted some kind of scenario where I am "making my case" and you need to get sarcastic with me and assign me strawman views and argue against them all condescendingly.
I just looked into Gary Webb, and hey, you're right, he actually probably did kill himself also. So I learned two things today. But because you were such a jackass about it, that's actually sort of difficult to admit, where if you'd just said "hey I think this is wrong, his ex-wife said he was acting weird and she believes it was suicide, here's the source" then it could have been a more factual conversation. It happens that I'm patient enough to go and look at sources myself even if you're being combative with me, but most people won't do that. They'll just be toxic back at you and both of you will waste a bunch of time "making your case." That's an inherent risk of talking with people on the internet but you don't need to lean into it when the other person's just being open minded and reasonable with you.
You're talking about conspiracy theories. Your personal fictitious interpretation of events is not equal to the facts of the matter.
Here's an actual thing you wrote (only, linking to more conspiracy theories you believe within):
Yes, I am similarly dismissive of conspiracy theories in real life. When my boss said "I won't get the vaccine because Bill Gates put in microchips" I didn't acknowledge that as a serious discussion.
If you want to be treated as if the things you're saying have value, you shouldn't pop off arrogantly about how the US government regularly has people killed. They don't.
Secrets aren't good at staying secrets.
Edit: more to the point, this comment section is full of people spouting conspiracy theories. None of their theories are plausible or make any degree of sense when dug into. That they are so widespread here is because of the mindset people have - a toxic mindset that makes their brains ripe for the rot of conspiracy thinking. That should not be encouraged in any public forum, because it is contagious.
Sure, let's talk.
Hmm... okay, I think I get it. You're putting me (and, presumably, anyone who says things that you already "know" to be false) in the same category as someone who thinks there are microchips in the vaccine. If you never make mistakes or are lacking information, that makes perfect sense. Since you do make mistakes sometimes and there are things you don't know, that's a stupid way to behave.
I think this is another stupid way to behave. You can talk with someone who thinks different things than you do -- whether they're right or wrong -- without being combative about it. It's actually an important skill to have. It doesn't mean the things they say "have value," it just means it's more productive to be factual and communicative than to be a dick about it and deliberately act as if they're saying things they're not saying so you can "win."
I mean, the US government does regularly have people killed. Please don't tell me that that's different because they're not Americans. What I said, though, was a little different than that; I said "powerful people in the US government." The US government killing Americans as a matter of public policy is not unheard of (Fred Hampton), but I don't think it happens all that often, no. I think it's a little more likely that some individual person in a position of power might decide to commit a murder. Especially if their life is going to be ruined if they don't. Are you saying that's an impossible or outlandish suggestion?
Entire thing is redacted except a single word that says something lawyer-y like "notwithstanding".
And any names already public
Well they needed to clean it first before they unsealed it.
Gotta blur some names so they won't be prosecuted.
I bet there is some catch. The only thing unsealed will be boring stuff. Oh it turns out a company Bill Clinton owned stock in, back in 1991, did some construction work for a property Epstein owned. It isn't going to be stuff like "here is a video of Justice Thomas raping a kid".