3 ms·

Is there even any evidence that he attended this dinner? ... that and having a taste for pretentious shock-art is not a crime last I checked. I've had a little

by api 10y ago

Is there even any evidence that he attended this dinner? ... that and having a taste for pretentious shock-art is not a crime last I checked. I've had a little bit of contact with East Coast elite circles before and that kind of vapid modern "aaaaaht" is par for the course. Never saw anything quite as over the top as Abromovic but I definitely saw things in the same shock-jocking coated with art school babble genre. I always figured it was a stuff people pretended to like for social signaling purposes. I don't consider all the pizzagate claims impossible. Blackmail has historically been a tool of political manipulation and so a high placed blackmail ring is not unthinkable. I just consider them unlikely, especially in light of the (IMHO rather obvious) existence of an intentional cyber warfare and propaganda campaign against the Clinton presidential campaign. I've become even more suspicious after listening to one or two interviews about "pizzagate" and hearing the following names and sources mentioned repeatedly: Brietbart news, gab.ai, 4chan, and the Washington Times. The latter is owned by a front for the Unification Church. The first two are pretty well known alt.right outlets, and 4chan is not exactly known for being a forum for unbiased rigorously vetted investigative journalism. (Nor is Reddit.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times The sources for this seem to have negative credibility. I'm being equal opportunity here. If there was a massive push to label Trump as head of a child abuse blackmail ring and all the info came from hard-left rags and people known for supporting Clinton I'd be just as skeptical.

DearDon 10y ago
I think you're pretty spot on with this. A handy thing to keep in mind when it comes to things like these is that we can only speculate. It happens too often that speculation and assumptions are presented as fact, or that someone retelling what another person says fails to use the same qualifying language and states something as fact. I've personally come to speculate that there is some dodgy and disgusting acts occurring at this pizza joint. I'm not going to get dogmatic and explain why. The media, through negligence or design, seems to almost always picks the weakest arguments and presents them as the best there is, if by design it's akin to strawmaning in my book. It works to drum up insane amounts of controversy and/or presents the opposing narratives case as weak. This is why we have 4chan and reddit with these rabid 'citizen journalists' that do all this investigation and forget how stupid it, and they, can be made to sound, it's also why we're going to get more of them, they can navigate through information that allows them to speculate (with good judgment in some cases IMO) that the MSM will just not cover.
- pcwalton 10y ago
  > I've personally come to speculate that there is some dodgy and disgusting acts occurring at this pizza joint. There was only one "dodgy and disgusting" act that occurred at Comet Ping Pong. That was when a man, misled by totally fabricated nonsense, brought an assault rifle into the store to, at best, intimidate and threaten innocent people. The people spreading this conspiracy theory should be ashamed.
throwaway420 10y ago
You are 100% correct that having an appreciation for shock art isn't a crime. For that matter, neither is hypothetically attending satanic spirit cooking dinners. But there's so much weirdness in the peoples' lives that the Pizzagate investigation is looking into and the media is so hysterical in denying the very idea of a pedophile ring that it's just causing people to look harder into it. The type of artwork that was at a supposedly family friendly pizza place was just weird enough, but then you had the JimmyComet Instagram account allegedly putting #chickenlovers hashtags on pics with kids and much other weirdness. No smoking guns obviously, but tons of weirdness. A normal person sees lots of things like that and goes "maybe there's something odd going on here". But the media refuses to show some of these pics and hysterically goes off kilter about "fake news". A normal person remembers that Anderson Cooper did a report years back about LITERALLY THOUSANDS of Pentagon employees buying child porn and that story vanished down the memory hole, but no, there's nothing bad going on in DC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7n316nGhVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7n316nGhVo
- tptacek 10y ago
  That is terrifying logic, because it applies equally well to pretty much any person that happens to be in the public eye. I could generate a "pizza related" pedophile ring conspiracy theory about Paul Graham, and someone like you could step up and say "well maybe it's true because the media doesn't take pedophile rings seriously and a lot of people at the Pentagon had child porn". A normal person does not look the underlying fact pattern and say "maybe something is going on there". But it's easy for trolls to decontextualize and distort --- well, we're down to "pizza shops" now, so I guess the words we're looking for are "anything at all" --- to force people to wonder whether there might be something going on. Because of course: something is going on: crazy Internet trolls are trying to frame strangers for pedophilia.
  - throwaway420 10y ago
    > Because of course: something is going on: crazy Internet trolls are trying to frame strangers for pedophilia. Frame is the absolute wrong word. Nobody is framing anybody. It's an investigation: and one that's limited to looking at public records and internet articles and social media accounts and the like. I know that the New York Times has already decided the idea of a pedophile ring involving some powerful people to be double-plus "fake news", but its current CEO Mark Thompson literally helped cover up the crimes of child abuser Jimmy Savile for the BBC, so should we just take their word for it? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/jimmy-savile/10512203/Former-BBC-boss-Mark-Thompson-lied-over-Savile-evidence-Nick-Pollard-claims.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/jimmy-savile/10... > The author of a controversial inquiry into the handling of the Jimmy Savile scandal at the BBC has suggested that a former director-general lied when giving evidence, according to a tape recording. Nick Pollard was asked by a journalist during a taped conversation if Mr Thompson's "instinct" was to "lie" during questioning when he appeared before the inquiry. Mr Pollard replied: "Yes. Well... yeah, yeah."

by api 10y ago

DearDon 10y ago

I think you're pretty spot on with this. A handy thing to keep in mind when it comes to things like these is that we can only speculate. It happens too often that speculation and assumptions are presented as fact, or that someone retelling what another person says fails to use the same qualifying language and states something as fact. I've personally come to speculate that there is some dodgy and disgusting acts occurring at this pizza joint. I'm not going to get dogmatic and explain why. The media, through negligence or design, seems to almost always picks the weakest arguments and presents them as the best there is, if by design it's akin to strawmaning in my book. It works to drum up insane amounts of controversy and/or presents the opposing narratives case as weak. This is why we have 4chan and reddit with these rabid 'citizen journalists' that do all this investigation and forget how stupid it, and they, can be made to sound, it's also why we're going to get more of them, they can navigate through information that allows them to speculate (with good judgment in some cases IMO) that the MSM will just not cover.

pcwalton 10y ago
> I've personally come to speculate that there is some dodgy and disgusting acts occurring at this pizza joint. There was only one "dodgy and disgusting" act that occurred at Comet Ping Pong. That was when a man, misled by totally fabricated nonsense, brought an assault rifle into the store to, at best, intimidate and threaten innocent people. The people spreading this conspiracy theory should be ashamed.

throwaway420 10y ago

You are 100% correct that having an appreciation for shock art isn't a crime. For that matter, neither is hypothetically attending satanic spirit cooking dinners. But there's so much weirdness in the peoples' lives that the Pizzagate investigation is looking into and the media is so hysterical in denying the very idea of a pedophile ring that it's just causing people to look harder into it. The type of artwork that was at a supposedly family friendly pizza place was just weird enough, but then you had the JimmyComet Instagram account allegedly putting #chickenlovers hashtags on pics with kids and much other weirdness. No smoking guns obviously, but tons of weirdness. A normal person sees lots of things like that and goes "maybe there's something odd going on here". But the media refuses to show some of these pics and hysterically goes off kilter about "fake news". A normal person remembers that Anderson Cooper did a report years back about LITERALLY THOUSANDS of Pentagon employees buying child porn and that story vanished down the memory hole, but no, there's nothing bad going on in DC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7n316nGhVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7n316nGhVo

tptacek 10y ago
That is terrifying logic, because it applies equally well to pretty much any person that happens to be in the public eye. I could generate a "pizza related" pedophile ring conspiracy theory about Paul Graham, and someone like you could step up and say "well maybe it's true because the media doesn't take pedophile rings seriously and a lot of people at the Pentagon had child porn". A normal person does not look the underlying fact pattern and say "maybe something is going on there". But it's easy for trolls to decontextualize and distort --- well, we're down to "pizza shops" now, so I guess the words we're looking for are "anything at all" --- to force people to wonder whether there might be something going on. Because of course: something is going on: crazy Internet trolls are trying to frame strangers for pedophilia.
- throwaway420 10y ago
  > Because of course: something is going on: crazy Internet trolls are trying to frame strangers for pedophilia. Frame is the absolute wrong word. Nobody is framing anybody. It's an investigation: and one that's limited to looking at public records and internet articles and social media accounts and the like. I know that the New York Times has already decided the idea of a pedophile ring involving some powerful people to be double-plus "fake news", but its current CEO Mark Thompson literally helped cover up the crimes of child abuser Jimmy Savile for the BBC, so should we just take their word for it? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/jimmy-savile/10512203/Former-BBC-boss-Mark-Thompson-lied-over-Savile-evidence-Nick-Pollard-claims.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/jimmy-savile/10... > The author of a controversial inquiry into the handling of the Jimmy Savile scandal at the BBC has suggested that a former director-general lied when giving evidence, according to a tape recording. Nick Pollard was asked by a journalist during a taped conversation if Mr Thompson's "instinct" was to "lie" during questioning when he appeared before the inquiry. Mr Pollard replied: "Yes. Well... yeah, yeah."