Archive link

The partner of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, completed a second day of questioning on Friday, where she shared information on about 100 different people with the Justice Department.

Maxwell, who was convicted of child sex trafficking in connection with the disgraced financier in 2021, met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for about three hours on Friday at a courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida.

She also sat down with Blanche to answer questions for about six hours on Thursday as the Justice Department tries to quell fallout over its handling of the Epstein files.

  • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 day ago

    You have wonderfully and eloquently summarized it all. On a depressing, dytopian level of hopelessness. Yes, that’s the same impression I get. The average murican (excluding some poor awakies like you who have to sit in midst of a moribund system, they’ll have to observe decaying, knowing exactly why and how) gives the impression of a prime Dunning-Kruger-example. Overconfident and loudly voicing an opinion that shouldn’t be voiced at all. By the power of a great imaginary sky-friend.

    Like your awesome Carlin said (hope to quote it correctly): “of course the american dream is still relevant. You just have to be asleep to believe it”

    I grew up with high respect for that great country. And only some decades later I pity the average Joe who has to live there.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      I appreciate the praise and sympathy both, hah!

      Yeah its… well, in one way, its very, very tragic and sad, essentially just in my lifetime, the US has gone from ‘sole world superpower’ to ‘absolute laughingstock / basket case’, to see the massive amount of unnecessary harm this does to ourselves, and to others.

      Once upon a time, a patriot was defined by love of one’s country, one’s countrymen, a broad sense of collective empathy and desire to see the maximum good for the maximum number of them.

      But this is no longer the case, now ‘patriotism’ is, to many, either a dirty word, or a jingoist and fanatical cult that worships at the altar of the God Emperor, who sits senile and deranged atop the throne of a long dead sense of American superiority, doing and believing whatever the mad king says in a vain hope that this will somehow re-manifest a mythical, falsely remembered past ‘greatness’.

      But, in another way, it is fucking infuriating to people like myself, and many others of apparently uncommon intelligence / insight (for an American), who have been describing the bad trends, outlining how to fix them, then screaming that they need to be fixed soon or essentially all will be lost…

      Only to be broadly gaslit and patted on the head and told ‘dont worry, its not that bad, you are catastrophizing!’ by most of society… as all our worst fears just objectively are occuring in realtime.

      People did not realize Carlin was not joking when he said that line, they did not take him seriously enough.

      … Its… its like being in a car with an overconfident, drunk or high driver and other passengers.

      You ask them to slow down, to be more careful, to stop, let me out, and their responses are braggadocious, then angry, then the car crashes, and they blame you for ‘distracting’ them.

      To give you a non American cultural reference: I agree with David Bowie, I too am afraid of Americans.

      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        Oh yes, bowie was a special one too. RIP.

        And I can totally feel you. I would probably have long emigrated. I remember back when I was younger people thought a green-card (if that stuff is still a thing, I dunno) to work/live in the US was the tits. Now I wouldn’t even consider working there if I’d be making less than, dunno, 20k net a month? Considering you’re always just a severe illness or accident away from bankruptcy… In that case even 20k can vanish with near light-, nay, ludicrous speed.

        And exactly knowing what is going on and how to fucking fix the shit, but noone gives a rat’s ass…this is something very…is there a fitting word for it? Especially if you see people getting fucked, cheering at the people that fuck them raw, wondering why their asses hurt. To use a more vivid language 😁

        But, it’s not just you guys. I witness the same trend here (krautland) too. Hitler isn’t even fully rotted yet, and we’re close to have voted nazis into power again. That also fuck exactly those peeps that voted them and cheered for them. Leopards ate my face hm?

        Just keep the sheeples busy with work, social media and…well that’s enough already.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 day ago

          That word you are looking for is ‘maddening’.

          This is why so many Americans identify with the Joker, use terms like ‘clown world’, why I have an extremely dark sense of humor at this point.

          Being well-adjusted to a deeply sick and dysfunctional society is not a sign of mental wellbeing.

          And yeah, I would have gotten out some time ago now, but unfortunately I’ve been crippled by injuries, and thus, impoverished by the rest of US society… so I’m here for the long haul, untill I more fully recover both my body and my finances… though the good news there is I am making good progress… but the bad news is it may take a while longer still.

          In the mean time, … welp, just gotta hope Trump and the Reps don’t cancel the Disability Insurance part of Social Security, otherwise I’m homeless in a month or two, and then likely dead or in some kind of prison or internment camp in another couple months.

          The current plan for the homeless is, as with brown skinned people, concentration camps.

          • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            9 hours ago

            ‘Maddening’ seems like a good fit. And the joker (using the latest movie as base) also fits well the open eyes in a dark world. How else to cope if not with dark humor. I see it the same way and my humor has always been very dark. And with each decade i become more “incompatible” with social groups and need to restrain my cynicism and misanthropy. But how could one not become that when running around with open eyes, unclouded and unaffected by propaganda?

            Fuck, I’m sorry to hear that dude. I always cuss at our local injustices here towards handicapped and whatever else, but then I hear/read something from you guys and it all seems relatively grear again. Like our saying “complaining on a high Niveau”. We are far from perfect (and even drift in the wrong direction), but, in principle, we have a social/medical net. Homeless people, in theory, get their welfare, everyone does who can’t work. We were even close to the much better solution “universal income”.

            Homelessness being illegal is one of the most dystopian things there could be. But probably helps greatly in getting cheap labour punishing bad people for their crimes.

            Crossing fingers your realism pessimism won’t be fulfilled and trump suddenly dies of penile rotting cancer and untreatable adult testicular torsion. But I could totally imagine camps. You could even name them bad-people-killing-facility and Murica, nay the whole world wouldn’t even flinch. It would just be noticed and maybe harshly judged by some random, yet uninfluential, intellectuals. Like with what the Jews currently do. Especially weird if you grew up here, where generational guilt is still taught at school.

            • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              6 hours ago

              Could you explain ‘Complaining from a high Niveau’?

              I don’t know what Niveua means, though I am guessing the phrase is roughly equivalent to ‘Get off your high horse’ or ‘Check your privilege’ or ‘The view from the ivory tower’…

              … which all roughly mean that a person has a fairly decent, wealthy and secure standard of living, and the stuggles of the poor either do not matter to them, or are literally not even conceivable to them, as they’ve never had to deal with those kinds of problems, and have no idea how difficult it is.

              But uh yeah… America hates the poor, and whats worst is that they’ve trained most of the poor to hate themselves and other poors, for being poor.

              It is so obviously stupid when you break out of that mindset, but, its very well trained into us, very hard for many to escape.

              Regarding Jews/Israelis, I just wanna clarify a distinction there.

              I have many Jewish relatives, here in the US.

              They all despise what Israel, and Israeli Jews sre doing.

              There are in fact more Jews in the US than there are Jews in Israel.

              For a great many of them, the actions of the state of Israel do not speak for all Jews, and many US Jews denounce what they have been and are currently doing, many of them have been taking part in and even leading protests against the ongoing Palestinian Genocide.