Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/13/cbs-news-shrieking-heard-from.html
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“If you were surprised to hear that Epstein committed suicide imagine how surprised hew was?”
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And, apparently, one of the guards was “not a regular corrections officer” for whatever that is worth.
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What’s more plausible: that the jail guards were careless and incompetent and honestly don’t give a shit about their prisoners, or that there was a massive conspiracy to silence Epstein even after all the crucial documentation had been taken as evidence?
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My only question here is, who was shrieking? If it was guards going “omg, we fucked up, we are so screwed!” I would say, yes you are and move on. If, on the other hand, it was Epstein being “suicided” that is a whole different kettle of fish. Given Barr is running this show, we will never know if it was the latter. More fodder for conspiracy theorists, which just plays into Trump’s game.
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$1 says the body discoverer was shrieking, CBS knew it, and this is a very bad story.
If there were any possibility it were Epstein, it would have put it out as a short breaking news item that made clear CBS did not know who was shrieking or when and that it might therefore be Epstein, but that it was going out on a limb to tell you this. The stack of recap bullshit is a half-hour of pointless busy work that tells you they know the story is trivial.
That’s my quick, media brain hunch.
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I think you’re likely correct. That 24 news cycle is a real pain in the ass, but got to fill those hours somehow, so why not with poorly written, half-baked speculation that confuses everyone…
Same with the detail about the guard… well, what does that mean, exactly? That no one had seen him before, that he works in another department, that he was a new hire, what?
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The whole thing is of course suspicious. I look forward to the Scorcese film in 2032.
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i think there’s also a possibility of jailhouse vigilante. A guard who knew what Epstein was accused of deciding to strangle him themselves. Not necessarily a conspiracy. I don’t think that would be so far fetched considering people like Jeffrey Dahmer who were killed in prison.
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It’s more plausible that it will be sunny tomorrow than rain tomorrow where I am at this point. Usually when I hear “dead of an apparent suicide” I figure I can completely safely conclude that it was a suicide and assume the “apparent” part is only there because that’s how reporters cover news. Anyone arguing that Robin Williams was murdered is a raving nut.
But in this case, I guess I’d ask: If the wave form collapses and Epstein was murdered, are you going to be shocked to your very core, or are you going to think, “Yeah, well that was always a low percentage possibility.”? I don’t think Epstein was murdered, but I’m not going to re-evaluate my worldview if it is true.
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When stories are “unbylined”, does that suggest that they were written by an AI? Half serious question because the time is coming when AI will just crank out pieces like this based on any available good or bad data.
News outlets might one day have bots whose function it is to keep a story like this on the front page for clicks.
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If it were a Dahmer situation, or even a rogue guard, I think there would be a conspiracy – because they claimed suicide and repeatedly confirmed it, when it would have been obvious soon enough.
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good point. I guess what i mean is not a conspiracy to kill him. maybe a conspiracy to cover up a monumental screw up (not keeping a better watch on him)… which… even if it was suicide, that still seems to be the case. someone dropped the ball.
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Same here. As I said in the earlier topic:
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It sure seems like the time to disappear Epstein would have been either just before he was taken into custody, or when he was arrested the first time. I’m just not so sure that the same cabal that can reach into federal lockup would also let the feds seize all the evidence before making their move.
(please no one misunderstand this–I absolutely believe that Epstein had a ton of damaging information on a bunch of extremely rich and powerful men who palled around with him to do terrible things to children with impunity and those people are probably not going to be held to account)
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No, it just means they don’t want a named person accountable for it. There are good and bad reasons for this – breaking news is often something that happens in a newsroom and no individual is singly deserving of either the scoop or any backlash to it. But oftentimes it’s a way to diffuse responsibility for something that they know is way out on a limb or plainly malign. Tabloid hits are often unbylined.
That’s a great question, though.
Code is at the point where it can write coldly technical sports recaps based on data provided to it. But it depends on strict grammars and formulaic templates. They’re generators, in other words, more complex and elaborate implementations of stuff like my Audiophile review generator and DPRK News Generator.
New machine intelligence stuff like GPT-2 is not good at writing fake news, despite the claims that its more advanced sets can’t be unleashed it because they’re too frighteningly convincing. They can’t remember facts or narratives for two sentences and despite the uncannily human writing, it’s obviously just wandering nonsense after a paragraph or two.
(GPT-2 is scary because it could be convincing at the lenght of a single thought or claim – i.e. twitter and facebook. I suspect the GPT-2 folks and others like them are in a position to disrupt social media badly with a new class of bot and that this is a much more serious threat than generative fake news at length. They’re either shaking down the social networks or working with them to avert the danger, which, when you think about it, still has one hand on the limb)
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Yeah, Hanlon’s razor is a great tool when dealing with random people you don’t know. When dealing with people who definitely have blackmail material that shows other people are pedophiles, you are entering an edge case where it breaks down.
I don’t think there is a shadowy cabal running everything that has nearly unlimited power. I do know for a fact there is an out-in-the-open gang of oligarchs who have the power to pay a prison guard in financial trouble $1M. I also know that people make bad, stupid decisions all the time. I do think every day that passes makes this idea less plausible. They would probably catch the person very quickly if this was what happened.
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Epstein’s 15 minutes of fame are over.
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The way i interpret it is that the headline is meant to be ambiguous because its acting as clickbait. It’s not about reporting the facts but about driving people to their site, i find it unethical the way its being handled by the media if they’re going to keep things vague since they’re playing into suspicious of a conspiracy or something of the sorts.
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Hanlon’s Razor:
”Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
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