I have to wonder how these guys find each other. Do they crack an off color-joke and see who laughs? Do they catch each other looking at underage girls at a party? Is there a webpage that's like tinder for pervs?

I can barely get four friends together for a bike ride on a Sunday afternoon, but somehow Epstein was able to connect with just about every wealthy pedo in the western world.

[–] eldavi@lemmy.ml 7 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

it's basic party planning; you invite significantly more people because you know that less than half will actually show up.

in your case: you'll need to invite like 50 people and expect 10 to show up, but be sure to have enough bikes in case all 50 people actually do show up.

i bet that's why epstein got caught; he had to make sure that he had at least one bike for each one of his pedo friends.

[–] BranBucket@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, but if I misjudge and one of my friends turns out to be vehimently anti-bike, I don't have to orchestrate a massive cover-up, conduct a decades long propaganda campaign, and install one of my other friends as the leader of the free world in an effort to avoid the legal, social, and political fallout from biking (literal biking, not a metaphor).

Seems like Epstein's party planning would have required a little more thought than my Sunday rides.

Then again, all the evidence seems to show they were able to operate with a depressing lack of opsec, so maybe they just ask each other or there's not enough people opposed to child rape in their world.

[–] eldavi@lemmy.ml 6 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

i'm less depressed by the lack of opsec and more depressed that they didn't have to bother hiding it; they were using gmail for fuck's sake!

also the bike riders already know each other because there's depressingly too many of them; but mistakes are sometimes made and those mistakes are written off as crazy people who propagate conspiracy theories like illuminati style global-sex-trafficking/human-sacrifice rings

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 14 hours ago

Rich people regularly are invited to meetup events with other rich people, business is 99% a social relations.

For example, while looking up Salinas Pliego (mexican oligarch, currently engineering a trump-ish movement) i found out he met Epstein at an edge billionaires event organized by some grifter guru, among many other billionaires. Billionaires don't attend these events to hear whatever the guru is saying, they go to meet other billionaires, so imagine a guy like Epstein, someone that made his fortune entirely by sycophancy with wall street investors, meeting other sycophant billionaires.

[–] GreenWizard@midwest.social 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

They are all in a world of debauchery that the commoners are only half-aware of, is my suspicion. Sort of like, once you try a single hard drug, you are probably more likely to try more or progressively harder drugs. Once you break the wall of trying one thing you know is terrible, your walls are broken down to making ever-worse decisions.

The nature of dopamine is to want more, newer, novel experiences. If that is driven by sick, psychopathic and unrestrained impulses (the same thing that drove their impulse to conquer business or politics), it will always get progressively worse and more extreme.

[–] blockheadjt@sh.itjust.works 2 points 15 hours ago

Maybe using slurs in online shooters