HereAndGone
23d ago
True, but having both parents around is different to "and then dad shook us off like we were dirt on the soles of his shoes and set out for a new fun life with a new fun family". That has got to hurt. Even a distant, neglectful father has to be better than one who made the choice to reject you in favour of someone else (someone better).
HereAndGone
23d ago
Very, very minor kerfuffle (the story seems to have quietly died) about our Arts Council asking questions about religion and sexual orientation on grant applications.
The Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has written to the Arts Council asking for further details on the “nature and content” of questions asked of artists when they were applying for bursary grants earlier this year.
It follows worries raised by a number of artists who contacted the Irish Independent in recent weeks to raise concerns after they were asked about their sexuality and religious orientation, among other personal questions, when they applied for the bursary round in February.
The headline makes it sound like some kind of vaguely sinister data-gathering on deviants and there's nothing in the body of the story to explain why they asked these questions, but if you think about it, it's obvious why. Of course, this is because it's a government body and so has DEI targets to hit, and how will it fill out the paperwork about the percentage of queer trans disabled neurodivergent multiracial Wiccans who were awarded a bursary unless it gathers data in this way?
The same people complaining they were asked if they were gay will be the first to cry "discrimination!" if they don't get a bursary and will go running to the media about how they were refused because they were gay, when it's much more likely the Arts Council wants to give as many grants to gay etc. artists as they can in the name of representation, except they have to find out who is gay etc. first!
HereAndGone
23d ago
My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit.
I think it's not his spirit, but rather where else could they go? The Democrats certainly have no signs of welcoming traditional believers aboard, unless they drop all that stuff about abortion/LGBT+ (and male headship for the harder core). What I was mildly surprised by was Kamala Harris failing to reach out on grounds of "I'm Christian too" (yeah, I know: citation needed). She did the usual campaigning in black churches, but no broader appeal to the religious conservatives with stories about "I sang in the church choir as a girl, I attend this church when I'm at home":
Harris, on the other hand, is a rare political figure who may have downplayed her spiritual life in public, given anti-religious sentiments in her native San Francisco Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.
Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a Black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother, and she is married to a Reform Jewish husband.
She’s a longtime member of San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church and has a deep relationship with its pastor, the Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she has attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C., area and in 2022 spoke at the National Baptist Convention.
...In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about her mother’s making sure she was exposed to both Hindu and African American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister, Maya, sang in the choir at 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland.
It's probably also complicated by the fact that that is an American Baptist-affiliated church, not a Southern Baptist one, but nevertheless she soft-pedalled on religion, as did Walz (quick, anybody have any idea, without looking it up, what denomination if any he belongs to?)
Whoops, looks like Walz is a souper!
"Tim, who was raised Catholic, became a Lutheran after marrying Gwen. He has called himself a "Minnesota Lutheran" and identified Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, a congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as his family's parish."
HereAndGone
25d ago
Is England a better place where nobody cares about the Legend of King Arthur anymore?
From "That Hideous Strength":
“It all began,” he said, “when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it — it will do as well as another. And then gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting.”
“What haunting?” asked Camilla.
“How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney — and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites?
But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.”
…“So that, meanwhile, is England,” said Mother Dimble. “Just this swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain?”
HereAndGone
25d ago
HereAndGone
26d ago
Oookay. I don't know what the hell the mistress thought was going to happen, and I don't know why the hell the guy agreed to introduce his mistress to his wife. Clearly he was not thinking with his brain there.
HereAndGone
26d ago
It's the attitude that drugs do no harm, the only harm is them being illegal. Similar to the push about the harm that adults having sex with kids isn't from the sex, it's from the social stigma around it which teaches the child to be ashamed and that they were harmed.
The people who push that attitude want to fuck kids without consequences. The people who want to push that "it's the illegal status that does the harm" around drugs also want no consequences from what they want to do.
But there will always be consequences. Being a druggie didn't make the 'friend' a chill, kind, guy. It made him paranoid and violent (on top of whatever crazy he has going on).
HereAndGone
26d ago
Oh, yeah. "He's not like that with me" up to the minute he is like that.
I don't get it, I genuinely don't. "Love" must be one hell of a drug, to hollow your brain out like that.
Also, in a lot of these situations and that class, the guy doesn't give a damn about if the woman gets knocked up or what. If she wants babies, fine. If she doesn't want babies, fine. It's her job to ensure she doesn't get pregnant. So it's perfectly plausible he'd threaten to kill the baby because it isn't his baby to him in any meaningful way. (The only use of "my client is a father of three children" to the likes of those scumbags is so their lawyers can plead them off in court).
HereAndGone
26d ago
Had experience a couple of years back with a family member who tried suicide, and despite their protestations, it was one of the "cry for help" types rather than genuine "will kill myself for sure". They certainly intended to die, but the method they picked wasn't 100% fatal (indeed, looking it up, it wouldn't have been fatal at all but they didn't know that).
So yeah, people can try and kill themselves and even be serious about it, but not so serious as to pick a really working method. I think Epstein was the kind of guy who would try and use a suicide attempt to bargain his way out of things, he just mis-timed it and it turned out it worked.
HereAndGone
26d ago
I remain impressed by how you manage to drag abortion in to any discussion whatsoever. Nobody was talking about 19th century attitudes to the personhood of the foetus, but there you went!
HereAndGone
26d ago
He got off the hook in 2008 and pled not guilty here. I don't see why he wouldn't at least fight the charges.
He got off once. He'd used up all his favours. It was likely the truth was going to come out about how he'd been lying all along, and the entire house of cards had collapsed.
HereAndGone
26d ago
The good times were over. There was no way he was rebuilding from this. And he was a guy who had spent his entire adult life re-inventing himself so he could clamber up to the circles of the rich and powerful. Now he had a future of jail time, then going back to being poor and obscure. Just being depressed and despairing for a short time, suicide in that time could have seemed the best option. Yeah, if he had lived till the next day, he might well have changed his mind about trying to kill himself - but he didn't live.
HereAndGone
26d ago
Or he's just really fed-up with people winking and nudging that he was fucking 14 and 15 year olds. I can see him being defensive about "so I hung out with him, so what? So did a lot of people back then, there were a lot of people in those social circles" and "yeah there were girls at those parties, there's always girls at those parties, attractive young women like rich and powerful men, why are you making such a big deal out of this?".
Trump is not somebody to sit back coolly and take a rational approach to this kind of constant dripping of irritation and reporters and others harassing him about Epstein. Particularly after the E. Jean Carroll case where he wasn't convicted of rape but the judge then came out and said "yeah you can say it was rape". People really are out to get him, even if he is being paranoid.
HereAndGone
26d ago
No, that can't be it, because there's one alleged victim who has been trawling the story around for years (and failing in all the law suits) that Trump and Epstein raped her when she was 12/13:
A federal lawsuit filed in California in April 2016 against Epstein and Donald Trump by a California woman alleged that the two men sexually assaulted her at a series of parties at Epstein's Manhattan residence in 1994, when she was 13 years old.
It may well be that there is no convenient little list or black book of clients that can be produced, and any records available are tangled up in "yeah but if you go ahead and say X was an Epstein client they will immediately drag you into court" so that the promised Big Reveal can't be made after all.
The trouble with high-profile cases like these is that there are then a lot of people happy to come forward with claims from "back in the day" which can't be substantiated (but they can peddle them to the media for nice sums of money):
On October 25, 2016, allegations were made by two men stating that Trump had attended and partaken in sex parties filled with underage minor females as young as 15 years old who were induced with promises of career advancement. Illegal drugs were also alleged to have been provided to the minors.
One man was identified as model and actor Andy Lucchesi, while the other was identified as a fashion photographer who spoke on condition of anonymity. Both men claim to have been acquaintances of Trump during that decade, which one described as his "Trump days".
Lucchesi, for his part, claimed that he saw Trump engage in sexual activity with the girls but did not witness him taking illicit drugs. Regarding the age of the girls, Lucchesi said he himself never specifically asked about their ages, only remarking of the attendees "a lot of girls, [aged] 14, look 24."
That part seems like careful legal advice about skating past any direct accusations and then counter-accusations of libel - after all, you never said X knowingly fucked a 14 year old when she could convincingly pass for 20, now did you? But it's sufficiently juicy a claim for the paper to run with the story.
HereAndGone
26d ago
On a cursory reading, it seems to be more that it was Epstein who liked them very young, and the other girls were recruited around ages 14-16 or so by other girls or by Maxwell and then groomed into being the party favours by promises of modelling careers and the like, with threats then if they tried leaving.
HereAndGone
26d ago
Paedophilia is the term that needs definition. There have been some extreme claims of 12-14 year olds being raped, but it seems in the main to be more "underage by American law" which is "not 18 yet" (in other countries, age of consent is 16, for example).
So he was operating off "all men are attracted to hot young things" and throwing parties where there would always be a supply of attractive young women to pay attention to the guests and to act as arm candy. Pimping them out? Yeah, that's the big question here. If you're at one of these parties and the attractive young woman expresses interest in being your one night stand, do you take that as "this is a sex worker operated by my host" or the general "yeah attractive young women do throw themselves at me because I'm rich/important"?
Epstein was a creep, and he was recruiting vulnerable young women to exploit, and he probably wasn't adverse to gathering intelligence/kompromat on the people he invited to those parties as blackmail material and insurance. Epstein himself probably liked them young, and the younger the better (see the rumours about him as a teacher at that private school). But was he deliberately pimping out underage girls to people who knew they weren't 18/17/16? That is the entire rationale for the scandal and the conspiracy theories and the "he didn't really commit suicide" allegations, and that is what remains to be proven.
Similar cases of accusations of child sex abuse against high profile people in the UK have been tainted by fraudsters such as Carl Beech and by an atmosphere of over-correction, where police forces swung from dismissing accusations against celebrities to taking prosecutions on the basis of flimsy accusations which later collapsed.
Things such as the following - how credible are they? Could they have happened? Were they just people trying to jump on the bandwagon like Beech did in the UK?
Julie Brown's 2018 exposés in the Miami Herald identified eighty victims and located about sixty of them. She quotes the then police chief Reiter as saying "This was 50-something 'shes' and one 'he'—and the 'shes' all basically told the same story." Details from the investigation included allegations that 12-year-old triplets were flown in from France for Epstein's birthday, and flown back the following day after being sexually abused by the financier.
They should be able to find out if 12 year old French triplets flew in and flew out of Florida, but did anyone do so?
HereAndGone
26d ago
Also sounds more like a stalker who followed her during periods of activity and went inactive when she was inactive? There's a lot of crazy people out there, someone obsessed with Ghislaine Maxwell who persuaded themselves into a fantasy life version of her (see the movie Single White Female for a fictional version of this) isn't the most implausible thing.
HereAndGone
26d ago
It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.
I think Epstein was competent (he managed to get and hold that job at Bear Stearns) but he was also greedy and couldn't stop himself from ruining a good thing by trying to profit even more out of it. His fundamental untrustworthiness meant he couldn't hold down anything honest, and he got himself entangled in his whole web of fake stories, deceit, and trying to find shortcuts to easy money.
Did he really commit suicide or was he killed? Suicide is odd. He might indeed have done so, because even if he survived all the scandal, he was looking at years in prison and once he got out, he would have nothing left. No money, no contacts, no chance of rebuilding his fortune and status. This was not a man who would be content to live a poor, obscure life. Momentary despair and seeing no other way out? That's plausible.
(Also plausible: he didn't intend for it to be successful but rather a 'cry for help' suicide, banked on the guards finding him in time and then he'd maybe be moved to better conditions or his lawyer could argue for clemency from the court due to his mental distress, but it didn't work out for him that way).
HereAndGone
26d ago
Regarding Maxwell, I think that was two con men trying to exploit one another. As mentioned in the original post, Maxwell had few connections in the USA and his media empire was built on sand (see the pensions fund scandal) and he wanted to use Epstein's contacts to get a foothold in the US, and Epstein of course wanted to use another rich guy for whatever he could extract out of him.
HereAndGone
26d ago
I agree that Epstein was a fabulist so we can't trust any claims he might have made. I think if there was any 'intelligence gathering' it was more akin to him trying to shop gossip around to anyone who would pay for it ("hey I have all these connections with rich and important people, you might be interested in what I can find out") because he was that sort of untrustworthy little toad, and that the best/only connections he had as contacts were Mossad or somebody who knew somebody who was connected to Mossad, and they might have bought bits'n'scraps because hey, why not? this guy might turn out to be useful sometime if he ever does stumble across anything important or we can finally find a use for him (I have no doubt, for instance, that they'd be happy to gather blackmail material on the Royal Family via 'Randy Andy' just because).
HereAndGone
27d ago
I don't think anyone should aspire to those kinds of occupations, nor romanticize or fetishize them.
And yet the work has to be done, and we don't yet have the robots to do it. All the unglamorous necessary toil to support civilisation.
HereAndGone
27d ago
The running plot, such as it is, throughout the books is good but it's mostly "the Napoleonic Wars at sea" so unless you're absolutely fascinated by the minutiae of naval campaigns, the real interest is "ooh so this was what life was like on a ship at that time" and then it's "will Jack advance his career, will Stephen ever have a happy relationship, never mind they're best bros and we all love learning natural history".
There are just so many great lines (everyone's favourite is this one) (warning: TV Tropes link):
Stephen acquires a sloth in South America, and it immediately befriends everybody aboard. Except Jack, who for some inexplicable reason gets rebuffed- the poor thing cried when it first saw him. When he finally resorts to feeding the sloth bits of ship's biscuit soaked in rum, he soon wins its friendship but ends up turning it into an alcoholic. Thus leading to a line found nowhere else in literature: "Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
But Stephen is like me - all the nautical terms and explanations just go right over my head and don't lodge. Gluppit the prawling strangles, indeed!
Stephen: The moment you are afloat you become pragmatical and absolute, a bashaw —do this, do that, gluppit the prawling strangles, there—no longer a social being at all.
You start off reading for the "Napoleonic Wars at sea" but then you sort of forget about that and treat it like 'Stephen's Big Natural History Expedition' and 'Jack climbs the ranks' so that the great world-shaking events become background, almost, to the little dramas played out in their world.
HereAndGone
27d ago
I keep forgetting the Zoomers are now old enough to be making dubious fashion choices of their own. And Alpha are the upcoming new generation!
HereAndGone
27d ago
Please tell me it was at least (1) his ex wife and (2) this bint wasn't the reason the marriage broke down. Because otherwise, if frying pans were meeting crania, I would not blame the (ex) missus one iota for the idiocy of both (ex) husband and new squeeze.
Everything has been getting worse everywhere, always, forever.
And yet here we are.
Taking the USA - the 70s made the BLM years look like a tea-party. Insurrection and a new civil war looked way more plausible then, with amateur militias like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army running around shooting and bombing. And yet - that never happened.
Black Lives Matter movement and the Summer of Saint Floyd has fizzled out.
Yeah, globally we're probably due for a recession and a lot of political turmoil and things are going to hurt for a few years, maybe even a decade. See the Winter of Discontent in the 70s, and indeed the 70s in general for the UK - The Specials were not singing Ghost Town at the start of the 80s about a happy, jolly time. The 80s were terrible for Ireland.
But then things will slowly right themselves once more, until we all tilt to the opposite direction once again.
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