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The Virginia Giuffre suicide brought to mind an idea I've been thinking about for a while: populism works best without the people. Rob Henderson and many others have talked about how certain ideas promoted by the upper class disproportionately harm the lower class. In his book Troubled, he wrote:
The problem is that people who entertain populist ideas like the above wind up shoved into the same part of the political spectrum as all these people who rave about "pedophile rings." Along with the internet personalities who won't endorse QAnon outright but pander to their QAnoner supporters with equivocating crap like "why can't they release the Epstein documents? I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, I just want TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT. Just asking qwestchins!" The populist movement winds up embracing the same mentality of helplessness Henderson is criticizing. Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*
You can only really stand up for the people by keeping them at arm's length.
*The QAnoners are convinced that happens ALL THE TIME but Epstein is the only example they can point to, which is why we're still hearing about it five years after Epstein's death and will probably keep hearing about it for decades more.
Por que no los dos? It's true that most of the victims were offered money to step on a plane, not forcibly kidnapped. But they were also psychologically manipulated and placed in a strange circumstance way outside anything the expected or had ever experienced. Being teenagers, maybe they thought they could handle it but then the reality was very different than they expected.
People seem to draw this really weird dichotomy where you have to choose between "Epstein was not a good guy" and "the girls were prostitutes." Where the reason Epstein was a bad guy was because the girls were prostitutes.
There's a certain type of girl who, through a weird touchy uncle, a demeaning mother, an absent or hostile father, or just lack of moral guidance anywhere, will end up selling herself for cash. Moving from childhood to the blossom of sexual maturity is in the best of situations a disorienting hormonal surge of conflicting desires. Throw in peer pressure, an amoral upbringing, or the sense that as long as it's secret, anything is permitted (hi, Japan) and you have a recipe for this. Epstein having wads of money and an effective scout in Maxwell (and then girls who would, for even more money, gull their peers into a taste of the glamorous life (TM) didn't hurt.)
A guy I once knew once described Japanese girls as "all whores." I think that's a shittily uncharitable way to view the world. But at the same time I'm often surprised at the amount of prostitution here, from the casual, French-art-film level day hooker to organized crime brothels to high-end callgirls. To say nothing of snackbars (hostess bars) or cabarets, burlesques, etc. My point is that without Epstein these girls may have become prostitutes on their own, but you can't be sure. Zig instead of zag.
I feel bad for Giuffre. She made wrong choices from day 1 (she was a street urchin before she even met Epstein), but one would hope anyone could turn it around, especially with a payout from Maxwell and basically everyone affirming her as a heroine.
Yeah, the daughters of impoverished single mothers living in Hispanic-majority neighborhoods are probably going to get taken advantage of in their teens regardless, and high rates of prostitution can just be expected.
People focus on Epstein because they love hearing about aristocrats- the good, the bad, and the ugly. If the IBEW was arranging underaged mistresses for their members it might be a scandal but it wouldn’t be a front page news story(…Rotherham). This is elites, so it is.
Just a followup: Giuffre was reporting that a bus hit her going 110 kph. The driver disputed that, as did the parents of the kids on the bus. The Western Ozzie police reported it as a minor crash with no injuries. The driver also said he didn't even see Giuffre in the car, but an elderly woman.
Now these sources are all probably less-than-perfect. But this is weird. And then she offs herself? After saying in 2019 that she was not suicidal? My tinfoil hat is right here, but I hate putting it on, it's really stupid-looking.
These are the same reasons I'm sceptical. She posted on Instagram that due to the severity of her injuries in the crash she only had four days to live. Well that wasn't true for a start.
She may indeed have committed suicide, and if so I'm sorry for her, but it could be another fake story. Or she may have intended a 'cry for help' attempt that would have seen her back in hospital, and back in the news headlines, but unluckily for her it really worked (or the person she expected to turn up and find her and call the ambulance arrived too late or something).
I can't work out an angle where she might've been "suicided" as she had already spilled many sacks of beans. Possibly she was covering for her husband's abuse? There was a record there apparently of him beating on her. At the same time he was the one who took out a restraining order on her. None of it makes sense. I suppose nonsensical murders and suicides regularly occur, but I followed the Epstein story fairly closely, read her depositions, even tried to read her poorly written (but interesting) book online (most of it.)
She and Maria Farmer both seemed mildly unreliable. Farmer (also in terrible health) is a bit too loud on the wealthy Jewish angle and prone to bizarre accusations ("Ghislaine gave me cancer!") to get much airtime (unlike her perfectly respectable sister Annie) but Giuffre was more interesting as she had been, for all I could see, a very willing sex slave (if such a thing exists) or at least was aware she was living a much more glamorous life than the one she had left. Apparently Maxwell and Epstein even wanted her to have a kid for them? That's slave, yes, but it's Number One Slave. Millions all over the world have far worse fates.
I'm not saying any of it was wholesome, but it seemed like squalid amoral people doing squalid amoral things, just instead of a trailer park they were on private jets and private islands and a lot cleaner. There's a passage in Giuffre's book where she complains about how healthily Epstein ate and how she herself just wanted a burger most of the time. It's fascinating from a class divide perspective.
And then she saw an out, and eventually realized she could parlay all her terrible self-interested choices into a narrative of victimhood and heroism, and that's the card she played, to apparently grand results--on the surface.
What's sad about this--what's even sadder than all the other sad parts--is that Giuffre apparently never stopped making bad choices. But who knows.
I was thinking more "faked her own death" or even "did a 'cry for help' effort not meant to be serious, but unluckily for her it did turn out to work" rather than "she was offed by Hillary Clinton" type affair.
If she really is dead by suicide, that is a sad end to a sad and squalid story.
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