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Well guys, it turns out we are ruled by satanic pedophiles. While the Epstein saga really cemented this as true, the most convincing thing I saw was some pieces in John Podesta's art collection. The worst stuff is from Kim Noble. You'll know we're undergoing a regime change when these people are rounded up and disposed of. Until that time, nothing has changed.
This is an interesting topic because it is one that can't be discussed with cool heads. Most people completely shut down, others more partial to Alex Jones style talk completely buy in. There's not a lot of fence-sitters when it comes to this question. What are we supposed to do if it becomes undeniable though?
Some in here might make the case that this p_do s_tan stuff including Epstein is a mutual blackmail ring that keeps elites from defecting against each other. I could buy that. But I'm not sure I could buy the case that this state of affairs is better than a less stable one without it.
Eh. I'll put down for the record that I'm a bit suspicious that this may be a troll post, but taking your observations at face value, I think you are being confused in the face of a set of aesthetics, values and social mores which are foreign to you. You are conflating two things which are a priori separate and don't even strike me as particularly correlated once you control for socioeconomic grouping - edgy art flirting with sexualisation of children (by the looks of it in the one-digit age range) on the one hand, and Epstein's harem of 16+ year old girls on the other. Out of these, the latter seems to stand in an ancient tradition of rich and powerful men surrounding themselves with young girls to whom they can make offers they can not refuse, remarkable only for its violation of, ironically, California values (like half of the US, to say nothing of the rest of the world, doesn't actually have 18 as the age of consent!) that say if you look at a 17 year old funny you might as well be raping toddlers, and the blackmail element that it acquired thanks to the creeping intra-American universalisation of those. The former, on the other hand, stands in a seemingly almost as old tradition of affluent subcultures going down costly aesthetic spirals to signal commitment, like architects tiling old towns with concrete-filled abuse of the nurbs tool or French aristocrats getting lead poisoning and corset-induced intestinal impactations.
You know another elite aesthetic preference that has always disgusted me? Blue cheese. If I attempted to craft a similar narrative around it, it'd be probably something about our rulers' worship of rot and decay, and I'd be exhibiting a highly suggestive array of grainy photos of people in white tie awkwardly shuffling around at Oxbridge wine-and-cheese parties, closeups of Stilton (the worst stuff!), "memento mori" oil paintings and corpses of soldiers in the muddy trenches of Ukraine. The analogy is of course somewhat exaggerated (as you may be right to argue that 50 year olds enjoying the suggestion of sexualised 8 year olds and 50 year olds sex-trafficking 17 year olds are more similar than enjoying rotten cheese and enjoying actions which lead to the rotting of young men), but qualitatively I think it is similar enough.
("Satanic" is doing no work here apart from being your "disturbing outgroup stuff" signifier of choice, right? I don't see any pentagrams, goats or even dark angelic beings in there.)
A quick google says Epstein girls were as young as 11, often in the range of 14. Agree this is separate from toddlers, but I don't think you have a lot of good reason to claim that it's just guys interested in young girls as they were in ages past. Except that the age of marriage in Europe has been mostly 18-22 pretty much since they started writing this stuff down.
Marriage is not the same as sexual intercourse, and Epstein or his guests didn't marry (de jure or de facto) his girls.
I would imagine that historically age of marriage in Europe was more bottlenecked by the ability of the man to provide for the family, not prohibitions against intercourse at a younger age. Matter of fact, the Wikipedia page of the very first historical European ruler I sampled for a lazy argument said,
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