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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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First accusation (probably legit): https://nymag.com/news/features/41826/

11 year old accusation (maybe not legit): https://nypost.com/2020/08/14/jeffrey-epstein-accused-of-sexually-abusing-11-year-old-suit/

You think the Epstein clients didn't know?

It probably runs the whole spectrum of guilt.

I like to imagine that if we got all the Epstein regulars in a room and dosed them with a (real) Truth Serum, there's at least one guy who would say something like "I don't even like teenage girls! You ever try to make cocktail small talk with a 15 year old? It was awful! But the contacts I made at these parties? I couldn't afford to stop going! Where else could you meet five billionaires who are instantly your new friends? You'd make money at these parties just from hanging around and hearing scuttlebutt. So I went, had a few drinks, tried to avoid the girls, then went home and fucked my wife. Occasionally, hey, when in Rome ya gotta do what ya gotta do to show you're one of the boys, but it wasn't something I liked, and it wasn't why I went."

Greed, power, fashion, sexual perversion are all bound up together in the same psychoses. Some probably had more of one than the other. If you take out the prostitution bit, I can't imagine how awesome and glamorous some of those parties must have been. Scientists, academics, lawyers, billionaires, politicians, geniuses. The absolute top tier. Elegance, luxury, total impunity. You know these men by reputation, by the news, by their publications; you know they aren't in prison. That atmosphere produces a strange effect on a lot of people.

Where else can you meet 5 billionaires?

You realize they do that every weekend in Palm Beach or NYC? They have dinner parties where the invite list is billionaire only and sometimes a service provider whose got a $100 million (like their art or real estate guy).

You didn't quote the rest of the sentence.

Where else could you meet five billionaires who are instantly your new friends?

Nothing binds like vice and crime. That's why the best initiations from the Agoge to my frat to gangs always involve a crime. A crime is a secret, and nothing bonds people together like a secret.

Given, I'll cop to never going to some billionaire's cocktail to-do in Palm Beach or NYC. Maybe they're super duper fun and everybody bonds super close. But I'll guess that even if a relatively "normie" academic could get in, they wouldn't get the same bonding.

The bonding occurs because you are both in the billionaires club.

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