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The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.
It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:
It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway).
Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day. Yes, what Epstein did (paying 16 year olds for sex and having them recruit their school friends for the same purpose) was cruel and wrong - and he deserved jail for it - but in the grand scheme of all sexual crimes it was far, far from the worst.
...Wut?
This is pushing whataboutism in new and interesting ways.
I stand by it. Epstein’s victims are victims - like Harvey Weinstein’s , to some extent - of the sexual revolution and the very negative consequences it had on many young women. My mother tells stories about half her friends at 14 years old (in the late 1970s) having 25-30 year old boyfriends who picked them up outside school. That is the way it was.
Few more than me have stood up more here to say this whole thing was a bad idea and a way for largely higher status men to maximize access to pussy (especially from previously respectable kinds of girls) without consideration for their wellbeing or that of society, but this specific case is just an illustration. Much of the most salacious theory (including Trump’s involvement) is implausible for a number of reasons. The rest is just a richer version of a sad, mundane story that occurs in countless places at countless times.
Is Donald Trump an inner city kid who got into trouble, the way you're blaming society for his crimes?
Seriously, bro, what are you doing here? You could have just ignored this thread if it didn't interest you, if you think the whole Epstein obsession is tinfoil-hat stuff. Instead you've jumped in to say "It doesn't matter that Donald Trump is lying about a bunch of stuff because, you know, there was this one thing that happened in a different country on the other side of the ocean, and as a result you're not allowed to care about anything else until I say you can" followed up with "actually Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong because it was society that was set up the wrong way or all this never would have happened."
I’m at most an ambivalent Trump supporter, it’s disingenuous to imply I haven’t criticized him and his more naive fans countless times on this board over the last decade.
This person was always a liar and a scumbag. I remember writing about what he did to the priceless Bonwit Teller sculptures, rare examples of good art deco (along with the rest of the building), his treatment of his business partners, lenders, investors and so on. His treatment of his wives, cheating on pregnant Melania with prostitutes etc.
But when in Stephen Miller and to some extent Homan the US has its best in 30 years and probably final chance to do even a small amount (which will have big effects down the line) about large scale illegal migration from Central and South America I can’t countenance the wasting of that singular political moment and energy on the irrelevant sexual proclivities of a disgusting but dead man decades ago.
I want my children to inherit a functioning country inhabited by civilized people with public services that function and with the smallest possible violent and dysfunctional criminal underclass. Until mass immigration is solved, this is the absolute political issue, above anything else, beyond everything else. The same is true about other irrelevancies, like Iran, Ukraine, tariffs.
Then don't comment on these threads, or just comment one sentence that you don't care about anything more than you care about Blanqueamiento, and move on.
The motte is for truth seeking, not petty dishonest political persuasion. It probably won't work for the latter anyway, and even if it did the US voting population of the forum might be 50 on a good day, of which I'm not sure you yourself are included.
How am I supposed to trust anything you say about the matter after you tell me that nothing else matters except deporting brown people? Your top level post the other day, do you actually believe that Epstein was just a particularly hot gay hustler, a Gold Digging Hall of Famer, or is that what you determined was the best thing to say to protect Stephen Miller's political project? Is everything you say about all the issues you just told me don't matter to be ignored, just a weather-vane tested method of finding the right piece of whataboutism to get everyone to shut up and give ICE more money?
I just don't understand how one goes on the motte and says "stop talking about X, it doesn't matter compared to Y." Because nothing we talk about on the motte matters; thus the truth is all that matters. And I'm disappointed that you've disavowed it.
I don’t think we should stop talking about it. I find Epstein fascinating enough that I’ve read almost everything (possibly everything) ever written on him. I think he was a real life example of extraordinarily high verbal intelligence, which is rarer even than the spatial equivalent. I’m talking about political attention. Apologies if that wasn’t clear, I don’t think the discussions we have matter politically, obviously.
We discuss a lot of things ere that aren’t the most important thing in the country, we discuss architecture, obesity drugs, video games, history, whatever.
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