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Back in 2021, Reuters published the following about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial:
"not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers. Instead, the Online Right has gone in a very different direction, being convinced that it would severely disrupt the status quo if they could prove the Epstein murder/pedo ring conspiracy is true. ActuallyATleilaxuGhola asserts that the only reason people would doubt that Epstein was murdered is a desire to avoid a backlash against the status quo or Jews:
I think it's the "Epstein was murdered" people who are engaging in motivated reasoning, since the evidence for the conspiracy is very weak. Instead of another perhaps pointless argument about the evidence, let's look at the underlying assumption that "exposure" of the supposed conspiracy would "disrupt the status quo." Would that actually happen?
Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.
Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.
You may say that, over the long term, voters will be more open to anti-establishment voices. I wouldn't be so sure. Won't take long for the establishment to come up with its equivalent of "the Soviet Union failed because it wasn't communist enough." They'll point out that the vast majority of the accused/convicted individuals are men, so we need more control of male sexuality. Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up. But if you want there to be a "reckoning" over this, it's unavoidable. If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power? After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition. Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?
Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.
I don't think you can conclude this.
It's a pointless political dead-end because it can't ever be adjudicated. At best you can say the epistemic commons are so poisoned on the issue that Epstein Files is now 9/11 Conspiracy is now JFK Conspiracy. No majority will believe any explanation, no matter how bipartisan the committee and how much evidence gets dumped.
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These men aren't being lambasted for being attracted to 16-17 yo girls. Men are being lambasted for fucking them with dubious consent and legality. It's the difference between desiring money and defrauding. Impulse control.
Furthermore, having extremely restrictive rules of engagement for hoi polloi while the billionaire elites get away with it is a cucked attitude.
Elites should not be breaking the law, they are supposed to be exemplars. Higher standing, higher rewards, higher standards. The FBI and CIA especially are not supposed to be breaking the law, they're supposed to be enforcing it.
How are you supposed to have a functioning country if the elites and officials are basically robbers, here for temporary gain, don't believe in anything except personal gratification (financial or sexual), don't care about enforcing rules evenly, take bribes or implicit promises of favours from powerful figures, take revenge on you if you report them? This is third-worldism not in the geopolitical sense but the social sense, third-world values. 'We shouldn't report or rally against the corrupt official because maybe the central government will punish us in retribution' is a supremely servile attitude. The Taliban were formed in large part to massacre child rapists amongst the warlords of Afghanistan. We may not share all their values but at least they believed in something more than short-term political gains, that's surely a large part of why they won the war. Why should those from the richest, strongest, most cultured nations hold lower standards than illiterate Afghans?
The rule of law is usually only brought up to justify judges or international courts nobody's ever heard of issuing strange and bizarre orders but this is a core example of where the rule of law should be invoked. No cover ups.
It’s just extremely disingenuous to suggest that warlords raping 8 year old boys is the same as Prince Andrew having sex with a 17 year old who may or may not have been a prostitute.
I support the latter being illegal, but there are obviously tiers of criminality. The sad reality of prostitution is that a large, disproportionate number of prostitutes are 16/17 and lie about their age, particularly in the poorest parts of the west, street walkers and truck stop sex workers, sometimes escorts on seeking arrangement / sugar baby sites too. Underclass and working class men hire them all the time without consequence, buying into the implicit suggestion they are adults if their conscience cares at all (it usually doesn’t).
It’s like the outrage over rich young actresses fucking ugly fat producers to become movie stars. I sympathize, but these are not the top victims of male predation. The purchasers of sex do something I think is wrong, but they aren’t worse than the millions of other men who do the same every day.
Those things aren't the same. However it is important to take a political stand in honest defence of values even if standing up for those values has short-term costs and ruffles feathers.
If we're gonna accept light statutory rape amongst elites (if it is even limited to light statutory rape, since the documentation and evidence of whatever's really going on remains concealed), why not medium statutory rape amongst grooming gangs? Where does it end? There are laws and those laws should be enforced. Laws and proper behaviour mustn't seem to be 'for suckers'.
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I would argue that Epstein and his guests are different from random truckers in that they purposefully selected for underage. If Epstein had hired 18yo's from escort websites only, this thing would be an absolute non-story, and nobody except a few prudes and feminists would get upset.
Being a sex worker at a truck stop is very likely not a great job. I would expect that the pay is lousy (because your clients do not have a lot of disposable income), it is rather dangerous (because "trucker", unlike "bank executive" does not filter for "intelligent person with an appropriate discounting function who will avoid any homicides they will not get away with") and that the clients are not particularly hot or skilled at sex. If you can make ends meet using OnlyFans or doing escort work, that seems much preferable. So I can totally see that this job selects for 16yo runaways who need to pay for their next meal or their next dose, and have neither the wardrobe nor the age to make it in the more respectable branches of sex work (where underage is likely a hard no, because it attracts the eye of Sauron like little else except murder).
Unlike the US, I have no problem with prostitution per se. I certainly do not think minors should be prostitutes, but also admit that I have no good way to align the incentives of a 16yo drug addict to that end. Still, I think informed consent is as important for sex work as for any sex act.
Some time ago, there was a scandal where some porn company would hire women for what they claimed to be modelling (or something similarly tame), then get into a plane to some other city, and suddenly be confronted with the fact that they would be shooting hardcore porn instead. This put the women in a position where they could either walk out, and find themselves in a city which they knew nothing about without a return ticket home, or they could conform with the expressed opinion of the set crew that shooting porn was not a big deal and believe their lies that their video would only be sold to foreign collectors and not be put on the internet. Eventually, the company got sued and is out of business now, and good riddance. By contrast, no hooker who climbs into a truck is under any illusion that the truck driver is going to do a photo shoot to kick off her modelling career. She might still get raped when the trucker violates the agreed boundaries, but that would then at least be a criminal matter (not that this would buy her anything, realistically).
Now, in theory, it could be that Epstein recruited his victims by driving to local truck stops and telling the sex workers: "I am currently recruiting underage prostitutes for a sex party. Here is a brief detailing transportation, accommodations, sex acts, payment, and safe words. Please read it, think about it for a week and then mail me what sex acts you feel comfortable with and I will get back to you."
However, in my world model, this is exceedingly unlikely. It is seems far more likely that the girls travelling on the Lolita express had at best a vague idea what would be required of them, and then were coerced in pretty much the same way as the victims of that unethical porn company were, except worse, because they were underage and actually trapped on an island.
I base this on my general impression of Epstein's MO wrt consent and also one major thing which I think is appealing in men about young partners, which is sexual inexperience. If you want an eager escort who has a great technique in oral sex, your ideal woman is likely a 25-30yo who has given head a few thousand times in her life and perfected her game, not a 16yo hooker. On priors, I don't think that Epstein specifically recruited virgins for his guests, because most of his guests would not appreciate a woman who curls down on the floor and starts crying when she is told what is expected of her, but I think that the whole setup was pretty much build around maximizing the power difference, his guests were probably into making their victims submit to sex acts which were way out of their comfort zone.
It's much easier to get a 16-yo to keep her mouth shut. A 26-yo will go to a gossip rag to tell everything about the sexual preferences of VIPs she was paid to have sex with the very moment her escorting career starts to wind down. A 16-yo is still young and stupid enough to be coerced into keeping her mouth shut, even stupid stuff like "would you like your parents to learn what you did?" will work on them.
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My impression is that Epstein's clients were not particularly requesting for underage, that was Epstein himself, and that he deliberately recruited teenaged girls who were vulnerable because they did not have great lives with bright futures ahead. 100% of these girls understood when getting on the plane that 'I need you to work a high end party' meant 'have sex with the guests'- especially because my impression is that, like most pimps, Epstein himself was having sex with them.
It seems likely to me that many of Epstein's guests were getting off on the taboo aspect of having sex with minors. I doubt that 'power differentials' are a big part of the explanation for the simple reason that his guests already have a very high power differential compared to the vast majority of possible partners. Epstein wasn't offering anything special enough there to make committing crimes appealing.
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What's the source of sympathy over casting couch situations? It's gross and worthy of judgment, but against both participants. The only people getting screwed are 1) the investors in the project, as the caster is misusing their authority to choose a (presumably inferior) casting option instead of fulfilling their responsibilities; and 2) the superior casting option who gets passed over. Just a particularly sleazy form of graft.
The young women choosing to do this might have economic struggles, but those aren't unique to them; whatever empathy they deserve for that should also be extended to all the women (and men!) who have the same economic struggles but don't choose the couch.
It depends on specifics, but in a lot of casting-couch cases I think the actress who's been offered the deal has a credible fear of retaliation if she says no - not just that she won't get the job, but that the spited producer will pull strings to get her blacklisted and ruin her career, leaving her much worse off than one who was never offered the deal in the first place. While you can still view giving in as the morally worse option, I think even an actress who gives in to that kind of ultimatum deserves a lot more sympathy than one who tries to sleep her way to a job of her own volition, with no expectation of actively negative consequences if she doesn't.
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Hmm I can think of at least 2 other people getting screwed…
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I found Giuffre more sympathetic than, say, Maria Farmer, who seems a little crazy (but at least said No to Maxwell). I also think it's clear from Giuffre's own barely readable biography that she was definitely whoring herself out from a very young age, well before Maxwell marked her for Epstein. Now did she have a terrible home life? It certainly seems so. But Epstein didn't make her a prostitute. That she happened to be working at Mar-A-Lago was an absolute fluke. It's also clear she ran the game as far as she could until she felt she was fed up with it, at which point she bailed to Thailand on Epstein's coin and decided to run for it. It's a compelling dramatic story but the narrative (now set in stone after her death) that she was always Epstein's victim leaves out a lot of her own really shitty choices. I do feel bad for her, but hers is a tragedy in the Greek drama sense --her determination, her ability to push through and survive, ended up leading to the life that destroyed her.
What is that quoted from?
Fixed. Apologies.
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Or maybe they read it like I do as "not being charged with crime".
Certainly there's room between "literally nothing changes" and "the white nationalist commie trad NOI extremists take control" right?
Bruh, people call that pedophilia all the time in other cases too. The "it's actually ephebophilia" statement is practically a meme of its own! And lots of people do get arrested for sexting/banging minors so I don't see why elites should be any different.
Also interesting little hedge in there of "most", ok so what about the ones that were a fair bit younger?
But they weren't just attracted to the teens! They were apparently trafficking them, pimping them out and having sex with them. People already get arrested for that and called pedophiles.
Doesn't seem like they need it too much, even just the stuff we publically know suggests they have access to a lot of our phone and computer data already.
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You are again purposely ignoring and denying what people mean when they talk about the situation. It's a ring of geriatric men trafficking and abusing a bunch of underage girls. Most people would agree that such a thing can be described as a pedo ring.
Nobody cares that technically, abusing 16 year old girls does not meet the criteria for a DSM-5 diagnosis for the mental disorder. People are still going to call them pedos.
Then people are wrong. I discussed this before.
Let me put it more plainly and provocatively. The problem with calling a 50yo who fucks a 16yo teen in a clearly coercive setting "pedophile" is that you are equating something which is deeply morally objectionable with something which is fine.
In case there is any doubt about which is which, yes, I am claiming that there is nothing morally wrong with being a pedophile, in the technically sense of the word.
Now obviously, it is a sexual orientation which sucks greatly for anyone with a remotely working moral compass (and will lead to behavior which is very wrong for those without one), and I thank my maker that I am into women with tits instead so I have access to ethically produced porn and ethical opportunities to have sex (even if being bi would be strictly preferable in that regard).
Sure, there is a large overlap between child-fuckers and pedophiles, but my problem is with child-fuckers as child-fuckers. If some asshole decides to sexually abuse a kid, I don't give a rats ass if they were into kids or watching MILF porn at the same time to keep aroused, they should go to prison either way.
Using pedos as a synonym for child abusers is bad. Expanding it to include creepy sex pest-ry targeting underage victims is even worse. I also do not think that the general vibe of "your sexual orientation makes you the likeliest group to be deported to death camps without anyone else saying a word in your defense" is actually very effective at keeping ethical pedos (who are not complicit in sexual abuse) ethical, probably a society which was meh about ethical pedos but very much against child abusers (which mostly describes western legal systems) would offer a better gradient.
I am not much of a linguistic prescriptionist, normally. I use to beg the question correctly, but it is not a hill I am willing to die on. Still, words matter, and I think that on this forum we should strive to use accurate terminology even if 85% of the general population is using it in a more diffuse manner, especially if it involves emotionally charged words which are intentionally repurposed for clear political goals.
As another example (without a strict 1:1 correspondence), consider a (perhaps hypothetical) attempt to redefine "rape" as "any sex act perpetrated by a man which involved a woman who either did not consent or regretted consenting subsequently". (It is not entirely divorced from common usage, people have sex under the influence of voluntarily consumed drugs which would inhibit their legal ability to consent all the time, and end up in situations where they can decide on the next day that they were raped (and then decide to report it or not) or retroactively grant consent. (Perhaps not legally, but practically. Legally, "last night when I was dead drunk, I urged my hot husband to fuck my brains out and he did" might still be rape, but unless she bring that up in divorce proceedings eventually, nobody cares.)) Still, I would definitely argue against anyone here who would try to push such a new definition, because it hopelessly muddies the water by using the same term for different things which are not remotely morally equivalent.
There's nothing morally wrong with being a psychopath either but the stigma around that term isn't going away anytime soon either. Having a mental disorder may be morally neutral but the results are not for the vast majority of those afflicted, so I can't blame the public for having prejudice.
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It's not pedophilia, but we should still call them pedos anyway. However, there's only so far you can push this socially useful equivocation before it starts backfiring.
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Another thing to consider here, is that within the past 20 years, the Catholic Church did suffer tremendous fallout for this thing.
It suffered massive losses in cultural influence, credibility, financial payouts, and legal win against it.
There’s two points here: one is that to the average person, this is a massive point in the “it could happen” column. Justice can be seen at least to a degree that isnt zero.
Second, all the excuses AT is making about technicality of ‘pedo ring’ applied here as well, but didn’t matter to the public perception. was widely regarded and reported as a pedo scandal, when it was mostly gay pederasty. The same mainstream taking down the Church downplayed this, not to justify them, but to avoid crossfire against homosexuality as well as get maximal outrage.
So again, ATs cutsie sneering at MAGAs that “this isn’t how it works” is completely at odds with how it actually did work and recently.
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But it’s a big deal if a group of Zionists, by way of Mega Group founder Les Wexner who seeded Epstein with 200-400 million dollars, was involved in blackmailing influential Americans to do Israel’s bidding as part of some insane fifth-gen lobbying campaign. It’s a very big deal that Jeffrey Epstein’s own brother says
(as I predicted in a comment weeks back). There’s a lot of evidence that this is what happened which I won’t rehash as I’ve commented on it enough recently.
Epstein making allusions is peak Epstein. There’s nothing in this statement. What did he know? As usual, unreported because there’s a good chance it was either third-hand hearsay or nothing.
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Turok: the Epstein saga is materially true in a broader sense. Leave the conspiracy aside for a moment. You only have to look as far as his first brush with the law over the issue, where he leverages connections and money to get off with a slap on the wrist and the government not looking too closely. Even if the public is fuzzy on the details they more or less have the right general direction here in terms of rich shadowy men with connections getting away with stuff. Also: shocker alert, what you call the "online right" is not entirely made up of dishonest hacks who only care about the returns. Nope, they are by and large true believers. They don't give a fig about the actual long-term second-order effects. It's not some big plan that you're bursting their bubble about. There's no Santa Claus, here, in the first place, so pointing out he's not real doesn't do anything. In that light, I find your comment to be pretty pointless, and that's coming from me who kind of agrees about the status quo being unreasonably sticky *taps username, this time unironically and that generic replacement figures obviously quite often come from a similar statistical ideological and demographic distributions as the prior ones.
In fact I also happen to think that a large proportion of politicians are also either true believers or so ideologically captured as to make little difference, because of the pipeline that produces them, but most people seem to disagree and consider them almost all pure ambitious sociopaths with agnostic or apathetic personal politics, with a handful of outright corrupt ones on the side.
Nobody disputes this, though. Well connected billionaires getting away with stuff is Tuesday.
The rich and powerful are expected to get away with some crimes. Sex trafficking children is not on that list.
In a civilized society, that kind of behavior gets you executed, and not because you know too much.
Err, the west covers for sex trafficking kids all the time, and you don't need to be rich and powerful to get away with it (though it helps). Popular entertainers get away with it. Politicians cover massive-scale abuse - far beyond what Epstein is accused of - up and journalists look the other way to avoid having their foreign policies outed as idiotic, avoid having to be on the same side as icky migration restrictionists, or to avoid being called racist.
Don't we all regard those examples as moral failures though?
I've yet to see anybody seriously take the position that grooming gangs were okay, I've only seen shameful denial.
And yet lots of people keep covering such things up and not freaking out and leaking them out of moral outrage.
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So your contention is that there has never been a civilized society?
Rather, that we are not living up to much of our ideals.
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Real civilization has never been tried.
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I think your viewpoint slots into a general pattern of enlightened
centrismchilling effects denial, where people of various colours explain to you why electing this or that candidate, winning or losing one token court case, or taking one town of 10k in Ukraine or successfully defending it will not actually make a difference.In reality, so much political power is determined not by what battles you can win, but what battles you can avoid even having to fight because your enemy is demoralised about his prospect of winning. The superior fighter will win 100 battles and lose his 101st because he is worn out, while the superior posturer will be secure in his position without having to fight a single battle.
The whole Epstein situation is a fuck-you flag planted in the town square, saying "we can even get away with this sort of thing". That this is about pederasty doesn't even matter, except insofar as there is common knowledge that a majority of people considers it the most heinous of crimes. While the flag stands, how many people who might otherwise choose to expend effort to go after a politician or dignitary for some lesser conspiracy or abuse of power will wisely choose to not even try?
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