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No, that is not how being an accessory works in the slightest.
I meant in the moral sense (and, as FttG said, the reputational sense), not in the strict legal sense. I thought describing the alternative scenario as "ethically exculpatory" made this clear and I didn't need to specify both times.
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Not in the legal sense, but absolutely in the reputational sense.
Only if you accept the basic guilt-by-contagion premise of the left side of the Culture War.
I disagree. Knowing that an acquaintance of yours is a pederast (or "merely" an ephebophile) and refusing to report him or cut ties with him reflects badly on you, even if it's not legally actionable, and this social convention long predates wokeness.
What crimes does this extend to? There are crimes of a whole range of severity. At what point does it become severe enough that you are obliged to cut ties or report? And what if you have less than 100% confidence that he committed the bad deed?
I haven't thought about this in a systemic way, but if I knew for a fact that a friend of mine had done one of the below (without having been punished), I think I would have no choice but to cut ties with him:
I'm sure there are others that one might add to the list, those are just the first few that come to mind. If I knew for a fact that a friend of mine had stolen someone's wallet or defrauded someone out of a significant amount of money, I would probably cut ties with them as well (although in that case it would be more out of concern that he might do the same to me).
What if I don't know for sure? If my friend has been publicly accused of one of these serious crimes, but I personally think he's innocent, then I don't think I have any obligation to cut ties with him (indeed, probably the worst thing about #MeToo was the number of men who lost their livelihoods and entire social circles on the basis of allegations which were implausible on their face). If he hasn't been publicly accused, but rumours are starting to circulate, then I think one ought to do one's due diligence, investigate if the rumours sound credible, and escalate if so.
I was thinking more "has done racist things". Does blackface, or a couple of racist remarks, mean you need to cut ties? What if it's less than 100% certain that the racist remarks were in context?
I'm trying to think of how explicitly racist someone would need to be before I would cut ties with them. Certainly I wouldn't want to be friends with someone if I found out that they had a swastika tattoo they had no intention of removing.
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Are you really saying that there is no such thing as a moral duty to report or otherwise act upon knowledge of evil deeds committed by others? If you're a passive witness to a murder or rape, and could identify the culprit, it's not at all immoral of you to move on with your life and keep the secret? Really?
When Epstein first got arrested, the investigator reached out broadly to Epstein's social caste for information. Purportedly, the only person to take the call and speak with him was Trump.
My google-fu is failing to find a cite for that; the current doc dump is obviously clogging the search results. But pretend for a second that it's true. In that hypothetical, would you say that such an action would make Trump uniquely righteous?
There's also the line from Trump saying Epstein likes women "on the younger side". It's hard to be sure without hearing the tone, but that seems like a polite, faux-friendly knifing, similar to the comments people like Seth McFarland made about Weinstein before his behavior came fully to light.
Do you think McFarland is more or less "guilty by association" than other celebrities who knew about Weinstein but kept silent?
This is an interesting point. I would hesitate to say "uniquely righteous" with no qualifications, insofar as providing information about evil deeds you were privy to if and when investigators reach out is considerably less virtuous than proactively volunteering it. If he did Know Things, then sitting on the information for that long isn't great. But it certainly casts Trump in a better light than not speaking out at all.
I doubt we'll ever get precise confirmation either way. My guess was that it was less privy to knowledge and more "broken stair" type rumors, and that the decision to take the call was heavily motivated by personal dislike.
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None of what you said is about "Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him".
Perhaps I should have specified "was an active pedophile", but I should have thought context and common sense made it obvious that I was not speaking about hypothetical preferences on Epstein's part. Granting the implicit "active", active pedophilia is a type of rape and so the post you're replying to does in fact cover this case.
Okay, let's say you know your buddy Bill likes seventeen year olds and has dated a few and slept with them. So far as you know, those have been consensual relationships. Technically, though, that's statutory rape.
Do you:
(1) "Gosh Bill, you're thirty-five years old, you're way too old for those girls and besides they're legally underage. I wish you'd stop, man, it's not good" and quietly distance yourself from the friendship
(2) "Hello, police officer? I wish to report a serial rapist, name of William Jones, address 63 Greenwood Lane, 85th Street, Middletown"
I think a lot of people would go for (1) and if that makes the majority of humans immoral, well duh man, this is the Fall and Original Sin.
We're making assumptions there that Trump knew Epstein was having sex with way too young girls and that this sex was coerced and was indeed rape, not just the murky area of "paying for sex with sex workers". He knew all about it, and there was no way he could not have known, and because he never called the cops then all the rest of it.
Do we know for sure all parts of the above follow? Did he know Epstein liked them age fourteen not seventeen? Did he agree that seventeen is not 'old and mature enough to know own mind' and so statutory rape, or agree that "what is the difference between seventeen years and three hundred and sixty four days as opposed to eighteen years"? I've seen the arguments over 'if a thirteen year old is mature enough, they can indeed decide to be sexually active', so let's not get too precious there over "but he should have known that girl was not eighteen!"
I don't know what anybody knew for sure, and the waters are now so muddied I don't think anyone will know unless we get someone's diary with "Today my good buddy Jeff got me a fresh little fourteen year old high schooler to rape, heh-heh-heh" entries.
You're of course right that there are unknowns and gray areas, but… I'm just stuck thinking of things like the "massage" anecdote summarized in this old effortspot. (Its central thesis that there were no "real" Epstein files has of course suffered just a bit lately, but that's not really relevant to the point I'm making.) By accounts like these, while not all the girls Epstein liked were necessarily that young, we are very much not talking about him sleeping with normal prostitutes some of whom happened to be younger than they looked. Epstein seemed to specifically get off on shocking and "corrupting" ingenues, breaking their boundaries.
If I learn that my good buddy Bill has romantically dated seventeen-year-olds, or that he once hired a busty prostitute and still went through with the act after learning that she'd lied about her age - then yeah, I might be inclined to leave it at a private admonishment. But if I learn that my good buddy Bill has been hiring ordinary teenagers he's never met before to give him massages, then exposing himself to them when they arrive and attempting to escalate from there? In that case he's not the Bill I thought I was friends with. In the name of the friendship we had, I might give him one (1) chance to mend his ways, but if anything about his apology sounds phony, if I get the slightest hint that he's carried right on in months or years to come - then yeah, I'm calling the cops, or at least a local paper or something.
Obviously Trump wouldn't have been privy to this specific kind of encounter. But when we talk about Epstein sleeping with teens, we're very much talking about him liking to prey on ingenues, about a kind of soft-coercion at best - about a pervy taste for deflowering the young. We are not dealing with a comparatively excusable scenario along the lines of "you're sleeping with a lot of cheap whores, and it's a fact of life that some whores are actually 17, and even if notice noticed, it'll be materially apparent to anyone who sleeps with a lot of prostitutes that sleeping with the 17-year-old isn't actually qualitatively different or more wicked from sleeping with her 18-year-old colleague, so you develop a kind of YOLO attitude about it". That very much affects the extent to which I would judge an associate of Epstein's for keeping silent about what was going on if he did know.
As to how plausible it is that Trump did know… again, this set of tastes doesn't seem to me like something Epstein was trying very hard to hide to people who came to the island. Surely you would notice that while you're leading your buxom beauty back to the bedroom, Jeff is pawing at a nervous-looking girl in more casual clothing (never mind whether you can tell exactly what age she is)? And this is assuming he doesn't actively hint at his ability to procure such girls to you when you first come to the island, because he doesn't know what you like yet and has to find out somehow. Besides, the apparent veiled references to it from Trump seem pretty believable. But I will grant you that it is the most tentative part of the chain.
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