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We interrupt your regularly scheduled Iran posts with more Epstein posts.
Melania Trump says rumors linking her to Epstein need to stop
For reference: This document, a proffer by one of Epstein's assistants, claims that Epstein introduced Melania to Donald; the assistant also worked for Paolo Zampolli, the man who hosted the party at which Trump and Melania met. Another piece of correspondence by a redacted author to Epstein claims that "I remember flying back with Donald on his plane the first weekend I went to visit you in Florida was the weekend he met Melania and he kept on coming out of the bedroom saying 'wow what a hot piece of ass'". So at the least, her claim that "My name has never appeared in court documents, depositions, victim statements, or FBI interviews surrounding the Epstein matter" is incorrect.
Michael Wolff, who become a sort of Epstein confidant while researching Trump, said Epstein claimed that the first time Trump and Melania banged was on the infamous Lolita Express.
This appears to be the referenced correspondence with Maxwell. Seems a little bit friendlier than "casual".
There are so many legitimate reasons why the Orange Man is Bad that it's a bit depressing that so many people feel the need to make up fake reasons too. Like, the corruption, incompetence, and blatant buffoonery aren't enough? We have to pretend Trump is a pedophile too?
I've always enjoyed hanging out in TheMotte, but the Epstein discourse is probably the best case example as to why this space matters. Epstein skepticism carries high social risks literally anywhere else.
The only thing I find mildly interesting about this whole meta crime drama is the selectively applied generosity reserved for individuals named in the "files" if they sit on the correct ideological shelf. How do you still stan for Trump, Clinton or Noam Chomsky if you actually believe they sinisterly engaged in (or at least overlooked) child rape and cannibalism? Maybe you are just genuinely disillusioned and don't want to believe your favourite leaders and intellectuals are evil but, if not child sex trafficking, what will get you to rescind your support for them?
In the spirit of "nothing ever happens", a mass societal shakeup by the world's most armed civilian underclass to punish their evil elites remains a meme.
Instead, it will be always the proles who ultimately pay for their sovereign's crimes. Now also factor in 2 decades of moral panic over video games, UK's online age verification laws, payment processors pressuring steam to delist certain games, Nexus mods removing ANY mod that touches child NPCs (completely non-sexual), Netflix's "Adolescence" driven "manosphere" hysteria, we might be looking at the most draconian assaults on ordinary people's civil liberties and digital lives since the Patriot Act.
This will be the real travesty of Epsteingate IMO.
Evil women gonna evil woman, what else is new?
This is also just the natural result of Gen X aging into the Moral Majority position. They're not digital natives, which is part of why their approach is largely Boomer 2.0. Remember that a good chunk of them came of age in the peak Pedophile Panic years, so this being one of Their Issues should probably be expected.
Liberals can likely beat them, just like the Boomers were beaten last time (and 1A code-is-speech + most Internet business located in the US + current administration unfriendly to blatant foreign attempts to assert extraterritorial sovereignty helps with this), but the technological conditions may not be as favorable this time around for the freedom side due to (among other things) long-established better alternatives and an increased amount of centralization, especially considering what apps are permitted to run on which devices. And trivial inconveniences aren't.
I can accept this form of "abuse" more than the kind of abuse evil women administer, with polite society's permission, daily. At least we can harden targets against this, but nobody would dare cross a teacher transing their kid, let alone give them the Adolescence treatment that behavior actually deserves. (Not that that series was anything other than woman-approved child pornography anyway.)
LOL. The internet was not, in fact, invented just in time for the millennials. And digital networks existed before the Internet was generally available.
Oh no, of course not. Gen X is 45-60 now; millennials are 30-45. The Internet graduated from being the domain of the specialist to general usefulness in the late '90s, so "just in time for" is still broadly accurate. At that point, Gen X was half past 35, so per Douglas Adams the Internet is still against the natural order of things for a lot of them, where for Gen Y it is not.
The Greater Eternal September came about coincident with the advent of the mobile VT-100, most commonly known as the "iPhone", but that's more a Gen Z thing. (Gen Alpha's major technological advancement is AI; they have the most to lose from Gen X caprice, as they're actively in its crosshairs.)
Actually, a good chunk of millennials aren't digital natives either, but in 30 years most of what Gen X is about to impose will likely start to lose significant ground. Most of the younger generations know "but teh pedos" is a Gen X thing anyway (outside of the conservatives among them that just copy whatever Gen X does, much like how millennials did with Boomer thought [particularly 2nd wave feminism]), or are at least in a better position to see it as bullshit as they grow up.
The midpoint of generation X didn't reach 35 until 2007.
The first commercial ISP was 1989. The original Eternal September was September 1993. And services such as AOL, Genie, Compu$erve, Fidonet, and standalone dialup BBSs were older, some much older.
These still required specialist knowledge, and specialist equipment, to actually use (AOL did try their best though). The technology became refined enough for general use in the late '90s; graduation from dial-up to dedicated always-connected hardware helped with that especially in the pre-cellphone days.
Academia was a few years ahead of that in terms of having those kinds of networks ahead of time, of course.
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