I’m genuinely baffled how many oligarchs had contact with Epstein. I do believe their primary job qualification is a lack of morals, but there’s so many ways to be amoral, you don’t have to all be friends with the guy that offers pedophilia.
Epstein’s “day job” was being a socialite. He was the guy who knew everybody. If you wanted an introduction, he could do it. He was the guy who made sure that the riff raff stayed out, even if they were rich.
I’m pretty sure that everybody knew he was always around “young women”, but I strongly suspect that most of the people he interacted with didn’t know about the child sex abuse. They were there for his “rolodex”.
But, the end result is that because he was the guy who knew everybody in a position of power, his network shows who has the power. My guess is that at least half the people he had in his network were not into child sex abuse, and didn’t know that he was involved in that. But, I have only the world’s tiniest violin to play for those people. I think they’re guillotine-worthy because of their abuses of power, and how they hoarded obscene amounts of wealth. For far too long, the ultra rich have had a good public image in the US. People should have been furious with them just for hoarding all that wealth. And, the Epstein folks are the ones who not only hoarded the wealth, but spent it to gain power, which they used to warp society to benefit themselves. So, now everybody’s disgusted with them and hates them, it’s for the wrong reasons, but at least they’re hated.
There were also single contact people that can be explained by Epstein operating a honeypot. If he could worked with you, he would get blackmail on you. And then you get scenes like this in The Simpsons after Matt Groening’s name appeared on the flight list.
Our previous president son is on the files. There was a news article where he explained that Epstein had contacted him for fundraising or some other legal thing and they met somewhere once for a short while but that’s all. There was also other finns, like one young woman who applied for an assistant job on some of his businesses but didn’t get hired.
So, while there’s a crapload of people who should be convicted and thrown in a jail there’s also a ton of people who don’t have anything to do with pedo-ring or anything else. Good to keep in mind that having someones name on the files alone doesn’t mean too much.
And just to avoid any confusion, if you are mentioned in the files more than Jesus is mentioned on the bible it’s not an accident or one time thing. Allegedly that applies at least to Trump and there should be a small and dark cell somewhere ready.
Epstein was not just a pedo pimp. He was a power-broker and a fixer for the American and Israeli rich elites. Not everyone was in for the girls, some of them were in for the other illegal stuff.
Just oligarchs? Oligarchs don’t suprise me at all. The more surprising aspect is so many artists, scientists etc. I guess humans have a weakness for someone who makes them feel like a privileged member of a boy’s club.
Noam Chomsky, that’s what broke my faith in humanity. His work in linguistics is why I’m a computer scientist, his work in political activism was my introduction to leftist theory, so much of what I do and think every day is directly influenced by his work.
Turns out at the end of the day he’s a neo-liberal apartheid supporting hypocrite and possibly a pedophile.
I’m kinda surprised that him proposing that the US should throw Ukraine to the wolves (Russia) didn’t completely tank his career. In hindsight, for the past 20 years he’s kinda just turned into a tankie (or at least tankie-adjacent) due the the US’s misdeeds in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
While the US has done wrong, that doesn’t automatically make its adversaries right.
Yeah it sucks. Don’t know if you are still in the field but I guess best reaction to this would be to set a better example in your corner of the world. Take what is good leave what is shitty and make sure to inform people who don’t know.
I’m way further left now, but I still recommend Manufacturing Consent as an essential reading, as it opened my eyes to how the rich controlled media shapes narratives and enables genocides and destructive imperial wars and regime changes. It’s just hard to recommend it now with his name attached.
I want to argue that there was no reason to recommend him before. Nothing will change my mind that Manufacturing Consent (1988) was written to distract from Inventing Reality (1986). Only one of those books has a dedicated Wikipedia page, and it’s not the one written by the communist.
Beyond just the pedophilia, his (Epstein) operation was largely one of socialising, and securing (probably coerced) introductions from people he helped facilitate and now held blackmail over.
e.g. using blackmail material on a Bill Gates to secure an introduction to another wealthy and influential individual, offering them a “massage” and then producing kompromat at a later date to bring them into his circle.
Now don’t get me wrong, everyone who found themselves in this position was a willing participant, not a victim - but I can understand how so many oligarchs eventually found their way into his little black book.
What this whole thing has taught me is that there is a market among billionaires for someone to peddle enslaved kids.
Now epstein is gone, and has been for years, but that demand doesn’t just die. I don’t have proof, but there is zero doubt in my mind that epstein is not a one and done. There’s either another epstein, or more likely a dozen smaller epsteins out there.
There’s a part of me that thinks all these ICE abducting kids is being done at trumps order, specifically as a means to replace epstein.
I don’t think there’s any reason to find as replacement for Epstein. There’s almost certainly other people already running those sorts of events. Jared Leto has a sex cult island. I think they’re all consenting adults, but you know he’s trading favors to producers that want to visit so he can keep getting movie roles.
Qanon was correct in the same way your conspiracy theorist uncle was right about MKULTRA. There’s a quick summary that can give a pretty big overlap of them and reality, but that’s not why these people believe this, and the more details, context, or scope you add the less they align.
Qanon is an intellectual descendant of the satanic panic, and the framing it uses is very much in that line of thinking. It’s framing it as political enemies raping young children as part of a dark ritual that involves blood libel.
The Epstein situation in contrast is that the rich, powerful, and influential run in overlapping social circles and within them there are people whose role is to facilitate connections (Peter Thiel actually facilitates a similar role). These people may also facilitate other connections like drugs (there’s so much drugs in the Epstein stories) and pimping. The pimping for the elite, at least by one of these people, also seemed to disproportionately traffic adolescents and many of the rich, powerful, and influential clients, friends, and connections of this man seemed to either partake in his underage victims or knowingly look the other way in order to maintain these beneficial connections.
Both of these are very bad things involving the rich and powerful engaging in pedophilia, but the former is utterly fantastical and originates in a panic with no evidence and itself lacks evidence, while the latter is a realistic situation that has a lot of evidence for it
It’s quite interesting. My great grandmother apparently used to talk about the Roman Catholics abusing children and mothers in the Magdalene Laundries and people saw her as a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Squid Game in a way is also a story about the rich elite participating in sickening immoral activities
That’s the thing, some conspiracy theories are going to be true, most aren’t, and some will bear a passing resemblance to the truth.
The main tool at our disposal here is skepticism. Are the claims being made plausible? Are the motivations realistic? Is there evidence from reputable sources? Am I approaching this with a critical mindset? Am I focused on the explicit claims, or am I allowing people to “yes and” this? Am I letting my emotions or preconceived biases and prejudices cloud my judgment?
There has been lot of information released indicating Epstein’s child trafficking ring was barely impacted by his absence. He had lots of conspirators, most of whom are probably still at it, nevermind all of the Mossad, KGB, and CIA cooperation.
I’ll check it out, but it seems pretty straightforward to me. When a social class sits outside the rules the rest of society is expected to live by, they get entitled and they get bored. Since they aren’t entirely immune to public opinion, they also become easy targets for blackmail as they push towards more and more “exclusive” forms of “entertainment”.
Exactly, also people tend to tolerate what their peers consider normal. We’re basically always checking reality off of how those in our circle react to things. This means that if your circle assumes old men always want to sleep with 18-20 year old women, and they do so regularly, then if suddenly a 17 year old girl shows up in the mix and nobody reacts it can be easily rationalized. And from there you can slip to a lot of 16 year olds. And while new people may not be comfortable with it, they likely have financial incentives not to walk away or cause a scene, because he wasn’t just a pimp, he was also a matchmaker, then in that case the rationalization engine that is the human brain can go to town.
I advise you do and it may get a bit more difficult to follow but your comment is partly right yes. The only aspect of it that differs is that it is a form of acquiring knowledge, because knowledge of god means knowledge of the sins. Through sinning you acquire understanding of why sins are wrong and the more you sin, the more valid your faith is unlike the faith of someone who has never sinned and therefore has no innate understanding of why sinning is wrong. It is a very strange cult but it is the only one that explains logically why powerful entities choose to commit things like the ones epstein did and there is a lot of goddamn powerful maniacs that have been proven to be true frankist and believe the nonsense it is.
Sounds to me like a rationalization for what I suggested. I’m not saying they don’t believe it but, in my experience, the main predictor of what people believe is what they want to believe. People decide how they want to live, then construct a belief system to justify it.
One of my favorite quotes of all times by henry ford reflects your statementent “Wether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
But I guess my last comment was more to highlight something odd about religious psychology and it is that this planet is not the end goal and that anything done here has implications on the judgement of your character in the afterlife to a faithful person. I guess religious execution would be a good example: In the modern times (this was not just in the middle ages), humans were still burned alive but the goal was not the spectacle as it often is assumed to be. When you read through proper literature from cardinals and theologians of those ages, (my favorite being Nicholas De Cusa which has written on this) the reason they practiced death by fire is because the pain was seen as an instrument to make the sinner regret their actions, allowing them to receive a quicker punishment for their actions here than endure what the christian god would give them in hell. This is therefore an attempt at saving their soul rather than a way to give everyone a show or even to deter other potential sinners by the public spectacle. And this in turn also was seen by the executioner as a way of acquiring more praise from god because they forced someone through a terrible situation, salvating the nature of their soul from any malice BEFORE they pass (meaning they saved the soul by lighting the body on fire). Frankism follows the same logic, sinning as a way to see the evil in sinning before you die and therefore being of higher religious value than a common soul which has not sinned as much. Because the pleasure in sinful acts is not the focus, what is the focus is that sinning brings suffering to even the sinner. This can be understood by false analogies like how a thief or a murderer will not acquire happiness from their act despite those acts being pleasurable to them. Because pleasure and happiness are not the same. Pleasure is ephemeral, happiness lasts. But knowledge also lasts, and so the murderer or thief will be brought to realizing the evil of their ways prior to death, following the assumption that most people experience the regret for sins they have commited before their passing.
And the same goes for ISIS which would stone some of their prisonners, typically when they were muslims as a way of saving them before their passage, strangely they prefered to just kill the caucasian prisonners right away by beheading which then was indeed for the spectale and deterrence of western visitors. This world is weird sometimes.
I’m genuinely baffled how many oligarchs had contact with Epstein. I do believe their primary job qualification is a lack of morals, but there’s so many ways to be amoral, you don’t have to all be friends with the guy that offers pedophilia.
Epstein’s “day job” was being a socialite. He was the guy who knew everybody. If you wanted an introduction, he could do it. He was the guy who made sure that the riff raff stayed out, even if they were rich.
I’m pretty sure that everybody knew he was always around “young women”, but I strongly suspect that most of the people he interacted with didn’t know about the child sex abuse. They were there for his “rolodex”.
But, the end result is that because he was the guy who knew everybody in a position of power, his network shows who has the power. My guess is that at least half the people he had in his network were not into child sex abuse, and didn’t know that he was involved in that. But, I have only the world’s tiniest violin to play for those people. I think they’re guillotine-worthy because of their abuses of power, and how they hoarded obscene amounts of wealth. For far too long, the ultra rich have had a good public image in the US. People should have been furious with them just for hoarding all that wealth. And, the Epstein folks are the ones who not only hoarded the wealth, but spent it to gain power, which they used to warp society to benefit themselves. So, now everybody’s disgusted with them and hates them, it’s for the wrong reasons, but at least they’re hated.
…
Exactly. He was actively seeking out wealthy and influential people to add to his circle of influence.
Pre 2008 conviction contacts can be excused by ignorance. E.g. Stephen Hawking visited Epstein Island with other scientists in 2006.
Gates was happy to make house visits to Epstein in 2011-2014
There were also single contact people that can be explained by Epstein operating a honeypot. If he could worked with you, he would get blackmail on you. And then you get scenes like this in The Simpsons after Matt Groening’s name appeared on the flight list.
https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f69c968e-00c8-4835-b87c-22679aa214ba
Our previous president son is on the files. There was a news article where he explained that Epstein had contacted him for fundraising or some other legal thing and they met somewhere once for a short while but that’s all. There was also other finns, like one young woman who applied for an assistant job on some of his businesses but didn’t get hired.
So, while there’s a crapload of people who should be convicted and thrown in a jail there’s also a ton of people who don’t have anything to do with pedo-ring or anything else. Good to keep in mind that having someones name on the files alone doesn’t mean too much.
And just to avoid any confusion, if you are mentioned in the files more than Jesus is mentioned on the bible it’s not an accident or one time thing. Allegedly that applies at least to Trump and there should be a small and dark cell somewhere ready.
Epstein was not just a pedo pimp. He was a power-broker and a fixer for the American and Israeli rich elites. Not everyone was in for the girls, some of them were in for the other illegal stuff.
Just oligarchs? Oligarchs don’t suprise me at all. The more surprising aspect is so many artists, scientists etc. I guess humans have a weakness for someone who makes them feel like a privileged member of a boy’s club.
Noam Chomsky, that’s what broke my faith in humanity. His work in linguistics is why I’m a computer scientist, his work in political activism was my introduction to leftist theory, so much of what I do and think every day is directly influenced by his work.
Turns out at the end of the day he’s a neo-liberal apartheid supporting hypocrite and possibly a pedophile.
I’m kinda surprised that him proposing that the US should throw Ukraine to the wolves (Russia) didn’t completely tank his career. In hindsight, for the past 20 years he’s kinda just turned into a tankie (or at least tankie-adjacent) due the the US’s misdeeds in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
While the US has done wrong, that doesn’t automatically make its adversaries right.
Yeah it sucks. Don’t know if you are still in the field but I guess best reaction to this would be to set a better example in your corner of the world. Take what is good leave what is shitty and make sure to inform people who don’t know.
I’m way further left now, but I still recommend Manufacturing Consent as an essential reading, as it opened my eyes to how the rich controlled media shapes narratives and enables genocides and destructive imperial wars and regime changes. It’s just hard to recommend it now with his name attached.
I want to argue that there was no reason to recommend him before. Nothing will change my mind that Manufacturing Consent (1988) was written to distract from Inventing Reality (1986). Only one of those books has a dedicated Wikipedia page, and it’s not the one written by the communist.
Beyond just the pedophilia, his (Epstein) operation was largely one of socialising, and securing (probably coerced) introductions from people he helped facilitate and now held blackmail over.
e.g. using blackmail material on a Bill Gates to secure an introduction to another wealthy and influential individual, offering them a “massage” and then producing kompromat at a later date to bring them into his circle.
Now don’t get me wrong, everyone who found themselves in this position was a willing participant, not a victim - but I can understand how so many oligarchs eventually found their way into his little black book.
What this whole thing has taught me is that there is a market among billionaires for someone to peddle enslaved kids.
Now epstein is gone, and has been for years, but that demand doesn’t just die. I don’t have proof, but there is zero doubt in my mind that epstein is not a one and done. There’s either another epstein, or more likely a dozen smaller epsteins out there.
There’s a part of me that thinks all these ICE abducting kids is being done at trumps order, specifically as a means to replace epstein.
I don’t think there’s any reason to find as replacement for Epstein. There’s almost certainly other people already running those sorts of events. Jared Leto has a sex cult island. I think they’re all consenting adults, but you know he’s trading favors to producers that want to visit so he can keep getting movie roles.
So Qanon was partially right? Just named the wrong people
Qanon was correct in the same way your conspiracy theorist uncle was right about MKULTRA. There’s a quick summary that can give a pretty big overlap of them and reality, but that’s not why these people believe this, and the more details, context, or scope you add the less they align.
Qanon is an intellectual descendant of the satanic panic, and the framing it uses is very much in that line of thinking. It’s framing it as political enemies raping young children as part of a dark ritual that involves blood libel.
The Epstein situation in contrast is that the rich, powerful, and influential run in overlapping social circles and within them there are people whose role is to facilitate connections (Peter Thiel actually facilitates a similar role). These people may also facilitate other connections like drugs (there’s so much drugs in the Epstein stories) and pimping. The pimping for the elite, at least by one of these people, also seemed to disproportionately traffic adolescents and many of the rich, powerful, and influential clients, friends, and connections of this man seemed to either partake in his underage victims or knowingly look the other way in order to maintain these beneficial connections.
Both of these are very bad things involving the rich and powerful engaging in pedophilia, but the former is utterly fantastical and originates in a panic with no evidence and itself lacks evidence, while the latter is a realistic situation that has a lot of evidence for it
It’s quite interesting. My great grandmother apparently used to talk about the Roman Catholics abusing children and mothers in the Magdalene Laundries and people saw her as a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Squid Game in a way is also a story about the rich elite participating in sickening immoral activities
That’s the thing, some conspiracy theories are going to be true, most aren’t, and some will bear a passing resemblance to the truth.
The main tool at our disposal here is skepticism. Are the claims being made plausible? Are the motivations realistic? Is there evidence from reputable sources? Am I approaching this with a critical mindset? Am I focused on the explicit claims, or am I allowing people to “yes and” this? Am I letting my emotions or preconceived biases and prejudices cloud my judgment?
There has been lot of information released indicating Epstein’s child trafficking ring was barely impacted by his absence. He had lots of conspirators, most of whom are probably still at it, nevermind all of the Mossad, KGB, and CIA cooperation.
The only logical explanation I have found about it is by learning about Frankism from Professor Jiang and his youtube channel Predictive history.
I’ll check it out, but it seems pretty straightforward to me. When a social class sits outside the rules the rest of society is expected to live by, they get entitled and they get bored. Since they aren’t entirely immune to public opinion, they also become easy targets for blackmail as they push towards more and more “exclusive” forms of “entertainment”.
Exactly, also people tend to tolerate what their peers consider normal. We’re basically always checking reality off of how those in our circle react to things. This means that if your circle assumes old men always want to sleep with 18-20 year old women, and they do so regularly, then if suddenly a 17 year old girl shows up in the mix and nobody reacts it can be easily rationalized. And from there you can slip to a lot of 16 year olds. And while new people may not be comfortable with it, they likely have financial incentives not to walk away or cause a scene, because he wasn’t just a pimp, he was also a matchmaker, then in that case the rationalization engine that is the human brain can go to town.
I advise you do and it may get a bit more difficult to follow but your comment is partly right yes. The only aspect of it that differs is that it is a form of acquiring knowledge, because knowledge of god means knowledge of the sins. Through sinning you acquire understanding of why sins are wrong and the more you sin, the more valid your faith is unlike the faith of someone who has never sinned and therefore has no innate understanding of why sinning is wrong. It is a very strange cult but it is the only one that explains logically why powerful entities choose to commit things like the ones epstein did and there is a lot of goddamn powerful maniacs that have been proven to be true frankist and believe the nonsense it is.
Sounds to me like a rationalization for what I suggested. I’m not saying they don’t believe it but, in my experience, the main predictor of what people believe is what they want to believe. People decide how they want to live, then construct a belief system to justify it.
One of my favorite quotes of all times by henry ford reflects your statementent “Wether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
But I guess my last comment was more to highlight something odd about religious psychology and it is that this planet is not the end goal and that anything done here has implications on the judgement of your character in the afterlife to a faithful person. I guess religious execution would be a good example: In the modern times (this was not just in the middle ages), humans were still burned alive but the goal was not the spectacle as it often is assumed to be. When you read through proper literature from cardinals and theologians of those ages, (my favorite being Nicholas De Cusa which has written on this) the reason they practiced death by fire is because the pain was seen as an instrument to make the sinner regret their actions, allowing them to receive a quicker punishment for their actions here than endure what the christian god would give them in hell. This is therefore an attempt at saving their soul rather than a way to give everyone a show or even to deter other potential sinners by the public spectacle. And this in turn also was seen by the executioner as a way of acquiring more praise from god because they forced someone through a terrible situation, salvating the nature of their soul from any malice BEFORE they pass (meaning they saved the soul by lighting the body on fire). Frankism follows the same logic, sinning as a way to see the evil in sinning before you die and therefore being of higher religious value than a common soul which has not sinned as much. Because the pleasure in sinful acts is not the focus, what is the focus is that sinning brings suffering to even the sinner. This can be understood by false analogies like how a thief or a murderer will not acquire happiness from their act despite those acts being pleasurable to them. Because pleasure and happiness are not the same. Pleasure is ephemeral, happiness lasts. But knowledge also lasts, and so the murderer or thief will be brought to realizing the evil of their ways prior to death, following the assumption that most people experience the regret for sins they have commited before their passing.
And the same goes for ISIS which would stone some of their prisonners, typically when they were muslims as a way of saving them before their passage, strangely they prefered to just kill the caucasian prisonners right away by beheading which then was indeed for the spectale and deterrence of western visitors. This world is weird sometimes.
Just a part of you?