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.
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.
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.
There were also single contact people that can be explained by Epstein operating a honeypot. If he couldn’t work 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.
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 a 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.
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.
Your point reminds me of the logic behind certain religious psychologies that see this world not as an end in itself, but as a proving ground or a purgatorial space. Its morality is sometimes inverted for a higher, otherworldly purpose.
Take public execution in medieval Christian Europe. While a spectacle of deterrence, some theologians (like Nicholas of Cusa aka who I picture rubbing my rod at night) grappled with a darker rationale: that the intense physical pain of burning could serve as a form of accelerated penance. The idea was that this suffering might pay the temporal debt of sin before death, potentially sparing the soul a longer, more severe punishment in the afterlife. The executioner, in this context, was performing an act of supposed spiritual charity, which is actually why executioners were often clergy or faith oriented men.
This mirrors,the core doctrine of Frankism, an 18th-century Jewish heretical movement. Frankists believed in ‘redemption through sin.’ Their goal was at times personal regret, but a cosmological acquisition of a higher knowledge. The pleasure or suffering of the sinner was incidental to this divine path to regret and penance.
We see a third variant in groups like ISIS. When they stoned Muslims for adultery, it was framed as enacting divine law to purify the community and offer the sinner ritual atonement. When they cut the throats of Western captives, the logic switched entirely to theater of terror, a spectacle for global distancing (stay in your country, as a result of the frequent invasions of countries from west asia), but also because in Islam, the act of cutting through the neck artery is seen as a quick and painless death. It causes death quickly because oxygen output runs out very fast and is why it is the mandatory way of making meat halal, part of it is to use a quick, simple and relatively painless death.
The unifying, and strangely rational, thread is this: when reality is viewed through an eschatological or cosmological lens, worldly concepts of pleasure, pain, and even morality become secondary. Acts are judged not by their immediate human cost, but by their function in a grand narrative of spiritual war, purification, or redemption. It’s a logic that operates on a plane completely separate from humanist rationale because humans are not the end all be all.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 couldn’t work 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.
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 a 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.
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.
Your point reminds me of the logic behind certain religious psychologies that see this world not as an end in itself, but as a proving ground or a purgatorial space. Its morality is sometimes inverted for a higher, otherworldly purpose.
Take public execution in medieval Christian Europe. While a spectacle of deterrence, some theologians (like Nicholas of Cusa aka who I picture rubbing my rod at night) grappled with a darker rationale: that the intense physical pain of burning could serve as a form of accelerated penance. The idea was that this suffering might pay the temporal debt of sin before death, potentially sparing the soul a longer, more severe punishment in the afterlife. The executioner, in this context, was performing an act of supposed spiritual charity, which is actually why executioners were often clergy or faith oriented men.
This mirrors,the core doctrine of Frankism, an 18th-century Jewish heretical movement. Frankists believed in ‘redemption through sin.’ Their goal was at times personal regret, but a cosmological acquisition of a higher knowledge. The pleasure or suffering of the sinner was incidental to this divine path to regret and penance.
We see a third variant in groups like ISIS. When they stoned Muslims for adultery, it was framed as enacting divine law to purify the community and offer the sinner ritual atonement. When they cut the throats of Western captives, the logic switched entirely to theater of terror, a spectacle for global distancing (stay in your country, as a result of the frequent invasions of countries from west asia), but also because in Islam, the act of cutting through the neck artery is seen as a quick and painless death. It causes death quickly because oxygen output runs out very fast and is why it is the mandatory way of making meat halal, part of it is to use a quick, simple and relatively painless death.
The unifying, and strangely rational, thread is this: when reality is viewed through an eschatological or cosmological lens, worldly concepts of pleasure, pain, and even morality become secondary. Acts are judged not by their immediate human cost, but by their function in a grand narrative of spiritual war, purification, or redemption. It’s a logic that operates on a plane completely separate from humanist rationale because humans are not the end all be all.
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?
Just a part of you?
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.