The Epstein thing seems more complex than some people acknowledge. It's pretty obvious that not everything recounted in those emails reflects reality. I don't think George HW Bush really raped a man.
If we stick to what's been supported with independent evidence, clearly Epstein himself is a sleazy pervert, and the question is how it reflects on the elites who stayed friends with him.
Your mileage may vary, but honestly I judge Larry Summers and Peter Attia more harshly for cheating on their wives than for being friends with Epstein. If a close friend of mine did something as bad as what Epstein is known to have done, I'd probably stay friends with them. If a less-important friend did that, I'd probably ditch that friend. But I have friends who frequently drive drunk, for example, putting people's actual lives at risk. I don't disassociate myself from those people.
I don't know how many of Epstein's friendships with these notables were close, as opposed to friendly acquaintances. But it's not obvious to me that what he did means he deserved to have zero friends from then on. Friendship is a funny, complicated thing.
If people stop listening to Larry Summers's thoughts about economics because of this, those people are unreasonable. Whether he's a good person or not, Summers knows what he's talking about.
Most of the high profile cases of so called sex trafficking that get reported in the news don’t really strike me as meeting the plain meaning definition of that term. These stories are mostly about completely voluntary encounters fueled by alcohol, drugs and the irresistible allure of partying and masquerading with wealthy people. The regret only comes after the fact.
If the elites need to be held accountable for their poor behavior, which they absolutely do, then so do their groupies. Let’s not allow the poor behavior of the groupies to be lumped together with the true victims of sex slavery.
Didn’t the FBI yesterday just tell us that 35 teenage girls, including a first victim to come forward who was 14, were found to have been recruited or picked up off the street to give him “sexualized massages”?
Sounds like there was plenty of work for these girls without involving other men. I’m not sure this makes Epstein a whole lot better although society has traditionally reserved scorn for procurers.
The difference between Epstein and Rotherham involves the distinction between consensually given 'sexualized massages' and statutory rape (consensual sexual intercourse with a female under the statutory age of consent, which varies by state), on the one hand, and nonconsensual rape (statutory or otherwise) and 'gang rape' coupled with stories of horrific violence and physical abuse, on the other. Epstein was a creep and a pervert, but for me there is a bright line between teenage girls being recruited to give 'sexualized messages' to Epstein and teenage girls being 'groomed' by young Pakistani Muslim boyfriends and subsequently being gang raped by the boyfriends' fathers, uncles and cousins.
I'm going to be cynical here. There's a reason why prostitution is called 'the oldest profession.' Although I would never have considered doing it myself, I can imagine being a teenage girl and thinking that giving sexualized massages to a wealthy old fart in exchange for money and other perks is easy pickings. And what's the difference between that and working professionally in a massage parlor with a reputation for giving massages with 'happy endings'? Regardless, I think it is highly unprofessional of Alice Evans to conflate the Epstein case with those of the Muslim grooming gangs in the UK and pedophilia in the Catholic Church.
I don’t like the presence of the “happy endings” massage parlors in every other junky suburban retail strip, And I feel like the tedious “happy endings” joke has contributed to normalizing that. Those Fake massage parlors and The Rotherham thing share an etiology. Looking the other way at what immigrants do.
I saw An unusual Twitter thread or something the other day. I’m not a member so I can’t reconstruct It or link it. But basically the guy described going into one of these strip center businesses for you know some quick ethnic take away lunch. And discovering after 15 minutes that there was no kitchen to the place and the girl who had taken his order had vanished.
She actually returned presently with his order from God knows where.
And it got him to thinking, how many of these business All over the city, with hardly ever any patrons or cars about are legitimate? What exactly is going on here and why does nobody care about the hollowing out of the civic sphere?
My hometown was full of strip clubs growing up. Still is I guess, there may be not quite as many as there used to be. A city famously without zoning. Eventually, they passed a law that strip places “clubs” lol could not be within so many feet of an elementary school.
That ordinance is probably still on the books. But the massage parlor with its open yelp reviews Only comes under scrutiny once in a while when the sewer line gets clogged by used condoms. (How dumb do you have to be?)
We are not better off with all this pretense. We’ve ceded far too much, including control of vice, and that includes the extent of “homage that vice will (always) pay to virtue”.
I think the lack of support from the Left for the Iranian opposition is more likely an axis that runs from "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to "no enemies further Left".
Which is more than a little weird because the Iranian government is religious and male supremacist--not usually associated with the left. But they can also be fitted into the narrative of "oppressed by technologically advanced, colonialist Europeans (and Euro descended) who they hate." Which seems to be enough.
The hate may actually help because it is righteous hate, hate of the oppressor--of the small proportion of the world that has kept the rest of the world poor.
I would think the Iranian conflict ought to be perfectly understandable via the oppressed vs oppressor view. You have a radically conservative patriarchal theocracy oppressing a group of (comparatively) secular, liberal dissenters who want a voice in government. Haven't western liberals been telling themselves they've been fighting the same battle for the past century or more in the US, against fundamentalist Christians and whatnot? So what's the problem? What I see instead is just another version of Scott Alexander's "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup:"
A high-falutin’ way of saying progressives have one law, equality, applied on a binary metric of “color”/“no color”. Or: “doesn’t look like me”.
Iranians all look the same and unfortunately look something like ourselves.
Sometimes it can be reshaped - with Yugoslavia, one group being Muslim sufficed to fill in for non-white, in a pinch, and we were off to the races.
With Ukraine and Russia, the left has this same problem the writer describes, obviously - but sorta resolved by making Trump out as a close ally of Putin. If there were no Trump in the picture, I’m not sure what the reaction would be.
"I find Evans persuasive." Give me a break. Evans repeats the trope that Epstein was a 'known pedophile.' The definition of a pedophile is an adult with a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. There is no evidence that Epstein was a pedophile. Yes, the evidence suggests he had an attraction to young women, including some underage minors, but most of the women labeled as 'survivors' of the Epstein cult (i.e. women who have extracted millions from Epstein's estate with the help of some creative lawyers) were over 18 at the time of their involvement with Epstein. Michael Tracey's Substack is my go-to for the Epstein saga. Tracey is a lefty curmudgeon with whom I disagree most topics, but in the case of Epstein (unlike Evans) he has actually taken the trouble to sift through the court proceedings and other evidence in an effort to separate the facts from the fiction. He is a harsh critic of the work of reporters like Julie Brown, whom Evans references. Being 'persuasive' is not a useful criterion in a case such as this.
In my experience, Brits are not very reliable when it comes to analyzing US events and political developments. Among other problems, they have a tendency to view the US through the lens of what happens in the UK, and project the latter onto the former. In this regard, it may be noteworthy that the BBC has been plagued by multiple scandals involving sexual abuse of children by leading TV presenters and personalities. Perhaps all sexual scandals look like pedophilia if you are British.
One of the things I hated most about the military (I was in the Navy for four years) was salutin' and sirrin' merely due to officers being designated as officers. Respect has to be earned. Mere prominence is not enough. I believe Hitler and Stalin were Time's Man of the Year, and war-mongering statists like Woodrow Wilson and FDR routinely make lists of the greatest Presidents.
I don't get your statement that the Iranian revolution doesn't compute on the oppressor-oppressed axis. How could anyone say that the Iranian people are not oppressed??
I guess I see what you mean. What they are interested in isn't oppression per se, but oppression of one group by another -- and especially oppression of certain specific groups.
Smith has some good points but hugely misses the key driver of polarization in America— the open secret illegal discrimination against Republicans as professors at elite colleges.
A necessary, tho perhaps not sufficient step at reducing polarization is to enforce the law. The law says that colleges get tax exemptions partly because they are non-partisan.
They may claim to be so, but they are not—they are partisan Democrats. Often claiming the Republicans are evil.
Polarization is inevitable if the colleges are allowed to follow their current policy, especially on personnel. If college students can’t hear steelman arguments from registered Dems and registered Reps, they won’t understand the issues intellectually.
30% quotas of both Congressional Parties would work faster at reducing polarization than any other proposed campus reform.
The Epstein thing seems more complex than some people acknowledge. It's pretty obvious that not everything recounted in those emails reflects reality. I don't think George HW Bush really raped a man.
If we stick to what's been supported with independent evidence, clearly Epstein himself is a sleazy pervert, and the question is how it reflects on the elites who stayed friends with him.
Your mileage may vary, but honestly I judge Larry Summers and Peter Attia more harshly for cheating on their wives than for being friends with Epstein. If a close friend of mine did something as bad as what Epstein is known to have done, I'd probably stay friends with them. If a less-important friend did that, I'd probably ditch that friend. But I have friends who frequently drive drunk, for example, putting people's actual lives at risk. I don't disassociate myself from those people.
I don't know how many of Epstein's friendships with these notables were close, as opposed to friendly acquaintances. But it's not obvious to me that what he did means he deserved to have zero friends from then on. Friendship is a funny, complicated thing.
If people stop listening to Larry Summers's thoughts about economics because of this, those people are unreasonable. Whether he's a good person or not, Summers knows what he's talking about.
It's almost like you don't know how public perception works. Then again, maybe it wouldn't if more people read your comment.
Most of the high profile cases of so called sex trafficking that get reported in the news don’t really strike me as meeting the plain meaning definition of that term. These stories are mostly about completely voluntary encounters fueled by alcohol, drugs and the irresistible allure of partying and masquerading with wealthy people. The regret only comes after the fact.
If the elites need to be held accountable for their poor behavior, which they absolutely do, then so do their groupies. Let’s not allow the poor behavior of the groupies to be lumped together with the true victims of sex slavery.
Yeah there's a big difference between Epstein and Rotherham
Didn’t the FBI yesterday just tell us that 35 teenage girls, including a first victim to come forward who was 14, were found to have been recruited or picked up off the street to give him “sexualized massages”?
Sounds like there was plenty of work for these girls without involving other men. I’m not sure this makes Epstein a whole lot better although society has traditionally reserved scorn for procurers.
The difference between Epstein and Rotherham involves the distinction between consensually given 'sexualized massages' and statutory rape (consensual sexual intercourse with a female under the statutory age of consent, which varies by state), on the one hand, and nonconsensual rape (statutory or otherwise) and 'gang rape' coupled with stories of horrific violence and physical abuse, on the other. Epstein was a creep and a pervert, but for me there is a bright line between teenage girls being recruited to give 'sexualized messages' to Epstein and teenage girls being 'groomed' by young Pakistani Muslim boyfriends and subsequently being gang raped by the boyfriends' fathers, uncles and cousins.
I guess I don’t consider it a cultural win to re-center a Protestant American idea of such things on the practices of another culture.
I'm going to be cynical here. There's a reason why prostitution is called 'the oldest profession.' Although I would never have considered doing it myself, I can imagine being a teenage girl and thinking that giving sexualized massages to a wealthy old fart in exchange for money and other perks is easy pickings. And what's the difference between that and working professionally in a massage parlor with a reputation for giving massages with 'happy endings'? Regardless, I think it is highly unprofessional of Alice Evans to conflate the Epstein case with those of the Muslim grooming gangs in the UK and pedophilia in the Catholic Church.
I don’t like the presence of the “happy endings” massage parlors in every other junky suburban retail strip, And I feel like the tedious “happy endings” joke has contributed to normalizing that. Those Fake massage parlors and The Rotherham thing share an etiology. Looking the other way at what immigrants do.
I saw An unusual Twitter thread or something the other day. I’m not a member so I can’t reconstruct It or link it. But basically the guy described going into one of these strip center businesses for you know some quick ethnic take away lunch. And discovering after 15 minutes that there was no kitchen to the place and the girl who had taken his order had vanished.
She actually returned presently with his order from God knows where.
And it got him to thinking, how many of these business All over the city, with hardly ever any patrons or cars about are legitimate? What exactly is going on here and why does nobody care about the hollowing out of the civic sphere?
My hometown was full of strip clubs growing up. Still is I guess, there may be not quite as many as there used to be. A city famously without zoning. Eventually, they passed a law that strip places “clubs” lol could not be within so many feet of an elementary school.
That ordinance is probably still on the books. But the massage parlor with its open yelp reviews Only comes under scrutiny once in a while when the sewer line gets clogged by used condoms. (How dumb do you have to be?)
We are not better off with all this pretense. We’ve ceded far too much, including control of vice, and that includes the extent of “homage that vice will (always) pay to virtue”.
True, there is a significant difference, but I've noticed that doesn't stop some podcasters and 'influencers' from conflating the two.
I think the lack of support from the Left for the Iranian opposition is more likely an axis that runs from "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to "no enemies further Left".
Which is more than a little weird because the Iranian government is religious and male supremacist--not usually associated with the left. But they can also be fitted into the narrative of "oppressed by technologically advanced, colonialist Europeans (and Euro descended) who they hate." Which seems to be enough.
The hate may actually help because it is righteous hate, hate of the oppressor--of the small proportion of the world that has kept the rest of the world poor.
The global Left has unrequited love for the Iranian jihadist regime in particular and for jihadists in general.
I would think the Iranian conflict ought to be perfectly understandable via the oppressed vs oppressor view. You have a radically conservative patriarchal theocracy oppressing a group of (comparatively) secular, liberal dissenters who want a voice in government. Haven't western liberals been telling themselves they've been fighting the same battle for the past century or more in the US, against fundamentalist Christians and whatnot? So what's the problem? What I see instead is just another version of Scott Alexander's "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup:"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
A high-falutin’ way of saying progressives have one law, equality, applied on a binary metric of “color”/“no color”. Or: “doesn’t look like me”.
Iranians all look the same and unfortunately look something like ourselves.
Sometimes it can be reshaped - with Yugoslavia, one group being Muslim sufficed to fill in for non-white, in a pinch, and we were off to the races.
With Ukraine and Russia, the left has this same problem the writer describes, obviously - but sorta resolved by making Trump out as a close ally of Putin. If there were no Trump in the picture, I’m not sure what the reaction would be.
"I find Evans persuasive." Give me a break. Evans repeats the trope that Epstein was a 'known pedophile.' The definition of a pedophile is an adult with a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. There is no evidence that Epstein was a pedophile. Yes, the evidence suggests he had an attraction to young women, including some underage minors, but most of the women labeled as 'survivors' of the Epstein cult (i.e. women who have extracted millions from Epstein's estate with the help of some creative lawyers) were over 18 at the time of their involvement with Epstein. Michael Tracey's Substack is my go-to for the Epstein saga. Tracey is a lefty curmudgeon with whom I disagree most topics, but in the case of Epstein (unlike Evans) he has actually taken the trouble to sift through the court proceedings and other evidence in an effort to separate the facts from the fiction. He is a harsh critic of the work of reporters like Julie Brown, whom Evans references. Being 'persuasive' is not a useful criterion in a case such as this.
In my experience, Brits are not very reliable when it comes to analyzing US events and political developments. Among other problems, they have a tendency to view the US through the lens of what happens in the UK, and project the latter onto the former. In this regard, it may be noteworthy that the BBC has been plagued by multiple scandals involving sexual abuse of children by leading TV presenters and personalities. Perhaps all sexual scandals look like pedophilia if you are British.
"The Left’s moral grammar can recognise injustice with impressive sophistication."
Part of this sophistication is that they can also ignore injustice with the same.
"If prominent people cannot behave better, then they do not deserve to be treated as our betters."
I reject the premise that prominence means a better person. Whatever correlation exists, it is pretty weak.
One of the things I hated most about the military (I was in the Navy for four years) was salutin' and sirrin' merely due to officers being designated as officers. Respect has to be earned. Mere prominence is not enough. I believe Hitler and Stalin were Time's Man of the Year, and war-mongering statists like Woodrow Wilson and FDR routinely make lists of the greatest Presidents.
"Respect has to be earned."
So you will not rise before the hoary head ( Leviticus 19:32) ?
I believe Arnold Kling has himself written about "rules and roles" that make up a civilization.
I don't get your statement that the Iranian revolution doesn't compute on the oppressor-oppressed axis. How could anyone say that the Iranian people are not oppressed??
In the progressive framing, Muslims are oppressed by Christians, not by other Muslims
I guess I see what you mean. What they are interested in isn't oppression per se, but oppression of one group by another -- and especially oppression of certain specific groups.
And because Muslims are oppressed by Christians, they cannot be oppressors themselves.
"the Iranian revolt does not compute along the oppressor-oppressed axis. "
Why not?
The simple reason why Left does not support Iran protests is that the Left has been aligned with jihadists for past 50 years.
Smith has some good points but hugely misses the key driver of polarization in America— the open secret illegal discrimination against Republicans as professors at elite colleges.
A necessary, tho perhaps not sufficient step at reducing polarization is to enforce the law. The law says that colleges get tax exemptions partly because they are non-partisan.
They may claim to be so, but they are not—they are partisan Democrats. Often claiming the Republicans are evil.
Polarization is inevitable if the colleges are allowed to follow their current policy, especially on personnel. If college students can’t hear steelman arguments from registered Dems and registered Reps, they won’t understand the issues intellectually.
30% quotas of both Congressional Parties would work faster at reducing polarization than any other proposed campus reform.