My thoughts on this latest Epstein Files "Trunch" or whatever.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

Some of my thoughts are echoed by The Liberal Redneck, here.

The whole thing about Jeffrey Epstein having an influence on 4chan and /pol/, here.

TL;DR, this shit goes way past the victimization of children into possible murder and cannibalism, and my capacity to handle those details is very limited. I'm not one of those "true crime" fans who are capable of consuming this kind stuff as "content," or even thinking of it as such. These are details which should have compelled any other society with even a semi-functioning legal apparatus to completely shut down the people committing these kinds of atrocities. The phrase "under the jail" comes to mind. But apparently, we were not even that functional of society back in 2007-2008, when Epstein got off nearly scott-free from the then-ongoing attempts to prosecute his crimes.

We might be living in a very different world today if our legal system had been able to shut him down in 2007-2008, and pull down every single billionaire or hanger-on connected with him. Trump probably wouldn't be president today, for one. And /pol/ would not have been reopened. Our society has arguably been destroyed because we couldn't manage to put one predatory creep away for good eighteen years ago. But if we weren't able to put one predatory creep away, maybe it was doomed to fail, or already failed.

There were so many slippery slope moments in the 2000s that people screamed about, and we were all told to shut up and we were overreacting. This was just one of them. The 2000s just feel like one big slippery slope. And now we've slid into fullblown authoritarian fascism. And it doesn't surprise me at all that it arrived hand-delivered by predator creeps who victimize children.

One sentiment I am seeing a lot in the yotube comments of videos talking about these crimes boils down to, "I don't understand the kind of person who sets out to do these sick, predatory things to people. All I want to do is live my dumb life and work my dumb job and enjoy my dumb little hobbies." And I think that's most of us in the 99%, frankly. Once again, I'm reminded of William Gibson's line about how the extremely wealthy have lost their humanity.

Comments

[sabotabby]

It's fascinating how much there really was a conspiracy that's wilder than I could have invented.

One Raindrop At a Time to Make Floods

[nyyki]

In the second Deja Vu novel, near the end, I dealt with something close to this, very close, and it was how my main character and her friends handled one of this type of sites. There is so much vileness in this world, and as someone who doesn't feel safe anywhere anymore I want all of it to get projected into a supernova. I don't know that Gibson is right at the most common level, but I think there's some value in analyzing what it takes to reach that many zeroes to work out how it rewards antisocial and/or narcissistic types. Both of these Cluster B disorders share a common element that makes it possible to look at other people as something other than fellow humans.

Oh, and I've sent you a couple to few emails -- did they get misplaced?

Re: One Raindrop At a Time to Make Floods

[numb3r_5ev3n]

Let me check, I don't remember seeing them and I'm worried they're going to spam or something.