1. "I have not heard of Mr Epstein playing the piano like Liberace, or having the repartee of Truman Capote, or spouting the wisdom of Oliver Wendell Holmes."
I understand that Young Jeffrey was in fact a virtuoso pianist. Still, I doubt that the Great And Good flocked to his island in hopes that perhaps Il Maestro would be in a mood to take requests that evening.
2. Was it not written of old that there is never "just one" cockroach? That for every cockroach we see, there are a hundred you don’t see?
Epstein was assuredly the one cockroach we saw. There are doubtless many more, purveyors of forbidden fruit, brokers of sordid connections and dirty deals, gatherers of kompromat, etc., just presumably keeping lower profiles.
3. We haven't seen any of Epstein's videos yet. There are assuredly many Kodak moments to bebhad in them.
4. Whole thing reminds me of Magda Lupescu's last practical joke on Romania. As she and Carol II prepared to flee the country, Lupescu left on her bed for the Iron Guard to find, a box of letters she had received from the bon ton of Romania, handwritten notes which made a lot of important Romanians suddenly decide they needed to high tail it for some spa somewhere and take a cure for a while.
Thanks are due to dear Mr McKinsey for his sterling work in promoting paedophilia as kind, necessary, caring, educational even. Preceded of course by illustrious forebears such as the fraudulent Freud and that remarkable Marquis... de Sade.
Child abuse is an offence that defies comparison. You can compare speeding and parking fines. Or murder and culpable homicide. The comparisons I draw here (with homosexuality or economic sanctions) are illustrative, but not perfect by far.
There is little fruit to be had from discussing why there is a tolerance of paedophilic imagery in society as a whole. It is almost boringly predictable that, when AI becomes a tool available to all comers, the first thing people do is make illicit images with it. It's somehow "safer" to undress an image of a child than to take a child, undress them and photograph them. Whether the propensity to do that is a product of some active popularisation or whether the popularisation is the product of increased opportunity is unclear. For instance, has the incidence of rape gone up in more recent years or has the rate of reporting gone up because of helplines that are available to victims?
I have myself been somewhat shocked at the provocation of publishers of child fashion magazines, who portray children as "little bad guys", with an undeniably sexual overtone. Or Balenciaga, the Spanish fashion house that shocked with its overtly sexual references in advertising several years ago. One has to ask, "Why does a fashion house toy with such sexually knife-edge advertising?" Advertisers adopt stances vis-à-vis their customers that they think their customers will react positively to in terms of sales. In short, Balenciaga is talking to customers who enjoy that kind of imagery.
When you look back at the classic "example" of Greek men courting young boys in ancient times, it's generally understood that the prime connection was sexual. And it may have been dressed up as "educational", and there were reportedly social mores that acted as a brake on these relationships. But the fact that these kinds of friendships were so institutionalised as to have been portrayed on pottery and narrated in texts shows to my mind not that they were peculiar to the ancient Greeks, but rather that they have existed for all time. How they get reported is simply a question of the level of taboo associated with them. To be blunt, I think there is a paedophile on "every street corner". But the incidence of what constitutes a crime is constrained by the legal repercussions, if not the moral ones (to translate: what the law will do to you if you transgress, and how a transgression would, absent proscription, affect your social standing). Actual levels of incidence aside, we therefore live in societies today that are not that far removed from ancient Greece. What the statutory prohibition does is make blackmail of paedophiles a viable source of income; and what makes blackmail a viable source of income is the fact that "there is a paedophile on every street corner". In short, if the number of people who would really quite like to indulge in paedophilia if the penalty were non-existent could suddenly do so, then the incidence of the act would balloon.
What makes paedophilia a crime that is so relatively rare is not some moral repulsion that ordinary, decent folk harbour in consideration of the offence. It is the fact it is an offence. If it were morals that were left to control the commission of the act, its commission would be rife. But then there would be no point in blackmailing anyone.
Suppose you could convince all motorists that there was a moral imperative not to break the speed limit. And then you abolished all the speed cameras and highway patrols. Do you think that people would never break the limit? I think they would. Except, whereas now they get fined, they wouldn't get fined any more. But what about those who barrel down the road in fast limousines? Do you think they would adhere to the limit on moral grounds? And if you introduced the speed cameras again, do you think they would adhere to the limit then?
What speed cameras do is create a trap for the unwary criminal. People like you and me who take a chance and know that our only way to escape punishment is to be careful about how we break the law. Enough of us get caught by the camera to prove that speed cameras are a good thing. But fast limousines never get fined. They have other ways to escape punishment. It works for every other aspect of the criminal law. Including murder. Money laundering. or perjury. Mountbatten-Windsor is not being rebuked by his royal family because of what he did but because what he did reflects on them, and, most importantly, he was dumb enough to get caught. But he will never go to prison.
1. "I have not heard of Mr Epstein playing the piano like Liberace, or having the repartee of Truman Capote, or spouting the wisdom of Oliver Wendell Holmes."
I understand that Young Jeffrey was in fact a virtuoso pianist. Still, I doubt that the Great And Good flocked to his island in hopes that perhaps Il Maestro would be in a mood to take requests that evening.
2. Was it not written of old that there is never "just one" cockroach? That for every cockroach we see, there are a hundred you don’t see?
Epstein was assuredly the one cockroach we saw. There are doubtless many more, purveyors of forbidden fruit, brokers of sordid connections and dirty deals, gatherers of kompromat, etc., just presumably keeping lower profiles.
3. We haven't seen any of Epstein's videos yet. There are assuredly many Kodak moments to bebhad in them.
4. Whole thing reminds me of Magda Lupescu's last practical joke on Romania. As she and Carol II prepared to flee the country, Lupescu left on her bed for the Iron Guard to find, a box of letters she had received from the bon ton of Romania, handwritten notes which made a lot of important Romanians suddenly decide they needed to high tail it for some spa somewhere and take a cure for a while.
I didn't know that thing with Rumania! Thanks.
Thanks are due to dear Mr McKinsey for his sterling work in promoting paedophilia as kind, necessary, caring, educational even. Preceded of course by illustrious forebears such as the fraudulent Freud and that remarkable Marquis... de Sade.
Child abuse is an offence that defies comparison. You can compare speeding and parking fines. Or murder and culpable homicide. The comparisons I draw here (with homosexuality or economic sanctions) are illustrative, but not perfect by far.
There is little fruit to be had from discussing why there is a tolerance of paedophilic imagery in society as a whole. It is almost boringly predictable that, when AI becomes a tool available to all comers, the first thing people do is make illicit images with it. It's somehow "safer" to undress an image of a child than to take a child, undress them and photograph them. Whether the propensity to do that is a product of some active popularisation or whether the popularisation is the product of increased opportunity is unclear. For instance, has the incidence of rape gone up in more recent years or has the rate of reporting gone up because of helplines that are available to victims?
I have myself been somewhat shocked at the provocation of publishers of child fashion magazines, who portray children as "little bad guys", with an undeniably sexual overtone. Or Balenciaga, the Spanish fashion house that shocked with its overtly sexual references in advertising several years ago. One has to ask, "Why does a fashion house toy with such sexually knife-edge advertising?" Advertisers adopt stances vis-à-vis their customers that they think their customers will react positively to in terms of sales. In short, Balenciaga is talking to customers who enjoy that kind of imagery.
When you look back at the classic "example" of Greek men courting young boys in ancient times, it's generally understood that the prime connection was sexual. And it may have been dressed up as "educational", and there were reportedly social mores that acted as a brake on these relationships. But the fact that these kinds of friendships were so institutionalised as to have been portrayed on pottery and narrated in texts shows to my mind not that they were peculiar to the ancient Greeks, but rather that they have existed for all time. How they get reported is simply a question of the level of taboo associated with them. To be blunt, I think there is a paedophile on "every street corner". But the incidence of what constitutes a crime is constrained by the legal repercussions, if not the moral ones (to translate: what the law will do to you if you transgress, and how a transgression would, absent proscription, affect your social standing). Actual levels of incidence aside, we therefore live in societies today that are not that far removed from ancient Greece. What the statutory prohibition does is make blackmail of paedophiles a viable source of income; and what makes blackmail a viable source of income is the fact that "there is a paedophile on every street corner". In short, if the number of people who would really quite like to indulge in paedophilia if the penalty were non-existent could suddenly do so, then the incidence of the act would balloon.
What makes paedophilia a crime that is so relatively rare is not some moral repulsion that ordinary, decent folk harbour in consideration of the offence. It is the fact it is an offence. If it were morals that were left to control the commission of the act, its commission would be rife. But then there would be no point in blackmailing anyone.
Suppose you could convince all motorists that there was a moral imperative not to break the speed limit. And then you abolished all the speed cameras and highway patrols. Do you think that people would never break the limit? I think they would. Except, whereas now they get fined, they wouldn't get fined any more. But what about those who barrel down the road in fast limousines? Do you think they would adhere to the limit on moral grounds? And if you introduced the speed cameras again, do you think they would adhere to the limit then?
What speed cameras do is create a trap for the unwary criminal. People like you and me who take a chance and know that our only way to escape punishment is to be careful about how we break the law. Enough of us get caught by the camera to prove that speed cameras are a good thing. But fast limousines never get fined. They have other ways to escape punishment. It works for every other aspect of the criminal law. Including murder. Money laundering. or perjury. Mountbatten-Windsor is not being rebuked by his royal family because of what he did but because what he did reflects on them, and, most importantly, he was dumb enough to get caught. But he will never go to prison.