Nobody could have predicted.
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Of course the flipside is claiming he was secretly working in intelligence is a great way for public officials to deflect from taking a bribe.
“People above me said I had to lay off Epstein. Pay no attention to the $5M deposited in a numbered account for me”. Especially since the person involved in that story went on to work for one of the most corrupt and incompetent presidential administrations in the last century.
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We certainly know which one of those had actual allegations and support.
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Acosta was pretty corrupt as the Secretary of Labor. Actively dismantling enforcement against human trafficking, forced, child and illegal alien labor.
Being on the take is on brand for former Trump cabinet members.
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And the manner of Epstein’s departure is not inconsistent with the above speculation
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Before I heard about this? No. Now? Well, hanging out with two child rapists brings to mind the adage that you know people by the company they keep. So let’s just say that now we cannot be so sure. And so, more investigation is warranted
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No one is immune from criticism, nor should they be, including Chomsky. Dude isn’t right about everything, including, apparently, hanging out with known predators. At the very least it is a major lapse in moral judgement.
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You win ChatGPT… there will be none better than that… we can finally shut that shit down now!
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You must not know any men like this (or, conversely, maybe you do and you favor protecting them from consequences), but the idea that Epstein and Allen would have wasted a plane trip without a child to ‘enjoy’ – Epstein for one has been accused of exactly that before – is naive. Even if Chomsky didn’t partake, he makes a living being highly intelligent and world-savvy, so there’s no way he wouldn’t have known exactly what kind of predators both of his traveling companions were.
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Exactly right. He should know better than to hang out with people like this. It’s really fucking gross.
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Oof. That’s not something you hear from people for whom it is a good idea to still be talking.
It doesn’t particularly bother me in terms of his work, since that’s not stuff you’d read for spiritual or emotional reasons, and he’s not a political leader. I mean, him being a creep doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know about US imperialism or stochastic propaganda.
If anyone was deifying him on a personal level though, that was already a mistake IMO, and this would be a great time to stop.
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That assumes his work happened in a vacuum, that he was not in a position of power over others in the course of his career, and that he was the only person who wrote about those things. This is a pretty big moral lapse, if you ask me, given how Epstein sought to use and manipulate people in positions of power to further his own agenda, including his BS belief in eugenics. The fact that Epstein had so much access to so many people in power, is exactly the kind of thing that Chomsky would be expected to highlight in his political writings and to be critical of others for doing. Yet, here were are, with evidence that he not only hung out with some horrendous people, but believes himself beyond criticism for such a moral lapse.
On top of that, Chomsky also not always right about everything he says. We really shouldn’t hold people on such a high regard that we’re willing to defend him hanging out with child rapists. It really shows a fundamental lack of interest in actual equity and justice, and yet more love for power for it’s own sake.
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All the Jeffrey Epstein stuff is super weird. On the one hand, I think that some of the conspiracy theories involving him might be kind of true. I can’t think of a single person who’s more fucked up than him, and he seems to have accessed a lot of high powered people who: 1) protected him, and 2) had a really difficult time explaining their relationship with him.
Cutting to the chase, I don’t think he killed himself. I think he gave a lot of powerful men the sick, fucked up thrills they wanted. He ruined the lives of so many girls. It’s infuriating.
And he used it all as leverage to grow in wealth and power. Even worse, those powerful men protected him because they wanted to protect themselves. When he got caught, he became a liability.
But I also think he was a salesman. I have no doubt that he approached powerful clients and asked them for access to other powerful people. That’s how he grew his grotesque empire. Some of them likely bit on it. They became clients. But others likely didn’t. They were just people on a super fucking weird plane ride. Or boat ride. Or overpriced dinner.
And that’s the problem. I’m sure some of them, even if they didn’t do anything wrong, sensed that something was wrong and didn’t say anything. They succumbed to the social pressures of being around other powerful, high status people.
For someone like Chomsky, association isn’t conviction. But his denial isn’t really a denial? At the very least, it casts a cloud of uncertainty over him.
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Is there more to Chomsky’s email that was published by bb? I can’t find it behind the WSJ paywall.
Anyway, WSJ, being one of the loudest mouthpieces for capitalism, must have been salivating at their great fortune in making this information about Chomsky, one of its most incisive critics, public. I am sure they feel righteous indignation, and perhaps are having a laugh, now that it is. Chomsky’s foible is his tenacity to meet with denizens, personalities, fans, celebrities, activists, moms and pops, political figures, and so forth, in order to share common interests, and then it also brought him into direct contact with inherently wicked people. (This story reminds me of the claims made about Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and other champions of public non-violent resistance with the purpose, essentially, to sully their character and degrade the nature of their primary narratives.) Because of the defensiveness with which he seems to respond to this criticism, unfortunately, his willingness to schedule appointments with the likes of such nether dwellers as Epstein, could sadly have become Chomsky’s fatal flaw.
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There have been a few cases where some minor celebrity has received significant blowback for something dumb and unkind they’ve done and I’ve decided on the whole it’s not bad enough for me to stop listening to them. What Chomsky said is hinky enough that yeah, I would shun him, had I not already stopped reading him for other reasons. I stopped reading Malcolm Gladwell books (another Epstein associate) when I heard his comments about Joe Paterno.
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It surprises me that he didn’t have a better response ready than “none of your beeswax.”
Chomsky is intelligent, and there is no way he wouldn’t know the guy who gave a million to his school was also a sex offender. If not at the time, then once the arrest was made.
He should have known someone, at some point, would ask about Epstein and him. It’s been almost 3 years since Epstein died. That he couldn’t come up with anything better than “nunya business” just heightens my suspicion, not allay it.
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Right? I mean this is a guy who is famous for speaking at great length on almost everything he talks about, and who is known to let Q&A sessions go on longer than his actual lectures.
I’m not ready to assume he’s a sex offender but “why do you care if I secretly hang out with rich and powerful child sex offenders?” is a really bad look.
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FYI Woody Allen and Mia Farrow were never married.
