Did any of you dear polymaths see the movie? I finally saw it the other night. I didn’t find it to be the “religious experience” which some evidently have. I CAN tell you I could not have sat through it when my child was at the age of the victims in the film.
But what I can’t believe is the attitudes of its critics on the Left! It seems to boil down to:
“Sure, child trafficking goes on , but it’s not as bad as this movie makes it seem! I mean okay, people are buying children for sex, but the idea that they’re extracting anything from their blood, now, that’s just crazy conspiracy talk!”
The movie doesn’t mention the “Adrenochrome” idea. But SO WHAT if it did? Wouldn’t the filmmakers have been justified in making use of anything they could latch on to, if it might help put an end to child sex slavery?
F’rinstance, is the dad of the two child heroes likely, IRL, to have been so innocent? Unfortunately I have personal experience with what I suspect is a not-uncommon phenomenon: parents pimping out their own kids for profit. But what woulda been the point in introducing that in this film?
The movie can be and has been criticised as just not being very good as a ‘thriller”, but that doesn’t explain the Left’s vitriol.
The Left’s primary cavil with this movie seem to be that it’s unfair to the purveyors of children and to their customers, puts them in a bad light, “embellishes” Tim Ballard’s story. (As though ‘Embellishment” were not pretty much the raison d’etre of all fiction, literary or visual.)
Really, wouldn’t you expect the Left to at least pretend it categorically opposes child sex slavery?
Well, the Left arranged for the convenient death of Mr. Epstein – whose only sin was apparently that he had been arranging for the Great & Good (ie, Leftists) to have sex with very willing and highly experienced 17 year-old girls.
So it seems to be a matter of age. Leftists are against the willing employment of people who would historically have been considered young adults (But they are under 18!), and not so concerned about the less willing employment of actual children. This seems to be more complicated than the expected normal Leftist hypocrisy.
In my opinion, Epstein did not have ‘victims”; he had accomplices.
These were well-curated young people. Epstein’s friends didn’t want just youth, or they coulda picked up snaggle toothed drug addicted teenagers on the streets of SF. So if his sex workers were under 18, it’s all on their parents or legal guardians, whoever was maintaining those well fed, shiny haired, straight-toothed maidens and ephebes up till that point in their lives. If they were 18 plus, it’s on them.
( But since there IS so much “outrage” about the infamous Island, I find it ludicrous that they now say, well, he’s dead, we will never know who was there and what went on,…,give me a break! He was running a luxury hotel, there have to be dozens of people, chambermaids, bellhops, waiters and waitresses, the crew of his planes, fuggod’s sake!—who knew everything and everybody involved! It is so transparently pseudo-naive.)
P. S.: And while I’m at it, lemme tell ya that I feel even more strongly that that is the case with Weinstein. Those would-be starlets AND their stage moms knew exactly what he was after. He had in his gift something they wanted, and they were willing to buy it at his price.
And BTW @Gavin your comment is perspicacious! Yes, to the Left, anybody under 30 is a “child”— except actual biologically aged children.
We have no word for sex, otherwise “sex slavery” would be a contradiction in terms. The thing for which we have no word is a holy estate affirmed by the 600M year concomitant explosion of speciation and individuation. Its desecration is essential for those whose will to power arises from their desire to return to “oneness”: to uncreate creation.
What do you mean, @jabowery , by “the thing for which we have no word”? Monogamy? No I doubt that. So then: copulation pure ‘n’ simple, the way male and female animals of the same species perform it as of course when they encounter each other during mating season?
The ecstatic potential of the act of procreation is neutralized – short-circuited – by the desecration of that for which we have no word. It starts in the desecration of child development. People get that viscerally. Manipulation of child development toward sterile obeisance is the essence of eusociety’s denial of the individual on behalf of The Hive.
I am going to follow this out this time.
Okay, so we are evolving toward eusociality (the Hive, as you wrote) and that is due to our manipulation of children toward “sterile obeisance” —or maybe the converse, never mind cause and effect.
But when does obeisance become “sterile”, as opposed to being s survival mechanism: don’t we as human adults have to keep our pre-mented infants from “independently” risking and likely terminating their lives? (Speaking as a mother: YES.)
And as I’ve written here before, I think our long infant dependency period explains jes’ ‘bout everything about human culture.
What are YOU saying, in terms of socialization of the young? That there shouldnt BE any? If not, then what ?
It is certainly true today in a world of broken homes that too many young people have to grow up and take care of themselves from a rather young age. I guess most of us are aware of teenagers who have spent their brief lives being bounced from parents to step-parents to grand-parents to older siblings. Some of them seem to emerge strong, self-confident, and mature from such trials. Others – not so much.
I have sometimes wondered about the conversation between the teenage girl on her way to Epstein’s Island and her step-parent/guardian. I imagine it something like this:
Teenager: Mary, I have borrowed your overnight bag. Step-mother: Oh! Are you going to do an overnight at your boyfriend’s place again? Teenager: No! I am done with high school boys. All losers. I have done so many overnights at so many boy’s places, and all I ever got was a McMuffin and a coffee in the morning. Step-mother: So where are you going? Teenager: Oh! It is great! One of the Seniors at my high school knows a big shot guy. He has agreed to take some of us from the Cheerleading Squad to his private island in the Carribean. And we are going on his private jet!. Step-mother: Lucky girl! I am jealous. Teenager: The best part is we are going to be meeting some important people. We may even meet a real English prince! All we have to do is keep telling them we are 18. Step-mother: But you just turned 17. Teenager: No prob! I get into 21+ clubs all the time. Just look at me! Step-mother: OK. Be sure to take that really sexy bikini you bought last week. Teenager: Duh! Private island, private beach. It’s clothing optional. And the Senior tells us we might come back with $10,000 as well as a sun tan. Step-mother: That would be good. My car needs some work, and if you have some cash you could help me out. Teenager: Later, Mary. I am out of here.
According to Whitney Webb’s book One Nation Under Blackmail, some of the girls procured by JE for his targets were as young as 13. One girl provided to Prince Andrew was 14. These girls were manipulated by JE and his Satanic harpie Gheislain Maxwell. And all to perpetuate highly criminal activity beyond the trafficking itself.
Maybe Whitney Webb had reliable sources, maybe not. The major issue is the one Hypatia pointed to – Where were the parents/guardians, or the government officials for children in care? Not to excuse Epstein in any way, but the chain of abuse certainly did not begin with him.
They were being bribed, blackmailed, or otherwise neutralized by the very group for which JE was running his little operation. That’s the point! JE wasn’t operating independent of government. He was running it at the behest of government! (Or governments as it were.)
It does seem like that. Apparently Epstein was some kinda FBI “asset”. Could his tsk have been to get s many prominent people as possible to his island so that there would always be something they could be blackmailed with?
The other puzzle is the source of his wealth. If you read his biography, it’s one dodgy thing after another, including gems such as (from the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook):
Epstein also stated to some people at the time that he was an intelligence agent. During the 1980s, Epstein possessed an Austrian passport that had his photo, but with a false name. The passport showed his place of residence in Saudi Arabia. In 2017 “a former senior White House official” reported that Alexander Acosta, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida who had handled Epstein’s criminal case in 2008, had stated to Trump transition interviewers, that “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to ‘leave it alone’”, and that Epstein was “above his pay grade”.
Now, how did such a guy end up running a financial management company running (he claimed) only assets of clients with more than US$ 1 billion net worth, making him (in his guilty plea for prostitution in 2008) “a billionaire with a net worth of over one billion dollars”, although at the time Forbes ran an article doubting this, “Why sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is not a billionaire”.
Anyway, billionaire or not, one obvious way he could have acquired sufficient wealth for the private island, plane, yacht, etc., is by blackmailing his élite clientèle with covert surveillance video of them cavorting on the island. This may have been his main “occupation” or synergistic with peddling the “work product” to assorted three-letter agencies around the globe.
A puzzle indeed! Supposedly, a part of Epstein’s wealth came from (pre-Woke) Victoria’s Secret – although one would have to sell a whole lot of ladies’ underwear to earn $1 Billion, even at Victoria’s Secret prices.
At the same time, one could ask about the source of Joe Biden’s astonishing wealth – or about the fortunes of so many other politicians who enter Congress as poor women & men and leave (eventually) as multi-millionaires. But those are the kinds of questions which never get air time.
Sort of. The guy who “owned” (whatever the corporate term is) VS is Leslie Wexner. It is thought—and the circumstantial evidence suggests—that Wexner gave JE a substantial amount of money early in their relationship during the early 80s.