MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
> It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide."
Nonsense.
"...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0]
"...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1]
etc.
Just throwing it out there, but forget Epstein, I'm sure most of us would not believe what NYT is sitting on in general. This is effectively a defacto global intelligence gathering service. I bet if we could read through a lot of that we'd all be gobsmacked and just stop believing in humanity altogether.
I understand most of what we haven't seen is uncorroborated, but it would still make for interesting reading if we didn't have to worry about falling down an elevator shaft onto some bullets.
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
not sure where you are looking but Rasmussen polls have been showing Trump hemorrhaging support since June among his base. if you visit X this is where many of them converse, and they are quite openly unhappy with the admin lately
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you both are in a bubble.
They're just different bubbles.
Liberals and conservatives have methodically and deliberately avoided holding their leaders accountable for decades. The only people who can't see that, are, frankly, liberals and conservatives.
What we have now is an opportunity to sweep everyone from Trump on down out of office. Anyone who would work for Trump or Clinton should have their judgement questioned at a minimum. And they should pray we don't look any further into what they've been getting up to.
This is a golden opportunity to scrub the walls clean and put in new people en masse. But I'm not naive. I know the corruption of the incumbent power brokers and parties will undoubtedly win the day. You can bet your bottom dollar that conservatives and liberals are cooperating and they've got the courts, Homeland security, CIA, everything.. out cleaning up for them. I just wish they'd get what's coming to them for once.
I have loathed Larry Summers since the repeal of Glass-Steagall. He has consistently treated the American public like he treats women in the Epstein emails. So glad he's finally getting his comeuppance.
I would like to bring the term "lamposted" into popular discourse.
I can only pray it becomes mainstream (along with the act, obviously). That is literally the only way to remedy this. You can pass new laws, but that does nothing for the past. You can go bankrupt trying to bring civil cases and possibly get some monetary compensation, but at a certain point all this stops working and people go back to what always works to return order back to society.
You can disagree, just understand you're agreeing to being subjugated or being enslaved, short of a viable and actionable alternative to being lamposted.
I hardly think a millionaire stepping away from his job is “comeuppance”.
Don’t forget Epstein’s circle of rapists and rapist-enablers still had friendly communication with him long after he was convicted and known pedophile.
I have doubts about officials’ ability to get real justice. I’ll still me shouting for blood in the streets, though.
He was working at the Center for American Progress to ensure if the Democrats got back in power they would be committed to not fixing anything, fulfilling any promises, or doing anything beyond Clinton/Obama/Biden managed decline.
It’s interesting that only now he is stepping back now that he’s been found out. It demonstrates that it’s not about ethics or morals, but about publicity and damage control.
The tax paying class of the world just have to watch all this horseshit go on, watch the institutions and the law enforcement agencies protect these people with our hard earned money, meanwhile if we break a single law, there are consequences for us, sometimes massive.
It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
> It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
> It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
This category of malcontent (about out-of-touch elites engaging in all sorts of depraved perversions while the poor starved) at Versailles eventually caused most of the former to lose their heads during the French Revolution.
The smart ones know that they need to keep up appearances, the dumb ones behave like they will never face consequences.
The smart ones are building bunkers to escape the hell that the US will become when the civil war actually starts. They're not hoping to survive the apocalypse, they're just hoping to ride out the 20 or 30 years of war and return as actual Lords for the serfs that are left after we kill each other.
I understand you want to highlight this, but you don’t have to begin your sentence with "It's interesting that..." because this is not interesting or novel in the slightest.
It's interesting to me because how the hell did he think this was going to end? "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work in the court of public opinion. So, if one was even peripherally associated with Epstein, it would seem like that would be a hell of a liability.
On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?
I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.
I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.
I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.
The joke is that it looks like a joke but isn’t in the same way a sociopath will explain in detail exactly how they’re going to fuck you before they do knowing you won’t believe them because it’s all a joke in a joke that isn’t real.
So it's okay for people who have the power and connections to actually impact the world in the horrible ways they're "joking"about to make jokes about doing just that?
I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.
That's the great thing about "invention", there are other ways to 0 pollution besides historic ones.
Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire.
Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
> Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.
> And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
A good many people I know and have known for 60+ years would, do, and yearn for civilisation as you know it to back the f off and get its foot from their neck.
Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport.
Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.
I remember hearing about the variance thing ages ago. Back when I was young enough and naïve enough to trust statements said in official voices without critically assessing them.
With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
I'm not touching the variability thing with a 10 foot pole except to say that the further out on each extreme of the IQ "scale" you go the less reliable the scores are. The whole idea of using IQ as a ranking of ability rather than a diagnostic tools is bogus. I do think it's clear now though that Summers was simply being a misogynist (you lose the presumption of good faith when you disclose that you'd been lying all along.)
I remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking.
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
Two of the committee resigned in protest, Kissinger almost turned it down because it was also being awarded to Lê Đức Thọ, Lê Đức Thọ actually turned it down because the peace it was supposed to be about hadn't happened yet, Kissinger accepted in absentia as he did not want to be targeted by anti-war protestors when getting the peace prize, then he later tried to return it only for the committee to say no.
They gave Arafat the prize as well. Basically for promising to stop murdering jews. A promise he reneged upon almost immediately to be clear. But of course the bar had already been set impossibly low by awarding the prize in chemistry to Fritz Haber, the guy who literally invented chemical warfare. At least to Kissingers credit he did try quite hard to make peace and sometimes succeeded.
Then they give the prize to guys who don't deserve it like Obama and overlook Trump, who even his biggest haters cannot claim hasn't done a lot of war ending over 2 terms.
John Carreyrou's book "Bad blood" is extremely good. Full of suspense, amazing revelations. I highly recommend it. It explores a lot of Elizabeth Holmes' and Sunny Balwani's insanity.
- Epstein connecting Summers with other important people
- Dishing on Trump and his inner circle
Given there were many more prominently featured people with more dirt in here, I wonder if Summers is worried there's a lot more that's about to be revealed.
Epstein seemed to be a power broker and a political fixer. If so, naturally many high-profile people would have interacted with him and even have confided in him. It does not mean everyone associated with him knew or participated in his criminal activities, right?
Not sure where you are getting this from. He regularly connected people with each other. The sex trafficking was just a small part of his nefarious power network
Not to defend Epstein, of course, but just to comment on the power brokering side. My understanding is that a power broker gets power by staying close to the power and by connecting people. I don't understand why powerful people need such broker, even though history shows other wise.
An example of one of the typical meetings Epstein was able to finagle with Summers:
> this week, thiel, summers,bill burns, gordon brown, jagland,
( council of europe and nobel chairman ). mongolia pres , hardeep puree ( india), boris ( gates). jabor ( qatar). sultan ( dubai, ), kosslyn ( harvard), leon black, woody. you are a welcome guest at any.....also if you
>think there are interesting people in town, everyone here for climate summit, clinton ,security
council, holy shit im on for next 30 minutes
> how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
>It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.
They know they above the law from the minute that reach a certain level of status, they don't care about the emails and if people see them, they know there will be next to zero repercussions for them.
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
> As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance.
(Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.)
On what basis do you say that Epstein was pretty talented at finance? This guy was a math teacher with no actual degree. The only reason he got his gig in finance was by schmoozing up the dad of one of his students, who was CEO of Bear Stearns.
The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now).
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
I wouldn't say we've made zero progress. There are always ups and downs, temporary wins and losses, but I think that over the long term, there's more skepticism and scrutiny now than in the past.
I think this is a side effect of having "paid law enforcement", it's not that the cops are bad, but their bosses are. The people who fund the law enforcement are ultimately at the mercy of the "rich and powerful" in some way or another, so basically people of a certain status get a pass.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
It used to be that any citizen could approach a grand jury and allege a crime. The purpose of the grand jury was to decide if tax dollars should be spent to hire a prosecutor for that (single) case.
"Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case.
It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into.
He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated.
The big question here is are they involved with Epstein because they are in power, or did they get power because they had Epstein pull in favors for them. From the emails he seems like the big spider in a spider web. Both parties and so many people in power referred to him for critical problems, pulling strings in critical places (Bannon on behalf of Trump was getting his advice on how to discredit Kavanaugh opponents and Epstein obliged with medical information on one of the opponents to bring up at a hearing). Beyond Clinton, Obama’s attorney is mentioned a bunch as well. I’m sure the democrats had plenty of favors in too.
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
This guy Epstein modus operandi of cozying up and becoming wingman to powerful people confirms that he was some kind of spy. But it's still weird to see a well known professor of 61 years texting about gurlz to his middle aged wingman. Who does that and is this really what millionaires do, reliving high school?
Money and power have been seen as corrupting influences since the dawn of humanity.
Those who seek those things -- money for money's sake, power for power's sake -- often tend to see their success as somehow making them "above" others. They derive perverse pleasure in seeing just how much they can flaunt society's rules. 'The rules don't apply to me' is like a drug in itself.
I think it depends on how they got rich. From the outside to me it looks like the ones who sacrifice their 20's to the grind and getting rich never get that shit out of their system like the rest of us do and end up as emotionally stunted adults trying to recapture their lost youth.
I grinded fairly well enough in my 20s, just as many other people I know who did. We're much better off than 99.99% of the world. That doesn't make us think of sexually abusing children and adolescents one bit because we need to "flush that shit out of our system" and "recapture our lost youth". I have better ways of recapturing my lost youth, by computer games, more time for hobbies and fucking closer to my age like rabbits.
PS:- being in the upper echelon does mean you have a somewhat easier access to the circles that engage in these vile activities, and yes you'll be completely excluded if you say no to them. Many are okay with that, while those who aren't are the ones in the files.
I really think there is so much variance to how people live. Looking at some of the Epstein emails I'm floored by the behavior. It really seems like middle schoolers. And the racist chats that came out from the Young Republican group earlier this year -- I can't imagine ever being a part of a chat group like that. I would literally think I was being pranked or they were genuinely crazy racists, but they were actual early leaders of one of our two major political parties.
The thing that perplexes me is that these people aren't in poverty or victims of some violent trauma. They are among the elites of the country -- and yet this is still how they behave -- are these people a niche group or am I?
Most people are followers whose belief systems are spoon fed to them by the largest village willing to accept them. Understanding cult psychology and the agendas of the people driving the bus is typically enough to understand their worldviews and subsequent behavior. That’s just my gut read on it..
A thing to remember is that Chamath Palihapitiya is a billionaire but spends his time on Twitter trying to convince people he has a big dick[0].
> i'll bet your entire net worth x 10. the anaconda is the worst kept secret of silicon valley...
I think the truth is probably that insecurity does not prevent success. Some argue that it might be the source of it. But probably the truth is there are secure billionaires and insecure billionaires and the latter are very obviously insecure because despite their success they do things like this.
I saw the email correspondence between him and Epstein. The sense that I got is he's pursuing some young girl half his age. And he actually thinks that she is attracted to him. Powerful, ugly men are so stupid sometimes.
Men who don't pursue women don't get laid. This is an extremely important gendered asymmetry in heterosexual dating. Most men aren't attractive to most women, and if you want to be successful at dating as a heterosexual man you have to have to display a certain amount of boldness in pursuing women. Maybe the girl in question really does find Larry Summers old and ugly and wants nothing to do with him, but in general men who assume this is the case and don't even try, or who heed the words of outsiders that it is stupid to think that a girl might be attracted to you, are putting themselves at a systematic disadvantage in dating.
That's a charitable take. It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship. Also the woman's dad is the founding president of some major Chinese bank (AIIB) that he was cozying up to.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
> "It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship"
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
"Hi, would you like to sleep with me? If you say no, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure you're unable to get a job in the field you want to pursue." And to be clear here, for most of these sex pests, that is not an idle threat.
There's a reason it's considered morally and ethically heinous to demand sexual favors with people whom you have power over, and if you can't understand why it's so heinous, then you do not deserve to have power over anybody.
He consulted with the most notorious child sex trafficker of modern times on his plan to use the power of his position to coerce a young woman into sex.
In those consultations, he used a racial slur to refer to the young woman.
There are other contrary positions you can take, it doesn't have to be that this was okay.
Maybe not a bad thing for another reason: assuming most powerful men are up to these kinds of shenanigans, this filters out for those who are not clever enough to keep it under wraps. Sounds like a useful job skill for the positions these kinds of people might need to handle.
Powerful men/women don't have to be sexually or in other ways abusive to subordinates. They really don't. Most of them, in fact, don't. You certainly hear about the ones who do, for a reason.
When you got up this morning did you know that this is the fight you would be taking up today? It's not too late man just delete it and go back to bed, try a fresh start.
What specific part of what Larry said in the emails was so egregious that he needed to resign? What’s wrong in simply asking people advice to sleep around?
Reading about the case, you get the sense that this is the general disposition from these abusers. They know what they're doing is wrong, and they understand the power imbalance, but they sort of excuse it and justify it by softly believing that the women actually want them. That they are actually sexy. And that they are helping the women, somehow.
It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
She was attracted to his power, which is why she spent time with him. Don't pretend she was an innocent protege. She was a nepo child playing the same game of stays climbing.
Why? He was one of the most prominent economists of his era. This is in the news because it's newsworthy, not because he's been radioactive this whole time.
Why not? He was a part of a pretty radioactive network of people. I doubt that he just happened to hang with Epstein by mere coincidence, and it does raise some questions about how much Sheryl knew about it.
I think it's very silly to suggest that Sandberg would have known anything at all about Summers personal life a decade before he had dealings with Epstein, simply because he was an undergraduate adviser to her. He was already one of the most famous economists in the country in the late 1980s, when that happened.
I cannot overstate the potential significance of what's going on in Congress currently and it has global implications.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sit at the nexus of an international pedophile ring that threatens to bring down many billionaires and even some governments. There is a concerted effort to prevent the release of this information and we're far from done yet.
A lot of effort was made by the administration to prevent the discharge petition reaching 218 signatures. For anyone unfamiliar with how the House of Representatives works, the majority party chooses the Speaker and the Speaker decides what bills get a vote. But if a majority of the 435 representatives (so 218) want the House to have a vote, there's a procedure called a discharge petition. If it gets 218 signatures, the Speaker has to schedule a vote within a week or so (I forget the exact time line).
The Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as basically putting the House in recess for 8+ weeks to avoid this happening. He avoided wearing in an Arizona congresswoman for that same period because she was going to be the 218th signature. The government was literally suspended to avoid this outcome.
Then the Speaker changed tactics to try to pass the bill with a procedure called "unaminous consent". Basically, if no House member objects, the bill passes. Why would he do this? To avoid having votes on the record. This was good politics to force a role call.
The Speaker continues to play defense here because carve outs were added to the bill to exempt files for "national security" reasons and anything under active investigation. That's brazen obstruction and the least surprising thing is that the president announced an investigation this week. It's explicitly to prevent the release of some evidence. Make no mistake.
It's not unique to this administration either. the previous administration sat on all of this for 4 years doing absolutely nothing.
Where doe sthis lead? Foreign governments and intelligence agencies who were not only aware of what was going on but they (allegedly) actively benefit from and participated in this trafficking ring to get access to and/or blackmail powerful people. That's the "national security" interest.
As many of us are aware by now, Ghislaine Maxwell's father was the British media mogul Robert Maxwell who was a Mossad asset and got a state funeral in israel for his contributions to the state of Israel going back to suplying militia wth weapons in World War Two that were ultimately used for ethnic cleasning. And how did Maxwell die? He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
If this stuff gets out, many heads will roll in government, in business and in prestigious colleges. Look no further than one Alan Dershowitz. Harvard in particular has unclean hands and is elbow deep in all of this. And certainly whatever you do don't look into how Kimble Musk met one of his "girlfriends".
Careful you don't go full Qanon on this one. If anything the fact this thing passed is an indication that there's very little unexploded ordnance left in the unredacted files.
The likely most damning/embaressing thing that has led to Summers resignations -- being a powerful 65-year-old man trying to pressure a 37-year-old mentee into having sex/relationship with you -- is considered (by me too) icky and unethical and an abuse of power, undoubtedly a violation of many ethics codes and depending on how it's done possibly some laws -- but is not actually anything to do with pedophilia or child abuse at all.
i know we like expanding the categories of all sins and then only refering to things by category name without the specifics, but.
>He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
Maxwell had been stealing from his worker's pension fund and it was all starting to come out. It is plausible that he killed himself to avoid the consequences. He was a monster.
Alternatively, there is no justice, and even the truth is lost to partisan politics. I have a strange feeling this benefits foreign intelligence, not harms it. Mossad, for example, knows who slipped through the cracks. Knows how much worse the "truth" is beyond the code names and vague emails. Now they have more power, not less.
This kind of thing can only exist in a climate of apathy and nihilism. The powerful want you to think the situation is hopeless and nothing will change. But remember this: at no point in history has a steady state been maintained for significant periods of time. Ever.
We are at a dangerous point in history. I personally believe that inequality is inevitably going to end in violence and we're beyuond the point of avoiding this with electoral politics. People are struggling to eat and survive at a time where we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. This simply can't continue.
I'm personally for outing wealthy and powerful pedophiles who are meaningfully making all of our lives worse to accrue completely unnecessary extra wealth.
There was nothing particularly suspicious about Maxwell's death. The music was up, the noose was tightening around him, and he was about to start eating shit for the consequences of his fraud.
The people he robbed in that fraud were regular Joes who were cheated out of their pensions, not some kind of shadow-government-global-conspiracy types who have the means to remote-program your toaster to kill you.
Him killing himself is not the most surprising way out of that situation.
They already bought off Ghislaine Maxwell by moving her to minimum security prison with unearned privileges, so she won’t spill what she knows about people in current administration. Not sure why you seem optimistic, she is possibly the most informed person left alive and she’s gotten kid glove treatment from Trump.
Poe’s law applies too much these days. I’ve tried to get out of the habit of leaving jokes ambiguous like that because it’s just too easy to trip readers up, especially when not everyone has native level awareness of idioms or social context.
Part of the problem is also frankly that HN has a culture that encourages serious engagement (or at least a facsimile of it) with the worst opinions it's possible to have. You just can't keep your sense for sincerity finely honed in an environment like that.
Man, it's so understandable. Especially when 35-40% the country is doing exactly that kind of bullshit equivocative defense. Frankly I'm shocked the shitheads usually here read the room and have kept the child-rape apologia to themselves.
There is such a long history of using humor to affect change and discuss extremely serious matters. Legally it's protected speech because of it's importance.
The main purpose of sarcasm is not humor, it's to use irony as a form of contempt. To the extent that humor is involved it's usually done so as a form of mockery.
This whole Epstein thing feels like a distraction. Yes, the people involved are reprehensible and deserve consequences. But why is this such a big focus for some people on the left and the right (apart from an opportunity to attack their political opponents)? Consider that even if Epstein had 1000 victims, there are still far larger-scale problems the country is facing that we aren’t spending the same time on.
It’s not enough to say “we can do more than one thing” - our attention is limited. And instead of those bigger issues dominating our conversation and political will, we’re focused on the Epstein issue. I also seriously doubt something will come of it. I expect that when anything is eventually released, it may have been selectively redacted or withheld, and any convictions will take years if they happen at all.
Meanwhile, vile politicians like MTG are latching onto this fervor and using it to push their own relevance and position on the American political stage. In her case, it’s a desperate play to disown her past of “Jewish space lasers”, QAnon, pizzagate, and all of that. But the naive public is eating this up. And they’re using what is a minor issue to hitch themselves onto otherwise harmful people.
I don't know what you tell you if the systematic abuse of hundreds (some reporting does suggest more than 1000) children doesn't rile you up. The fact that it is nearly exclusively rich and powerful people who participated only amplifies the effect. Most of us are absolutely fed up with the two-tier justice system, where the rich, powerful, and connected get to do whatever they want, while regular folk continually have their rights eroded. The powerful are often able to divert our attention from the injustice of the rich/powerful by dividing the people with propaganda, pitting one side against the other. Turns out the Epstein situation is one of the rare cases where nearly everyone agrees. You should expect it to receive increasingly large amounts of attention until we actually receive the real info and heads roll.
Like I said - it’s reprehensible. I’m not minimizing the crime but pointing out there are bigger problems. Focusing on this instead of inflation or housing or healthcare means a lot more people will suffer than there are victims of Epstein. We have to prioritize. If too much attention and energy goes to this, bigger problems will be left unaddressed. The things I’m listing are occupying virtually none of the national focus right now, for example.
Why do you think the current government would be the slightest bit interested in solutions to housing, inflation or healthcare if Epstein wasn't an issue?
I'm not as alarmed that one of the most influential economists in America is a potential sex trafficker. I'm alarmed about to what degree the most influential people in America are being blackmailed.
The story goes way beyond the abuse itself, they were videotaping everything to black mail other rich people and even world leaders... it's one of the biggest scandals in American history and it's about more than Epstein alone.
My gut feeling is that theres a lot of things in there that punters need to know about, to make informed electoral decisions.
My gut feeling is also that its been largely overblown, and releasing the files might actually take some of the wind out of the conspiracy theories built on the lack of this data.
Epstein put a lot of rich and powerful people with influence in government and industry into compromising positions. Those thousand victims weren't a hobby. He was creating blackmail material and using it for his own gain, and to sell to others. The amount of money flowing through the scheme is so large that it has to be from government entities, like intelligence agencies. Sergey Lavrov's name has come up in the documents. It's very plausible that a lot of the money Epstein got originated in Russia. That's a national security problem.
Well, good to see Hahhvuhhhd is not above the British monarchy when it comes to eventually ejecting sex pests! A low bar to clear, but well done!
Now, just for certain ex-Brit colonies to follow their example! Quick... who can think of a popular leader who is, ehhhm, quite intricately linked to the same, ehh, gentleman with pretty specific tastes?
In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.
>We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Not that I wholly disagree, but in the interests of robust conversation, I feel compelled to ask:
"Cook controversially dines with Saudi Crown Prince at White House"
Now, I'm no Saudi Crown Prince stan, but would the word 'controversially' have been used if Cook dined with Biden - who funded and supported a genocide, in which hundreds of journalists were killed? Why was the word 'controversially' not used to refer to also being at the table with Trump there?
Yes, it's controversial that Cook had dinner with the Saudi Crown Prince. In my view it's even more controversial to be having dinner with Trump.
This is just the most recent headline I can give as an example. But there are many like this.
> In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
There's nothing that quite makes me feel like humanity has undergone speciation than the fact that this STILL HAS TO BE FUCKING SPELLED OUT FOR PEOPLE.
Hero worship is sycophancy of the highest order. Ugh, and I know you're so right.
And, to be less coy, how is the opposition party the one that treats Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman? It's somehow Epstein all the way down. Glad I'm a left-wing Chomskyite, cynical about all of those corrupt, elite institutions. Wait...
Obama was the hothouse flower of the Democrat party that Bill Clinton singlehandedly wrought. No Bill Clinton, no Barack Obama. Before Bill Clinton, here's what the NYTimes (left wing though not as far left as now, but i.e. sympathetic) had to say about the field of Democrat candidates for president:
"The strongest and saddest impression this viewer took away from the collective appearance of the Democratic Presidential candidates on national television was that Snow White was missing, while the Seven Dwarfs prattled on."https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/04/opinion/in-the-nation-the...
and you saw similar dynamics at play in the most recent series of elections. Biden was rammed into the nomination in 2020 because non of the field of candidates had a broad enough base of support. On the other side, Trump did what Clinton did, reshaped his party in his own image.
tl;dr: Because there were ongoing investigations (which was true) and it's generally considered bad to release your evidence before trial, or something like that, IANAL.
This will also be Trump's (false) reason for not releasing them.
> Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman?
Huh? Bill Clinton has been a relatively invisible ex-president compared to the other modern ones (aka Carter & Obama, Biden hasn't been gone long enough for data).
Perhaps that's because he didn't want to overshadow Hillary, but it's at least partly because of the Lewinsky affair.
The odds, though sadly still vanishingly small, of him doing the right thing and drowning himself in a toilet bowl just increased. Today is a good day.
> "In other exchanges, Mr. Summers appeared to ask Mr. Epstein’s advice on how to pursue a romantic relationship"
That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the woman into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”"
I think it remarkable how the NYT buries (far down on the page), and CNBC omits altogether, the underlying story about what Larry Summers was actually doing. CNBC euphemizes the whole thing away to vapor (there were mails—the end). These aren't good expositions.
(Speaking of the NYT' coverage, there's a new revelation one of their reporters actually helped Epstein evade scrutiny—it's another bit from the recently-disclosed email tranches. Their reporter Landon Thomas secretly tipped off Epstein that one of his NYT coworkers was "digging around" into Epstein—even gave Epstein the guy's name).
> That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the undergraduate into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
What undergraduate? According to the link you provide, she graduated in 2004 and was the subject of discussion between Epstein and Summers in 2018.
In related news, Harvard is also launching its own investigation into its former president Summers: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/19/harvard-opens-...
OMG the correspondence described there is disgusting: Summers seeking advice from Epstein on how to turn a mentoring relationship into a romantic one.
MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmat...
Nicholas Tartaglione
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2019/09/23/feds-how-n...
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
> It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide."
Nonsense. "...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0] "...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1] etc.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/us/politics/trump-epstein... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/trump-epstein...
Isn’t NYT complicit and sat on a lot of Epstein files before the 2016 election.
Um..
Just throwing it out there, but forget Epstein, I'm sure most of us would not believe what NYT is sitting on in general. This is effectively a defacto global intelligence gathering service. I bet if we could read through a lot of that we'd all be gobsmacked and just stop believing in humanity altogether.
I understand most of what we haven't seen is uncorroborated, but it would still make for interesting reading if we didn't have to worry about falling down an elevator shaft onto some bullets.
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
MAGA will follow Trump off a bridge. The America First collective pushed for this and many of them have given up on Trump.
not sure where you are looking but Rasmussen polls have been showing Trump hemorrhaging support since June among his base. if you visit X this is where many of them converse, and they are quite openly unhappy with the admin lately
I believe it has nothing to do with sexual offense and that the higher prices of goods is really affecting people.
So he's still immune the anything that's horrendous.
guess you can believe what you want but data shows the Epstein topic has been damaging his base support
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
This doesn't accord with experience. MAGA is notorious for rationalizing anything Trump says or does.
The uniparty is a rotten, spiraling race to the bottom.
Usually true, but the MAGA base was truly pushing this.
Only because Trump told them to push it first. His problem is that he changed his mind.
Then you're in a bubble.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you both are in a bubble.
They're just different bubbles.
Liberals and conservatives have methodically and deliberately avoided holding their leaders accountable for decades. The only people who can't see that, are, frankly, liberals and conservatives.
What we have now is an opportunity to sweep everyone from Trump on down out of office. Anyone who would work for Trump or Clinton should have their judgement questioned at a minimum. And they should pray we don't look any further into what they've been getting up to.
This is a golden opportunity to scrub the walls clean and put in new people en masse. But I'm not naive. I know the corruption of the incumbent power brokers and parties will undoubtedly win the day. You can bet your bottom dollar that conservatives and liberals are cooperating and they've got the courts, Homeland security, CIA, everything.. out cleaning up for them. I just wish they'd get what's coming to them for once.
I have loathed Larry Summers since the repeal of Glass-Steagall. He has consistently treated the American public like he treats women in the Epstein emails. So glad he's finally getting his comeuppance.
Not enough, if you ask me. He should be publicly shamed and humiliated. Truly one of the most evil maniacs of our time.
Is that not what is happening?
I mean, he’s still teaching. For now.
Gotta be a matter of time unless the place he teaches truly has no principles.
I would like to bring the term "lamposted" into popular discourse.
I can only pray it becomes mainstream (along with the act, obviously). That is literally the only way to remedy this. You can pass new laws, but that does nothing for the past. You can go bankrupt trying to bring civil cases and possibly get some monetary compensation, but at a certain point all this stops working and people go back to what always works to return order back to society.
You can disagree, just understand you're agreeing to being subjugated or being enslaved, short of a viable and actionable alternative to being lamposted.
I hardly think a millionaire stepping away from his job is “comeuppance”.
Don’t forget Epstein’s circle of rapists and rapist-enablers still had friendly communication with him long after he was convicted and known pedophile.
I have doubts about officials’ ability to get real justice. I’ll still me shouting for blood in the streets, though.
He was working at the Center for American Progress to ensure if the Democrats got back in power they would be committed to not fixing anything, fulfilling any promises, or doing anything beyond Clinton/Obama/Biden managed decline.
Good riddance.
It’s interesting that only now he is stepping back now that he’s been found out. It demonstrates that it’s not about ethics or morals, but about publicity and damage control.
How do we know that whoever asked him to step down already privately knew?
it's the good old eleventh commandment, "thou shalt not get caught"
most of what we know today we knew years ago, too
The tax paying class of the world just have to watch all this horseshit go on, watch the institutions and the law enforcement agencies protect these people with our hard earned money, meanwhile if we break a single law, there are consequences for us, sometimes massive.
It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
It's a big club, and we ain't in it.
By most metrics, it's almost always been worse. But that doesn't make the modern era suck any less.
And would most of those metrics you allude to happen to have been brought to us by institutions like Harvard, or the US Treasury Department?
Brought to you by Steven Pinker, another one of Epstein's associates.
"The big thieves hang the little thieves"
> It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
> It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
This category of malcontent (about out-of-touch elites engaging in all sorts of depraved perversions while the poor starved) at Versailles eventually caused most of the former to lose their heads during the French Revolution.
The smart ones know that they need to keep up appearances, the dumb ones behave like they will never face consequences.
The smart ones are building bunkers to escape the hell that the US will become when the civil war actually starts. They're not hoping to survive the apocalypse, they're just hoping to ride out the 20 or 30 years of war and return as actual Lords for the serfs that are left after we kill each other.
I understand you want to highlight this, but you don’t have to begin your sentence with "It's interesting that..." because this is not interesting or novel in the slightest.
You are entitled to your opinion and they theirs.
It's interesting to me because how the hell did he think this was going to end? "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work in the court of public opinion. So, if one was even peripherally associated with Epstein, it would seem like that would be a hell of a liability.
On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?
"Winklevoss twins are assholes [but I have nothing substantive to say against their claim of product theft]" - LS
Let's not forget that time he advocated for dumping toxic waste in poor countries.
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.
He was literally part of a ring of rich and powerful pedophiles who trafficked underage women.
Evil people can make jokes too, and mimicking the formal tone of an official document is a bit as old as time.
I'm not really in a charitable mood with this guy right now.
I’m with you. Stuff that seems cartoonish to regular people does often seem to be serious from him.
"I know I'm wrong, but still I have to double down on this to save face"
That wasn't the implication.
It's certainly a possibility but I also wouldn't put it past him to advocate for something that evil.
I read the memo. Maybe just me, but I don't see any indication that it was tongue in cheek.
And yet that's exactly what he and his ilk have been doing ever since western countries began to demand workers' rights and environmental protections.
I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.
What’s the joke?
It was tongue-in-cheek, but the cheek belonged to an underaged girl.
Wow. That text is wild! Another excerpt:
Being familiar with economist jargon, this looks like a joke.
The joke is that it looks like a joke but isn’t in the same way a sociopath will explain in detail exactly how they’re going to fuck you before they do knowing you won’t believe them because it’s all a joke in a joke that isn’t real.
So it's okay for people who have the power and connections to actually impact the world in the horrible ways they're "joking"about to make jokes about doing just that?
I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.
That's the great thing about "invention", there are other ways to 0 pollution besides historic ones.
Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire.
Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.
And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
"Bad" people can still have good ideas or well-thought arguments. It happens often enough to have become became a clichéd meme.
https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
> Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.
> And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
A good many people I know and have known for 60+ years would, do, and yearn for civilisation as you know it to back the f off and get its foot from their neck.
Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport.
Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
The /s was supposed to be implied.
And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.
Jonathan Swift was a writer and known satirist with publicly known views that were opposite to the absurdist views expressed in his famous satire.
> And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.
If you're going to engage in satire, its best the satire be obvious.
I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically.
Also known as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
Sorry, did you mean "Summers unironically wrote" or "capitalist economist types unironically believe" ?
This is dumber than "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke.
That memo redefines himself as toxic waste.
He also famously gave a speech declaring that one of the reasons women were underrepresented in science and engineering faculty positions was "issues of intrinsic aptitude". - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/science-jan-june05-summ...
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.
I remember hearing about the variance thing ages ago. Back when I was young enough and naïve enough to trust statements said in official voices without critically assessing them.
With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
I'm not touching the variability thing with a 10 foot pole except to say that the further out on each extreme of the IQ "scale" you go the less reliable the scores are. The whole idea of using IQ as a ranking of ability rather than a diagnostic tools is bogus. I do think it's clear now though that Summers was simply being a misogynist (you lose the presumption of good faith when you disclose that you'd been lying all along.)
Oh indeed, on all counts. I'd just like to know if it was purely his own BS, or the reproducibility crisis.
(I don't know why I'd like to know, thinking about it at a meta level…)
I remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking.
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
Surely he could not possibly be sexist, nah.
To me that memo is pretty clearly a sacarstic version of reductio ad absurdum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVG5V7FzB_Q
Actual unedited title: "Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board after release of emails with Epstein"
Title as interpreted by me: "Larry Summers was on the OpenAI board this whole time"
Echoes of Kissinger on Theranos' board (and many other examples, no doubt).
I still haven't got over war criminal Kissinger getting a Nobel Peace Prize.
Such a weird history, that one.
Two of the committee resigned in protest, Kissinger almost turned it down because it was also being awarded to Lê Đức Thọ, Lê Đức Thọ actually turned it down because the peace it was supposed to be about hadn't happened yet, Kissinger accepted in absentia as he did not want to be targeted by anti-war protestors when getting the peace prize, then he later tried to return it only for the committee to say no.
They gave Arafat the prize as well. Basically for promising to stop murdering jews. A promise he reneged upon almost immediately to be clear. But of course the bar had already been set impossibly low by awarding the prize in chemistry to Fritz Haber, the guy who literally invented chemical warfare. At least to Kissingers credit he did try quite hard to make peace and sometimes succeeded.
Then they give the prize to guys who don't deserve it like Obama and overlook Trump, who even his biggest haters cannot claim hasn't done a lot of war ending over 2 terms.
The Peace Prize is weird one. It is a political tool to pressure people toward peace. That's why Obama got one strictly for not being George W Bush.
It's one of the few Trump grievant that is legitimate.
I had to look this up. That is absolutely insane…
John Carreyrou's book "Bad blood" is extremely good. Full of suspense, amazing revelations. I highly recommend it. It explores a lot of Elizabeth Holmes' and Sunny Balwani's insanity.
If you don't have time for the book, there's a decent documentary available
It might have gotten flagged as political content if the full title was used.
Reid Hoffman already resigned so I guess, kudos to him for getting ahead of the curve!
Next up will be selling of shares to finance defense teams
So far, what has been revealed in the documents is embarrassing, but not necessarily implicating: https://searchepsteinfiles.com/person/163
For the most part, the threads are a mix of:
- Really cringe dating advice
- Epstein connecting Summers with other important people
- Dishing on Trump and his inner circle
Given there were many more prominently featured people with more dirt in here, I wonder if Summers is worried there's a lot more that's about to be revealed.
really cringe dating advice about pursuing an affair with a student almost 40 years younger than he is
it's way beyond cringe
27 years younger.
She is approximately 43 (college grad '04) and he is 70.
The text messages were 6 years ago.
Has the name of the woman come out? She's not directly named in their communications.
her name was front page news in several US tabloids today
Yes, it has.
Epstein seemed to be a power broker and a political fixer. If so, naturally many high-profile people would have interacted with him and even have confided in him. It does not mean everyone associated with him knew or participated in his criminal activities, right?
Agreed, but continued communication after he was found guilty of sex crimes is definitely a bright red flag.
hang loose, young lady, i have to ask this sex criminal how best to respond to your latest message
absolutely
he didn't have any power or ability to fix anything that didn't involve trafficking young girls
he can "fix" you up with a teenager who will give you a private "massage"
Not sure where you are getting this from. He regularly connected people with each other. The sex trafficking was just a small part of his nefarious power network
Not to defend Epstein, of course, but just to comment on the power brokering side. My understanding is that a power broker gets power by staying close to the power and by connecting people. I don't understand why powerful people need such broker, even though history shows other wise.
Same as any broker of stocks, houses, spouses, jobs, airline tickets.
The broker connects people, especially in the pre-Internet / young Internet days . The clients at ebsuy doing their main activity.
he can "fix" you up with a teenager who will give you a private "massage"
... while being videotaped. Those recordings provide him an immense amount of power and ability.
An example of one of the typical meetings Epstein was able to finagle with Summers:
> this week, thiel, summers,bill burns, gordon brown, jagland, ( council of europe and nobel chairman ). mongolia pres , hardeep puree ( india), boris ( gates). jabor ( qatar). sultan ( dubai, ), kosslyn ( harvard), leon black, woody. you are a welcome guest at any.....also if you >think there are interesting people in town, everyone here for climate summit, clinton ,security council, holy shit im on for next 30 minutes
https://searchepsteinfiles.com/file/text/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028...
He also regularly provided research funding for universities.
> Epstein seemed to be a power broker and a political fixer. If so...
If so we are getting a window into a world we rarely see. For some of us this is confirming our priors, for others this will be profoundly shocking.
It's a pity he hung himself. Otherwise he might have been induced into giving over a lot of secrets about lots of rich and powerful people....
[dead]
> - Dishing on Trump and his inner circle
At this moment in time, this is the most serious crime to those in charge
There's an interesting list of criticisms about Larry Summers here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15320922
Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?
It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
> how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
so... this might be the pattern.
Telling people in power what they want to hear.
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
>It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.
Someone (maybe Charlie Munger) said that the presence of a woman he has lust for reduces a man's IQ by 20 points.
Seems anecdotally true.
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I think ladder climbing is its own skill only loosely correlated with intelligence.
> Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?
"Funnily", if you read Epstein's contributions to a lot of his emails, he also gives off that same vibe.
Don't get me started on Trump
They know they above the law from the minute that reach a certain level of status, they don't care about the emails and if people see them, they know there will be next to zero repercussions for them.
What do you mean? I assumed he was cozied up to by the likes of Epstein because he had already ascended the ladder.
I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things.
According to wikipedia:
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...
> As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance.
(Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.)
On what basis do you say that Epstein was pretty talented at finance? This guy was a math teacher with no actual degree. The only reason he got his gig in finance was by schmoozing up the dad of one of his students, who was CEO of Bear Stearns.
The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now).
[dead]
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
I know we're never going to fix this problem, but it's depressing how we seem to have made zero or negative progress on it.
I wouldn't say we've made zero progress. There are always ups and downs, temporary wins and losses, but I think that over the long term, there's more skepticism and scrutiny now than in the past.
I think this is a side effect of having "paid law enforcement", it's not that the cops are bad, but their bosses are. The people who fund the law enforcement are ultimately at the mercy of the "rich and powerful" in some way or another, so basically people of a certain status get a pass.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
Why pays cops and orders then to pick fights with innocent people
It used to be that any citizen could approach a grand jury and allege a crime. The purpose of the grand jury was to decide if tax dollars should be spent to hire a prosecutor for that (single) case.
"Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case.
It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into.
He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated.
He just supported the status quo. Look how much money he lost during the 2008 crisis.
Summers is just weather vane for current economic thinking. He's not a particularly brilliant at anything.
When has he been right about economics?
The big question here is are they involved with Epstein because they are in power, or did they get power because they had Epstein pull in favors for them. From the emails he seems like the big spider in a spider web. Both parties and so many people in power referred to him for critical problems, pulling strings in critical places (Bannon on behalf of Trump was getting his advice on how to discredit Kavanaugh opponents and Epstein obliged with medical information on one of the opponents to bring up at a hearing). Beyond Clinton, Obama’s attorney is mentioned a bunch as well. I’m sure the democrats had plenty of favors in too.
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
This guy Epstein modus operandi of cozying up and becoming wingman to powerful people confirms that he was some kind of spy. But it's still weird to see a well known professor of 61 years texting about gurlz to his middle aged wingman. Who does that and is this really what millionaires do, reliving high school?
Money and power have been seen as corrupting influences since the dawn of humanity.
Those who seek those things -- money for money's sake, power for power's sake -- often tend to see their success as somehow making them "above" others. They derive perverse pleasure in seeing just how much they can flaunt society's rules. 'The rules don't apply to me' is like a drug in itself.
He was killed in maximum security custody, so an Intel operation.
I think it depends on how they got rich. From the outside to me it looks like the ones who sacrifice their 20's to the grind and getting rich never get that shit out of their system like the rest of us do and end up as emotionally stunted adults trying to recapture their lost youth.
What the actual fuck logic is this?
I grinded fairly well enough in my 20s, just as many other people I know who did. We're much better off than 99.99% of the world. That doesn't make us think of sexually abusing children and adolescents one bit because we need to "flush that shit out of our system" and "recapture our lost youth". I have better ways of recapturing my lost youth, by computer games, more time for hobbies and fucking closer to my age like rabbits.
PS:- being in the upper echelon does mean you have a somewhat easier access to the circles that engage in these vile activities, and yes you'll be completely excluded if you say no to them. Many are okay with that, while those who aren't are the ones in the files.
I read that as being more a claim about the "professor of 61 years texting about gurlz to his middle aged wingman" rather than how old the girls were.
>This guy Epstein modus operandi of cozying up and becoming wingman to powerful people confirms that he was some kind of spy
Ah yes, no one else has ever tried to ingratiate themselves into the world of the rich and famous. It's spies all the way down!
High school never ends.
I really think there is so much variance to how people live. Looking at some of the Epstein emails I'm floored by the behavior. It really seems like middle schoolers. And the racist chats that came out from the Young Republican group earlier this year -- I can't imagine ever being a part of a chat group like that. I would literally think I was being pranked or they were genuinely crazy racists, but they were actual early leaders of one of our two major political parties.
The thing that perplexes me is that these people aren't in poverty or victims of some violent trauma. They are among the elites of the country -- and yet this is still how they behave -- are these people a niche group or am I?
> they were genuinely crazy racists, but they were actual early leaders of one of our two major political parties
Why not both?
Most people are followers whose belief systems are spoon fed to them by the largest village willing to accept them. Understanding cult psychology and the agendas of the people driving the bus is typically enough to understand their worldviews and subsequent behavior. That’s just my gut read on it..
I think you mean forever trying to be cooler than he was(n't) in high school.
A thing to remember is that Chamath Palihapitiya is a billionaire but spends his time on Twitter trying to convince people he has a big dick[0].
> i'll bet your entire net worth x 10. the anaconda is the worst kept secret of silicon valley...
I think the truth is probably that insecurity does not prevent success. Some argue that it might be the source of it. But probably the truth is there are secure billionaires and insecure billionaires and the latter are very obviously insecure because despite their success they do things like this.
0: https://x.com/chamath/status/1931039584672186651?s=20
I saw the email correspondence between him and Epstein. The sense that I got is he's pursuing some young girl half his age. And he actually thinks that she is attracted to him. Powerful, ugly men are so stupid sometimes.
Men who don't pursue women don't get laid. This is an extremely important gendered asymmetry in heterosexual dating. Most men aren't attractive to most women, and if you want to be successful at dating as a heterosexual man you have to have to display a certain amount of boldness in pursuing women. Maybe the girl in question really does find Larry Summers old and ugly and wants nothing to do with him, but in general men who assume this is the case and don't even try, or who heed the words of outsiders that it is stupid to think that a girl might be attracted to you, are putting themselves at a systematic disadvantage in dating.
That's a charitable take. It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship. Also the woman's dad is the founding president of some major Chinese bank (AIIB) that he was cozying up to.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
> "It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship"
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
[flagged]
"Hi, would you like to sleep with me? If you say no, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure you're unable to get a job in the field you want to pursue." And to be clear here, for most of these sex pests, that is not an idle threat.
There's a reason it's considered morally and ethically heinous to demand sexual favors with people whom you have power over, and if you can't understand why it's so heinous, then you do not deserve to have power over anybody.
He consulted with the most notorious child sex trafficker of modern times on his plan to use the power of his position to coerce a young woman into sex.
In those consultations, he used a racial slur to refer to the young woman.
There are other contrary positions you can take, it doesn't have to be that this was okay.
Maybe not a bad thing for another reason: assuming most powerful men are up to these kinds of shenanigans, this filters out for those who are not clever enough to keep it under wraps. Sounds like a useful job skill for the positions these kinds of people might need to handle.
Powerful men/women don't have to be sexually or in other ways abusive to subordinates. They really don't. Most of them, in fact, don't. You certainly hear about the ones who do, for a reason.
I hope so. I'm just having a particularly cynical day.
When you got up this morning did you know that this is the fight you would be taking up today? It's not too late man just delete it and go back to bed, try a fresh start.
What specific part of what Larry said in the emails was so egregious that he needed to resign? What’s wrong in simply asking people advice to sleep around?
Simply asking, at that point, a well known human trafficker for advice on how to leverage his power to sleep around.
You have no issue with that?
This dude is an AI goon. There's a lot he doesn't have an issue with!
what do you mean?
Nope. Read the emails before discussing, please.
I read the relevant parts. What was so bad?
Reading about the case, you get the sense that this is the general disposition from these abusers. They know what they're doing is wrong, and they understand the power imbalance, but they sort of excuse it and justify it by softly believing that the women actually want them. That they are actually sexy. And that they are helping the women, somehow.
It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
She was attracted to his power, which is why she spent time with him. Don't pretend she was an innocent protege. She was a nepo child playing the same game of stays climbing.
[flagged]
Why? He was one of the most prominent economists of his era. This is in the news because it's newsworthy, not because he's been radioactive this whole time.
Why not? He was a part of a pretty radioactive network of people. I doubt that he just happened to hang with Epstein by mere coincidence, and it does raise some questions about how much Sheryl knew about it.
I think it's very silly to suggest that Sandberg would have known anything at all about Summers personal life a decade before he had dealings with Epstein, simply because he was an undergraduate adviser to her. He was already one of the most famous economists in the country in the late 1980s, when that happened.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
I cannot overstate the potential significance of what's going on in Congress currently and it has global implications.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sit at the nexus of an international pedophile ring that threatens to bring down many billionaires and even some governments. There is a concerted effort to prevent the release of this information and we're far from done yet.
A lot of effort was made by the administration to prevent the discharge petition reaching 218 signatures. For anyone unfamiliar with how the House of Representatives works, the majority party chooses the Speaker and the Speaker decides what bills get a vote. But if a majority of the 435 representatives (so 218) want the House to have a vote, there's a procedure called a discharge petition. If it gets 218 signatures, the Speaker has to schedule a vote within a week or so (I forget the exact time line).
The Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as basically putting the House in recess for 8+ weeks to avoid this happening. He avoided wearing in an Arizona congresswoman for that same period because she was going to be the 218th signature. The government was literally suspended to avoid this outcome.
Then the Speaker changed tactics to try to pass the bill with a procedure called "unaminous consent". Basically, if no House member objects, the bill passes. Why would he do this? To avoid having votes on the record. This was good politics to force a role call.
The Speaker continues to play defense here because carve outs were added to the bill to exempt files for "national security" reasons and anything under active investigation. That's brazen obstruction and the least surprising thing is that the president announced an investigation this week. It's explicitly to prevent the release of some evidence. Make no mistake.
It's not unique to this administration either. the previous administration sat on all of this for 4 years doing absolutely nothing.
Where doe sthis lead? Foreign governments and intelligence agencies who were not only aware of what was going on but they (allegedly) actively benefit from and participated in this trafficking ring to get access to and/or blackmail powerful people. That's the "national security" interest.
As many of us are aware by now, Ghislaine Maxwell's father was the British media mogul Robert Maxwell who was a Mossad asset and got a state funeral in israel for his contributions to the state of Israel going back to suplying militia wth weapons in World War Two that were ultimately used for ethnic cleasning. And how did Maxwell die? He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
If this stuff gets out, many heads will roll in government, in business and in prestigious colleges. Look no further than one Alan Dershowitz. Harvard in particular has unclean hands and is elbow deep in all of this. And certainly whatever you do don't look into how Kimble Musk met one of his "girlfriends".
This is only the beginning.
Careful you don't go full Qanon on this one. If anything the fact this thing passed is an indication that there's very little unexploded ordnance left in the unredacted files.
The likely most damning/embaressing thing that has led to Summers resignations -- being a powerful 65-year-old man trying to pressure a 37-year-old mentee into having sex/relationship with you -- is considered (by me too) icky and unethical and an abuse of power, undoubtedly a violation of many ethics codes and depending on how it's done possibly some laws -- but is not actually anything to do with pedophilia or child abuse at all.
i know we like expanding the categories of all sins and then only refering to things by category name without the specifics, but.
>He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
Maxwell had been stealing from his worker's pension fund and it was all starting to come out. It is plausible that he killed himself to avoid the consequences. He was a monster.
I'm having extreme difficulties visualizing Kash Patel holding powerful people to account.
Alternatively, there is no justice, and even the truth is lost to partisan politics. I have a strange feeling this benefits foreign intelligence, not harms it. Mossad, for example, knows who slipped through the cracks. Knows how much worse the "truth" is beyond the code names and vague emails. Now they have more power, not less.
What’s partisan about what your OP described? Democrats and republicans alike were entangled in Epstein’s crimes.
This kind of thing can only exist in a climate of apathy and nihilism. The powerful want you to think the situation is hopeless and nothing will change. But remember this: at no point in history has a steady state been maintained for significant periods of time. Ever.
We are at a dangerous point in history. I personally believe that inequality is inevitably going to end in violence and we're beyuond the point of avoiding this with electoral politics. People are struggling to eat and survive at a time where we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. This simply can't continue.
I'm personally for outing wealthy and powerful pedophiles who are meaningfully making all of our lives worse to accrue completely unnecessary extra wealth.
There was nothing particularly suspicious about Maxwell's death. The music was up, the noose was tightening around him, and he was about to start eating shit for the consequences of his fraud.
The people he robbed in that fraud were regular Joes who were cheated out of their pensions, not some kind of shadow-government-global-conspiracy types who have the means to remote-program your toaster to kill you.
Him killing himself is not the most surprising way out of that situation.
Well it's a good thing that the DOJ and FBI have highly qualified and totally non-partisan bosses that will see to it that justice will be done /s
I'm sure I don't know what you mean. The FBI director is such a good guy he even writes children's books.
They already bought off Ghislaine Maxwell by moving her to minimum security prison with unearned privileges, so she won’t spill what she knows about people in current administration. Not sure why you seem optimistic, she is possibly the most informed person left alive and she’s gotten kid glove treatment from Trump.
> This is only the beginning.
And perhaps the end. If its as serious as you claim it is nothing will come out of it.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Game's gone.
What has the world come to , bowing down to children ....
they telling us to "think of the children" again am I right? /s
It’s elf ‘n safety gone mad!
Utter woke nonsense!
*if you’re a democrat
[flagged]
You should really Google some of the emails he wrote to Epstein. Summers wasn't just friends with Epstein, he was Epstein's padawan.
I think you missed the sarcasm in the original post ;)
Poe’s law applies too much these days. I’ve tried to get out of the habit of leaving jokes ambiguous like that because it’s just too easy to trip readers up, especially when not everyone has native level awareness of idioms or social context.
Part of the problem is also frankly that HN has a culture that encourages serious engagement (or at least a facsimile of it) with the worst opinions it's possible to have. You just can't keep your sense for sincerity finely honed in an environment like that.
> the worst opinions it's possible to have
can you give examples?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitHNSays/ Exists for just this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45982802
your example is obvious sarcasm?
ah crap, my gullibility strikes again
<3
Man, it's so understandable. Especially when 35-40% the country is doing exactly that kind of bullshit equivocative defense. Frankly I'm shocked the shitheads usually here read the room and have kept the child-rape apologia to themselves.
Part of the purpose of sarcasm is to inject humor. Personally, I don't find anything humorous about sexual assault.
There is such a long history of using humor to affect change and discuss extremely serious matters. Legally it's protected speech because of it's importance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire
The main purpose of sarcasm is not humor, it's to use irony as a form of contempt. To the extent that humor is involved it's usually done so as a form of mockery.
I am perfectly OK with having contempt for powerful pedophiles. The opportunity for laughter is a bonus.
I just hope that the fallout doesn't begin and end with Prince Andrew and Larry Summers.
Don't read Swift's A Modest Proposal then.
[flagged]
[flagged]
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting dross like this.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983044 and marked it off topic.
This whole Epstein thing feels like a distraction. Yes, the people involved are reprehensible and deserve consequences. But why is this such a big focus for some people on the left and the right (apart from an opportunity to attack their political opponents)? Consider that even if Epstein had 1000 victims, there are still far larger-scale problems the country is facing that we aren’t spending the same time on.
It’s not enough to say “we can do more than one thing” - our attention is limited. And instead of those bigger issues dominating our conversation and political will, we’re focused on the Epstein issue. I also seriously doubt something will come of it. I expect that when anything is eventually released, it may have been selectively redacted or withheld, and any convictions will take years if they happen at all.
Meanwhile, vile politicians like MTG are latching onto this fervor and using it to push their own relevance and position on the American political stage. In her case, it’s a desperate play to disown her past of “Jewish space lasers”, QAnon, pizzagate, and all of that. But the naive public is eating this up. And they’re using what is a minor issue to hitch themselves onto otherwise harmful people.
I don't know what you tell you if the systematic abuse of hundreds (some reporting does suggest more than 1000) children doesn't rile you up. The fact that it is nearly exclusively rich and powerful people who participated only amplifies the effect. Most of us are absolutely fed up with the two-tier justice system, where the rich, powerful, and connected get to do whatever they want, while regular folk continually have their rights eroded. The powerful are often able to divert our attention from the injustice of the rich/powerful by dividing the people with propaganda, pitting one side against the other. Turns out the Epstein situation is one of the rare cases where nearly everyone agrees. You should expect it to receive increasingly large amounts of attention until we actually receive the real info and heads roll.
Why is it such a big deal that many of our leaders (including Numero Uno) are likely rapists and pedophiles?
I don’t even know how to answer that question.
Like I said - it’s reprehensible. I’m not minimizing the crime but pointing out there are bigger problems. Focusing on this instead of inflation or housing or healthcare means a lot more people will suffer than there are victims of Epstein. We have to prioritize. If too much attention and energy goes to this, bigger problems will be left unaddressed. The things I’m listing are occupying virtually none of the national focus right now, for example.
Why do you think the current government would be the slightest bit interested in solutions to housing, inflation or healthcare if Epstein wasn't an issue?
> Focusing on this instead of inflation or housing or healthcare
> The things I’m listing are occupying virtually none of the national focus right now, for example.
Have you forgotten why the government was shut down last month?
What an embarrassing comment. I hope you don't mind me linking this back to you once the files are released in full.
I'm not as alarmed that one of the most influential economists in America is a potential sex trafficker. I'm alarmed about to what degree the most influential people in America are being blackmailed.
The story goes way beyond the abuse itself, they were videotaping everything to black mail other rich people and even world leaders... it's one of the biggest scandals in American history and it's about more than Epstein alone.
My gut feeling is that theres a lot of things in there that punters need to know about, to make informed electoral decisions.
My gut feeling is also that its been largely overblown, and releasing the files might actually take some of the wind out of the conspiracy theories built on the lack of this data.
Epstein put a lot of rich and powerful people with influence in government and industry into compromising positions. Those thousand victims weren't a hobby. He was creating blackmail material and using it for his own gain, and to sell to others. The amount of money flowing through the scheme is so large that it has to be from government entities, like intelligence agencies. Sergey Lavrov's name has come up in the documents. It's very plausible that a lot of the money Epstein got originated in Russia. That's a national security problem.
Well, good to see Hahhvuhhhd is not above the British monarchy when it comes to eventually ejecting sex pests! A low bar to clear, but well done!
Now, just for certain ex-Brit colonies to follow their example! Quick... who can think of a popular leader who is, ehhhm, quite intricately linked to the same, ehh, gentleman with pretty specific tastes?
Anyone?
In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.
>We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Not that I wholly disagree, but in the interests of robust conversation, I feel compelled to ask:
When?
It's in everyday things.
Like this most recent headline from AppleInsider:
"Cook controversially dines with Saudi Crown Prince at White House"
Now, I'm no Saudi Crown Prince stan, but would the word 'controversially' have been used if Cook dined with Biden - who funded and supported a genocide, in which hundreds of journalists were killed? Why was the word 'controversially' not used to refer to also being at the table with Trump there?
Yes, it's controversial that Cook had dinner with the Saudi Crown Prince. In my view it's even more controversial to be having dinner with Trump.
This is just the most recent headline I can give as an example. But there are many like this.
> In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
There's nothing that quite makes me feel like humanity has undergone speciation than the fact that this STILL HAS TO BE FUCKING SPELLED OUT FOR PEOPLE.
Hero worship is sycophancy of the highest order. Ugh, and I know you're so right.
[dead]
And, to be less coy, how is the opposition party the one that treats Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman? It's somehow Epstein all the way down. Glad I'm a left-wing Chomskyite, cynical about all of those corrupt, elite institutions. Wait...
Bill Clinton hasn’t been relevant in politics for like twenty years. Nobody on the left thinks about or cares about him.
He's still extremely relevant, if only to derail discussions as demonstrated here. I'm waiting for someone to bring up Al Franken!
Don't forget Ted Kennedy!
Depends on how deep the pillow talk went during the Obama admin.
> its most valuable elder statesman
That's Barack Obama. Among other things, he's not 80 and still has the vigor of youth. Clinton is just old at this point.
Pretty sure Obama is the MVES of the Democratic party.
Obama was the hothouse flower of the Democrat party that Bill Clinton singlehandedly wrought. No Bill Clinton, no Barack Obama. Before Bill Clinton, here's what the NYTimes (left wing though not as far left as now, but i.e. sympathetic) had to say about the field of Democrat candidates for president:
"The strongest and saddest impression this viewer took away from the collective appearance of the Democratic Presidential candidates on national television was that Snow White was missing, while the Seven Dwarfs prattled on." https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/04/opinion/in-the-nation-the...
and you saw similar dynamics at play in the most recent series of elections. Biden was rammed into the nomination in 2020 because non of the field of candidates had a broad enough base of support. On the other side, Trump did what Clinton did, reshaped his party in his own image.
As someone who voted for Bill Clinton. If Bill Clinton is implicated, then he needs to suffer for it.
I think the real question is why didn't the Biden administration release the files. How many very powerful people left and right are in there?
> I think the real question is why didn't the Biden administration release the files. How many very powerful people left and right are in there?
If I had to guess it's because there's nothing incriminating about Trump in them. Otherwise we all know they would have been leaked a long time ago.
tl;dr: Because there were ongoing investigations (which was true) and it's generally considered bad to release your evidence before trial, or something like that, IANAL.
This will also be Trump's (false) reason for not releasing them.
Why was t true before but false now?
I suspect it's been the false reason the whole time.
No one is investigating anything, only wiping hard drives and tying up loose ends
> Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman?
Huh? Bill Clinton has been a relatively invisible ex-president compared to the other modern ones (aka Carter & Obama, Biden hasn't been gone long enough for data).
Perhaps that's because he didn't want to overshadow Hillary, but it's at least partly because of the Lewinsky affair.
On the contrary, he's the perfect man to be on OpenAI's board; before and after these extra revelations.
The odds, though sadly still vanishingly small, of him doing the right thing and drowning himself in a toilet bowl just increased. Today is a good day.
> "In other exchanges, Mr. Summers appeared to ask Mr. Epstein’s advice on how to pursue a romantic relationship"
That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the woman into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”"
I think it remarkable how the NYT buries (far down on the page), and CNBC omits altogether, the underlying story about what Larry Summers was actually doing. CNBC euphemizes the whole thing away to vapor (there were mails—the end). These aren't good expositions.
(Speaking of the NYT' coverage, there's a new revelation one of their reporters actually helped Epstein evade scrutiny—it's another bit from the recently-disclosed email tranches. Their reporter Landon Thomas secretly tipped off Epstein that one of his NYT coworkers was "digging around" into Epstein—even gave Epstein the guy's name).
https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3m5hn... ("Fall 2017: Then-NYT reporter literally warning Epstein that someone is "digging around again.")
> That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the undergraduate into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
What undergraduate? According to the link you provide, she graduated in 2004 and was the subject of discussion between Epstein and Summers in 2018.
I got some of basic facts very wrong; I've removed that error.