I do not think there is evidence that thinking pedophilia to be awful is the province of "low human capital" or "losers." I believe it is a widely shared view that cuts across socio-economic and educational attainment classes. I think your view on this is rare and very much on the fringe.
You read it wrong. He’s saying only stupid poor people are angry at pedophiles because they’re insecure about being stupid and poor, while the wealthy (who are universally hard-working and highly intelligent in Hanania’s brain space) aren’t.
Pedophilia is sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. If you talk about men who are not only pedophiles but actually commit sex crimes against pre-pubescent children, then yes obviously to a random guy on the street that is one of the worst crimes possible.
However the argument here is that people misuse the term "pedophilia" and apply it to cases where we talk about ordinary heterosexuality, like having consensual sex with a 16 year old high school cheerleader. This would be legal almost everywhere given the fact that 16 is a legal age for sex almost everywhere.
Actual pedophilia is insanely rare. You almost never hear of cases where men have sex with pre-pubescent children. And when that happens, its typically within the family, so we are talking about incest.
So the argument is that this obsession with pedophilia has lead to the word loosing its meaning and now being applied to ordinary cases of heterosexuality where an older man has consensual sex with a biologically grown up woman who just happens to be under the age of 18.
The main argument is that stupid people care more about this issue. I do not think that’s true. And I do find it “off” and unhealthy for a mature man to have a sexual relationship with an adolescent.
> And I do find it “off” and unhealthy for a mature man to have a sexual relationship with an adolescent.
Great but the main result of this attitude in the hands of the stupid violent people is that 21 year old bachelors are severely persecuted for dating 16 year old high school cheer leaders. It's up for debate if that's a "mature man in a sexual relationship with an adolescent" or not, or whether it's "unhealthy" and "off." History, biology, and I find a 21 year old and 16 year old couple to be a good age match for each other, approximately in the same stage of life, and such a relationship neither off nor unhealthy, but shitty proletariat have skipped the debate and moved to violence for this type of relationship, which is absurd.
I don't think he's proposing it as a law. Age/2 + 7 matches pretty closely to most people's intuitions about when the age gap is likely to be a problem for the relationship. Whether or not anyone is culpable, a 30 year old dating an 18 year old is probably regressing back into his extended childhood. The 30 year old might even have a worse time of it (I've seen this IRL).
The reason no one says age/2 + 3 is because it gives the wrong answers in many cases; eg., it approves of an 18 year old with a 12 year old, and what exactly is acceptable for two 6-year olds to do together? Age/2 + 7 says no sex till 14.
All this is meant as a softer boundary than the law.
Racist take, David. Have you ever worked in a Hispanic community in the USA, not to mention Mexico. The delay of motherhood past the "teenage" years is a historic and global anomaly, a recent experiment driven purely to accommodate the equally recent Western valuation of extended schooling. Indeed the results of that experiment are only now beginning to hit .. a lower population from waiting too long being just one of them (which ironically drives the need to import laborers with culturally fewer qualms about, say, 'teenage' girls dancing topless down the streets of a Brazilian Mardi Gras.) I also take it a bit personal, as my own precious grandchildren would not be alive today if this new morality had ruled when my teenage rock n roll parents skipped school one day to drive to nearby State where they could be legally married at 15 .. both seniors - kids skipped grades back then. Post script, I was on a plane with my Mom to Japan two years later to join my US Air Force Airman Father. They are still going strong 66 years later. And having NOT delayed adulthood to accommodate your sensibilities, they are still alive for their Great-Grandchildren DESPITE both myself and my daughter delaying our own matrimonies and families until we over 30. This one or two children spaced out once every thirty years .. is not, on its face, a good idea.
This. My wife was 15 when her mom *finally* allowed her to live with me under one and only condition - no problems at school. As a highly motivated girl, she managed and is a successful lawyer now. 30 years later, we still love each other very much, watching in disbelieve how the world goes crazy.
But I have to admit, looking at my nieces, just few years back, when they reached 14, I could not believe I started serious relationship with my wife at that age. They looked completely immature and childish to me. Did they just looked like that, or were they actually immature? Not sure, but now at 25, they are very jelaous of how beautiful relationship we have with my wife, unhappy with their own relationships.
Why? At 16 you are fully grown up as a woman. Its perfectly natural and normal for a man of any age to have sexual relations with a 16 year old woman. Only reason you are saying this is because you look at 18 as some sacred age
Only if the child is overprotected. Try telling my Mom she was not a "emotionally or intellectually" adult when she flew, married and 16, on an airplane from Kentucky to Japan with me in her lap to join my 17 year old Air Force airman father. Wow.
He didn’t say low status people care more, he said they tend to obsess about it to the poof hysteria and witch hunting more because it’s one of the only things low status people can use to look down on high status people. They do this to feel better about themselves.
"Mom's new boyfriend" is another setting where sex with pre-pubescent children occurs. Technically sort of within the family but not incest. Another setting is male leaders of sports teams and youth groups having sex (usually fellatio) with peri-pubescent boys. These cause great moral panic because the organizations abuse social trust, far out of proportion to any actual harm to the "victims" who are sometimes even "into it" because of proto-homosexual vibes they give off which the trusted adult takes advantage of.
But these cases, like incest-child-abuse pedophilia itself are not at all the same thing as sexual attraction to fully post-pubescent minors who knew what they were doing and consented, even if the behaviour was not in their best interests. That's called ephebophilia. Not pedophilia.
Position being ... ? You do not approve of human beings bearing children at the age they were biologically designed to best do so? For their own health and to help ensure they are around to assist humanity as healthy grandparents? If your argument is that a 16 year old woman is not as attractive to you personally as someone who was historically a grandmother's age, that is a different issue. But what is dangerous is to even remotely conflate Epstein's misdeeds and crimes with 'pedophilia'. They are bad enough on their own. It is not even a grey area .. the ability to bear children is the VERY DEFINITION of not being a child.
I think everyone finds pedophilia to be awful, but online there is a striking amount of violent discourse & obsession.
Look no further than the (aforementioned) influencers, the violent videos, the entrapments, and the merchandise out there! I've seen bumper stickers with "Kill Your Local Pedophile" on them. It's an odd obsession when you consider the amount of engagement.
If I met someone in this orbit I could not help but feel a sense of pity for choosing to focus on this. There is also just a weird misdirection by this crowd, whereby they obsess over elite pedophiles and strangers, not the more common instances of familial abuse.
The main argument is that stupid people care more about this issue. I do not think that’s true. And I do find it “off” and unhealthy for a mature man to have a sexual relationship with an adolescent.
Epstein as never once been accused of pedophilia .. and this article does not even address the issue of pedophilia itself. It is about a case of Orwellian style dishonest use of semantics (actually it's "anti-semantic" as being semantic means sticking strictly to literal definions) to create a pariah in order to conduct ad hominem attacks on political opponents through guilt by association. The population that learned the lessons of the McCarthy era have aged out.
Hanania’s definition of “low human capital” is anyone who doesn’t come to the same conclusions as he does. It’s his Occam’s razor, except Occam’s razor calls for the simplest explanation that fits the data, and his explanation in this case doesn’t fit the data.
He’s talking about the type of people who obsess over pedophilia (as stated in his title) and those who widen the definition to include age gap relationships with older men and 18 or 17 year olds. He never said only low status people think pedophilia is bad.
Obsess vs. care more? And where is evidence for so-called obsession? I don't obsess about older men taking advantage of younger women. But I think it's creepy. A 55 year old man with an 18 year old woman. I would call that man low status and would have nothing to do with him. I think it's low status to approve of that.
>You’ll often hear pedo hysterics assert that 16- and 17-year-olds are “children.” But we never refer to them as children in any other context.
This is not true, anytime there's a victim that's less than 18, people call it, he killed a kid, he killed a child. He threatened a child. Hamas killing sub 18 yr olds is classified as killing children. Like what world are you in if you are unfamiliar with "oh my god, she's just a child" for 16 yr olds.
>Videos of “pedophiles” getting abused and publicly humiliated rack up huge numbers on social media, and again we have to think how strange this would be for any other crime.
Richard consider you don't understand this cause you have a terrible theory of mind. People do not consider most of these other crimes as bad as pedophilia, kids are considered vulnerable, that's the entire basis of parenting, robbing a child at gun point is considered worse, they baked babies or shot kids is considered the pinnacle of crime of Hamas as are "child soldiers", someone that kills a teenager is considered much worse. The ubiquitous of this feeling around the world should show you it's not that simple, as we indeed live longer, some extended childhood is expected but also no period of our history had high or notable rates of teenage marriage, they were almost always frowned upon or shied away from even in region their religion allows it, The Taliban had to change this law by force. Saudi Arabia age of consent is now 18 and they use Sharia law that they could use to justify that.
I think you easily understand this when you see data that says most men find young women attractive and that's natural male sexuality but for some reason don't understand the most people find sexual relations between and adult and teenagers questionable. And even in France with Young age of consent, the relationships are not common and still considered kinda weird.
And you see to keep ignoring that women are the one thta are most against this. Just like that age gap thing, you ignore that while men are okay with ut, the other side largely isn't, and the small age gap (over 15) that are extremely happy, have to go through the great filtering and all the malicious ones would have been filtered out, and most on shaky foundations will also not survive the social sanctions.
And to be honest, as a personal opinion, the guys that indeed go for teenage girls are the kind you don't want around your loved ones.
It's not just fear of harm to children. There's very little interest in kids being abused in non-sexual ways as central to low human capital conspiracy theories. This is very sex-specific, and the hysteria even goes up the late teens, because they need to expand the definition of pedophilia as far as possible to satisfy their need for sex-specific things to get angry about.
Exactly. In the UK specifically, stories of parents physically abusing their children until finally killing them are hot topic for a couple of days. Stories about sexual abuse go on for years.
Prof. Kathryn Bond Stockton once made this point about people caring more about sexual harms and dangers to children, rather than the dangers of poverty, family dysfunction, and physical violence, in her famous book "The Queer Child" (2009).
Chapter 1 is the most relevant and only good chapter, which included the banner line that Congress "has acted only once to resolve against science: in order to say that children must be harmed."
She was referring to the Rind et al. 1998 controversy, which is a fun rabbit hole if you like scholarly controversies and want to read lots of replies and back and forths about age gap sex...
18 is just a made up number, it has no significance. Its just a number made up by politicians. At the age of 16 you are fully grown up as a woman, you are fertile and can easily get pregnant and you stop growing. You have absolutely no right to tell older men that they cant date or marry a 16 year old woman. That goes against science and human biology
“At the age of 16 you are fully grown up as a woman, you are fertile and can easily get pregnant and you stop growing.” This is a ridiculously narrow definition of being “fully grown up.”
Thats what "grown up" is supposed to mean. When you reach an age where you stop growing, you are a grown up. Otherwise, the term "grown up" loses all its meaning and it can mean anything. We can then say that people are children until 25 and nobody under 25 is a grown up.
Or how about 30? Lets then say that people are not grown ups until 30, or how about 35? How about saying that women are only grown ups when they become too old to have kids.
If its not about biology, but just a random age, then that age could be anything. Nothing prevents us from saying that people are not grown ups until their 30s.
There is no such thing as being "emotionally or intellectually" grown up. Those are subjective terms. Its like saying that someone is handsome or ugly, its entirely subjective. I could say that Piper Rockelle is emotionally a smart and mature woman, and some other guy might say that I am completely wrong and she is deeply immature.
All you are doing is expressing an opinion. With biology we are not talking about opinions but about objective reality
There certainly is emotional and intellectual maturity. Widely accepted with decades of research and longitudinal studies. Same with moral development (read William O. Perry’s theories). Have a good day.
Moreover what world are people living in that they think people 16, even 15 or 14, aren't having sex? It's bizarre. It's a bit like people getting hysterical about underaged drinking: nearly everyone has their first alcoholic beverage in high school, despite the magical "21" age that the feds insist everyone stick to.
An interesting thing about the US is "age of consent" used to be much much lower than it is today. But "age of marriage" used to be much much higher than it is today (often 18 for women and 21 for men in times past). So our more "conservative" "religious" society recognized people would have sex younger, but wait for official marriage until later (at least in the early to 19th-late 20th centuries). The trend since the 1970s has been to equalize the ages for both sexes and also lower the age of marriage/majority.
Today typically you can get married - with parental authority - at 15-17 in most states.
And yet also today we have pedo-hysterics about teenagers having sex or getting married. It's just weird.
Thats one of the most weird and insane thing about this whole obsession about 18 as an age for sex. Its this notion that if a 16 year old woman has sex with a 16 or 17 or 18 year old man its perfectly fine and normal and acceptable. She can have sex as many times she wants, with whoever she wants (as long as they are close to her age), whenever she wants, however she wants. Anal, vaginal, orgies, group, whatever. Violent sex or non-violent sex, its all fine... as long as the man is 16-18 years old.
Basically you see a 16 year old woman having sex with men close to her age as anarchy, everything is allowed as long as she agrees to it. So when it comes to a 16 year old woman sleeping with a 17 year old man or 18 year old man she is considered to have a developed brain, she is capable of consenting, and everything is fine.
But if she agrees to have sex with an older man, then suddenly everything changes completely. Now sex is suddenly horrible and a terrible crime. Her brain is not capable of consenting anymore. So your brains ability to consent depends on how much older the man is.
This makes absolutely no sense, and there is no way for people to defend and justify this view point.
History tells a different story, if it's biology yet it remained so consistently uncommon throughout all of our history, and in fact men are mlst attracted to 22 to 25 yr olds not 16.
"It's biology" is a nonsense excuse, biology is probably also why parents and the public are skeptical of old men that would go for 16 year olds. And of course, we do not limit ourselves to biology in most parts of our lives all we will be nothing but monkeys. Why even marry and be monogamous considering it's not exactly align with our biology to be attracted and sexually interested in many people at once.
In ancient China, age at first marriage was generally 13-14 for girls and 15-16 for girls. This is much lower than in premodern Europe, which developed a late marriage pattern (22 average for women and 27 average for men), but in China, it was socially widespread and even legally enforced with (at times) rising taxes if a girl was over 15 but still unmarried.
(This is not to say this was good policy or led to human flourishing or anything. It's just factually inaccurate to say that it was never widespread.)
It's not inaccurate. If i said twin killings were not widespread that is not disproven by one tribe in africa engaged in it. My actual argument is that it was not the norm, one nation in one period doing it doesn't change that. And even in this china period, this is a bad example, they were still mostly marriages between teens not adults and teenager.
NOTE: I had mentioned many times here that it was allowed even recently and today in some places like Afghanistan, and Northern Nigeria. The thing is even though it was legally allowed, it was still mostly teenage to teenage marriages , and old men and teenage is seen as suspicious and often only allowed when the dude is crazy rich.
This isn't "one tribe." This is one of the largest civilizations in the world, for centuries, with the full force of law. The medieval European marriage pattern is unusually late.
I didn't say it was one tribe, it was still just one region for one period, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't meet the definition of widespread. The size of the chinese region not withstanding. We are more talking how many cultures did that.
Again, you see to not understand how that's even irrelevant to my point, i know some groups allowed it, i mentioned middleeast and Northern Nigeria, I didn't say it wasn't practiced anywhere, what i specifically said wasn't widespread was the teenage marrying an old man thing. Which is also true in China where most of the teenage marriages were between two teenagers.
No, it has always been the norm for men in their 20s and 30s to marry women between 15-17 years old. It was the norm in ancient societies such as Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia. As a 16 year old you would marry and older man who is more mature and could financially provide for you and your kids.
What you are doing here is you are taking 18 as some kind of magical sacred number and then you base your morality on that age. So you are fine with someone like Leonardo Dicaprio dating 20 year old women, but would object to someone dating a 17 year old woman, despite the fact that both 17 year olds and 20 year old women are fully biologically grown up women.
You are trying to give some academical twist to your obsession about 18 as some magical sacred age.
We actually have actual evidence that it was indeed not common in Ancient rome, greece or Egypt, those are where we determined they were indeed not the norm and the norm was 20s to 20s!. You can look no further to actual states now that allow child marriages and still most teen marriages are between two teens.
Leo is famously mocked for his stuff and he's like 20 years older than his gf now. But yeah
There is no need for academic twist, biological sexual is not the only thing we conside or it would be okay to marry 8 yr olds, 12 yr olds. There's a lot of things ti consider here like "they are clearly not that intellectually developed yet and teens are actually not at full sexual maturity if you see how they have high maternity mortality rate".
And again, there's the point that eveb most of where this teenage marriage thing exists, it's between two teenagers not a teenager and an old man. And the idea of threshold exists everywhere in our lives, borders are examples of that. The idea that one medieval state did it for some time is also a terrible defense of your position. Like yes we should start sacrificing Twins cause Africans did.
That is simply not true. It was the norm for a 16 year old woman to marry older men. Even today in most African countries the average age a woman has her first child is 18, meaning it is the norm for 15-17 year old women to have kids. And in many of of those cases she has a child with older men.
Di Caprio is mocked because he dumps his girlfriends as soon as they turn 25. I dont think most people would care if he marries a 19 year old woman and then has a family with her. My point here is that 18 is just an arbitrary number, made up by politicians. Today we refer to 17 year olds as "minors" and 18 year olds as "adults". But if 10 years from now politicians increase the age of majority to 21, then we would be talking about 20 year olds as "minors". Its just a number made up by politicians.
Have you ever even met a man? Nope .. maybe you are conflating what men are now willing to say out loud. Rock and roll songs and every past romance back to Romeo and Juliet was "You're 16, You're Beautiful, and Your Mine". And that's just INSIDE Western Civilization .. the one that has dragged out Primary School into Graduate School, and with the new adults scoring lower on IQ tests than their grandparents. The entire prodigious career and artistic output of Buddy Holly was over by the age the new finger-waggers assert adults and careers and families should even begin.
I'm a man, I've interacted mostly with men my entire life, i grew up in a region where child marriage is allowed, Nigeria. I'm not conflating what men are willing to say out loud, I'm not talking about what men think at all, I'm talking about what the actual data across history shows and that's that, teenage marriage was not the norm, it was more common in the past but not the norm and indeed even when looking at Teen marriages across history and in regions that allow it now, it's overwhelmingly between two teenagers not between an old man and a teenager.
Yes a number of rock and roll dude did it, some of them literally had their reputation ruined for it and again they aren't really representive of what's common. And indeed in the rare instances of adult men and teenage women relationships across history, it is predominantly happened between very very rich or influential men and teenage girls, very commonly due to debt repayment, but yeah ut happened. But agained it happened doesn't change it wasn't come on.
You mentioned the rock and roll period, we have data from that period (that period was indeed historically unique, was one of the most liberal across history), we know teenage marriage was higher then than now but still a minority even then and we know most teen marriages were between two teenagers not adults and teenage girls. We have this data boss.
Fast times at Ridgemont high, 1980, the 25 year old with high school girl. That wasn't criminal, it was not very abnormal. Beatles song, "she was just 17..." Also whole concept of "sweet 16".
1. Losing virginity is not indication of teen marriage
2. It also doesn't say anything about the pedophile adult marrying teens thing. Most teen marriages are between teens.
3. Historically from what Archaeology has shown, teen marriage were indeed never actually common. The average age of first birth is over 20 for both men and women
"The average age of first birth is over 20 ..." And what does the distribution look like -- how thick is the left tail? The average being over 20 doesn't indicate that a a substantial proportion are at a younger age. I don't know either way.
The bigger segments of the left tail is probably closer to 18-23 than to under that. And again the argument is about the commonality, talking about left tail indeed going towards how uncommon it is. And of course, I'm not saying it didn't happen, it' definitely did happen way more than it does now, it's just also true that most teenage marriages are between two teenagers not between adults that are like more than 15 year olds and teenagers. Look no further than literal cultures that still allow it based on culture and religion like Afghanistan and Northern Nigeria that practice it now and practice teenage marriag more thoroughly in recent decades. It's mostly between two teenagers.
Stop saying nonsense, what evidence. First birth is the Greatest indication of teen marriage cause like you said contradictorily in the 1st point, losing your virginity is a sign of marriage, you think teen marriage is the common option yet age at first birth is like 23 to 25, that makes sense to you.
I ignored this point before but there is no data on what age people lost virginities outside the west pre 1940s. Indeed, historians largely agree pre marital sex was actually the norm in the global scale. Historians show we know about 20 to 40% of chilren were conceived before their parents marriage, this is higher than even current world but you have to understand rhey didn't have BC. This "disproven by evidence" only to make up everything is dumb. There were a lot of cultures that did the virginity test on marriage day but we also have evidence this wasn't treated tgat seriously and indeed was gamed by couples that had already engaged in pre marital sex. And even the Yoruba virginity test was uncommon globally, the greeks, athens, romans, europe were all having pre marital sex.
Even African and many native cultures: In many pre-colonial African, Polynesian, and Native American societies, adolescent sexual experimentation was often seen as a normal stage of development.
Also teen marriages even now in regions where its allowed like Nigeria where I come from, still largely happen between two teenagers, fathers of kids born to teenage mothers are overwhelmingly also teenagers.
Indeed even Nigeria got the teenage marriage thing only in the North and it was from Arab Muslim culture getting there. And even there most of the teen marriage are between two teens like I stated already as something that bolsters my point not take from it. And you even stated it as if that disproves my point that teen marriages between 14-19 were common. Nonsese, it wasn't common, but most teen marriages were indeed between two teens which strengthens my argument again Richard point not take from it.
Did you miss how teen marriages are common among 14 to 19 years olds does not disprove my point cause I have literally stated most teen marriages are indeed between teenagers and stating that is a dumb way to refute argument against marriage between adults and teenagers.
>First birth =\= first marriage. Waiting years before having your first child is a common thing
OH god you have a terrible grasp of history, this is not historically true, there was no family planning, birth control, condom, almost no abortion, they didn't know how to track cycles and as you just said, they got into marriage to have sex, you think they were getting into marriages and not having sex for years? Like you also claimed, this is not the case cause you literally stated they used to lose their virginities as teenagers. We know europe for one and asia had very much higher rate of pre marital conceiving.
Teen marriage happened at higher rate than they do now, but they were overwhelmingly between two teenagers, and were not the norm or common and it was indeed not common for adults to marry teenagers. The 14 to 19 range you mentioned are within teenager range. Even within teen marriage counts, marriage between a teen and adults like 15 years older was not common. You have absolutely abysmal knowledge of history and archaeology and for some reason feel so confident enough to state "your statement defies evidence" and make up many incorrect claims
The median age gap was 5 or 6 years, so no it was not between 2 teenagers, he would have been 20 when she was 14 or 15 and she would go through her teens while he is in his early to mid 20s.
Jeez, why do you have so much bad ideas about history, birth control are literally a modern invention as is family planning, kids died a lot then, people lived shorter lives and needed kids to work on farms so they basically had a lot of kids. There were instances of condoms in ancient europe and Asia but they were by no means common or mass produced and used.
Historically, they were used almost exclusively to prevent syphilis and other STIs, usually in brothels. They were expensive, uncomfortable, and notoriously unreliable. A 17th-century peasant or a 19th-century laborer was not using a "sheepskin" every night to space out their children.
Another obvious proof is that inter-birth interval was consistently 2 years which is consistent with no such effective birth control. Breast feeding supresses ovulation for a while and then children again.
Even Richard Hanania reposted a Tyler Cowen article he contributed to that mentioned how birth control and family planning introduction in modern age are responsible for falling birth rates.
My understanding is the median age of marriage in Northwestern Europe was mid 20s since at least middle ages and early to mid 20s in 18th century America. There are areas of the world were teenage marriage was common but Northwestern Europe was not one of them.
It did happen but it wasn't normative or socially acceptable and rare cases such as Charlie Johns and Eunice Winstead in the 1930s caused a national scandal.
Maybe a simpler read is that "elite human capital" are generally equipped financially and socially to feel safe, comfortable, and secure, while low SES people's core experience is insecurity and anxiety, which is expressed and sublimated in large scale concerns presented by forces out of their control - demonic possession, satanic child abduction cults, conspiracy of foreigners, etc.
Of course high status people also have their neuroses and obsessions but they run media and academic institutions so their neuroses become normative and good to worry about while we can all make fun of the rubes at the bottom.
However, it's interesting why CSA and by extension, sexual exploitation of young women/physically mature teenage girls (and to some extent boys too, especially by men, especially at younger ages) has become THE chief bogeyman of our era, above and beyond anything else.
To the degree that occasional at least accounts of people who report sexual contact with adults as teenagers or even children as non-traumatic and occasionally positive are completely dismissed, unspeakable even.
Interestingly, though, the tables also show SES to be a significant predictor of emotional and physical abuse of children, but while lower class people obsess over CSA, they seem to downplay emotional and physical abuse of children: "I was hit as a kid and I turned out fine," "Kids need harsh discipline, not emotional support and participation trophies," etc., while higher class people seem to be more concerned with these forms of abuse, though without, of course, developing elaborate conspiracies around them.
Sorry but this is totally off. Spanking or yelling isn’t abuse of children. I’d say higher class people just don’t think about this stuff day in and day out, because they don’t need to rationalize certain antisocial behaviors
Clearly you’re allergic to the concept that innumerable references to pre pubescent children (pedophilia) are in the files and yet you spend all of this article bleating and trying to split hairs about the experience of the victims as older teenagers to make it seem less creepy. Revolting.
And yes, perhaps it is “low human capital” to care about young children. Historically, many of the “elites” you worship do indeed sacrifice their innocence of their young children in various ways to achieve their Machiavellian ends. Is it a leap to guess you personally would do similar tactics with your own children to advance your status in some way? Gross.
I listened to a few Michael Tracey podcasts this morning, and I'll admit I have been radicalised against the masses. If you stop pussyfooting around and actually come up with some concrete plans for disenfranchising proles and putting them on reservations, then I'll get on board with neoliberalism.
Asking for Net Tax Balance of maybe above 2000$ (ie all tax & social security contributions minus all welfare checks, tax credit, Obamacare subsidies etc) will disenfranchise most proles. In addition to all illegals, and a majority of legal immigrants.
It would be unmanageable, lol. The easy way out would be to see tariffs as a sales tax, see that flow to the treasury in percentage of gross domestic product, and adjust it as a linear, "withheld" tax credit on your net income. So if your net income were 50k, tariffs were 200 Bill and GDP were 15 Trill, it would be around 750$.
The point is - people who are under water with Net Tax Balance don't invest in stock etc. So basically, almost everything that is not taxed away or paid into Social Security away from them ends up in consumption. Even paying mortgage is kind of consumption. So you can argue that a linear part of their net income goes to tariffs. As a first approximation. Maybe slightly more, since China produces a lot of cheap consumables.
Yup. It has been extraordinarily bemusing to watch dynasties fall over having associated with a "pedophile" - "convicted" no less - when Epstein himself has never once been seriously accused of pedophilia either formally or informally. As I said to my own wife, if the media keeps plastering posters of successful men with busty hot babes in their arms to illustrate a "pedophile", then every young man will aspire to be one.
Well, I don't think that's completely correct. Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida, and in Florida the age of consent is 18. So taking pedophilia to mean sexual interest in a person with whom sex is legally forbidden, Epstein was. And Epstein seems to have had sexualized interest in a lot of girls well below the age of consent, though I've not seen any clear accounting of exactly how far he went with how many, that is, the exact amount he violated the law. But it's clear that Epstein acted on his sexual interest in underaged girls, and didn't seem to covert to a strict hands-off policy after his first conviction, and in the public's mind, that's pedophilia.
Which should matter as much as the Taliban arresting a woman for letting her face mask drop. Absurd law .. when my own mother was 18 I was two years old and living with my (still) married parents on Tachikawa Air Force base in Japan. I was born a full 15 months year after they were married, so not a hardship exemption .. just a trendy thing to do in the Rock & Roll era .. three couples skipped County High that day to caravan to the nearest State where parental permission was not required. Any law that asserts that I, and by extension my grandchildren, should not have been born, I do not recognize nor respect. The bizarre, US-centric,, and very recent experiment of raising the age of consent alongside the ever increasing number of years society appears to pressure young adults to remain in school, is already not ending well. (By this measure, Jerry Lee Lewis would be a criminal - oh nvm, he actually would have fallen under some of Florida's exemptions to this code - and Buddy Holly's entire massive catalogue contribution to humanity would have existed due to him being stuck in college at the age he died. But that would have been good, right? We need another sociology major more than we needed a timeless body of American music and art - that will represent us as proudly Plato's Republic represents the Ancient Greeks.
Having said all that, not defending the guy who was on the crew with with Trump and other 90's New York Democrat fundraisers who together pulled carpetbagger Hillary Clinton against all odds over the Senate race finish line .. just sensitive to double-sworded hypocrisy. (The recent reduction of all politics to a binary team sport brings with it the team culture of rooting for referees who make bad calls that happen to assist your own team.)
But the larger issue with redefining 'Pedophilia' as " pedophilia to mean sexual interest in a person with whom sex is legally forbidden" is that we now no longer have a word for Pedophilia .. and since cavorting with peak fertile womanhood happens the world over about a .. I dunno, a BILLION? times more often than dating a 3 year old, you just gave permission to every actually convicted child molester to shrug off the label with a 'so what, so was your grandmother', unless, as with 'racist' and even 'rape' these days, one must ask further questions before forming a judgement .. which very few will actually do, nor probably should they.
I say this with love: you sometimes write very interesting pieces. But anytime your writing relates to your ideas about Elite Human Capital versus Low Human Capital, the quality drops off.
I would argue that the overall conceptual distinction is useful but it hasn't been analyzed enough to be a really good assessment. But a new useful concept is never fully developed by any single thinker.
The joke of course is that as you mention, they started with QAnon telling them that there was this cabal of largely Jewish influencers in a global conspiracy to traffic children. And it turns out they were right. But their solution was to elect the guy who was most wrapped up in it. But then they believed him when he said Mexico would pay for his wall, and tariffs fix inflation, so par for the course.
I am not particularly interested in debating whether Epstein was a true pedophile or “merely” an ephebophile (I am sure I spelled that wrong, but I refuse to look it up). We often use the term pedophile more broadly than its clinical definition, and that’s OK. It seems clear that in the early 2000s, Epstein sexually victimized teenage girls in a criminal manner. However, where I think Tracey is right is that nothing really indicates that he trafficked these girls to other rich people.
Its important because pedophilia and heterosexuality are two different things. A man who is attracted to 15-17 year old women is a straight heterosexual man. A man who is attracted to pre-pubescent children is a pedophile.
All men regardless of age are attracted to 16 year old women and that is natural. And there is nothing wrong with older man having consensual relations with 16 year old women. If you call men who are attracted to 16 year old women "pedophiles" you are destroying the meaning of the word.
There's plenty showing that he and Maxwell facilitated the victimization of teenage girls - that the pair groomed these girls for themselves and for others - and likely vice versa ("show me yours and I'll show you mine"). And many of these girls were flown around, domestically and internationally.
Tracey is bizarrely obsessed with shitting on any and every aspect of "the Epstein story." Just because some opportunistic shysters, journalists and "influencers" have gone to town on this, doesn't mean that a lot of creepy people didn't abuse a lot of girls and young women, or that some of that conduct wasn't illegal.
Tracey's entire schtick for months now has been Epstein "contrarianism." He's a click-chasing, low-effort, Epstein-obsessed shit-flinger.
There is no evidence that Maxwell facilitated the victimization of teenage girls. First, none of the 3 witnesses at her trial who claimed to be underage established that they were "victimized", they claimed to be engaged in illegal acts with Epstein which do not require victimization as an element of the offense, rather they only require age. Second, all of the 3 witnesses were paid 7 figures for their testimony, which invalidates it. Each of their stories are consistent with the Epstein parts being true, but Maxwell being inserted here and there. Maxwell's defense established in the case of Nadia Bjorlin that she inserted Maxwell into the story between her statements to the FBI in 2019 and her statements at the trial. Maxwell was Epstein's girlfriend and was probably jealous of these other girls, she was almost certainly not recruiting them and probably didn't like them. The girls were silent until Epstein died because they still liked him and received money from him and then all signed up to make millions of dollars to take down an old sexual rival, that seems to be the best explanation for what happened.
That's not evidence. The conviction, while invalid, was not even for victimizing teenage girls, it was for allegedly provoking girls to travel to give illegal but consensual massages to Jeffrey Epstein. Victimization is not even an element of the offense.
>Maxwell was Epstein's girlfriend and was probably jealous of these other girls, she was almost certainly not recruiting them and probably didn't like them. The girls were silent until Epstein died because they still liked him and received money from him and then all signed up to make millions of dollars to take down an old sexual rival, that seems to be the best explanation for what happened.
Exactly. That is the essence of competition within groups of women. Undermining and revenge. Tears and lies. That's how they do it. The whole point of this "scandal" was to nail Maxwell. I hope Trump pardons her. (I'm more into women my own age anyway.)
It’s the “for others” that I don’t see the evidence of. Do you have anything concrete, other than Virginia Guiffre, who seems to have been done combination of mentally ill and a grifter?
I’ve read the 2019 indictment. It alleges that between 2002 and 2005 he enticed girls, including minors as young as 14, to come to his homes in New York and Palm Beach to provide sexualized massages and he groped and otherwise molested them. It further alleges he enlisted the aid of his employees in this criminal endeavor. That’s the basis of the “conspiracy.” It doesn’t actually allege that he trafficked those girls to other men.
I’m not going to read all of their depositions. How many girls, other than Guiffre, have alleged that he trafficked them to other men?
I haven't followed the whole thing, or intended to, but Substack keeps feeding me this stuff.
It's irrelevant to me whether HE acted in ways that met the precise legal definition for "trafficking" under federal or NY, Florida or USVI law. Or whether the accusers win lawsuits or settlements. I find these hair-splitting attempts to salvage a predator's image to be repugnant. Especially Michael Tracey, who's making his living shitting on lots of women.
Harris, Amy Julia; Robles, Frances; Baker, Mike; Rashbaum, William K. (August 29, 2019). "How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls for Jeffrey Epstein". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.
It is very much NOT okay. My parents were not pedophiles. Also if child was whisked off to Epstein Island and "victimized" the charge would be kidnapping, not sex trafficking. Has the lesson of METOO to be suspicious of any decades past charges of victimization been so quickly lost. The same single mentally ill gal who committed suicide is repeatedly trotted out .. there is a higher percentage of young women who shop at my local Fred Meyers who have killed themselves than of those who have been employed by Epstein in any capacity. (And if you're gonna count today's young shoppers who WILL kill themselves over the next decade ... the jury is still out, and the horror of Fred Myers continues to grow.)
▶ noun an adult who is sexually attracted to adolescents.
adolescent /ˌadəˈlɛsnt/
▶ adjective (of a young person) in the process of developing from a child into an adult
I don't know of a single word for men who are attracted to physically-adult teenage girls, but I believe most men of all ages are. I mean "attracted" in a purely sexual sense that does not imply action.
All straight men are attracted to teenage girls for a significant portion of their life. What attraction they report changes with age, and teens disappear from the bottom of the attraction range when men are 30. Thus, all normal men in their teens and 20s are attracted to teenage girls. Ephebophilia is not the word for this since "ephebos" means "adolescent boy" or "young man" in Greek. It most closely meant males aged 18 to 20 as there was a militia in Athens called the "Ephebos" which contained citizens aged 18 to 20 who were doing their compulsory service. Koré was the word for "maiden," "adolescent girl" or "young woman." So you could call it "koréphilia", although attraction to maidens is normal. All straight men are "koréphiles" who have "breeding" and boob "fetishes." That is quite literally what "straightness" is optimizing for.
As a side note, ephebophilia was coined to describe homosexuals who primarily target teenage boys a few decades ago. The first reference extending this to men who date teenage girls was around 2005. The root "philia" does not even describe sexual attraction, but that's an older error going back 100 years ago or so. The proper root is "eros", as "philiia" means "fraternity", so it's used correctly in "Anglophile" which denotes somebody who likes Britain in a non-sexual way. It should be "pedoéroticist", "epheboéroticist" and so on. But proles are too dumb to know any Greek. A "pedophile" would literally be someone who likes child-culture, or someone who finds children endearing or entertaining, which is probably most women and a lot of men. An ephebophile would be the same but for teenagers.
I would disagree with the notion that older men are not attracted to 16 year olds. That attraction doesnt disappear just because you get older. What typically happens is that the older you are the less interactions you have with people that still go to school, like high school.
However if you put an older man on an island alone with a 16 year old woman, natural attraction is going to take place.
The ODE and NOAD have this etymological note under the definition I previously pasted: "1960s: from Greek ephēbos ‘adolescent boy’ (see ephebe) + -phile." American Heritage does not include the word.
Teens -- that includes 19? -- disappear from the bottom of the attraction range when men are 30? In the sense I provided for attraction, I find that very difficult to believe. How about, say, a man who is 80? I'm asking for a friend.
Now do "heterosexuals". There is no negative connotation to straight men being attracted to adolescent females. It is just an observation. And if a man is not sexually attracted to women at their peak flowering .. they are simply not attracted to women. Social norms do not dictate biology - when you married your own beautiful wife, did I magically and mysteriously cease finding her attractive, despite her now, at least per my own moral code, being suddenly off-limits? I call my own grandchildren gorgeous because I know they are indeed attractive.
What sort of "sexual victimization" did Epstein engage in that was in a criminal manner? (if you know.) If you mean rape, why not say so? If you mean something else illegal that wasn't rape, please specify so we can join in to judge him pre-trial and posthumously, too. Just want to know what we're judging him *for*.
What we can be fairly confident of is that between 2002 and 2005 he recruited teenage girls to give him “massages.” These girls were not trained massage therapists and had no knowledge or experience in how to give an actual good massage. He got them to partially undress during these sessions, shushing down to bra and panties. He sometimes groped them, touching breasts and genital regions. During these sessions he had erections and masturbated. He may have induced some to give him a hand job. He gave them approximately $300 in cash per session, and these girls were not from wealthy families.
In one case that we know of he had full on sexual intercourse with an underage girl. She was at the time 17 years and 364 days old — literally the day before her 18th birthday. Whatever the statute books say, prosecutors don’t usually bring statutory rape charges against men who engage in consensual sex with girls the day before they reach the age of consent. The girl says that the sex was consensual. This encounter was the basis of one of the two counts he pled guilty to.
One thing that to me stands out is that his actual misconduct wasn’t romantic or even villainous in a James Bond Villain kind of way. It wasn’t like something out of an action movie. It’s pathetic, and it makes him seem like a loser, not a wealthy megavillain.
Here's from the 2007 Grand Jury Transcript which caused this entire ridiculous story to occur, via detective work Epstein researchers have been able to un-redact some of this (the present version on the Internet is still heavily redacted). This is an interview with Saige Gonzalez, the single 14 year-old involved in the original Palm Beach investigation:
Q. How old were you in February of 2005? [First contact with Epstein]
A. I was 14 still.
Q. 14 or 15?
A. I was 14 still. Well, this happened when I was 14, so.
Q. You turned --
A. 15, in May of that year.
Q. And you just turned 16?
A. Yeah.
...
Q. Did you know someone named Haley Robson? [A purported "victim" who recruited overaged women and underaged "minors" and essentially pimped them to Epstein and others in the Palm Beach area]
A. Yes.
Q. How do you know Haley Robson?
A. I used to date her cousin.
Q. All right. How old's Haley?
A. At the time I think she was 18 or 19. I think.
...
Q. How much contact did you have with Haley?
A. I met her about -- I met her the night before I went to Jeffrey's house.
...
And she was like, what are you doing tomorrow? And I -- I said nothing. And then she was like, oh well, do you want to make, like, $200?
And I was like, yeah, sure.
And then -- and she was like, well, you're going to have to, like, meet my friend Jeffrey. And he lives in a big humongous mansion. ... And then she's like, but you have to give him a massage for like 40 minutes. And that's all you have to do. And you get, like, $200 for it. And it's really easy.
And I was like, okay, whatever, it's just a massage.
... [Haley calls Jeffrey's assistant on the phone to schedule a massage] ...
But Haley said that, like, I had to be 18. So she told the lady I was 18, and that I went to Royal Palms, and I was a senior and everything.
...
[Her boyfriend (16) knows what goes on and is saying, "don't go", but she decides to go anyway because it's $200, anyhow, she visits Epstein w/ Haley and another girl]
...
And then Jeffrey's like, how about you? Pointing to me. And I was like, okay. And then I was like, looking back at Haley and laughing. ... And she was laughing too. ... [she travels to Epstein's massage room with his assistant] And then -- she told me to get un -- well, not undressed, but, like, put -- keep your bra and panties on. And I was like, okay. ...
And then Jeffrey did come in the room. And he said, hi, and he shook my hand again. But then he went out of the room and he got undressed, but he had a towel on [and laid on the massage table].
...
Q. Okay, what kind of underwear did you have on?
A. A thong.
... Q. Were you uncomfortable getting down to your bra and underwear?
A. Uh-huh. Like, at -- I was kind of hesitant. ... But I just didn't care because it wanted $200, I wanted to spend it. ... And then I started to give him a massage. And then he's making conversation, asking me exactly what Haley was going to tell me to do. Like, if -- what high school did you go to, and all this stuff, etc.
Q. Did he ask him how old you were?
A. Uh-huh. And I --
Q. And you tell him?
A. I told him I was 18.
... [massage goes on] ...
[He], like, asked, well, would you like to make an extra hundred dollars? And then I said, sure. And then he's like, ... it's going to be something different. And I was like, well, what is it? And then he's like, um, can I use a vibrator on you? And I said, um, okay."
Anyhow that's the gist of all of it. The girls were told to lie about their ages, most of the "sexual acts" were him jerking off while massaging him and/or getting a vibrator on their vagina. He probably knew some of them were under the age of consent of Florida (because some of them would come back to his house over and over for 2 years and he'd note they were still in high school) although it's plausible (I guess) to have assumed they were "held back". One of the 14 year olds (not investigated in the Palm Beach case as she claims to have been recruited by Virginia Roberts Giuffre and told to lie about her age) specifically mentioned that she already had large breasts and could easily pass for a 21 year-old with make-up on.
The current crop of "victims" paraded around the media (Maria Farmer, Rina Oh, Lisa Phillips, Anouska De Georgiou, etc.) were all over 18 and most over the age of 20 when they met Epstein.
That's why I've been demanding all the pearl-clutchers wailing about "abuse" to define for me exactly what they mean by "abuse". Because there is no such crime as "abuse". I think they know it's not rape so they can't call it rape even it's illegal (I guess) to use a vibrator on a 14-year-old. There's also no evidence of the kind of power imbalance where women who are dependent on men for their sustenance get "trapped" in relationships where they have to do things they don't want to do. None of that here. The 14-year-old and her older colleagues seem quite cagey and worldly. Good for them. They are probably smirking at us right now being so histrionic over the "terrible things" done to them.
Under the legal definition of trafficking, if you fly a prostitute from Las Vegas to New York to have sex with her for money, that’s trafficking, even if you pay her $1,000,000 and she’s happy with the exchange.
In California if you hired an escort and she drove herself to your hotel, and you both enjoyed a glass of wine at dinner before going to a dance club and she decided to grind on you, and you never ended up having sex, that would count as sex trafficking (if a prosecutor so desired). The laws are retarded.
He never did that. He traveled with the girls sometimes but not for the purpose of sex. He got the sex without traveling because they lived nearby. He traveled because they were friends and wanted to travel. Therefore there was no traveling with "intent" to engage in prostitution. Intent is a necessary part of the offense; it must be proven with communications like "I am transporting Nadia to Nevada so she can have sex with Diddy." If it's Nadia, the masseuse, wants to tag along on a gambling trip, and later they happen to have sex, it's not sex trafficking, just a sex crime if the sex is illegal when it occurs in Nevada.
thanks for speaking out on this so forcefully. it won't be a popular cause but the hysteria over it is ridiculous. the fact that this is the leading political issue of the day right now indeed confirms the pernicious nature of this low IQ obsession. there is no conspiracy to traffic children, and Epstein and powerful older men desiring beautiful younger women is nothing surprising, nor particularly galling. we draw the line somewhere on what's permissible, fine, but that this "crime" is more morally repugnant than many others is silly.
perhaps the real thing we ought to address, then, is our attitude towards sex. is it sacred or profane? is it wise or foolish? is it purely biological urge or is it something more?
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the other celebrity formerly known as Prince, was famously photographed in 2001 with Virginia Roberts (Giuffre) in England. He was 41. She was 17. The age of consent there is 16. Just saying...
The fact that he was photographed with her doesn’t prove they had sex. As it happens, I’ve been photographed with both Brooke Shields and Lynda Carter. I think I’d probably remember if I had sex with either of them.
The family and friends of both the Bride and the Groom had no issue at the wedding of Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13 year old (the night before the wedding she was 12, so they had to wait). The idea of NO ONE starting adulthood .. ie, earning an income, starting a family .. until EVERYONE has finished college .. is a new and bizarre one .. and is already not ending well - as seen by the cratering of native Western populations. (Also .. no one wants to admit this .. but in the past, the main reason many American men DID wait until nearly 30 to get married is because they had been TRYING since about age 14. Not because they chose to wait. So delay 14 to 21 to even GET ON the Rejection treadmill .. do the math .. one must be a bit insane (with hormones) to keep hopelessly trying .. again .. 14, not 24.
Though I have (only recently) seen a published report that Giuffre says she had sex with Andrew when she was underaged, which I assume means below 16. So there might be an actual accusation of illegality.
By British standards, Jerry Lee Lewis' wife was 'underaged'. British customs and courtesies carry as much moral weight as those of a remote Amazon tribe.
Well, it depends on *where* the sex happened. As Hanania stresses, we have to draw a line at some age but the age is semi-arbitrary. So we have to assign the moral weight based on whether the act is illegal at that place and time. Otherwise, nobody can know whether their actions are "moral" or not...
I volunteered in a British prison for many years and can confirm the strange hierarchy that puts paedos on a step so low, it is a convicts moral duty to murder them if they ever get into gen pop.
Yet a man who did a commando raid on his neighbours and stabbed them to death on their sofa is afforded compassion. He just had a funny moment.
For this and other reasons, I completely agree with your thesis.
What disturbs me is that even in my own (well educated) family, the taboo of making these points, eg Epstein was barely, or "technically" a paedo, is so strong. I make the points that, despite the vastness of the material, there is no smoking gun, that codewords hypothesis is nonsense, and I don't get much airplay.
It's like a cloud of derangement - I guess this is mass hysteria. Interesting to watch.
I think the core political point here is importantly right, but you massively overclaim on the way to making it.
It's common sense, or if you don't have common sense, basic evolutionary psychology, that people are uniquely protective of children. They react with the same visceral horror to children being physically abused or murdered, and nobody explains that as low-status resentment looking for someone to kick down at. The protective instinct is real and grounded in something. You can't explain it away as a class pathology and you don't try to, which means you're left asserting without evidence that there's "very little" of this crime and that concern about it is disproportionate.
That said, the political point stands on its own without any of that. Think of it this way: serial killers are real, horrifying, and universally condemned. But if you built a political movement around hunting serial killers, gave it special powers, made it the animating issue of a faction, the salience-to-frequency ratio would guarantee definition creep, conspiracy thinking, and the erosion of procedural rights. The people attracted would be selected for emotional intensity and against analytical reasoning. They'd be terrible on every adjacent issue. That's QAnon. This is arguably even worse than building a coalition around immigrant crime, because at least that connects to policy questions. Pure "go after bad people" politics with no limiting principle is structurally corrosive regardless of whether the bad people are actually bad.
And the definition inflation stuff is fair. I live in the UK where the age of consent is 16, always has been, and society hasn't collapsed. An American proposing the same standard would be destroyed.
But you also need to hear something about the Epstein stuff specifically, because I think you and Tracey make good points about the overclaiming while being amazingly incurious in the other direction. For example, the recent guest, Arvind, on the Ezra Klein show was - with not really any pushback - making absolutely crazy claims like that Bannon and Chomsky were just performing for the cameras and don't really believe in their respective ideologies, which is just pure conspiracism on the world's leading liberal podcast.
But there is real corruption here as well.
Take Andrew. The arrest was for misconduct in public office, not sex trafficking. It doesn't vindicate the people screaming about elite pedophile rings. But misconduct in public office carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The emails show him forwarding classified trade intelligence to a convicted sex offender while serving as a government envoy.
You could forget that Epstein was ever convicted of anything sexual and this would still be serious. This is not the equivalent of finding an unpaid parking ticket when you go through someone's emails. You don't just stumble across government officials funnelling state documents to convicted criminals in anyone's inbox. If Epstein had been convicted of fraud what Andrew did would still be a major crime.
The fact that you and Tracey treat it as essentially a parking ticket reveals that you've set the evidentiary bar so that anything short of a formal sex trafficking charge doesn't register. Epstein wasn't just a swell guy that people liked.
The conventional corruption alone shows he was actively extracting value from powerful people in ways that required their knowing cooperation, And I think a reasonable person would be pretty suspicious of him without all of the ranting about "the Epstein class" or hidden networks of elite child sex traffickers.
It would be illegal for the Prince to forward classified trade intelligence to any person outside Government. Epstein's status as a convicted sex offender is relevant only in that it was because Andrew's leak showed up in the Epstein files that he got caught. If he had just forwarded the information to me, I'd have got quietly rich, paid Andrew his cut and no one would have ever known. But no, he had to tip off a sex offender. Dumb, man.
Excellent comment. Epstein pedo hysteria is ott. Epstein as a likely sociopathic manipulator collecting influence, friends and compromat is a genuine story.
Older teenagers are, as a biological fact, sexually mature and fertile - of course they can be sexually attractive. At the same time, society needs to draw an age of consent line somewhere, ours seem reasonable, and there are good social reasons to respect them.
But those two ideas are in tension and low decoupling ability may struggle with that. If "pedophelia" means ever feeling sexually attracted to anyone below the age of consent, then there really are pedophiles everywhere. And if it's also a major felony, then there are criminals or prospective criminals everywhere.
This hysteria is also spreading across the world with politicians in France, UK & even Slovakia having to resign due to associations with Epstein. Moral panics involving “defending children” are used both by right-wing populists like Orban to ban pride parades and mainstream “liberals” like Macron to censor social media. It really is a perfect storm that has elements of woke hysteria, low IQ right-wing conspiracism and prole resentment against elites. You are right to speak out against this.
I do not think there is evidence that thinking pedophilia to be awful is the province of "low human capital" or "losers." I believe it is a widely shared view that cuts across socio-economic and educational attainment classes. I think your view on this is rare and very much on the fringe.
I didn't read the article as Richard saying that paedophilia isn't awful, but that older men having sex with 16-18yr olds isn't paedophilia.
Which it isn't, unless you know any pre-pubescent 18yr olds?
You read it wrong. He’s saying only stupid poor people are angry at pedophiles because they’re insecure about being stupid and poor, while the wealthy (who are universally hard-working and highly intelligent in Hanania’s brain space) aren’t.
Pedophilia is sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. If you talk about men who are not only pedophiles but actually commit sex crimes against pre-pubescent children, then yes obviously to a random guy on the street that is one of the worst crimes possible.
However the argument here is that people misuse the term "pedophilia" and apply it to cases where we talk about ordinary heterosexuality, like having consensual sex with a 16 year old high school cheerleader. This would be legal almost everywhere given the fact that 16 is a legal age for sex almost everywhere.
Actual pedophilia is insanely rare. You almost never hear of cases where men have sex with pre-pubescent children. And when that happens, its typically within the family, so we are talking about incest.
So the argument is that this obsession with pedophilia has lead to the word loosing its meaning and now being applied to ordinary cases of heterosexuality where an older man has consensual sex with a biologically grown up woman who just happens to be under the age of 18.
The main argument is that stupid people care more about this issue. I do not think that’s true. And I do find it “off” and unhealthy for a mature man to have a sexual relationship with an adolescent.
> And I do find it “off” and unhealthy for a mature man to have a sexual relationship with an adolescent.
Great but the main result of this attitude in the hands of the stupid violent people is that 21 year old bachelors are severely persecuted for dating 16 year old high school cheer leaders. It's up for debate if that's a "mature man in a sexual relationship with an adolescent" or not, or whether it's "unhealthy" and "off." History, biology, and I find a 21 year old and 16 year old couple to be a good age match for each other, approximately in the same stage of life, and such a relationship neither off nor unhealthy, but shitty proletariat have skipped the debate and moved to violence for this type of relationship, which is absurd.
The old rule, "half his age plus seven" seems to work well. So I'd say six months after her 17th birthday if it were my daughter. But that's just me.
I think a 17 year old could date a 77 year old. A 17 year old is smart enough to understand. The age gap is irrelevant.
Why not age/2 + 3? It's not up to you to make your arbitrary uninformed line a felony to cross.
I don't think he's proposing it as a law. Age/2 + 7 matches pretty closely to most people's intuitions about when the age gap is likely to be a problem for the relationship. Whether or not anyone is culpable, a 30 year old dating an 18 year old is probably regressing back into his extended childhood. The 30 year old might even have a worse time of it (I've seen this IRL).
The reason no one says age/2 + 3 is because it gives the wrong answers in many cases; eg., it approves of an 18 year old with a 12 year old, and what exactly is acceptable for two 6-year olds to do together? Age/2 + 7 says no sex till 14.
All this is meant as a softer boundary than the law.
Racist take, David. Have you ever worked in a Hispanic community in the USA, not to mention Mexico. The delay of motherhood past the "teenage" years is a historic and global anomaly, a recent experiment driven purely to accommodate the equally recent Western valuation of extended schooling. Indeed the results of that experiment are only now beginning to hit .. a lower population from waiting too long being just one of them (which ironically drives the need to import laborers with culturally fewer qualms about, say, 'teenage' girls dancing topless down the streets of a Brazilian Mardi Gras.) I also take it a bit personal, as my own precious grandchildren would not be alive today if this new morality had ruled when my teenage rock n roll parents skipped school one day to drive to nearby State where they could be legally married at 15 .. both seniors - kids skipped grades back then. Post script, I was on a plane with my Mom to Japan two years later to join my US Air Force Airman Father. They are still going strong 66 years later. And having NOT delayed adulthood to accommodate your sensibilities, they are still alive for their Great-Grandchildren DESPITE both myself and my daughter delaying our own matrimonies and families until we over 30. This one or two children spaced out once every thirty years .. is not, on its face, a good idea.
This. My wife was 15 when her mom *finally* allowed her to live with me under one and only condition - no problems at school. As a highly motivated girl, she managed and is a successful lawyer now. 30 years later, we still love each other very much, watching in disbelieve how the world goes crazy.
But I have to admit, looking at my nieces, just few years back, when they reached 14, I could not believe I started serious relationship with my wife at that age. They looked completely immature and childish to me. Did they just looked like that, or were they actually immature? Not sure, but now at 25, they are very jelaous of how beautiful relationship we have with my wife, unhappy with their own relationships.
Why? At 16 you are fully grown up as a woman. Its perfectly natural and normal for a man of any age to have sexual relations with a 16 year old woman. Only reason you are saying this is because you look at 18 as some sacred age
“fully grown up as a woman” at age 16? Nowhere near the truth. Perhaps physically— not emotionally nor intellectually.
Only if the child is overprotected. Try telling my Mom she was not a "emotionally or intellectually" adult when she flew, married and 16, on an airplane from Kentucky to Japan with me in her lap to join my 17 year old Air Force airman father. Wow.
He didn’t say low status people care more, he said they tend to obsess about it to the poof hysteria and witch hunting more because it’s one of the only things low status people can use to look down on high status people. They do this to feel better about themselves.
"Mom's new boyfriend" is another setting where sex with pre-pubescent children occurs. Technically sort of within the family but not incest. Another setting is male leaders of sports teams and youth groups having sex (usually fellatio) with peri-pubescent boys. These cause great moral panic because the organizations abuse social trust, far out of proportion to any actual harm to the "victims" who are sometimes even "into it" because of proto-homosexual vibes they give off which the trusted adult takes advantage of.
But these cases, like incest-child-abuse pedophilia itself are not at all the same thing as sexual attraction to fully post-pubescent minors who knew what they were doing and consented, even if the behaviour was not in their best interests. That's called ephebophilia. Not pedophilia.
Did you read the essay? The bank robber example addresses this point completely.
I did read the essay. I disagree with the position taken.
Position being ... ? You do not approve of human beings bearing children at the age they were biologically designed to best do so? For their own health and to help ensure they are around to assist humanity as healthy grandparents? If your argument is that a 16 year old woman is not as attractive to you personally as someone who was historically a grandmother's age, that is a different issue. But what is dangerous is to even remotely conflate Epstein's misdeeds and crimes with 'pedophilia'. They are bad enough on their own. It is not even a grey area .. the ability to bear children is the VERY DEFINITION of not being a child.
I think everyone finds pedophilia to be awful, but online there is a striking amount of violent discourse & obsession.
Look no further than the (aforementioned) influencers, the violent videos, the entrapments, and the merchandise out there! I've seen bumper stickers with "Kill Your Local Pedophile" on them. It's an odd obsession when you consider the amount of engagement.
If I met someone in this orbit I could not help but feel a sense of pity for choosing to focus on this. There is also just a weird misdirection by this crowd, whereby they obsess over elite pedophiles and strangers, not the more common instances of familial abuse.
The main argument is that stupid people care more about this issue. I do not think that’s true. And I do find it “off” and unhealthy for a mature man to have a sexual relationship with an adolescent.
Who do you think is the audience for the violent and conspiratorial content focused on this?
I think it’s more unhealthy for them to have sex with peers. I’m willing to compromise and say that minor teens should not be having sex with anyone.
Epstein as never once been accused of pedophilia .. and this article does not even address the issue of pedophilia itself. It is about a case of Orwellian style dishonest use of semantics (actually it's "anti-semantic" as being semantic means sticking strictly to literal definions) to create a pariah in order to conduct ad hominem attacks on political opponents through guilt by association. The population that learned the lessons of the McCarthy era have aged out.
That photo of Virinia Guifree smiling happy always struck me as dispositive. She was having the time of her life.
Hanania’s definition of “low human capital” is anyone who doesn’t come to the same conclusions as he does. It’s his Occam’s razor, except Occam’s razor calls for the simplest explanation that fits the data, and his explanation in this case doesn’t fit the data.
He’s talking about the type of people who obsess over pedophilia (as stated in his title) and those who widen the definition to include age gap relationships with older men and 18 or 17 year olds. He never said only low status people think pedophilia is bad.
Obsess vs. care more? And where is evidence for so-called obsession? I don't obsess about older men taking advantage of younger women. But I think it's creepy. A 55 year old man with an 18 year old woman. I would call that man low status and would have nothing to do with him. I think it's low status to approve of that.
>You’ll often hear pedo hysterics assert that 16- and 17-year-olds are “children.” But we never refer to them as children in any other context.
This is not true, anytime there's a victim that's less than 18, people call it, he killed a kid, he killed a child. He threatened a child. Hamas killing sub 18 yr olds is classified as killing children. Like what world are you in if you are unfamiliar with "oh my god, she's just a child" for 16 yr olds.
>Videos of “pedophiles” getting abused and publicly humiliated rack up huge numbers on social media, and again we have to think how strange this would be for any other crime.
Richard consider you don't understand this cause you have a terrible theory of mind. People do not consider most of these other crimes as bad as pedophilia, kids are considered vulnerable, that's the entire basis of parenting, robbing a child at gun point is considered worse, they baked babies or shot kids is considered the pinnacle of crime of Hamas as are "child soldiers", someone that kills a teenager is considered much worse. The ubiquitous of this feeling around the world should show you it's not that simple, as we indeed live longer, some extended childhood is expected but also no period of our history had high or notable rates of teenage marriage, they were almost always frowned upon or shied away from even in region their religion allows it, The Taliban had to change this law by force. Saudi Arabia age of consent is now 18 and they use Sharia law that they could use to justify that.
I think you easily understand this when you see data that says most men find young women attractive and that's natural male sexuality but for some reason don't understand the most people find sexual relations between and adult and teenagers questionable. And even in France with Young age of consent, the relationships are not common and still considered kinda weird.
And you see to keep ignoring that women are the one thta are most against this. Just like that age gap thing, you ignore that while men are okay with ut, the other side largely isn't, and the small age gap (over 15) that are extremely happy, have to go through the great filtering and all the malicious ones would have been filtered out, and most on shaky foundations will also not survive the social sanctions.
And to be honest, as a personal opinion, the guys that indeed go for teenage girls are the kind you don't want around your loved ones.
It's not just fear of harm to children. There's very little interest in kids being abused in non-sexual ways as central to low human capital conspiracy theories. This is very sex-specific, and the hysteria even goes up the late teens, because they need to expand the definition of pedophilia as far as possible to satisfy their need for sex-specific things to get angry about.
Exactly. In the UK specifically, stories of parents physically abusing their children until finally killing them are hot topic for a couple of days. Stories about sexual abuse go on for years.
Wow, good point. The grooming gangs in UK were branding the girls butts with coat hangars. They were very abusive.
Prof. Kathryn Bond Stockton once made this point about people caring more about sexual harms and dangers to children, rather than the dangers of poverty, family dysfunction, and physical violence, in her famous book "The Queer Child" (2009).
Chapter 1 is the most relevant and only good chapter, which included the banner line that Congress "has acted only once to resolve against science: in order to say that children must be harmed."
She was referring to the Rind et al. 1998 controversy, which is a fun rabbit hole if you like scholarly controversies and want to read lots of replies and back and forths about age gap sex...
18 is just a made up number, it has no significance. Its just a number made up by politicians. At the age of 16 you are fully grown up as a woman, you are fertile and can easily get pregnant and you stop growing. You have absolutely no right to tell older men that they cant date or marry a 16 year old woman. That goes against science and human biology
“At the age of 16 you are fully grown up as a woman, you are fertile and can easily get pregnant and you stop growing.” This is a ridiculously narrow definition of being “fully grown up.”
Thats what "grown up" is supposed to mean. When you reach an age where you stop growing, you are a grown up. Otherwise, the term "grown up" loses all its meaning and it can mean anything. We can then say that people are children until 25 and nobody under 25 is a grown up.
Or how about 30? Lets then say that people are not grown ups until 30, or how about 35? How about saying that women are only grown ups when they become too old to have kids.
If its not about biology, but just a random age, then that age could be anything. Nothing prevents us from saying that people are not grown ups until their 30s.
Only if you define “grown up” as in physical body — not emotionally or intellectually. Have a good day.
There is no such thing as being "emotionally or intellectually" grown up. Those are subjective terms. Its like saying that someone is handsome or ugly, its entirely subjective. I could say that Piper Rockelle is emotionally a smart and mature woman, and some other guy might say that I am completely wrong and she is deeply immature.
All you are doing is expressing an opinion. With biology we are not talking about opinions but about objective reality
There certainly is emotional and intellectual maturity. Widely accepted with decades of research and longitudinal studies. Same with moral development (read William O. Perry’s theories). Have a good day.
It's a ridiculously reasonable definition, while broadening lets uneducated people just make stuff up and pick a random number.
Moreover what world are people living in that they think people 16, even 15 or 14, aren't having sex? It's bizarre. It's a bit like people getting hysterical about underaged drinking: nearly everyone has their first alcoholic beverage in high school, despite the magical "21" age that the feds insist everyone stick to.
An interesting thing about the US is "age of consent" used to be much much lower than it is today. But "age of marriage" used to be much much higher than it is today (often 18 for women and 21 for men in times past). So our more "conservative" "religious" society recognized people would have sex younger, but wait for official marriage until later (at least in the early to 19th-late 20th centuries). The trend since the 1970s has been to equalize the ages for both sexes and also lower the age of marriage/majority.
Today typically you can get married - with parental authority - at 15-17 in most states.
And yet also today we have pedo-hysterics about teenagers having sex or getting married. It's just weird.
Thats one of the most weird and insane thing about this whole obsession about 18 as an age for sex. Its this notion that if a 16 year old woman has sex with a 16 or 17 or 18 year old man its perfectly fine and normal and acceptable. She can have sex as many times she wants, with whoever she wants (as long as they are close to her age), whenever she wants, however she wants. Anal, vaginal, orgies, group, whatever. Violent sex or non-violent sex, its all fine... as long as the man is 16-18 years old.
Basically you see a 16 year old woman having sex with men close to her age as anarchy, everything is allowed as long as she agrees to it. So when it comes to a 16 year old woman sleeping with a 17 year old man or 18 year old man she is considered to have a developed brain, she is capable of consenting, and everything is fine.
But if she agrees to have sex with an older man, then suddenly everything changes completely. Now sex is suddenly horrible and a terrible crime. Her brain is not capable of consenting anymore. So your brains ability to consent depends on how much older the man is.
This makes absolutely no sense, and there is no way for people to defend and justify this view point.
History tells a different story, if it's biology yet it remained so consistently uncommon throughout all of our history, and in fact men are mlst attracted to 22 to 25 yr olds not 16.
"It's biology" is a nonsense excuse, biology is probably also why parents and the public are skeptical of old men that would go for 16 year olds. And of course, we do not limit ourselves to biology in most parts of our lives all we will be nothing but monkeys. Why even marry and be monogamous considering it's not exactly align with our biology to be attracted and sexually interested in many people at once.
In ancient China, age at first marriage was generally 13-14 for girls and 15-16 for girls. This is much lower than in premodern Europe, which developed a late marriage pattern (22 average for women and 27 average for men), but in China, it was socially widespread and even legally enforced with (at times) rising taxes if a girl was over 15 but still unmarried.
(This is not to say this was good policy or led to human flourishing or anything. It's just factually inaccurate to say that it was never widespread.)
It's not inaccurate. If i said twin killings were not widespread that is not disproven by one tribe in africa engaged in it. My actual argument is that it was not the norm, one nation in one period doing it doesn't change that. And even in this china period, this is a bad example, they were still mostly marriages between teens not adults and teenager.
NOTE: I had mentioned many times here that it was allowed even recently and today in some places like Afghanistan, and Northern Nigeria. The thing is even though it was legally allowed, it was still mostly teenage to teenage marriages , and old men and teenage is seen as suspicious and often only allowed when the dude is crazy rich.
This isn't "one tribe." This is one of the largest civilizations in the world, for centuries, with the full force of law. The medieval European marriage pattern is unusually late.
I didn't say it was one tribe, it was still just one region for one period, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't meet the definition of widespread. The size of the chinese region not withstanding. We are more talking how many cultures did that.
Again, you see to not understand how that's even irrelevant to my point, i know some groups allowed it, i mentioned middleeast and Northern Nigeria, I didn't say it wasn't practiced anywhere, what i specifically said wasn't widespread was the teenage marrying an old man thing. Which is also true in China where most of the teenage marriages were between two teenagers.
No, it has always been the norm for men in their 20s and 30s to marry women between 15-17 years old. It was the norm in ancient societies such as Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia. As a 16 year old you would marry and older man who is more mature and could financially provide for you and your kids.
What you are doing here is you are taking 18 as some kind of magical sacred number and then you base your morality on that age. So you are fine with someone like Leonardo Dicaprio dating 20 year old women, but would object to someone dating a 17 year old woman, despite the fact that both 17 year olds and 20 year old women are fully biologically grown up women.
You are trying to give some academical twist to your obsession about 18 as some magical sacred age.
We actually have actual evidence that it was indeed not common in Ancient rome, greece or Egypt, those are where we determined they were indeed not the norm and the norm was 20s to 20s!. You can look no further to actual states now that allow child marriages and still most teen marriages are between two teens.
Leo is famously mocked for his stuff and he's like 20 years older than his gf now. But yeah
There is no need for academic twist, biological sexual is not the only thing we conside or it would be okay to marry 8 yr olds, 12 yr olds. There's a lot of things ti consider here like "they are clearly not that intellectually developed yet and teens are actually not at full sexual maturity if you see how they have high maternity mortality rate".
And again, there's the point that eveb most of where this teenage marriage thing exists, it's between two teenagers not a teenager and an old man. And the idea of threshold exists everywhere in our lives, borders are examples of that. The idea that one medieval state did it for some time is also a terrible defense of your position. Like yes we should start sacrificing Twins cause Africans did.
That is simply not true. It was the norm for a 16 year old woman to marry older men. Even today in most African countries the average age a woman has her first child is 18, meaning it is the norm for 15-17 year old women to have kids. And in many of of those cases she has a child with older men.
Di Caprio is mocked because he dumps his girlfriends as soon as they turn 25. I dont think most people would care if he marries a 19 year old woman and then has a family with her. My point here is that 18 is just an arbitrary number, made up by politicians. Today we refer to 17 year olds as "minors" and 18 year olds as "adults". But if 10 years from now politicians increase the age of majority to 21, then we would be talking about 20 year olds as "minors". Its just a number made up by politicians.
You are laughably mistaken.
Have you ever even met a man? Nope .. maybe you are conflating what men are now willing to say out loud. Rock and roll songs and every past romance back to Romeo and Juliet was "You're 16, You're Beautiful, and Your Mine". And that's just INSIDE Western Civilization .. the one that has dragged out Primary School into Graduate School, and with the new adults scoring lower on IQ tests than their grandparents. The entire prodigious career and artistic output of Buddy Holly was over by the age the new finger-waggers assert adults and careers and families should even begin.
I'm a man, I've interacted mostly with men my entire life, i grew up in a region where child marriage is allowed, Nigeria. I'm not conflating what men are willing to say out loud, I'm not talking about what men think at all, I'm talking about what the actual data across history shows and that's that, teenage marriage was not the norm, it was more common in the past but not the norm and indeed even when looking at Teen marriages across history and in regions that allow it now, it's overwhelmingly between two teenagers not between an old man and a teenager.
Yes a number of rock and roll dude did it, some of them literally had their reputation ruined for it and again they aren't really representive of what's common. And indeed in the rare instances of adult men and teenage women relationships across history, it is predominantly happened between very very rich or influential men and teenage girls, very commonly due to debt repayment, but yeah ut happened. But agained it happened doesn't change it wasn't come on.
You mentioned the rock and roll period, we have data from that period (that period was indeed historically unique, was one of the most liberal across history), we know teenage marriage was higher then than now but still a minority even then and we know most teen marriages were between two teenagers not adults and teenage girls. We have this data boss.
Perhaps. I'd tend to agree with some of what you say, but not with all of it. Let me be clear: Not - With - All of it.
😂 well that's what I'd expect from reasonable people
Fast times at Ridgemont high, 1980, the 25 year old with high school girl. That wasn't criminal, it was not very abnormal. Beatles song, "she was just 17..." Also whole concept of "sweet 16".
I think it's since about 1990. Drew Barrymore with Jack Nicholson in late 80s. Not a scandal.
1. Losing virginity is not indication of teen marriage
2. It also doesn't say anything about the pedophile adult marrying teens thing. Most teen marriages are between teens.
3. Historically from what Archaeology has shown, teen marriage were indeed never actually common. The average age of first birth is over 20 for both men and women
"The average age of first birth is over 20 ..." And what does the distribution look like -- how thick is the left tail? The average being over 20 doesn't indicate that a a substantial proportion are at a younger age. I don't know either way.
The bigger segments of the left tail is probably closer to 18-23 than to under that. And again the argument is about the commonality, talking about left tail indeed going towards how uncommon it is. And of course, I'm not saying it didn't happen, it' definitely did happen way more than it does now, it's just also true that most teenage marriages are between two teenagers not between adults that are like more than 15 year olds and teenagers. Look no further than literal cultures that still allow it based on culture and religion like Afghanistan and Northern Nigeria that practice it now and practice teenage marriag more thoroughly in recent decades. It's mostly between two teenagers.
Stop saying nonsense, what evidence. First birth is the Greatest indication of teen marriage cause like you said contradictorily in the 1st point, losing your virginity is a sign of marriage, you think teen marriage is the common option yet age at first birth is like 23 to 25, that makes sense to you.
I ignored this point before but there is no data on what age people lost virginities outside the west pre 1940s. Indeed, historians largely agree pre marital sex was actually the norm in the global scale. Historians show we know about 20 to 40% of chilren were conceived before their parents marriage, this is higher than even current world but you have to understand rhey didn't have BC. This "disproven by evidence" only to make up everything is dumb. There were a lot of cultures that did the virginity test on marriage day but we also have evidence this wasn't treated tgat seriously and indeed was gamed by couples that had already engaged in pre marital sex. And even the Yoruba virginity test was uncommon globally, the greeks, athens, romans, europe were all having pre marital sex.
Even African and many native cultures: In many pre-colonial African, Polynesian, and Native American societies, adolescent sexual experimentation was often seen as a normal stage of development.
Also teen marriages even now in regions where its allowed like Nigeria where I come from, still largely happen between two teenagers, fathers of kids born to teenage mothers are overwhelmingly also teenagers.
Indeed even Nigeria got the teenage marriage thing only in the North and it was from Arab Muslim culture getting there. And even there most of the teen marriage are between two teens like I stated already as something that bolsters my point not take from it. And you even stated it as if that disproves my point that teen marriages between 14-19 were common. Nonsese, it wasn't common, but most teen marriages were indeed between two teens which strengthens my argument again Richard point not take from it.
Did you miss how teen marriages are common among 14 to 19 years olds does not disprove my point cause I have literally stated most teen marriages are indeed between teenagers and stating that is a dumb way to refute argument against marriage between adults and teenagers.
>First birth =\= first marriage. Waiting years before having your first child is a common thing
OH god you have a terrible grasp of history, this is not historically true, there was no family planning, birth control, condom, almost no abortion, they didn't know how to track cycles and as you just said, they got into marriage to have sex, you think they were getting into marriages and not having sex for years? Like you also claimed, this is not the case cause you literally stated they used to lose their virginities as teenagers. We know europe for one and asia had very much higher rate of pre marital conceiving.
Teen marriage happened at higher rate than they do now, but they were overwhelmingly between two teenagers, and were not the norm or common and it was indeed not common for adults to marry teenagers. The 14 to 19 range you mentioned are within teenager range. Even within teen marriage counts, marriage between a teen and adults like 15 years older was not common. You have absolutely abysmal knowledge of history and archaeology and for some reason feel so confident enough to state "your statement defies evidence" and make up many incorrect claims
The median age gap was 5 or 6 years, so no it was not between 2 teenagers, he would have been 20 when she was 14 or 15 and she would go through her teens while he is in his early to mid 20s.
The median age gap is for all marriages, since, it wasn't the case for the uncommon teenage marriages. This is a terrible argument
Jeez, why do you have so much bad ideas about history, birth control are literally a modern invention as is family planning, kids died a lot then, people lived shorter lives and needed kids to work on farms so they basically had a lot of kids. There were instances of condoms in ancient europe and Asia but they were by no means common or mass produced and used.
Historically, they were used almost exclusively to prevent syphilis and other STIs, usually in brothels. They were expensive, uncomfortable, and notoriously unreliable. A 17th-century peasant or a 19th-century laborer was not using a "sheepskin" every night to space out their children.
Another obvious proof is that inter-birth interval was consistently 2 years which is consistent with no such effective birth control. Breast feeding supresses ovulation for a while and then children again.
Even Richard Hanania reposted a Tyler Cowen article he contributed to that mentioned how birth control and family planning introduction in modern age are responsible for falling birth rates.
Only in the past ten years Korea, Japan, the Philippines, have put in age of consent laws of the west. Prior they were 14.
My understanding is the median age of marriage in Northwestern Europe was mid 20s since at least middle ages and early to mid 20s in 18th century America. There are areas of the world were teenage marriage was common but Northwestern Europe was not one of them.
It did happen but it wasn't normative or socially acceptable and rare cases such as Charlie Johns and Eunice Winstead in the 1930s caused a national scandal.
Maybe a simpler read is that "elite human capital" are generally equipped financially and socially to feel safe, comfortable, and secure, while low SES people's core experience is insecurity and anxiety, which is expressed and sublimated in large scale concerns presented by forces out of their control - demonic possession, satanic child abduction cults, conspiracy of foreigners, etc.
Of course high status people also have their neuroses and obsessions but they run media and academic institutions so their neuroses become normative and good to worry about while we can all make fun of the rubes at the bottom.
Clearly!!
However, it's interesting why CSA and by extension, sexual exploitation of young women/physically mature teenage girls (and to some extent boys too, especially by men, especially at younger ages) has become THE chief bogeyman of our era, above and beyond anything else.
To the degree that occasional at least accounts of people who report sexual contact with adults as teenagers or even children as non-traumatic and occasionally positive are completely dismissed, unspeakable even.
Leave the Confederate States of America out of it. What did WE do?
I wonder if some of it is a class thing. My sense is that pedo behavior is more common in low SES households, but I could be wrong.
Indeed. See: https://cap.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/sedlaknis.pdf, Table 4-4, which shows that SES is a significant predictor of CSA.
Interestingly, though, the tables also show SES to be a significant predictor of emotional and physical abuse of children, but while lower class people obsess over CSA, they seem to downplay emotional and physical abuse of children: "I was hit as a kid and I turned out fine," "Kids need harsh discipline, not emotional support and participation trophies," etc., while higher class people seem to be more concerned with these forms of abuse, though without, of course, developing elaborate conspiracies around them.
Sorry but this is totally off. Spanking or yelling isn’t abuse of children. I’d say higher class people just don’t think about this stuff day in and day out, because they don’t need to rationalize certain antisocial behaviors
Clearly you’re allergic to the concept that innumerable references to pre pubescent children (pedophilia) are in the files and yet you spend all of this article bleating and trying to split hairs about the experience of the victims as older teenagers to make it seem less creepy. Revolting.
And yes, perhaps it is “low human capital” to care about young children. Historically, many of the “elites” you worship do indeed sacrifice their innocence of their young children in various ways to achieve their Machiavellian ends. Is it a leap to guess you personally would do similar tactics with your own children to advance your status in some way? Gross.
I listened to a few Michael Tracey podcasts this morning, and I'll admit I have been radicalised against the masses. If you stop pussyfooting around and actually come up with some concrete plans for disenfranchising proles and putting them on reservations, then I'll get on board with neoliberalism.
Asking for Net Tax Balance of maybe above 2000$ (ie all tax & social security contributions minus all welfare checks, tax credit, Obamacare subsidies etc) will disenfranchise most proles. In addition to all illegals, and a majority of legal immigrants.
Do you get credit for any tariffs you paid?
It would be unmanageable, lol. The easy way out would be to see tariffs as a sales tax, see that flow to the treasury in percentage of gross domestic product, and adjust it as a linear, "withheld" tax credit on your net income. So if your net income were 50k, tariffs were 200 Bill and GDP were 15 Trill, it would be around 750$.
Thanks. I wasn't actually expecting a serious answer but that's a pretty good honest attempt at one. Full marks!
The point is - people who are under water with Net Tax Balance don't invest in stock etc. So basically, almost everything that is not taxed away or paid into Social Security away from them ends up in consumption. Even paying mortgage is kind of consumption. So you can argue that a linear part of their net income goes to tariffs. As a first approximation. Maybe slightly more, since China produces a lot of cheap consumables.
Based
Remember that black conspiracy theory about CIA deliberately poisoning black proles flooding water with drugs? We should do it, but for real!
Yup. It has been extraordinarily bemusing to watch dynasties fall over having associated with a "pedophile" - "convicted" no less - when Epstein himself has never once been seriously accused of pedophilia either formally or informally. As I said to my own wife, if the media keeps plastering posters of successful men with busty hot babes in their arms to illustrate a "pedophile", then every young man will aspire to be one.
Well, I don't think that's completely correct. Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida, and in Florida the age of consent is 18. So taking pedophilia to mean sexual interest in a person with whom sex is legally forbidden, Epstein was. And Epstein seems to have had sexualized interest in a lot of girls well below the age of consent, though I've not seen any clear accounting of exactly how far he went with how many, that is, the exact amount he violated the law. But it's clear that Epstein acted on his sexual interest in underaged girls, and didn't seem to covert to a strict hands-off policy after his first conviction, and in the public's mind, that's pedophilia.
Which should matter as much as the Taliban arresting a woman for letting her face mask drop. Absurd law .. when my own mother was 18 I was two years old and living with my (still) married parents on Tachikawa Air Force base in Japan. I was born a full 15 months year after they were married, so not a hardship exemption .. just a trendy thing to do in the Rock & Roll era .. three couples skipped County High that day to caravan to the nearest State where parental permission was not required. Any law that asserts that I, and by extension my grandchildren, should not have been born, I do not recognize nor respect. The bizarre, US-centric,, and very recent experiment of raising the age of consent alongside the ever increasing number of years society appears to pressure young adults to remain in school, is already not ending well. (By this measure, Jerry Lee Lewis would be a criminal - oh nvm, he actually would have fallen under some of Florida's exemptions to this code - and Buddy Holly's entire massive catalogue contribution to humanity would have existed due to him being stuck in college at the age he died. But that would have been good, right? We need another sociology major more than we needed a timeless body of American music and art - that will represent us as proudly Plato's Republic represents the Ancient Greeks.
Having said all that, not defending the guy who was on the crew with with Trump and other 90's New York Democrat fundraisers who together pulled carpetbagger Hillary Clinton against all odds over the Senate race finish line .. just sensitive to double-sworded hypocrisy. (The recent reduction of all politics to a binary team sport brings with it the team culture of rooting for referees who make bad calls that happen to assist your own team.)
But the larger issue with redefining 'Pedophilia' as " pedophilia to mean sexual interest in a person with whom sex is legally forbidden" is that we now no longer have a word for Pedophilia .. and since cavorting with peak fertile womanhood happens the world over about a .. I dunno, a BILLION? times more often than dating a 3 year old, you just gave permission to every actually convicted child molester to shrug off the label with a 'so what, so was your grandmother', unless, as with 'racist' and even 'rape' these days, one must ask further questions before forming a judgement .. which very few will actually do, nor probably should they.
I say this with love: you sometimes write very interesting pieces. But anytime your writing relates to your ideas about Elite Human Capital versus Low Human Capital, the quality drops off.
LHC thought
“Low Human Commenter”
I would argue that the overall conceptual distinction is useful but it hasn't been analyzed enough to be a really good assessment. But a new useful concept is never fully developed by any single thinker.
The joke of course is that as you mention, they started with QAnon telling them that there was this cabal of largely Jewish influencers in a global conspiracy to traffic children. And it turns out they were right. But their solution was to elect the guy who was most wrapped up in it. But then they believed him when he said Mexico would pay for his wall, and tariffs fix inflation, so par for the course.
I am not particularly interested in debating whether Epstein was a true pedophile or “merely” an ephebophile (I am sure I spelled that wrong, but I refuse to look it up). We often use the term pedophile more broadly than its clinical definition, and that’s OK. It seems clear that in the early 2000s, Epstein sexually victimized teenage girls in a criminal manner. However, where I think Tracey is right is that nothing really indicates that he trafficked these girls to other rich people.
Its important because pedophilia and heterosexuality are two different things. A man who is attracted to 15-17 year old women is a straight heterosexual man. A man who is attracted to pre-pubescent children is a pedophile.
All men regardless of age are attracted to 16 year old women and that is natural. And there is nothing wrong with older man having consensual relations with 16 year old women. If you call men who are attracted to 16 year old women "pedophiles" you are destroying the meaning of the word.
There's plenty showing that he and Maxwell facilitated the victimization of teenage girls - that the pair groomed these girls for themselves and for others - and likely vice versa ("show me yours and I'll show you mine"). And many of these girls were flown around, domestically and internationally.
Tracey is bizarrely obsessed with shitting on any and every aspect of "the Epstein story." Just because some opportunistic shysters, journalists and "influencers" have gone to town on this, doesn't mean that a lot of creepy people didn't abuse a lot of girls and young women, or that some of that conduct wasn't illegal.
Tracey's entire schtick for months now has been Epstein "contrarianism." He's a click-chasing, low-effort, Epstein-obsessed shit-flinger.
There is no evidence that Maxwell facilitated the victimization of teenage girls. First, none of the 3 witnesses at her trial who claimed to be underage established that they were "victimized", they claimed to be engaged in illegal acts with Epstein which do not require victimization as an element of the offense, rather they only require age. Second, all of the 3 witnesses were paid 7 figures for their testimony, which invalidates it. Each of their stories are consistent with the Epstein parts being true, but Maxwell being inserted here and there. Maxwell's defense established in the case of Nadia Bjorlin that she inserted Maxwell into the story between her statements to the FBI in 2019 and her statements at the trial. Maxwell was Epstein's girlfriend and was probably jealous of these other girls, she was almost certainly not recruiting them and probably didn't like them. The girls were silent until Epstein died because they still liked him and received money from him and then all signed up to make millions of dollars to take down an old sexual rival, that seems to be the best explanation for what happened.
"There is no evidence that Maxwell facilitated the victimization of teenage girls."
You mean, OTHER than the fact that she was convicted of such.
That's not evidence. The conviction, while invalid, was not even for victimizing teenage girls, it was for allegedly provoking girls to travel to give illegal but consensual massages to Jeffrey Epstein. Victimization is not even an element of the offense.
>Maxwell was Epstein's girlfriend and was probably jealous of these other girls, she was almost certainly not recruiting them and probably didn't like them. The girls were silent until Epstein died because they still liked him and received money from him and then all signed up to make millions of dollars to take down an old sexual rival, that seems to be the best explanation for what happened.
Exactly. That is the essence of competition within groups of women. Undermining and revenge. Tears and lies. That's how they do it. The whole point of this "scandal" was to nail Maxwell. I hope Trump pardons her. (I'm more into women my own age anyway.)
It’s the “for others” that I don’t see the evidence of. Do you have anything concrete, other than Virginia Guiffre, who seems to have been done combination of mentally ill and a grifter?
Read his 2019 indictment, for starters. Take a stroll through "the files." Use one of the sites that's indexed them.
Read some of the dozens (hundreds) of publicly available depositions given by these women. Theyre no ALL lying.
I’ve read the 2019 indictment. It alleges that between 2002 and 2005 he enticed girls, including minors as young as 14, to come to his homes in New York and Palm Beach to provide sexualized massages and he groped and otherwise molested them. It further alleges he enlisted the aid of his employees in this criminal endeavor. That’s the basis of the “conspiracy.” It doesn’t actually allege that he trafficked those girls to other men.
I’m not going to read all of their depositions. How many girls, other than Guiffre, have alleged that he trafficked them to other men?
I haven't followed the whole thing, or intended to, but Substack keeps feeding me this stuff.
It's irrelevant to me whether HE acted in ways that met the precise legal definition for "trafficking" under federal or NY, Florida or USVI law. Or whether the accusers win lawsuits or settlements. I find these hair-splitting attempts to salvage a predator's image to be repugnant. Especially Michael Tracey, who's making his living shitting on lots of women.
Harris, Amy Julia; Robles, Frances; Baker, Mike; Rashbaum, William K. (August 29, 2019). "How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls for Jeffrey Epstein". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.
It's Giuffre and that's it. You also oughta start reading the statutes about "trafficking" - it doesn't mean what you think it means.
>And many of these girls were flown around, domestically and internationally.
In chains?
Champagne, tropical beaches, yachts, princes. It was terrible.
It is very much NOT okay. My parents were not pedophiles. Also if child was whisked off to Epstein Island and "victimized" the charge would be kidnapping, not sex trafficking. Has the lesson of METOO to be suspicious of any decades past charges of victimization been so quickly lost. The same single mentally ill gal who committed suicide is repeatedly trotted out .. there is a higher percentage of young women who shop at my local Fred Meyers who have killed themselves than of those who have been employed by Epstein in any capacity. (And if you're gonna count today's young shoppers who WILL kill themselves over the next decade ... the jury is still out, and the horror of Fred Myers continues to grow.)
ODE:
ephebophile /ɛˈfi:bə(ʊ)fʌɪl, ɪˈfi:bə(ʊ)fʌɪl/
▶ noun an adult who is sexually attracted to adolescents.
adolescent /ˌadəˈlɛsnt/
▶ adjective (of a young person) in the process of developing from a child into an adult
I don't know of a single word for men who are attracted to physically-adult teenage girls, but I believe most men of all ages are. I mean "attracted" in a purely sexual sense that does not imply action.
All straight men are attracted to teenage girls for a significant portion of their life. What attraction they report changes with age, and teens disappear from the bottom of the attraction range when men are 30. Thus, all normal men in their teens and 20s are attracted to teenage girls. Ephebophilia is not the word for this since "ephebos" means "adolescent boy" or "young man" in Greek. It most closely meant males aged 18 to 20 as there was a militia in Athens called the "Ephebos" which contained citizens aged 18 to 20 who were doing their compulsory service. Koré was the word for "maiden," "adolescent girl" or "young woman." So you could call it "koréphilia", although attraction to maidens is normal. All straight men are "koréphiles" who have "breeding" and boob "fetishes." That is quite literally what "straightness" is optimizing for.
As a side note, ephebophilia was coined to describe homosexuals who primarily target teenage boys a few decades ago. The first reference extending this to men who date teenage girls was around 2005. The root "philia" does not even describe sexual attraction, but that's an older error going back 100 years ago or so. The proper root is "eros", as "philiia" means "fraternity", so it's used correctly in "Anglophile" which denotes somebody who likes Britain in a non-sexual way. It should be "pedoéroticist", "epheboéroticist" and so on. But proles are too dumb to know any Greek. A "pedophile" would literally be someone who likes child-culture, or someone who finds children endearing or entertaining, which is probably most women and a lot of men. An ephebophile would be the same but for teenagers.
I would disagree with the notion that older men are not attracted to 16 year olds. That attraction doesnt disappear just because you get older. What typically happens is that the older you are the less interactions you have with people that still go to school, like high school.
However if you put an older man on an island alone with a 16 year old woman, natural attraction is going to take place.
The ODE and NOAD have this etymological note under the definition I previously pasted: "1960s: from Greek ephēbos ‘adolescent boy’ (see ephebe) + -phile." American Heritage does not include the word.
Teens -- that includes 19? -- disappear from the bottom of the attraction range when men are 30? In the sense I provided for attraction, I find that very difficult to believe. How about, say, a man who is 80? I'm asking for a friend.
So you mean that’s really a synonym for “Catholic Priests?”
Thanks for the info!
My pleasure. I've edited my previous reply to add another definition and my, uh, comment since you posted your reply.
Now do "heterosexuals". There is no negative connotation to straight men being attracted to adolescent females. It is just an observation. And if a man is not sexually attracted to women at their peak flowering .. they are simply not attracted to women. Social norms do not dictate biology - when you married your own beautiful wife, did I magically and mysteriously cease finding her attractive, despite her now, at least per my own moral code, being suddenly off-limits? I call my own grandchildren gorgeous because I know they are indeed attractive.
What sort of "sexual victimization" did Epstein engage in that was in a criminal manner? (if you know.) If you mean rape, why not say so? If you mean something else illegal that wasn't rape, please specify so we can join in to judge him pre-trial and posthumously, too. Just want to know what we're judging him *for*.
What we can be fairly confident of is that between 2002 and 2005 he recruited teenage girls to give him “massages.” These girls were not trained massage therapists and had no knowledge or experience in how to give an actual good massage. He got them to partially undress during these sessions, shushing down to bra and panties. He sometimes groped them, touching breasts and genital regions. During these sessions he had erections and masturbated. He may have induced some to give him a hand job. He gave them approximately $300 in cash per session, and these girls were not from wealthy families.
In one case that we know of he had full on sexual intercourse with an underage girl. She was at the time 17 years and 364 days old — literally the day before her 18th birthday. Whatever the statute books say, prosecutors don’t usually bring statutory rape charges against men who engage in consensual sex with girls the day before they reach the age of consent. The girl says that the sex was consensual. This encounter was the basis of one of the two counts he pled guilty to.
One thing that to me stands out is that his actual misconduct wasn’t romantic or even villainous in a James Bond Villain kind of way. It wasn’t like something out of an action movie. It’s pathetic, and it makes him seem like a loser, not a wealthy megavillain.
I meant “shucking down,” but it apparently got autocorrected
Most accurate take on the whole thing.
Here's from the 2007 Grand Jury Transcript which caused this entire ridiculous story to occur, via detective work Epstein researchers have been able to un-redact some of this (the present version on the Internet is still heavily redacted). This is an interview with Saige Gonzalez, the single 14 year-old involved in the original Palm Beach investigation:
Q. How old were you in February of 2005? [First contact with Epstein]
A. I was 14 still.
Q. 14 or 15?
A. I was 14 still. Well, this happened when I was 14, so.
Q. You turned --
A. 15, in May of that year.
Q. And you just turned 16?
A. Yeah.
...
Q. Did you know someone named Haley Robson? [A purported "victim" who recruited overaged women and underaged "minors" and essentially pimped them to Epstein and others in the Palm Beach area]
A. Yes.
Q. How do you know Haley Robson?
A. I used to date her cousin.
Q. All right. How old's Haley?
A. At the time I think she was 18 or 19. I think.
...
Q. How much contact did you have with Haley?
A. I met her about -- I met her the night before I went to Jeffrey's house.
...
And she was like, what are you doing tomorrow? And I -- I said nothing. And then she was like, oh well, do you want to make, like, $200?
And I was like, yeah, sure.
And then -- and she was like, well, you're going to have to, like, meet my friend Jeffrey. And he lives in a big humongous mansion. ... And then she's like, but you have to give him a massage for like 40 minutes. And that's all you have to do. And you get, like, $200 for it. And it's really easy.
And I was like, okay, whatever, it's just a massage.
... [Haley calls Jeffrey's assistant on the phone to schedule a massage] ...
But Haley said that, like, I had to be 18. So she told the lady I was 18, and that I went to Royal Palms, and I was a senior and everything.
...
[Her boyfriend (16) knows what goes on and is saying, "don't go", but she decides to go anyway because it's $200, anyhow, she visits Epstein w/ Haley and another girl]
...
And then Jeffrey's like, how about you? Pointing to me. And I was like, okay. And then I was like, looking back at Haley and laughing. ... And she was laughing too. ... [she travels to Epstein's massage room with his assistant] And then -- she told me to get un -- well, not undressed, but, like, put -- keep your bra and panties on. And I was like, okay. ...
And then Jeffrey did come in the room. And he said, hi, and he shook my hand again. But then he went out of the room and he got undressed, but he had a towel on [and laid on the massage table].
...
Q. Okay, what kind of underwear did you have on?
A. A thong.
... Q. Were you uncomfortable getting down to your bra and underwear?
A. Uh-huh. Like, at -- I was kind of hesitant. ... But I just didn't care because it wanted $200, I wanted to spend it. ... And then I started to give him a massage. And then he's making conversation, asking me exactly what Haley was going to tell me to do. Like, if -- what high school did you go to, and all this stuff, etc.
Q. Did he ask him how old you were?
A. Uh-huh. And I --
Q. And you tell him?
A. I told him I was 18.
... [massage goes on] ...
[He], like, asked, well, would you like to make an extra hundred dollars? And then I said, sure. And then he's like, ... it's going to be something different. And I was like, well, what is it? And then he's like, um, can I use a vibrator on you? And I said, um, okay."
Anyhow that's the gist of all of it. The girls were told to lie about their ages, most of the "sexual acts" were him jerking off while massaging him and/or getting a vibrator on their vagina. He probably knew some of them were under the age of consent of Florida (because some of them would come back to his house over and over for 2 years and he'd note they were still in high school) although it's plausible (I guess) to have assumed they were "held back". One of the 14 year olds (not investigated in the Palm Beach case as she claims to have been recruited by Virginia Roberts Giuffre and told to lie about her age) specifically mentioned that she already had large breasts and could easily pass for a 21 year-old with make-up on.
The current crop of "victims" paraded around the media (Maria Farmer, Rina Oh, Lisa Phillips, Anouska De Georgiou, etc.) were all over 18 and most over the age of 20 when they met Epstein.
That's excellent. Thank you for your diligence.
That's why I've been demanding all the pearl-clutchers wailing about "abuse" to define for me exactly what they mean by "abuse". Because there is no such crime as "abuse". I think they know it's not rape so they can't call it rape even it's illegal (I guess) to use a vibrator on a 14-year-old. There's also no evidence of the kind of power imbalance where women who are dependent on men for their sustenance get "trapped" in relationships where they have to do things they don't want to do. None of that here. The 14-year-old and her older colleagues seem quite cagey and worldly. Good for them. They are probably smirking at us right now being so histrionic over the "terrible things" done to them.
Most of these girls were over 20. They were beautiful women. It isn't odd.
The thing never mentioned is how white everyone at the parties were. Much respect there.
Wrapped in it how?
Well, it wasn't trafficking, and it wasn't children. But he did have a bunch of teenage girlfriends.
Under the legal definition of trafficking, if you fly a prostitute from Las Vegas to New York to have sex with her for money, that’s trafficking, even if you pay her $1,000,000 and she’s happy with the exchange.
In California if you hired an escort and she drove herself to your hotel, and you both enjoyed a glass of wine at dinner before going to a dance club and she decided to grind on you, and you never ended up having sex, that would count as sex trafficking (if a prosecutor so desired). The laws are retarded.
He never did that. He traveled with the girls sometimes but not for the purpose of sex. He got the sex without traveling because they lived nearby. He traveled because they were friends and wanted to travel. Therefore there was no traveling with "intent" to engage in prostitution. Intent is a necessary part of the offense; it must be proven with communications like "I am transporting Nadia to Nevada so she can have sex with Diddy." If it's Nadia, the masseuse, wants to tag along on a gambling trip, and later they happen to have sex, it's not sex trafficking, just a sex crime if the sex is illegal when it occurs in Nevada.
Moral of story: always make the girl buy her own plane tickets.
Sending a car to pick them up is trafficking. They must come by their own means. Everything is easily exaggerated.
thanks for speaking out on this so forcefully. it won't be a popular cause but the hysteria over it is ridiculous. the fact that this is the leading political issue of the day right now indeed confirms the pernicious nature of this low IQ obsession. there is no conspiracy to traffic children, and Epstein and powerful older men desiring beautiful younger women is nothing surprising, nor particularly galling. we draw the line somewhere on what's permissible, fine, but that this "crime" is more morally repugnant than many others is silly.
perhaps the real thing we ought to address, then, is our attitude towards sex. is it sacred or profane? is it wise or foolish? is it purely biological urge or is it something more?
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the other celebrity formerly known as Prince, was famously photographed in 2001 with Virginia Roberts (Giuffre) in England. He was 41. She was 17. The age of consent there is 16. Just saying...
The fact that he was photographed with her doesn’t prove they had sex. As it happens, I’ve been photographed with both Brooke Shields and Lynda Carter. I think I’d probably remember if I had sex with either of them.
And she looks as happy as can be.
It looks like a souvenir pic.
The family and friends of both the Bride and the Groom had no issue at the wedding of Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13 year old (the night before the wedding she was 12, so they had to wait). The idea of NO ONE starting adulthood .. ie, earning an income, starting a family .. until EVERYONE has finished college .. is a new and bizarre one .. and is already not ending well - as seen by the cratering of native Western populations. (Also .. no one wants to admit this .. but in the past, the main reason many American men DID wait until nearly 30 to get married is because they had been TRYING since about age 14. Not because they chose to wait. So delay 14 to 21 to even GET ON the Rejection treadmill .. do the math .. one must be a bit insane (with hormones) to keep hopelessly trying .. again .. 14, not 24.
Though I have (only recently) seen a published report that Giuffre says she had sex with Andrew when she was underaged, which I assume means below 16. So there might be an actual accusation of illegality.
By British standards, Jerry Lee Lewis' wife was 'underaged'. British customs and courtesies carry as much moral weight as those of a remote Amazon tribe.
Well, it depends on *where* the sex happened. As Hanania stresses, we have to draw a line at some age but the age is semi-arbitrary. So we have to assign the moral weight based on whether the act is illegal at that place and time. Otherwise, nobody can know whether their actions are "moral" or not...
I volunteered in a British prison for many years and can confirm the strange hierarchy that puts paedos on a step so low, it is a convicts moral duty to murder them if they ever get into gen pop.
Yet a man who did a commando raid on his neighbours and stabbed them to death on their sofa is afforded compassion. He just had a funny moment.
For this and other reasons, I completely agree with your thesis.
What disturbs me is that even in my own (well educated) family, the taboo of making these points, eg Epstein was barely, or "technically" a paedo, is so strong. I make the points that, despite the vastness of the material, there is no smoking gun, that codewords hypothesis is nonsense, and I don't get much airplay.
It's like a cloud of derangement - I guess this is mass hysteria. Interesting to watch.
I think the core political point here is importantly right, but you massively overclaim on the way to making it.
It's common sense, or if you don't have common sense, basic evolutionary psychology, that people are uniquely protective of children. They react with the same visceral horror to children being physically abused or murdered, and nobody explains that as low-status resentment looking for someone to kick down at. The protective instinct is real and grounded in something. You can't explain it away as a class pathology and you don't try to, which means you're left asserting without evidence that there's "very little" of this crime and that concern about it is disproportionate.
That said, the political point stands on its own without any of that. Think of it this way: serial killers are real, horrifying, and universally condemned. But if you built a political movement around hunting serial killers, gave it special powers, made it the animating issue of a faction, the salience-to-frequency ratio would guarantee definition creep, conspiracy thinking, and the erosion of procedural rights. The people attracted would be selected for emotional intensity and against analytical reasoning. They'd be terrible on every adjacent issue. That's QAnon. This is arguably even worse than building a coalition around immigrant crime, because at least that connects to policy questions. Pure "go after bad people" politics with no limiting principle is structurally corrosive regardless of whether the bad people are actually bad.
And the definition inflation stuff is fair. I live in the UK where the age of consent is 16, always has been, and society hasn't collapsed. An American proposing the same standard would be destroyed.
But you also need to hear something about the Epstein stuff specifically, because I think you and Tracey make good points about the overclaiming while being amazingly incurious in the other direction. For example, the recent guest, Arvind, on the Ezra Klein show was - with not really any pushback - making absolutely crazy claims like that Bannon and Chomsky were just performing for the cameras and don't really believe in their respective ideologies, which is just pure conspiracism on the world's leading liberal podcast.
But there is real corruption here as well.
Take Andrew. The arrest was for misconduct in public office, not sex trafficking. It doesn't vindicate the people screaming about elite pedophile rings. But misconduct in public office carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The emails show him forwarding classified trade intelligence to a convicted sex offender while serving as a government envoy.
You could forget that Epstein was ever convicted of anything sexual and this would still be serious. This is not the equivalent of finding an unpaid parking ticket when you go through someone's emails. You don't just stumble across government officials funnelling state documents to convicted criminals in anyone's inbox. If Epstein had been convicted of fraud what Andrew did would still be a major crime.
The fact that you and Tracey treat it as essentially a parking ticket reveals that you've set the evidentiary bar so that anything short of a formal sex trafficking charge doesn't register. Epstein wasn't just a swell guy that people liked.
The conventional corruption alone shows he was actively extracting value from powerful people in ways that required their knowing cooperation, And I think a reasonable person would be pretty suspicious of him without all of the ranting about "the Epstein class" or hidden networks of elite child sex traffickers.
It would be illegal for the Prince to forward classified trade intelligence to any person outside Government. Epstein's status as a convicted sex offender is relevant only in that it was because Andrew's leak showed up in the Epstein files that he got caught. If he had just forwarded the information to me, I'd have got quietly rich, paid Andrew his cut and no one would have ever known. But no, he had to tip off a sex offender. Dumb, man.
How did the Prince get the classified intelligence in the first place? I mean, just looking at him, doesn't seem to be the type to keep a secret.
Excellent comment. Epstein pedo hysteria is ott. Epstein as a likely sociopathic manipulator collecting influence, friends and compromat is a genuine story.
It's probably just low decoupling ability?
Older teenagers are, as a biological fact, sexually mature and fertile - of course they can be sexually attractive. At the same time, society needs to draw an age of consent line somewhere, ours seem reasonable, and there are good social reasons to respect them.
But those two ideas are in tension and low decoupling ability may struggle with that. If "pedophelia" means ever feeling sexually attracted to anyone below the age of consent, then there really are pedophiles everywhere. And if it's also a major felony, then there are criminals or prospective criminals everywhere.
I think it's infantilization of women promoted by feminists. Men bad, women holy.
Hanania puts this topic onto my screen at least as often as low human capital does, I'll say that much.
This hysteria is also spreading across the world with politicians in France, UK & even Slovakia having to resign due to associations with Epstein. Moral panics involving “defending children” are used both by right-wing populists like Orban to ban pride parades and mainstream “liberals” like Macron to censor social media. It really is a perfect storm that has elements of woke hysteria, low IQ right-wing conspiracism and prole resentment against elites. You are right to speak out against this.
People like Orban are however the typical case of pot calling the kettle black, since there are suspects his own government protected public officials guilty of child abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C5%91l%C5%91_Street_scandal#Background
Consider also former Hungarian President of Republic resigned after an inquiry discovered she pardoned a child abuser: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68264363
I think Asia, Africa, Arabia, South America, it wouldn't be a scandal.