Jeffrey Epstein Arrested for Sex Trafficking of Minors - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15017402
Sivad wrote:Wow, I wasn't aware of that. Wingnuts have long claimed that there was an agenda to normalize pedophilia but I always thought it was homophobic crankery on par with chemtrails and lizard people.

Many older people can remember the alliance between the homosexual and paedophile lobby groups, hence some of the association between the two comes from this. Today, this is always portrayed as homophobia. Some of it may well be bigotry or prejudice, but certainly not all of it. For instance, as late as 1997 Peter Tatchell wrote a letter to the Guardian in which he condoned paedophilia:

Peter Hitchens wrote:For on June 26, 1997, Mr Tatchell wrote a start­ling letter to the Guardian newspaper.

In it, he defended an academic book about ‘Boy-Love’ against what he saw as calls for it to be censored. When I contacted him on Friday, he emphasised that he is ‘against sex between adults and children’ and that his main purpose in writing the letter had been to defend free speech.

He told me: ‘I was opposing calls for censorship generated by this book. I was not in any way condoning paedophilia.’

Personally, I think he went a bit further than that. He wrote that the book’s arguments were not shocking, but ‘courageous’.

He said the book documented ‘examples of societies where consenting inter-generational sex is considered normal’.

He gave an example of a New Guinea tribe where ‘all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood’ and allegedly grow up to be ‘happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers’.

And he concluded: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.

‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’

It's probably also worth pointing out that the paedophile lobby was much more prominent and outspoken in continental Europe (especially Germany, France, Netherlands) than in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Sivad wrote:I'll have dig into it and see how deeply rooted it is in the postmodernist cult.

Not very much is my guess, although they are more prone to becoming confused and then being exploited by nefarious interests, which is also the charitable interpretation of what happened in the 1970s and 80s.

Finfinder wrote:They want to minimalize it then normalize it. Teach that its just a sexual orientation and not a disorder.

The argument of progressives back then was that children had sexual agency and could give consent. I don't see them making inroads today.

------------------------------------

Edited to add one paragraph to the quote.
#15017408
Kaiseschmarrn wrote:The argument of progressives back then was that children had sexual agency and could give consent.
:roll: That's rubbish and you know it. A few dipshits with their opinions is not representative of all progressives, or you'd be a pedophile by your connection to conservatives, which would be, of course, a ridiculous assertion.

Wait... are you discussing the Catholic Church, again?
#15017411
Godstud wrote: :roll: That's rubbish and you know it. A few dipshits with their opinions is not representative of all progressives, or you'd be a pedophile by your connection to conservatives, which would be, of course, a ridiculous assertion.

Very prominent progressive intellectual leaders made that argument and many progressive went along with it, a good portion of them because they felt they were prudes otherwise. It was framed in terms of oppression (obviously!) and so children had to be "liberated" just like everybody else. They tried to lay the ideological foundation to make child sexual abuse morally acceptable.

For Germany, here is a long article that touches on this phenomenon:
Der Spiegel wrote:
How the Left Took Things Too Far


Germany's left has its own tales of abuse. One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the sexual liberation of children. For some, this meant overcoming all sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was considered progressive.

In the spring of 1970, Ursula Besser found an unfamiliar briefcase in front of her apartment door. It wasn't that unusual, in those days, for people to leave things at her door or drop smaller items into her letter slot. She was, after all, a member of the Berlin state parliament for the conservative Christian Democrats. Sometimes Besser called the police to examine a suspicious package; she was careful to always apologize to the neighbors for the commotion.

The students had proclaimed a revolution, and Besser, the widow of an officer, belonged to those forces in the city that were sharply opposed to the radical changes of the day. Three years earlier, when she was a newly elected member of the Berlin state parliament, the CDU had appointed Besser, a Ph.D. in philology, to the education committee. She quickly acquired a reputation for being both direct and combative.

The briefcase contained a stack of paper -- the typewritten daily reports on educational work at an after-school center in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, where up to 15 children aged 8 to 14 were taken care of during the afternoon. The first report was dated Aug. 13, 1969, and the last one was written on Jan. 14, 1970.

Even a cursory review of the material revealed that the educational work at the Rote Freiheit ("Red Freedom") after-school center was unorthodox. The goal of the center was to shape the students into "socialist personalities," and its educational mission went well beyond supervised play. The center's agenda included "agitprop" on the situation in Vietnam and "street fighting," in which the children were divided into "students" and "cops."

Pantomiming Intercourse

The educators' notes indicate that they placed a very strong emphasis on sex education. Almost every day, the students played games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.

According to the records, a "sex exercise" was conducted on Dec. 11 and a "fucking hour" on Jan. 14. An entry made on Nov. 26 reads: "In general, by lying there we repeatedly provoked, openly or in a hidden way, sexual innuendoes, which were then expressed in pantomimes, which Kurt and Rita performed together on the low table (as a stage) in front of us."

The material introduced the broader public to a byproduct of the student movement for the first time: the sexual liberation of children. Besser passed on the reports to an editor at the West Berlin newspaper Der Abend, who published excerpts of the material. On April 7, 1970, the Berlin state parliament discussed the Rote Freiheit after-school center. As it turned out, the Psychology Institute at the Free University of Berlin was behind the center. In fact, the institute had established the facility and provided the educators who worked there. Besser now believes that it was a concerned employee who dropped off the reports at her door.

A few days later, Besser paid a visit to the Psychology Institute in Berlin's Dahlem neighborhood, "to take a look at the place," as she says. In the basement, Besser found two rooms that were separated by a large, one-way mirror. There was a mattress in one of the rooms, as well as a sink on the wall and a row of colorful washcloths hanging next to it. When asked, an institute employee told Besser that the basement was used as an "observation station" to study sexual behavior in children.

It has since faded into obscurity, but the members of the 1968 movement and their successors were caught up in a strange obsession about childhood sexuality. It is a chapter of the movement's history which is never mentioned in the more glowing accounts of the era. On this issue, the veterans of the late '60s student movement seem to have succumbed to acute amnesia; an analysis of this aspect of the student revolution would certainly be worthwhile.

The Possibility of Sex with Children

In the debate on sexual abuse, one of the elements is confusion as to where the line should be drawn in interactions with children. It is a confusion not limited to the Catholic Church. Indeed, it was precisely in so-called progressive circles that an eroticization of childhood and a gradual lowering of taboos began. It was a shift that even allowed for the possibility of sex with children.

The incidents at the Odenwald School in the western state of Hesse -- a boarding school with no religious affiliation -- showed that there was a connection between calls for reform and the removal of inhibition. The case of Klaus Rainer Röhl, the former publisher of the leftist magazine Konkret, also makes little sense without its historical context. The articles in Konkret that openly advocated sex with minors are at least as disturbing as the accusations of Röhl's daughters Anja and Bettina that he molested them, which Röhl denies.

The left has its own history of abuse, and it is more complicated than it would seem at first glance. When leaders of the student movement of the late 1960s are asked about it, they offer hesitant or evasive answers. "At the core of the movement of 1968, there was in fact a lack of respect for the necessary boundaries between children and adults. The extent to which this endangerment led to abuse cases is unclear," Wolfgang Kraushaar, a political scientist and chronicler of the movement, writes in retrospect.

A lack of respect for boundaries is putting it mildly. One could also say that the boundaries were violently torn open.

Sexual liberation was at the top of the agenda of the young revolutionaries who, in 1967, began turning society upside down. The control of sexual desire was seen as an instrument of domination, which bourgeois society used to uphold its power. Everything that the innovators perceived as wrong and harmful has its origins in this concept: man's aggression, greed and desire to own things, as well as his willingness to submit to authority. The student radicals believed that only those who liberated themselves from sexual repression could be truly free.

'Hostile Treatment of Sexual Pleasure'

To them, it seemed obvious that liberation should begin at an early age. Once sexual inhibitions had taken root, they reasoned, everything that followed was merely the treatment of symptoms. They were convinced that it was much better to prevent those inhibitions from developing in the first place. Hardly any leftist texts of the day did not address the subject of sexuality.

[...]


Article continues and is worth a read.

Godstud wrote:Wait... are you discussing the Catholic Church, again?

Right, with the church nobody has a problem with generalisations.
#15017417
“I Was Told Epstein ‘Belonged to Intelligence’ And to Leave It Alone.”

Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.

“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-e ... ref=scroll

That would explain how a guy without even a bachelor's got job teaching math at the Dalton School.


Acosta dodges when asked if Epstein was an 'intelligence asset'

Acosta, under fire for the non-prosecution agreement he’d made with Epstein’s attorneys and for the light 13-month jail stint that Epstein served more than a decade ago, told reporters at a press conference that he couldn’t answer questions about whether Epstein was allegedly tied to an intelligence agency in some way because he was prohibited from doing so due to Justice Department regulations.

“So, there has been reporting to that effect. And let me say, there’s been report to a lot of effects in this case. Not just now but over the years. And again, I would, I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact,” Acosta said.

“This was a case that was brought by our office. This was a case that was brought based on the facts,” said Acosta. “And I look at the reporting and others. I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines.”
#15017451
Kirillov wrote:Epstein - grooming under-age girls for sexual activities...
Weinstein - got actresses to watch as he masturbated into domestic shrubbery...

Those are examples of healthy libidos to you?


If you can’t comprehend English, that really isn’t my problem.
#15017509
Sivad wrote:Jews are not "particularly prone to produce callous psychopaths", Jews produce psychopaths at the same rate as every other group.



The higher diversity in the AJ population was paralleled by a lower inbreeding coefficient, F, indicating the AJ population is more outbred than Europeans, not inbred, as has long been assumed
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/ ... SZc6rxMFTs



Are you seriously posing the jewish question? :lol:





:knife: If you're concerned about psychopaths running the world then I recommend you focus less on the ethnicity of the psychopaths and more on the power structures they rely on to dominate us.

I'm sorry to see that some such as yourself have failed to comprehend that I wasn't expressing my own views , merely addressing what others might make of this . I myself don't really have much of an opinion one way or the other . I will only say that the idea that genetics may play a role in the development of predatory psychopathy is not a fringe notion , but rather is being researched by psychologists , and is commonly seen to be credible . https://www.drgeorgesimon.com/is-psychopathy-genetic I certainly would never want to paint any people with a broad brush , and whether or not any ethnic group is particularly prone to carrying such genes I will not even speculate about . That I shall leave for credentialed psychologists . I'll only say that if there is evidence found some day that numerous , though by no means all Jewish men have toxic masculinity , I sure wouldn't want to have the dubious honor of presenting that thesis .
#15017542
Deutschmania wrote:I'm sorry to see that some such as yourself have failed to comprehend that I wasn't expressing my own views , merely addressing what others might make of this . I myself don't really have much of an opinion one way or the other . I will only say that the idea that genetics may play a role in the development of predatory psychopathy is not a fringe notion , but rather is being researched by psychologists , and is commonly seen to be credible . https://www.drgeorgesimon.com/is-psychopathy-genetic I certainly would never want to paint any people with a broad brush , and whether or not any ethnic group is particularly prone to carrying such genes I will not even speculate about . That I shall leave for credentialed psychologists . I'll only say that if there is evidence found some day that numerous , though by no means all Jewish men have toxic masculinity , I sure wouldn't want to have the dubious honor of presenting that thesis .

"I'm not an antisemite, but...." :lol:
#15017574


ness31 wrote:I find you posts intriguing @Rich , even when I don’t get em entirely :lol: For instance, I don’t understand the IRA reference or how powerful men like Epstein can be compared to Saddam Hussein. Like, I kind of get it, but you sir are on another level entirely. You’re like the right wing equivalent to Rhetoric Thug :lol:


I lol'd.

Sivad wrote:Wow, I wasn't aware of that. Wingnuts have long claimed that there was an agenda to normalize pedophilia but I always thought it was homophobic crankery on par with chemtrails and lizard people.


Not sure who you mean by "Wingnuts" but I've heard of this too.
#15018020
Bubba invited a child sex trafficker to his daughter's wedding:




:lol:


Accusations of recruiting underage girls

Maxwell was accused by allgeged Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre of recruiting the then-15-year-old into sexual slavery while she was working at a towel girl at President Trump's Mar-a-Lago club.

Giuffre asserts in her complaint that Maxwell, the sole defendant in the suit and the daughter of late publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, routinely recruited underaged girls for Epstein and was doing so when she approached the $9-an-hour locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 1999 about giving massages to the wealthy investment banker.

Giuffre alleges that Maxwell ultimately trained her in how to give “massages” to Epstein that involved sex acts and, essentially, prostitution. When Maxwell publicly denied the allegations and called Giuffre a liar in 2015, that gave her the opening to head to federal court and file the defamation suit now headed for trial. -Politico

According to court filings, Maxwell was said to have hired, supervised and fired household staff, while directing the visits of dozens of "massage therapists" to Epstein's residence, according to the Journal.

In depositions taken in 2009 and 2010 as part of civil lawsuits against Mr. Epstein, household employees said Ms. Maxwell was a central figure in Mr. Epstein’s private life. Several said Ms. Maxwell hired, supervised, and fired household staff, while directing the visits of dozens of "massage therapists”—typically young women.

Juan Alessi, who said in one of the depositions that he served as the Palm Beach house manager from around 1992 through 2002, described a basket of sex toys in Ms. Maxwell’s bathroom closet. He said he would find them around when he cleaned up after visits from the young women. -WSJ
#15018955
Potemkin wrote:So some dipshit billionaires like to use their money and power to indulge their perverted sexual tastes? Who'da thunk it?? :eek: :eh:


I think the bigger issue is that this appears to be a blackmail operation. Not saying it is and not that the media is ever going to report it, but that's want a lot of people are saying.

It's funny that in the era of #MeToo, where a woman's butt got grabbed or she changed her mind about the way she felt about her sexual experience with some prominent man, that the Epstein scandal is really not being portrayed under the #MeToo banner.

Also, in light of the recent college scandal where wealthy parents were paying a middleman to bribe university officials for enrolling their children, you'd think that the talking heads would be giving the Harvard-Epstein relationship more coverage.

But they are too busy trying to hard to connect Epstein to the president and downplaying Epstein's connections to other Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer.

Convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein is not a Harvard alum. Nor is he a faculty member or an affiliate of the University. In fact, he does not even hold a college degree.

But the billionaire — who for years operated a sex ring of underage girls out of his Palm Beach, Fla. home, the Miami Herald reported in a three-part feature Wednesday — nonetheless boasts deep and longstanding ties to Harvard.

Epstein has donated millions of dollars to the University. His money funded the construction of at least one campus building, still standing today. He cultivated cozy friendships with top Harvard administrators including a former University president. And he forged close professional and personal ties to Alan M. Dershowitz, a high-profile professor emeritus at Harvard Law School who also allegedly had sexual relations with a minor.

When the allegations against Epstein first became public more than a decade ago, University representatives told The Crimson they had no plans to return any money the school received from him.


A ‘LONG-TIME, LOW-PROFILE DONOR’

Though Epstein is not a Harvard alumnus or affiliate, he has a history of strong financial ties to the University.

In a 2003 profile, The Crimson reported that many of Epstein’s friends described him as a “long-time, low-profile” donor.

In 1990, Epstein partnered with fellow billionaire Leslie H. Wexner to fund the construction of a new building at Harvard Hillel — Rosovsky Hall, named after former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Henry Rosovsky, one of Epstein’s oldest friends.

Around 1998, Epstein helped fund the research of Anne Harrington ’82, a History of Science professor who also serves as Pforzheimer House faculty dean. Harrington wrote in an email Sunday that Epstein served on the advisory board of the Harvard Society of Mind, Brain, and Behavior at the time of the donation.

Harrington called Epstein’s actions “terrible.”

“He became interested in some work I was doing on the placebo effect and offered me modest funding to pull together an interdisciplinary group that would work on the subject,” Harrington wrote. “Had I known then even a hint of what we all have subsequently learned about him, I never would have accepted it.”

Roughly a half-decade later, Epstein approached David R. Gergen, a Harvard Kennedy School professor, to inquire about making a donation to the school. In an interview Sunday, Gergen said the encounter — which he said took place around 2004 or 2005 — marked the first time he met Epstein.

“It turned out he was serious and we, of course, had to do due diligence on him as we do on every donor, and the due diligence report that came back said that there were some questions about his past but that the University saw no reason not to receive the potential gift,” Gergen said.

Gergen said the idea for the donation was eventually scrapped.

“Somewhere along the way, serious questions began to arise about his past and at that point, we slowed the conversations way down and became very wary of making sure it was the right thing to do or not and eventually both he and we — the conversation waned and eventually ended several years ago,” he said.

Most notably, in 2003, Epstein pledged a $30 million donation to Harvard to fund the work of mathematical biologist Martin A. Nowak. His donation established the University’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which Nowak directs today.

Nowak, a professor of Mathematics and Biology, did not respond to a request for comment.

When Epstein was first charged in July 2006, several recipients of his donations — including New Mexico Governor Bill B. Richardson and New York attorney general and then-gubernatorial candidate Eliot L. Spitzer — distanced themselves from the billionaire.

Harvard did not.

Former University President Derek C. Bok, then serving as Harvard’s interim president, stood by his longstanding assertion that the University should not “have an obligation to investigate each donor and impose detailed moral standards.” University spokespeople said in 2006 that Harvard had no plans to return any money it had received from Epstein.

University spokesperson Melodie L. Jackson declined to comment on any questions related to Epstein on Sunday, including one that explicitly asked whether Harvard plans to return Epstein’s donation in light of the Herald’s reporting and the new details it unearthed.

“We decline to comment,” Jackson wrote in a one-sentence emailed statement Sunday.
#15019383
I’ve developed an obsession with this Epstein story..whole things weird. And his joker mouth totally creeps me out.

The article below is worth a read, so long as it isn’t put up behind a pay wall..
https://www.afr.com/news/world/north-am ... 719-p528q1
#15019432
ness31 wrote:Trump and Epstein footage. It’s just weird :eh:


Epstein seems more reserved than Trump, Trump just enjoys the situation like a jock in high school.

The fact that both Clinton and Trump were Epstein's clients also should make people consider whether the whole Trumps vs Clintons thing is a farce. Like Ivanka Trump married Jared Kushner, Chelsea Clinton married Marc Mezvinsky. It's the same NYC establishment, I could even imagine it was Bill Clinton who actually invented Trump as a politician.

Image
#15019514
Epstein seems more reserved than Trump, Trump just enjoys the situation like a jock in high school.


Did you check out Epstein’s body language? How many times in your life have you seen someone with their hand in their pocket like that? And the walk! Jesus Christ, the walk! :eek: Trump just looks like a bad Elvis impersonator and the guy that Trump is talking to looks like a detective. Weird. Weird. Weird.
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