I don't think anybody knew the extent of relationships with Epstein that were revealed when 20k email messages were dumped onto the world.
I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.
Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.
All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.
The one-time head of the most elite academic institution as well as the US Treasury is an insecure 12 year old boy at heart. Summers clearly saw Epstein as aspirational for his "success" with "women". But this isn't really new information about him. In 2005 he went in front of an audience including top women scientists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and essentially said the lack of women at the top of science was mostly about their lack of innate aptitude, not discrimination [1] (he gave multiple alternate "theories" but it was clear which one he actually believed). People immediately saw that for what it was: a powerful guy projecting his own hang-ups about women. That he's maintained his status over the last 20 years does not speak well of the US's most prestigious institutions.
MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
> It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide."
Nonsense.
"...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0]
"...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1]
etc.
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
This is what I expect as well, the cultish members will never see him for what he is no matter what happens. I've seen similar sentiment toward dictators in other countries as well, especially if you talk to the older civilians who really bought into the system, even years after the dictator was overthrown.
not sure where you are looking but Rasmussen polls have been showing Trump hemorrhaging support since June among his base. if you visit X this is where many of them converse, and they are quite openly unhappy with the admin lately
There has been a very public split between MTG and Trump in the past week or so over the Epstein issue. It has been causing a rift in the MAGA base for a while though, it seems to be coming to a head now though.
> Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was.
Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?
MAGA was pushing for it when they believed it was a liberal conspiracy, with the Clintons trafficking children and "harvesting their adrenochrome" (see Comet Pizza incident). Now MAGA luminaries are suggesting grown men abusing minors isn't that creepy if the victims are teenaged - so much for protecting the kids.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you both are in a bubble.
They're just different bubbles.
Liberals and conservatives have methodically and deliberately avoided holding their leaders accountable for decades. The only people who can't see that, are, frankly, liberals and conservatives.
What we have now is an opportunity to sweep everyone from Trump on down out of office. Anyone who would work for Trump or Clinton should have their judgement questioned at a minimum. And they should pray we don't look any further into what they've been getting up to.
This is a golden opportunity to scrub the walls clean and put in new people en masse. But I'm not naive. I know the corruption of the incumbent power brokers and parties will undoubtedly win the day. You can bet your bottom dollar that conservatives and liberals are cooperating and they've got the courts, Homeland security, CIA, everything.. out cleaning up for them. I just wish they'd get what's coming to them for once.
Cannot count the number of times people forget how powerful algorithmic bubble making is. It isnt a “you are in a bubble so ur dumb” it is more of, “all of our information is algorithmically fed to us be aware!”
To add to this, I have a friend who has two kids. One is lefty trans and the other is becoming a christian conservative. They are Indian zoomers. Two totally different algorithms at work. One got the Charlie and the other got Hassan. Really makes one wonder what is in your own information feed.
Just throwing it out there, but forget Epstein, I'm sure most of us would not believe what NYT is sitting on in general. This is effectively a defacto global intelligence gathering service. I bet if we could read through a lot of that we'd all be gobsmacked and just stop believing in humanity altogether.
I understand most of what we haven't seen is uncorroborated, but it would still make for interesting reading if we didn't have to worry about falling down an elevator shaft onto some bullets.
The big question here is are they involved with Epstein because they are in power, or did they get power because they had Epstein pull in favors for them. From the emails he seems like the big spider in a spider web. Both parties and so many people in power referred to him for critical problems, pulling strings in critical places (Bannon on behalf of Trump was getting his advice on how to discredit Kavanaugh opponents and Epstein obliged with medical information on one of the opponents to bring up at a hearing). Beyond Clinton, Obama’s attorney is mentioned a bunch as well. I’m sure the democrats had plenty of favors in too.
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.
> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.
Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
I burst out laughing when I read the following excerpts, one after the other:
> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.
> ...
> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.
If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
I appreciate that I'm not the only person here seeing this and I think the last part of your comment is what some people are missing here. He can be a misogynist pedophile and still make funny jokes sometimes and it's weirdly reductive to pretend otherwise.
I thought his emails to Esptein asking for dating advice about how to "get horizontal" with the "yellow peril" were particularly cringe. “Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor” ... poor guy!
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein
You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
That’s what he claimed it is, but I don’t buy it. I’m a big fan of satire and deadpan humor, and that’s just not what this is- the tone is serious, and he put a lot of thought in how to argue the point. Monsters exist, and this guy is one.
If you project the other things you know about this guy to color everything he did, sure. Reading it made the tone obvious, well before I got to his defense in the wiki article. The memo on its own is painfully obviously a joke but I'm really not surprised that the audience of HN has difficulty interpreting tone.
We disagree about the tone, but that aside- a person capable of writing this essay as a dry satire would need to possess a level of empathy and introspection that the rest of his life personally and professionally demonstrates that he does not. He’s not Voltaire or Johnathan Swift, he’s just a sociopath that tried to play it off as a joke when he got in trouble.
I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.
I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.
Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.
You don’t need to. The target audience was people to whom that’s obvious in the first few lines and then who keep reading to see how far he can take it with a straight face.
I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.
If it had been tongue in cheek or satire, that would suggest he also had enough capacity for introspection and empathy to see what is wrong with it. Looking at both his career and personal life suggests that he does not.
I mean this is presumably why it wasn't a publicly published memo or policy recommendation. If structural adjustment and economy management is part your job, you might have some steam to let off about it in private, and plenty of draft ideas and documents that need refinement. It does become a mistake when it's made public, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a joke originally.
Chief Economist of the World Bank and top level bureaucrat in the Clinton administration? He and his buddies were tip of the spear doing an end-run around hard-won labor, environment, and human rights laws and permitting corporations to outsource their poisoning and exploitation. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-clintons-true-legacy_b_1...
Just because he claimed to have been sarcastic about something, doesn't mean he is not also guilty of it.
See elsewhere where I've quoted parts of it in this thread but if you read "Actually, I don't think Africa is polluted enough!" and take the person saying it seriously instead of reading it as a joke, then you might need to touch grass.
And instead this will go unappreciated for how gruesome it is if we're meant to take any of the above accusations seriously, but hey - he's been here for at least 11 years, one of ours, right?
Does the following sounds like a joke to you? I mean, does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?
And if it's a joke, what is the punchline?
DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP
'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
> does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?
> what is the punchline?
It's akin to saying "This establishment's high Google/Yelp ratings indicate it's leaving money on the table. There's clearly room to raise prices, cut costs, and really degrade the customer experience."
I don't know if Summers is telling the truth about his intent. But as far as jokes go, it's decent.
The whole thing is the punchline. If you're missing something, read strken's response elsewhere in this thread, because he put it in a better way than I have anywhere else here - none of it is serious, and if you read it seriously, you are the other punchline:
> argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated.
It's not a joke. He didn't even say it was a joke. He said (as quoted on the Wikipedia page for the memo!) that it was “a comment on a research paper that was being prepared by part of my staff at the World Bank” and that it “sought to clarify the strict economic logic by using some rather inflammatory language”.
The closest it gets to being a joke is that it is mockery and derision directed at underlings as a form of feedback on work product.
“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”
Kind of what I mean. I hadn't heard of this guy before today, and this memo openly laments that it's challenging to bring Africa into the world pollution economy because moving solid waste there is a logistical challenge. If this memo was about how cool it is to traffic and rape children, as some people in this thread and a few others today seem to be interpreting it, I'd probably be less inclined to lend it the benefit of this tone, but I'm just not sold on the premise that someone who is demonstrably evil in some dimension is incapable of making honestly benign bureaucratic jokes in a presumably private context. It kind of knocks the legs out of genuine criticism if the dude can't chew bubblegum without taking flack.
Sure but in the most polite way, that's almost saying nothing at all. I just think it kneecaps any real criticism and real issues associated with this guy to go "okay that might be a joke, but it probably isn't because <legitimate evil reason>". Though I guess it encroaches on the definition of what a joke is and if it's defined by intent. If he meant it as one, but nobody took it as one, is it?
I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.
The joke is that it looks like a joke but isn’t in the same way a sociopath will explain in detail exactly how they’re going to fuck you before they do knowing you won’t believe them because it’s all a joke in a joke that isn’t real.
So it's okay for people who have the power and connections to actually impact the world in the horrible ways they're "joking"about to make jokes about doing just that?
I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.
A good many people I know and have known for 60+ years would, do, and yearn for civilisation as you know it to back the f off and get its foot from their neck.
Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport.
Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
> Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.
> And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
That's the great thing about "invention", there are other ways to 0 pollution besides historic ones.
Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire.
Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."
The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.
> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.
I remember hearing about the variance thing ages ago. Back when I was young enough and naïve enough to trust statements said in official voices without critically assessing them.
With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
I'm not touching the variability thing with a 10 foot pole except to say that the further out on each extreme of the IQ "scale" you go the less reliable the scores are. The whole idea of using IQ as a ranking of ability rather than a diagnostic tools is bogus. I do think it's clear now though that Summers was simply being a misogynist (you lose the presumption of good faith when you disclose that you'd been lying all along.)
I remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking.
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
> how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
>It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.
They know they above the law from the minute that reach a certain level of status, they don't care about the emails and if people see them, they know there will be next to zero repercussions for them.
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
> As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance.
(Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.)
On what basis do you say that Epstein was pretty talented at finance? This guy was a math teacher with no actual degree. The only reason he got his gig in finance was by schmoozing up the dad of one of his students, who was CEO of Bear Stearns.
The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now).
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
I wouldn't say we've made zero progress. There are always ups and downs, temporary wins and losses, but I think that over the long term, there's more skepticism and scrutiny now than in the past.
I think this is a side effect of having "paid law enforcement", it's not that the cops are bad, but their bosses are. The people who fund the law enforcement are ultimately at the mercy of the "rich and powerful" in some way or another, so basically people of a certain status get a pass.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
It used to be that any citizen could approach a grand jury and allege a crime. The purpose of the grand jury was to decide if tax dollars should be spent to hire a prosecutor for that (single) case.
"Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case.
It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into.
He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated.
It’s interesting that only now he is stepping back now that he’s been found out. It demonstrates that it’s not about ethics or morals, but about publicity and damage control.
The tax paying class of the world just have to watch all this horseshit go on, watch the institutions and the law enforcement agencies protect these people with our hard earned money, meanwhile if we break a single law, there are consequences for us, sometimes massive.
It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
One metric of change would be that statutory (underage) rape wasn't a crime anywhere 200 years ago. In some countries, it still isn't. Mass rape and kidnapping is going on right now from Nigeria to Sudan. Wealthy old men can still marry 12 year olds across much of the Middle East. The fact that sex with minors has become relegated to something like a luxury designer drug for the elite hypocrites in the US and UK, and the fact that they're now being exposed for it, is in many ways an unexpected victory for humanity. The previous 5k years of recorded history, and probably the whole million years before that, were wall to wall with war, slavery and raping children. As well as the elites having such rights as prima nocta and simply executing anyone they wished. So I think we are making progress.
I'm talking about disease prevention, maternal mortality, infant mortality, access to clean water, anesthetic(!!) and access to things like reading glasses and hearing aids and oh, I don't know, refrigeration.
What does your precious Harvard and US Treasury Department have to say about that?
Admittedly, I only read a brief review of the book, but it was suggesting the opposite.
And example: we tend to inject too much of our modern viewpoint onto the old monarchies—that Henry VIII would not have thought himself ruler of the "state" of England although we talk about him in that regard from our modern perspective.
> It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
> It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
This category of malcontent (about out-of-touch elites engaging in all sorts of depraved perversions while the poor starved) at Versailles eventually caused most of the former to lose their heads during the French Revolution.
The smart ones know that they need to keep up appearances, the dumb ones behave like they will never face consequences.
The smart ones are building bunkers to escape the hell that the US will become when the civil war actually starts. They're not hoping to survive the apocalypse, they're just hoping to ride out the 20 or 30 years of war and return as actual Lords for the serfs that are left after we kill each other.
Yes I know of someone who willingly gave up their US citizenship for tax reasons but has EU, Israeli, and a bunch of other citizenships. They get to live a good life in the Netherlands + traveling the world while the US tears itself apart and then when it is time to retire in 30-40 years, the country will be ripe of the picking..they will buy their citizenship back through one of the multiple buy your way into the US visa programs...and retire in Montana.
I understand you want to highlight this, but you don’t have to begin your sentence with "It's interesting that..." because this is not interesting or novel in the slightest.
It's interesting to me because how the hell did he think this was going to end? "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work in the court of public opinion. So, if one was even peripherally associated with Epstein, it would seem like that would be a hell of a liability.
On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?
- Epstein connecting Summers with other important people
- Dishing on Trump and his inner circle
Given there were many more prominently featured people with more dirt in here, I wonder if Summers is worried there's a lot more that's about to be revealed.
Epstein seemed to be a power broker and a political fixer. If so, naturally many high-profile people would have interacted with him and even have confided in him. It does not mean everyone associated with him knew or participated in his criminal activities, right?
Not sure where you are getting this from. He regularly connected people with each other. The sex trafficking was just a small part of his nefarious power network
Not to defend Epstein, of course, but just to comment on the power brokering side. My understanding is that a power broker gets power by staying close to the power and by connecting people. I don't understand why powerful people need such broker, even though history shows other wise.
An example of one of the typical meetings Epstein was able to finagle with Summers:
> this week, thiel, summers,bill burns, gordon brown, jagland,
( council of europe and nobel chairman ). mongolia pres , hardeep puree ( india), boris ( gates). jabor ( qatar). sultan ( dubai, ), kosslyn ( harvard), leon black, woody. you are a welcome guest at any.....also if you
>think there are interesting people in town, everyone here for climate summit, clinton ,security
council, holy shit im on for next 30 minutes
This guy Epstein modus operandi of cozying up and becoming wingman to powerful people confirms that he was some kind of spy. But it's still weird to see a well known professor of 61 years texting about gurlz to his middle aged wingman. Who does that and is this really what millionaires do, reliving high school?
It opens up the possibility but hardly confirms it. I would be happy to see some convincing evidence to the contrary though. He seems more like a plain old con man and pervert to me, Occam's razor.
Money and power have been seen as corrupting influences since the dawn of humanity.
Those who seek those things -- money for money's sake, power for power's sake -- often tend to see their success as somehow making them "above" others. They derive perverse pleasure in seeing just how much they can flaunt society's rules. 'The rules don't apply to me' is like a drug in itself.
I think it depends on how they got rich. From the outside to me it looks like the ones who sacrifice their 20's to the grind and getting rich never get that shit out of their system like the rest of us do and end up as emotionally stunted adults trying to recapture their lost youth.
I grinded fairly well enough in my 20s, just as many other people I know who did. We're much better off than 99.99% of the world. That doesn't make us think of sexually abusing children and adolescents one bit because we need to "flush that shit out of our system" and "recapture our lost youth". I have better ways of recapturing my lost youth, by computer games, more time for hobbies and fucking closer to my age like rabbits.
PS:- being in the upper echelon does mean you have a somewhat easier access to the circles that engage in these vile activities, and yes you'll be completely excluded if you say no to them. Many are okay with that, while those who aren't are the ones in the files.
I really think there is so much variance to how people live. Looking at some of the Epstein emails I'm floored by the behavior. It really seems like middle schoolers. And the racist chats that came out from the Young Republican group earlier this year -- I can't imagine ever being a part of a chat group like that. I would literally think I was being pranked or they were genuinely crazy racists, but they were actual early leaders of one of our two major political parties.
The thing that perplexes me is that these people aren't in poverty or victims of some violent trauma. They are among the elites of the country -- and yet this is still how they behave -- are these people a niche group or am I?
Most people are followers whose belief systems are spoon fed to them by the largest village willing to accept them. Understanding cult psychology and the agendas of the people driving the bus is typically enough to understand their worldviews and subsequent behavior. That’s just my gut read on it..
A thing to remember is that Chamath Palihapitiya is a billionaire but spends his time on Twitter trying to convince people he has a big dick[0].
> i'll bet your entire net worth x 10. the anaconda is the worst kept secret of silicon valley...
I think the truth is probably that insecurity does not prevent success. Some argue that it might be the source of it. But probably the truth is there are secure billionaires and insecure billionaires and the latter are very obviously insecure because despite their success they do things like this.
I saw the email correspondence between him and Epstein. The sense that I got is he's pursuing some young girl half his age. And he actually thinks that she is attracted to him. Powerful, ugly men are so stupid sometimes.
Men who don't pursue women don't get laid. This is an extremely important gendered asymmetry in heterosexual dating. Most men aren't attractive to most women, and if you want to be successful at dating as a heterosexual man you have to have to display a certain amount of boldness in pursuing women. Maybe the girl in question really does find Larry Summers old and ugly and wants nothing to do with him, but in general men who assume this is the case and don't even try, or who heed the words of outsiders that it is stupid to think that a girl might be attracted to you, are putting themselves at a systematic disadvantage in dating.
That's a charitable take. It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship. Also the woman's dad is the founding president of some major Chinese bank (AIIB) that he was cozying up to.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
> "It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship"
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
He consulted with the most notorious child sex trafficker of modern times on his plan to use the power of his position to coerce a young woman into sex.
In those consultations, he used a racial slur to refer to the young woman.
There are other contrary positions you can take, it doesn't have to be that this was okay.
"Hi, would you like to sleep with me? If you say no, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure you're unable to get a job in the field you want to pursue." And to be clear here, for most of these sex pests, that is not an idle threat.
There's a reason it's considered morally and ethically heinous to demand sexual favors with people whom you have power over, and if you can't understand why it's so heinous, then you do not deserve to have power over anybody.
Maybe not a bad thing for another reason: assuming most powerful men are up to these kinds of shenanigans, this filters out for those who are not clever enough to keep it under wraps. Sounds like a useful job skill for the positions these kinds of people might need to handle.
Powerful men/women don't have to be sexually or in other ways abusive to subordinates. They really don't. Most of them, in fact, don't. You certainly hear about the ones who do, for a reason.
When you got up this morning did you know that this is the fight you would be taking up today? It's not too late man just delete it and go back to bed, try a fresh start.
What specific part of what Larry said in the emails was so egregious that he needed to resign? What’s wrong in simply asking people advice to sleep around?
She was attracted to his power, which is why she spent time with him. Don't pretend she was an innocent protege. She was a nepo child playing the same game of stays climbing.
Reading about the case, you get the sense that this is the general disposition from these abusers. They know what they're doing is wrong, and they understand the power imbalance, but they sort of excuse it and justify it by softly believing that the women actually want them. That they are actually sexy. And that they are helping the women, somehow.
It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
I cannot overstate the potential significance of what's going on in Congress currently and it has global implications.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sit at the nexus of an international pedophile ring that threatens to bring down many billionaires and even some governments. There is a concerted effort to prevent the release of this information and we're far from done yet.
A lot of effort was made by the administration to prevent the discharge petition reaching 218 signatures. For anyone unfamiliar with how the House of Representatives works, the majority party chooses the Speaker and the Speaker decides what bills get a vote. But if a majority of the 435 representatives (so 218) want the House to have a vote, there's a procedure called a discharge petition. If it gets 218 signatures, the Speaker has to schedule a vote within a week or so (I forget the exact time line).
The Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as basically putting the House in recess for 8+ weeks to avoid this happening. He avoided wearing in an Arizona congresswoman for that same period because she was going to be the 218th signature. The government was literally suspended to avoid this outcome.
Then the Speaker changed tactics to try to pass the bill with a procedure called "unaminous consent". Basically, if no House member objects, the bill passes. Why would he do this? To avoid having votes on the record. This was good politics to force a role call.
The Speaker continues to play defense here because carve outs were added to the bill to exempt files for "national security" reasons and anything under active investigation. That's brazen obstruction and the least surprising thing is that the president announced an investigation this week. It's explicitly to prevent the release of some evidence. Make no mistake.
It's not unique to this administration either. the previous administration sat on all of this for 4 years doing absolutely nothing.
Where doe sthis lead? Foreign governments and intelligence agencies who were not only aware of what was going on but they (allegedly) actively benefit from and participated in this trafficking ring to get access to and/or blackmail powerful people. That's the "national security" interest.
As many of us are aware by now, Ghislaine Maxwell's father was the British media mogul Robert Maxwell who was a Mossad asset and got a state funeral in israel for his contributions to the state of Israel going back to suplying militia wth weapons in World War Two that were ultimately used for ethnic cleasning. And how did Maxwell die? He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
If this stuff gets out, many heads will roll in government, in business and in prestigious colleges. Look no further than one Alan Dershowitz. Harvard in particular has unclean hands and is elbow deep in all of this. And certainly whatever you do don't look into how Kimble Musk met one of his "girlfriends".
The likely most damning/embaressing thing that has led to Summers resignations -- being a powerful 65-year-old man trying to pressure a 37-year-old mentee into having sex/relationship with you -- is considered (by me too) icky and unethical and an abuse of power, undoubtedly a violation of many ethics codes and depending on how it's done possibly some laws -- but is not actually anything to do with pedophilia or child abuse at all.
i know we like expanding the categories of all sins and then only refering to things by category name without the specifics, but.
>He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
Maxwell had been stealing from his worker's pension fund and it was all starting to come out. It is plausible that he killed himself to avoid the consequences. He was a monster.
Alternatively, there is no justice, and even the truth is lost to partisan politics. I have a strange feeling this benefits foreign intelligence, not harms it. Mossad, for example, knows who slipped through the cracks. Knows how much worse the "truth" is beyond the code names and vague emails. Now they have more power, not less.
This kind of thing can only exist in a climate of apathy and nihilism. The powerful want you to think the situation is hopeless and nothing will change. But remember this: at no point in history has a steady state been maintained for significant periods of time. Ever.
We are at a dangerous point in history. I personally believe that inequality is inevitably going to end in violence and we're beyuond the point of avoiding this with electoral politics. People are struggling to eat and survive at a time where we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. This simply can't continue.
I'm personally for outing wealthy and powerful pedophiles who are meaningfully making all of our lives worse to accrue completely unnecessary extra wealth.
They already bought off Ghislaine Maxwell by moving her to minimum security prison with unearned privileges, so she won’t spill what she knows about people in current administration. Not sure why you seem optimistic, she is possibly the most informed person left alive and she’s gotten kid glove treatment from Trump.
Careful you don't go full Qanon on this one. If anything the fact this thing passed is an indication that there's very little unexploded ordnance left in the unredacted files. Though of course i will reserve my judgement.
The irony here is that the QAnon people were right, just not in the way they thought they were. There's no child trafficking pizzeria where Democrats were using "cp" to mean, well, something that isn't "cheese pizza". That's all crazy.
I also don't believe Epstein was murdered. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there's no such evidence of the murder claims. More to the point, the onus is on people making such claims to provide the evidence, not everyone else to disprove it.
But Robert Maxwell's history is well-documented and verifiable. And there's so much evidence that Epstein was mysteriously well-connected. The jobs he got. A match teacher at a prestigious school without a college degree. Power of attorney over Leslie Wexner's assets. The access he had to the wealthy, world leaders and academics. The fact that nobody really knows how he made his money. He's been dubbed a financier but this just isn't documented. There are thousands of bank accounts that haven't been scrutinized for where money was going and why.
And of course Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking people to... absolutely no one. Nobody has been named let alone charged. Her conditions on jail aren't appropriate for someone with her charges. She has a bunch of privileges in a Club Fed prison she shouldn't be in. The president fired the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York so only his former personal lawyers met with Maxwell for a proffer session.
And of course the connections to intelligence agencies and certain governments is both entirely believable and it fits a ton of evidence. There are credible claims why this is why he got the most lenient sweetheart plea agreement in 2006 despite Palm Beach police having the testimony of dozens of underage victims.
There was nothing particularly suspicious about Maxwell's death. The music was up, the noose was tightening around him, and he was about to start eating shit for the consequences of his fraud.
The people he robbed in that fraud were regular Joes who were cheated out of their pensions, not some kind of shadow-government-global-conspiracy types who have the means to remote-program your toaster to kill you.
Him killing himself is not the most surprising way out of that situation.
It's not only that he (allegedly) killed himself. It's the manner in which it happened.
First, extremely wealthy people are by and large sociopaths. It's how they get rich. They will never view themselves as responsible or deserving or prosecution. Many are so rich they never consider getting prosecuted a realistic possibility. They will use various legal means to hide assets from being reclaimed by victims. Alan Bond, an Australian entrepreneur, also raided pension funds (which he ultimately went to jail for) but he mysteriously got divorced from his wife (who got a large property settlement) before it all went south and he stayed on good terms with her even after the divorce. Weird, huh?
Second, it's weird that nobody on his yacht noticed he was gone. For hours. That... just doesn't make sense if you know how luxury yachts work. The principal or the owner will dictate the entire schedule of the boat. If they get up at 6am, staff will get up at 5am to make sure their needs are being met. Beverages, breakfast, whatever. At all times the bridge will be manned (ie have someone on watch) who will be looking out for hazards but also at cameras on the boat. They are on alert for things like a fire breaking out or a VIP being up so they can alert other staff.
So could he have slipped through that net to throw himself overboard? Sure, it's possible. It's not icnredibly likely however. Also, is that how a rich and powerful man who was once an arms dealer commits suicide? Again, it's possible but it doesn't seem like the most likely method.
Lastly, if you're going to kill somebody but don't want it to be seen as a murder, this tops the list of how you'd do it. Why? Because, being in the water is going to wash away evidence and there are multiple ways of inducing a heart attack that are essentially undetectable (eg potassium overdose). And the delay in the body being found will likely get rid of any potential evidence there too.
He is a economist who served as the Secretary of Treasury, as the president of Harvard University, and as director of the National Economic Council. Seems like he would be able to give them some good advice.
Pretty helpful person to have on your board if you are aiming (as Sarah Friar, OpenAI CFO, mentioned) to get the government to guarantee $100B - $1T in infrastructure loans.
He was terrible at 2 out of three of those jobs. He ruined many people's lives. He was corrupt as hell. He shouldn't be welcome in polite society.. well I guess Epstein's inner circle isn't exactly polite society.
I was referring to his stints as treasury secretary and on the NEC, during which he championed a worldview that saw economics as being science, with immutable laws, that inevitably led to policy outcomes that caused the explosion in income inequality that we've seen since 2008 especially. The U.S. would be in a better place if he was never in the Obama or Clinton admins.
But now that I think about it, the email leaks show that he was sexually harassing women while he was at Harvard too. So he was terrible at all three jobs.
In general he was not a fan of regulating banks, although he walked back some of his beliefs after 2008. Although iirc he still supports combining investment and commercial banks. Various shenanigans involving privatization of Russian industry. Pushing for tax cuts at the expense of infrastructure spending. He didn't like that the US capped exec pay at banks that received bailouts (banks that gave him millions in speaking fees, which seems a lil bit sketch)
All of them lol. Summers pushed aggressively for the free trade agreements (including allowing China into the WTO) that, in practice, shuttered American manufacturing, he pushed for cuts to capital gains tax, he lobbied aggressively against regulating derivatives and in favor of repealing glass-stegall, both of which directly led to the 2008 crisis, and then after the crisis he caused, he architected a recovery package that prioritized bailing out banks (but not enough to dig the economy out of recession quickly). He's one of the most damaging American figures of all time, he basically got us Trump if you ask me.
Why? He was one of the most prominent economists of his era. This is in the news because it's newsworthy, not because he's been radioactive this whole time.
Why not? He was a part of a pretty radioactive network of people. I doubt that he just happened to hang with Epstein by mere coincidence, and it does raise some questions about how much Sheryl knew about it.
I think it's very silly to suggest that Sandberg would have known anything at all about Summers personal life a decade before he had dealings with Epstein, simply because he was an undergraduate adviser to her. He was already one of the most famous economists in the country in the late 1980s, when that happened.
Two of the committee resigned in protest, Kissinger almost turned it down because it was also being awarded to Lê Đức Thọ, Lê Đức Thọ actually turned it down because the peace it was supposed to be about hadn't happened yet, Kissinger accepted in absentia as he did not want to be targeted by anti-war protestors when getting the peace prize, then he later tried to return it only for the committee to say no.
> It's one of the few Trump grievant that is legitimate.
Hardly. What does it have to do with Trump? The only reason it's a "grievance" is that Trump feels he should get the prize. While he supports a genocidal nation and tries to start wars.
They gave Arafat the prize as well. Basically for promising to stop murdering jews. A promise he reneged upon almost immediately to be clear. But of course the bar had already been set impossibly low by awarding the prize in chemistry to Fritz Haber, the guy who literally invented chemical warfare. At least to Kissingers credit he did try quite hard to make peace and sometimes succeeded.
Then they give the prize to guys who don't deserve it like Obama and overlook Trump, who even his biggest haters cannot claim hasn't done a lot of war ending over 2 terms.
Haber invented the process for artificially creating ammonia. Since ammonia is a critical fertilizer, this invention has fed billions of people. On the other hand, it’s also critical for the manufacture of explosives. His work on chemical weapons was practically irrelevant by comparison. This was an astounding feat of chemistry, and well worth rewarding.
But fundamentally I don’t think we should make moral judgements over things like chemistry. A chemical process to create ammonia is a tool, and tools can always be used for good or evil. Even explosives are just tools that can be used for good or evil. Sometimes those explosives are even the same substance that is used for fertilizer. The morality of the use of the tool is provided by the user of the tool, not the creator of the tool.
We can celebrate the people who make the tools while saving our condemnation for the people who use tools for evil.
I agree about the Peace prize though, that one’s generally worthless.
John Carreyrou's book "Bad blood" is extremely good. Full of suspense, amazing revelations. I highly recommend it. It explores a lot of Elizabeth Holmes' and Sunny Balwani's insanity.
I have loathed Larry Summers since the repeal of Glass-Steagall. He has consistently treated the American public like he treats women in the Epstein emails. So glad he's finally getting his comeuppance.
I would like to bring the term "lamposted" into popular discourse.
I can only pray it becomes mainstream (along with the act, obviously). That is literally the only way to remedy this. You can pass new laws, but that does nothing for the past. You can go bankrupt trying to bring civil cases and possibly get some monetary compensation, but at a certain point all this stops working and people go back to what always works to return order back to society.
You can disagree, just understand you're agreeing to being subjugated or being enslaved, short of a viable and actionable alternative to being lamposted.
He was working at the Center for American Progress to ensure if the Democrats got back in power they would be committed to not fixing anything, fulfilling any promises, or doing anything beyond Clinton/Obama/Biden managed decline.
I hardly think a millionaire stepping away from his job is “comeuppance”.
Don’t forget Epstein’s circle of rapists and rapist-enablers still had friendly communication with him long after he was convicted and known pedophile.
I have doubts about officials’ ability to get real justice. I’ll still me shouting for blood in the streets, though.
I don't know what you tell you if the systematic abuse of hundreds (some reporting does suggest more than 1000) children doesn't rile you up. The fact that it is nearly exclusively rich and powerful people who participated only amplifies the effect. Most of us are absolutely fed up with the two-tier justice system, where the rich, powerful, and connected get to do whatever they want, while regular folk continually have their rights eroded. The powerful are often able to divert our attention from the injustice of the rich/powerful by dividing the people with propaganda, pitting one side against the other. Turns out the Epstein situation is one of the rare cases where nearly everyone agrees. You should expect it to receive increasingly large amounts of attention until we actually receive the real info and heads roll.
I'm not as alarmed that one of the most influential economists in America is a potential sex trafficker. I'm alarmed about to what degree the most influential people in America are being blackmailed.
Like I said - it’s reprehensible. I’m not minimizing the crime but pointing out there are bigger problems. Focusing on this instead of inflation or housing or healthcare means a lot more people will suffer than there are victims of Epstein. We have to prioritize. If too much attention and energy goes to this, bigger problems will be left unaddressed. The things I’m listing are occupying virtually none of the national focus right now, for example.
Why do you think the current government would be the slightest bit interested in solutions to housing, inflation or healthcare if Epstein wasn't an issue?
The story goes way beyond the abuse itself, they were videotaping everything to black mail other rich people and even world leaders... it's one of the biggest scandals in American history and it's about more than Epstein alone.
My gut feeling is that theres a lot of things in there that punters need to know about, to make informed electoral decisions.
My gut feeling is also that its been largely overblown, and releasing the files might actually take some of the wind out of the conspiracy theories built on the lack of this data.
Epstein put a lot of rich and powerful people with influence in government and industry into compromising positions. Those thousand victims weren't a hobby. He was creating blackmail material and using it for his own gain, and to sell to others. The amount of money flowing through the scheme is so large that it has to be from government entities, like intelligence agencies. Sergey Lavrov's name has come up in the documents. It's very plausible that a lot of the money Epstein got originated in Russia. That's a national security problem.
Poe’s law applies too much these days. I’ve tried to get out of the habit of leaving jokes ambiguous like that because it’s just too easy to trip readers up, especially when not everyone has native level awareness of idioms or social context.
Part of the problem is also frankly that HN has a culture that encourages serious engagement (or at least a facsimile of it) with the worst opinions it's possible to have. You just can't keep your sense for sincerity finely honed in an environment like that.
And reddit exist for the sake of smug echo-chamber dwellers. Or bots.
A lot of the posts listed there are:
* obvious joke/sarcasm/tongue-in-cheek etc
* taken out of context, or editorialised to similar effect (e.g. missing nuance that often exists in the same thread)
* based on the disbelief or disapproval of equally unqualified reddit-bros
* flagged/dead or heavily downvoted, the opposite of being 'encouraged'
In other words, a lot of low effort 'gotcha' point scoring against alleged 'tech-bros' which may or ma not mean everyone in HN is a SV start-up pitcher, or that no one really know what a tech-bro is.
Man, it's so understandable. Especially when 35-40% the country is doing exactly that kind of bullshit equivocative defense. Frankly I'm shocked the shitheads usually here read the room and have kept the child-rape apologia to themselves.
There is such a long history of using humor to affect change and discuss extremely serious matters. Legally it's protected speech because of it's importance.
The main purpose of sarcasm is not humor, it's to use irony as a form of contempt. To the extent that humor is involved it's usually done so as a form of mockery.
HN is not the place for wishing ill on people like this, no matter who it is or what they're accused of. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. We've had to ask you before not to heap scorn on people. Substantive criticism of someone's actions is fine. Wishing grave harm and humiliation on them is not. If you want to keep using HN, you need to stop doing this. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well, good to see Hahhvuhhhd is not above the British monarchy when it comes to eventually ejecting sex pests! A low bar to clear, but well done!
Now, just for certain ex-Brit colonies to follow their example! Quick... who can think of a popular leader who is, ehhhm, quite intricately linked to the same, ehh, gentleman with pretty specific tastes?
In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.
>We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Not that I wholly disagree, but in the interests of robust conversation, I feel compelled to ask:
"Cook controversially dines with Saudi Crown Prince at White House"
Now, I'm no Saudi Crown Prince stan, but would the word 'controversially' have been used if Cook dined with Biden - who funded and supported a genocide, in which hundreds of journalists were killed? Why was the word 'controversially' not used to refer to also being at the table with Trump there?
Yes, it's controversial that Cook had dinner with the Saudi Crown Prince. In my view it's even more controversial to be having dinner with Trump.
This is just the most recent headline I can give as an example. But there are many like this.
> In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
There's nothing that quite makes me feel like humanity has undergone speciation than the fact that this STILL HAS TO BE FUCKING SPELLED OUT FOR PEOPLE.
Hero worship is sycophancy of the highest order. Ugh, and I know you're so right.
And, to be less coy, how is the opposition party the one that treats Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman? It's somehow Epstein all the way down. Glad I'm a left-wing Chomskyite, cynical about all of those corrupt, elite institutions. Wait...
Obama was the hothouse flower of the Democrat party that Bill Clinton singlehandedly wrought. No Bill Clinton, no Barack Obama. Before Bill Clinton, here's what the NYTimes (left wing though not as far left as now, but i.e. sympathetic) had to say about the field of Democrat candidates for president:
"The strongest and saddest impression this viewer took away from the collective appearance of the Democratic Presidential candidates on national television was that Snow White was missing, while the Seven Dwarfs prattled on."https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/04/opinion/in-the-nation-the...
and you saw similar dynamics at play in the most recent series of elections. Biden was rammed into the nomination in 2020 because non of the field of candidates had a broad enough base of support. On the other side, Trump did what Clinton did, reshaped his party in his own image.
tl;dr: Because there were ongoing investigations (which was true) and it's generally considered bad to release your evidence before trial, or something like that, IANAL.
This will also be Trump's (false) reason for not releasing them.
> Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman?
Huh? Bill Clinton has been a relatively invisible ex-president compared to the other modern ones (aka Carter & Obama, Biden hasn't been gone long enough for data).
Perhaps that's because he didn't want to overshadow Hillary, but it's at least partly because of the Lewinsky affair.
> "In other exchanges, Mr. Summers appeared to ask Mr. Epstein’s advice on how to pursue a romantic relationship"
That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the woman into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”"
I think it remarkable how the NYT buries (far down on the page), and CNBC omits altogether, the underlying story about what Larry Summers was actually doing. CNBC euphemizes the whole thing away to vapor (there were mails—the end). These aren't good expositions.
(Speaking of the NYT' coverage, there's a new revelation one of their reporters actually helped Epstein evade scrutiny—it's another bit from the recently-disclosed email tranches. Their reporter Landon Thomas secretly tipped off Epstein that one of his NYT coworkers was "digging around" into Epstein—even gave Epstein the guy's name).
> That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the undergraduate into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
What undergraduate? According to the link you provide, she graduated in 2004 and was the subject of discussion between Epstein and Summers in 2018.
Why is this on the front page of HN other than the mention of OpenAI? The article barely even mentions how this is related to OpenAI. What’s notable about this event other than this person is disliked by many?
It's newsworthy because he's a prominent economic leader who has been at the center of U.S. economic policy, elite academia, and global finance for decades. He's held almost every marquee job an economist can have, Treasury Secretary under Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council under Obama, Chief economist of world bank, president of Harvard, connected at IMF and an influential voice on inflation, interest rates, fiscal policy, and banking regulations. He's a trusted voice in the VC world, was on the board of Square, an advisor at A16z/Andreessen Horowitz and involved in crypto/blockchain as an advisor to one of the major crypto VCs.
I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.
Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.
All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript...
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmat...
Nicholas Tartaglione
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2019/09/23/feds-how-n...
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
Nonsense. "...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0] "...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1] etc.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/us/politics/trump-epstein... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/trump-epstein...
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
So he's still immune the anything that's horrendous.
The real test is how people vote. With this much confusion I think it is perfectly valid to take a few opinion polls with a grain of salt.
Much like how Dems rate their party poorly but still turn it against Trump, I'm not sure MAGA discontent with have any real impact on elections.
Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?
This doesn't accord with experience. MAGA is notorious for rationalizing anything Trump says or does.
The uniparty is a rotten, spiraling race to the bottom.
They're just different bubbles.
Liberals and conservatives have methodically and deliberately avoided holding their leaders accountable for decades. The only people who can't see that, are, frankly, liberals and conservatives.
What we have now is an opportunity to sweep everyone from Trump on down out of office. Anyone who would work for Trump or Clinton should have their judgement questioned at a minimum. And they should pray we don't look any further into what they've been getting up to.
This is a golden opportunity to scrub the walls clean and put in new people en masse. But I'm not naive. I know the corruption of the incumbent power brokers and parties will undoubtedly win the day. You can bet your bottom dollar that conservatives and liberals are cooperating and they've got the courts, Homeland security, CIA, everything.. out cleaning up for them. I just wish they'd get what's coming to them for once.
Cannot count the number of times people forget how powerful algorithmic bubble making is. It isnt a “you are in a bubble so ur dumb” it is more of, “all of our information is algorithmically fed to us be aware!”
To add to this, I have a friend who has two kids. One is lefty trans and the other is becoming a christian conservative. They are Indian zoomers. Two totally different algorithms at work. One got the Charlie and the other got Hassan. Really makes one wonder what is in your own information feed.
Just throwing it out there, but forget Epstein, I'm sure most of us would not believe what NYT is sitting on in general. This is effectively a defacto global intelligence gathering service. I bet if we could read through a lot of that we'd all be gobsmacked and just stop believing in humanity altogether.
I understand most of what we haven't seen is uncorroborated, but it would still make for interesting reading if we didn't have to worry about falling down an elevator shaft onto some bullets.
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/why-larry-summers-sh...
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.
> ...
> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.
If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
https://archive.ph/hSc5Z
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.
I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.
Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.
You don’t need to. The target audience was people to whom that’s obvious in the first few lines and then who keep reading to see how far he can take it with a straight face.
Just because he claimed to have been sarcastic about something, doesn't mean he is not also guilty of it.
And if it's a joke, what is the punchline?
> what is the punchline?
It's akin to saying "This establishment's high Google/Yelp ratings indicate it's leaving money on the table. There's clearly room to raise prices, cut costs, and really degrade the customer experience."
I don't know if Summers is telling the truth about his intent. But as far as jokes go, it's decent.
> argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated.
The closest it gets to being a joke is that it is mockery and derision directed at underlings as a form of feedback on work product.
Yes. See also:
“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Kind of what I mean. I hadn't heard of this guy before today, and this memo openly laments that it's challenging to bring Africa into the world pollution economy because moving solid waste there is a logistical challenge. If this memo was about how cool it is to traffic and rape children, as some people in this thread and a few others today seem to be interpreting it, I'd probably be less inclined to lend it the benefit of this tone, but I'm just not sold on the premise that someone who is demonstrably evil in some dimension is incapable of making honestly benign bureaucratic jokes in a presumably private context. It kind of knocks the legs out of genuine criticism if the dude can't chew bubblegum without taking flack.
I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport.
Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
> And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire.
Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
If you're going to engage in satire, its best the satire be obvious.
I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically.
From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."
The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.
> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
(I don't know why I'd like to know, thinking about it at a meta level…)
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
Surely he could not possibly be sexist, nah.
Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?
It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
so... this might be the pattern.
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
Seems anecdotally true.
I think ladder climbing is its own skill only loosely correlated with intelligence.
"Funnily", if you read Epstein's contributions to a lot of his emails, he also gives off that same vibe.
I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things.
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...
The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance.
(Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.)
The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now).
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
"Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case.
It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into.
Summers is just weather vane for current economic thinking. He's not a particularly brilliant at anything.
It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
One metric of change would be that statutory (underage) rape wasn't a crime anywhere 200 years ago. In some countries, it still isn't. Mass rape and kidnapping is going on right now from Nigeria to Sudan. Wealthy old men can still marry 12 year olds across much of the Middle East. The fact that sex with minors has become relegated to something like a luxury designer drug for the elite hypocrites in the US and UK, and the fact that they're now being exposed for it, is in many ways an unexpected victory for humanity. The previous 5k years of recorded history, and probably the whole million years before that, were wall to wall with war, slavery and raping children. As well as the elites having such rights as prima nocta and simply executing anyone they wished. So I think we are making progress.
What does your precious Harvard and US Treasury Department have to say about that?
> The three freedoms that most of our ancestors enjoyed, but which most modern humans lack are:
> The freedom to leave.
> The freedom to disobey an order.
> The freedom to create new ways of relating to one another.
https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/the-three-fundamental-hu...
And example: we tend to inject too much of our modern viewpoint onto the old monarchies—that Henry VIII would not have thought himself ruler of the "state" of England although we talk about him in that regard from our modern perspective.
> It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
This category of malcontent (about out-of-touch elites engaging in all sorts of depraved perversions while the poor starved) at Versailles eventually caused most of the former to lose their heads during the French Revolution.
The smart ones know that they need to keep up appearances, the dumb ones behave like they will never face consequences.
Wonder how it would have turned out if the French revolution happened before the American Revolution? What could we have learned from them?
On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?
For the most part, the threads are a mix of:
- Really cringe dating advice
- Epstein connecting Summers with other important people
- Dishing on Trump and his inner circle
Given there were many more prominently featured people with more dirt in here, I wonder if Summers is worried there's a lot more that's about to be revealed.
it's way beyond cringe
She is approximately 43 (college grad '04) and he is 70.
The text messages were 6 years ago.
he can "fix" you up with a teenager who will give you a private "massage"
The broker connects people, especially in the pre-Internet / young Internet days . The clients at ebsuy doing their main activity.
... while being videotaped. Those recordings provide him an immense amount of power and ability.
> this week, thiel, summers,bill burns, gordon brown, jagland, ( council of europe and nobel chairman ). mongolia pres , hardeep puree ( india), boris ( gates). jabor ( qatar). sultan ( dubai, ), kosslyn ( harvard), leon black, woody. you are a welcome guest at any.....also if you >think there are interesting people in town, everyone here for climate summit, clinton ,security council, holy shit im on for next 30 minutes
https://searchepsteinfiles.com/file/text/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028...
He also regularly provided research funding for universities.
If so we are getting a window into a world we rarely see. For some of us this is confirming our priors, for others this will be profoundly shocking.
At this moment in time, this is the most serious crime to those in charge
Those who seek those things -- money for money's sake, power for power's sake -- often tend to see their success as somehow making them "above" others. They derive perverse pleasure in seeing just how much they can flaunt society's rules. 'The rules don't apply to me' is like a drug in itself.
I grinded fairly well enough in my 20s, just as many other people I know who did. We're much better off than 99.99% of the world. That doesn't make us think of sexually abusing children and adolescents one bit because we need to "flush that shit out of our system" and "recapture our lost youth". I have better ways of recapturing my lost youth, by computer games, more time for hobbies and fucking closer to my age like rabbits.
PS:- being in the upper echelon does mean you have a somewhat easier access to the circles that engage in these vile activities, and yes you'll be completely excluded if you say no to them. Many are okay with that, while those who aren't are the ones in the files.
The thing that perplexes me is that these people aren't in poverty or victims of some violent trauma. They are among the elites of the country -- and yet this is still how they behave -- are these people a niche group or am I?
Why not both?
Ah yes, no one else has ever tried to ingratiate themselves into the world of the rich and famous. It's spies all the way down!
> i'll bet your entire net worth x 10. the anaconda is the worst kept secret of silicon valley...
I think the truth is probably that insecurity does not prevent success. Some argue that it might be the source of it. But probably the truth is there are secure billionaires and insecure billionaires and the latter are very obviously insecure because despite their success they do things like this.
0: https://x.com/chamath/status/1931039584672186651?s=20
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
In those consultations, he used a racial slur to refer to the young woman.
There are other contrary positions you can take, it doesn't have to be that this was okay.
There's a reason it's considered morally and ethically heinous to demand sexual favors with people whom you have power over, and if you can't understand why it's so heinous, then you do not deserve to have power over anybody.
You have no issue with that?
It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sit at the nexus of an international pedophile ring that threatens to bring down many billionaires and even some governments. There is a concerted effort to prevent the release of this information and we're far from done yet.
A lot of effort was made by the administration to prevent the discharge petition reaching 218 signatures. For anyone unfamiliar with how the House of Representatives works, the majority party chooses the Speaker and the Speaker decides what bills get a vote. But if a majority of the 435 representatives (so 218) want the House to have a vote, there's a procedure called a discharge petition. If it gets 218 signatures, the Speaker has to schedule a vote within a week or so (I forget the exact time line).
The Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as basically putting the House in recess for 8+ weeks to avoid this happening. He avoided wearing in an Arizona congresswoman for that same period because she was going to be the 218th signature. The government was literally suspended to avoid this outcome.
Then the Speaker changed tactics to try to pass the bill with a procedure called "unaminous consent". Basically, if no House member objects, the bill passes. Why would he do this? To avoid having votes on the record. This was good politics to force a role call.
The Speaker continues to play defense here because carve outs were added to the bill to exempt files for "national security" reasons and anything under active investigation. That's brazen obstruction and the least surprising thing is that the president announced an investigation this week. It's explicitly to prevent the release of some evidence. Make no mistake.
It's not unique to this administration either. the previous administration sat on all of this for 4 years doing absolutely nothing.
Where doe sthis lead? Foreign governments and intelligence agencies who were not only aware of what was going on but they (allegedly) actively benefit from and participated in this trafficking ring to get access to and/or blackmail powerful people. That's the "national security" interest.
As many of us are aware by now, Ghislaine Maxwell's father was the British media mogul Robert Maxwell who was a Mossad asset and got a state funeral in israel for his contributions to the state of Israel going back to suplying militia wth weapons in World War Two that were ultimately used for ethnic cleasning. And how did Maxwell die? He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
If this stuff gets out, many heads will roll in government, in business and in prestigious colleges. Look no further than one Alan Dershowitz. Harvard in particular has unclean hands and is elbow deep in all of this. And certainly whatever you do don't look into how Kimble Musk met one of his "girlfriends".
This is only the beginning.
i know we like expanding the categories of all sins and then only refering to things by category name without the specifics, but.
Maxwell had been stealing from his worker's pension fund and it was all starting to come out. It is plausible that he killed himself to avoid the consequences. He was a monster.
We are at a dangerous point in history. I personally believe that inequality is inevitably going to end in violence and we're beyuond the point of avoiding this with electoral politics. People are struggling to eat and survive at a time where we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. This simply can't continue.
I'm personally for outing wealthy and powerful pedophiles who are meaningfully making all of our lives worse to accrue completely unnecessary extra wealth.
I also don't believe Epstein was murdered. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there's no such evidence of the murder claims. More to the point, the onus is on people making such claims to provide the evidence, not everyone else to disprove it.
But Robert Maxwell's history is well-documented and verifiable. And there's so much evidence that Epstein was mysteriously well-connected. The jobs he got. A match teacher at a prestigious school without a college degree. Power of attorney over Leslie Wexner's assets. The access he had to the wealthy, world leaders and academics. The fact that nobody really knows how he made his money. He's been dubbed a financier but this just isn't documented. There are thousands of bank accounts that haven't been scrutinized for where money was going and why.
And of course Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking people to... absolutely no one. Nobody has been named let alone charged. Her conditions on jail aren't appropriate for someone with her charges. She has a bunch of privileges in a Club Fed prison she shouldn't be in. The president fired the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York so only his former personal lawyers met with Maxwell for a proffer session.
And of course the connections to intelligence agencies and certain governments is both entirely believable and it fits a ton of evidence. There are credible claims why this is why he got the most lenient sweetheart plea agreement in 2006 despite Palm Beach police having the testimony of dozens of underage victims.
The people he robbed in that fraud were regular Joes who were cheated out of their pensions, not some kind of shadow-government-global-conspiracy types who have the means to remote-program your toaster to kill you.
Him killing himself is not the most surprising way out of that situation.
First, extremely wealthy people are by and large sociopaths. It's how they get rich. They will never view themselves as responsible or deserving or prosecution. Many are so rich they never consider getting prosecuted a realistic possibility. They will use various legal means to hide assets from being reclaimed by victims. Alan Bond, an Australian entrepreneur, also raided pension funds (which he ultimately went to jail for) but he mysteriously got divorced from his wife (who got a large property settlement) before it all went south and he stayed on good terms with her even after the divorce. Weird, huh?
Second, it's weird that nobody on his yacht noticed he was gone. For hours. That... just doesn't make sense if you know how luxury yachts work. The principal or the owner will dictate the entire schedule of the boat. If they get up at 6am, staff will get up at 5am to make sure their needs are being met. Beverages, breakfast, whatever. At all times the bridge will be manned (ie have someone on watch) who will be looking out for hazards but also at cameras on the boat. They are on alert for things like a fire breaking out or a VIP being up so they can alert other staff.
So could he have slipped through that net to throw himself overboard? Sure, it's possible. It's not icnredibly likely however. Also, is that how a rich and powerful man who was once an arms dealer commits suicide? Again, it's possible but it doesn't seem like the most likely method.
Lastly, if you're going to kill somebody but don't want it to be seen as a murder, this tops the list of how you'd do it. Why? Because, being in the water is going to wash away evidence and there are multiple ways of inducing a heart attack that are essentially undetectable (eg potassium overdose). And the delay in the body being found will likely get rid of any potential evidence there too.
The whole thing just stinks to high heaven.
And perhaps the end. If its as serious as you claim it is nothing will come out of it.
But now that I think about it, the email leaks show that he was sexually harassing women while he was at Harvard too. So he was terrible at all three jobs.
FriendFeed shutdown same day Facebook was incorporated - these things are important for continuity
Here's another POV: why did Micro$oft $ide again$t the PhD$? Hmm, I gue$$ it make$ $en$e why they cho$e $ummer$.
Two of the committee resigned in protest, Kissinger almost turned it down because it was also being awarded to Lê Đức Thọ, Lê Đức Thọ actually turned it down because the peace it was supposed to be about hadn't happened yet, Kissinger accepted in absentia as he did not want to be targeted by anti-war protestors when getting the peace prize, then he later tried to return it only for the committee to say no.
It's one of the few Trump grievant that is legitimate.
Hardly. What does it have to do with Trump? The only reason it's a "grievance" is that Trump feels he should get the prize. While he supports a genocidal nation and tries to start wars.
Then they give the prize to guys who don't deserve it like Obama and overlook Trump, who even his biggest haters cannot claim hasn't done a lot of war ending over 2 terms.
But fundamentally I don’t think we should make moral judgements over things like chemistry. A chemical process to create ammonia is a tool, and tools can always be used for good or evil. Even explosives are just tools that can be used for good or evil. Sometimes those explosives are even the same substance that is used for fertilizer. The morality of the use of the tool is provided by the user of the tool, not the creator of the tool.
We can celebrate the people who make the tools while saving our condemnation for the people who use tools for evil.
I agree about the Peace prize though, that one’s generally worthless.
If you give a school enough evidence. Like, say, this email. Your career there is done.
And that's any school.
I can only pray it becomes mainstream (along with the act, obviously). That is literally the only way to remedy this. You can pass new laws, but that does nothing for the past. You can go bankrupt trying to bring civil cases and possibly get some monetary compensation, but at a certain point all this stops working and people go back to what always works to return order back to society.
You can disagree, just understand you're agreeing to being subjugated or being enslaved, short of a viable and actionable alternative to being lamposted.
Good riddance.
Don’t forget Epstein’s circle of rapists and rapist-enablers still had friendly communication with him long after he was convicted and known pedophile.
I have doubts about officials’ ability to get real justice. I’ll still me shouting for blood in the streets, though.
I don’t even know how to answer that question.
> The things I’m listing are occupying virtually none of the national focus right now, for example.
Have you forgotten why the government was shut down last month?
What an embarrassing comment. I hope you don't mind me linking this back to you once the files are released in full.
My gut feeling is also that its been largely overblown, and releasing the files might actually take some of the wind out of the conspiracy theories built on the lack of this data.
can you give examples?
A lot of the posts listed there are: * obvious joke/sarcasm/tongue-in-cheek etc * taken out of context, or editorialised to similar effect (e.g. missing nuance that often exists in the same thread) * based on the disbelief or disapproval of equally unqualified reddit-bros * flagged/dead or heavily downvoted, the opposite of being 'encouraged'
In other words, a lot of low effort 'gotcha' point scoring against alleged 'tech-bros' which may or ma not mean everyone in HN is a SV start-up pitcher, or that no one really know what a tech-bro is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire
I just hope that the fallout doesn't begin and end with Prince Andrew and Larry Summers.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983044 and marked it off topic.
Now, just for certain ex-Brit colonies to follow their example! Quick... who can think of a popular leader who is, ehhhm, quite intricately linked to the same, ehh, gentleman with pretty specific tastes?
Anyone?
We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.
Not that I wholly disagree, but in the interests of robust conversation, I feel compelled to ask:
When?
Like this most recent headline from AppleInsider:
"Cook controversially dines with Saudi Crown Prince at White House"
Now, I'm no Saudi Crown Prince stan, but would the word 'controversially' have been used if Cook dined with Biden - who funded and supported a genocide, in which hundreds of journalists were killed? Why was the word 'controversially' not used to refer to also being at the table with Trump there?
Yes, it's controversial that Cook had dinner with the Saudi Crown Prince. In my view it's even more controversial to be having dinner with Trump.
This is just the most recent headline I can give as an example. But there are many like this.
There's nothing that quite makes me feel like humanity has undergone speciation than the fact that this STILL HAS TO BE FUCKING SPELLED OUT FOR PEOPLE.
Hero worship is sycophancy of the highest order. Ugh, and I know you're so right.
That's Barack Obama. Among other things, he's not 80 and still has the vigor of youth. Clinton is just old at this point.
"The strongest and saddest impression this viewer took away from the collective appearance of the Democratic Presidential candidates on national television was that Snow White was missing, while the Seven Dwarfs prattled on." https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/04/opinion/in-the-nation-the...
and you saw similar dynamics at play in the most recent series of elections. Biden was rammed into the nomination in 2020 because non of the field of candidates had a broad enough base of support. On the other side, Trump did what Clinton did, reshaped his party in his own image.
I think the real question is why didn't the Biden administration release the files. How many very powerful people left and right are in there?
If I had to guess it's because there's nothing incriminating about Trump in them. Otherwise we all know they would have been leaked a long time ago.
This will also be Trump's (false) reason for not releasing them.
I suspect it's been the false reason the whole time.
No one is investigating anything, only wiping hard drives and tying up loose ends
Huh? Bill Clinton has been a relatively invisible ex-president compared to the other modern ones (aka Carter & Obama, Biden hasn't been gone long enough for data).
Perhaps that's because he didn't want to overshadow Hillary, but it's at least partly because of the Lewinsky affair.
That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the woman into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”"
I think it remarkable how the NYT buries (far down on the page), and CNBC omits altogether, the underlying story about what Larry Summers was actually doing. CNBC euphemizes the whole thing away to vapor (there were mails—the end). These aren't good expositions.
(Speaking of the NYT' coverage, there's a new revelation one of their reporters actually helped Epstein evade scrutiny—it's another bit from the recently-disclosed email tranches. Their reporter Landon Thomas secretly tipped off Epstein that one of his NYT coworkers was "digging around" into Epstein—even gave Epstein the guy's name).
https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3m5hn... ("Fall 2017: Then-NYT reporter literally warning Epstein that someone is "digging around again.")
What undergraduate? According to the link you provide, she graduated in 2004 and was the subject of discussion between Epstein and Summers in 2018.