We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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So, has anyone determined what US war aims actually are? Damned if I can figure it out.
“Black students at the University of Oxford who feel traumatised by the killing of George Floyd will be able to apply for a reduction in workload and special consideration in their exams.” That line came from a a report in the “iPaper” from June 15th 2020, six years ago today. The report continued:
The extra support was outlined in an open letter sent to students by the university on Monday.
Signed by the vice chancellor Louise Richardson and the heads of Oxford’s colleges, it was apparently sent in response to concerns raised about the welfare of black students, following the police killing of Mr Floyd in the US last month.
Click on the link to read the “Open letter to Oxford students from the Vice-Chancellor and Heads of House”. Besides devaluing the degrees of all black Oxford students who took their finals in 2020 whether the students wanted “special consideration” or not, the letter said much else of interest. For instance:
“While much is being done by many committed people, we acknowledge that we are rightly reproached for our collective failure to address the issue of systemic racism properly, and that we have work to do.”
At any one time there are several hundred Americans studying at Oxford. The terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11th 2001 killed 2,977 people. Oxford University did not offer its American students special consideration in their exams for the trauma of seeing their nation attacked and thousands of their compatriots murdered. Oxford did not declare itself “rightly reproached” for its collective failure to address the issue of anti-Americanism properly, though a much clearer line could be drawn from the output of certain Oxford academics to the 9/11 attacks than could be drawn from Oxford to George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department.
In the quarter century since then, scores of other countries have had their citizens murdered en masse by Islamist terrorists. I would hope and assume that students whose family members were murdered in the name of Islam were offered special consideration in their exams, but if the leadership of the university publicly offered it to all students from Indonesia, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, India, Pakistan, France, Russia, Kenya, Nigeria, Iraq, Canada, Australia, Yemen, Syria, Denmark, Tunisia, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Turkey, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Somalia, Niger, Lebanon, the Philippines, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Uruguay, Ivory Coast, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Iran, Finland, the Netherlands, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Austria, and, above all, Israel when their respective countries were attacked, I never heard about it.
I listed many nations above, but when the University said “We’re determined to support our Black students in every way we can” after some of them said they had been traumatised by George Floyd’s death, the support was offered to those students on grounds of race, not nation. Did it offer white students, or brown students – or black students, come to that – support when people of the same race as them were murdered in large numbers by Islamists that was similar to the support it offered black students when one man was killed by the American police? Did the leadership of the university issue a public invitation to Jewish students of all nationalities to claim extra time in their exams for the trauma of having to read about, hear about, or see on video the copious and horrible evidence of the thousand-plus murders of Jews on October 7th 2023? When Henry Nowak died just as George Floyd had, pleading “I can’t breathe” to the police officers restraining him, did Oxford “reach out” to its white students to “stand with them during these difficult moments”?
Many dismiss the type of arguments I have made above as “Whataboutery” or “whataboutism”. “Whataboutery” is the older term, having originated in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The idea behind it was that when every attempt to get people to agree that some particular terrorist act was wrong was immediately countered by the cry of “What about [insert similar atrocity by the other side here]?”, it became impossible to de-escalate the conflict. Perhaps it did make sense to disparage the practice of endlessly citing old injustices in the Northern Irish context, but I think that to cite a current or historical parallel and ask “Why are these two similar situations not treated the same way?” is more often right than wrong. People of all races should be treated equally. That is the only form of “racial justice” that is actually just. Individual justice is also the only form of racial justice that is stable. Every deviation from the simple yet profound principle of equal treatment, however well-intentioned, is like stretching an elastic band. Eventually, either the elastic snaps back, which might cause injuries from the speed of the contraction but at least restores balance, or the elastic breaks – in which case society goes to the other stable pattern, that of considering those outside the tribe to have no rights at all.
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Related post: The main reason so many people fear Islam
Remember that photo of Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement? Leaving aside the question of whether George Floyd’s death was murder – the late Niall Kilmartin thought it was not – it was inevitable that people would eventually ask why, if the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was obliged to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness because the police in a foreign country had killed one man, should not Muslim leaders and opinion-formers make some similar acknowledgement that all these thousands upon thousands of murders preceded by a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” had something to do with Islam? Why can’t there be – why is there not – a “Kafir Lives Matter” movement?
“Half of Belgium sees the US as a bigger adversary than China”, reports EuroNews.
The poll also found that China is viewed less negatively than the US. Between 40% and 44% of respondents described China as an adversary. However, very few Belgians consider China an ally, with many respondents choosing the option “neither ally nor adversary”.
Despite that, concerns about Beijing remain. Nearly 60% of respondents said they believe a Chinese military attack on Taiwan is likely in the near future, reflecting continued unease about China’s growing military influence.
The survey also suggests that Belgians generally feel secure within their own country. Only a small minority believe Belgium itself could face a direct military attack, with 12% of respondents in Flanders and 21% in Wallonia expressing that concern.
At the same time, respondents supported greater European independence in both defence and economic policy. More than 80% said Europe should become militarily self-sufficient, while a majority backed stronger European responses to US trade measures and tariffs.
The poll also found strong support for limiting foreign influence in Belgian affairs. Nearly 90% of respondents said Belgium should not allow the US to interfere in its domestic matters, reflecting recent controversy surrounding comments made by the US ambassador to Belgium.
Despite growing scepticism towards Washington, Belgians remain broadly supportive of Western institutions. Around 80% said Belgium should remain a member of NATO under all circumstances. Many respondents view the alliance as a collective European security shield rather than an instrument of US influence.
Like it or not, the opinion of an increasing proportion of Belgians as revealed in this survey is shared by other European countries. Like it or not, the corresponding opinion of an increasing proportion of Americans is “Okay, bye”.
Quite possibly, this is all just a spat that brought on by the fact that, to use Scott Alexander’s formulation, Xi’s China is the “fargroup” you hardly ever think about, whereas Trump’s America is the “outgroup” whose antics irritate you every day.
But if these attitudes are real, the Belgians and other Europeans need to get equally real about the cost of the changes they say they want. “More than 80% said Europe should become militarily self-sufficient”. Europe being militarily self-sufficient would make Belgium safer, but also poorer. It would require more Belgians to be ready to fight and die for their country at a moment’s notice. I am not sure they even realise that that is what Trump has been asking them to do for years.
“Canada’s Newspaper of Record Asks: ‘What If They Ultimately Find Nothing?’”, asks Jonathan Kay at Quillette.
A month ago, I offered some predictions about how Canadian journalists would cover the five-year anniversary of the country’s infamous “unmarked graves” social panic, which began on May 27, 2021. On one hand, this kind of important landmark would be difficult for news outlets to ignore. (After all, this was considered the Canadian “Story of the Year” at the time.) On the other hand, any intellectually honest retrospective that these outlets produced would require at least some passing explanation as to why the entire Canadian media establishment had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a story that turned out to be fake—something that most journalists have so far proven unwilling to do.
On Wednesday, it will have been exactly five years since the Kamloops First Nation in British Columbia claimed it has found 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of the community’s former residential school. In the weeks that followed, gullible reporters transformed the narrative into a kind of horror-movie script, complete with mass murdering priests and midnight burials.
It all turned out to be complete nonsense. In five years, not a single actual grave has been found.
The only evidence that had been offered in support of the original claims consisted of a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the former residential school grounds. As reporters (belatedly) learned, GPR technology merely detects sub-surface soil dislocations—not actual graves. These dislocations can be associated with graves, but also with pipes, rocks, tree roots, and a dozen other common subsurface artifacts. To truly identify actual graves, one must dig—something that the Kamloops First Nation leaders who originally advanced these false claims have conspicuously failed to do; despite having received more than $12-million from Canada’s (equally gullible) government for search activities.
The Globe and Mail is often referred to as Canada’s “Newspaper of Record”. True to Mr Kay’s predictions, it did carry a slightly repentant but very evasive retrospective. The Globe and Mail’s own link is here and the article can also be seen here. The article starts with the ringing title “There is no reconciliation without truth”, before immediately rowing back in the first line with “Two things can be true, at the same time.”
There is much else in the same vein, including this darvolicious line:
That there have been no human remains found at Kamloops does not mean children did not die there. It does not mean that crimes were not committed against children, crimes that were inexcusable. A contention otherwise is denialism, and it is morally repugnant.
As Jonathan Kay says,
In paragraph eight, the writers try a second motte-and-bailey gambit. We are informed that “regardless of what they find [in Kamloops], the fact remains that more than 3,500 children are named on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation‘s registry of students who died as a result of the residential school system, which operated in Canada for more than 160 years.” This is absolutely true. But it’s also completely irrelevant. No one disputes the information published by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which, unlike the Kamloops hysteria, was based on careful research. In that case, researchers had names, dates of birth, and other identifying details for the victims. None of that exists in the case of the Kamloops story.
The Globe’s implicit argument here is that it doesn’t really matter all that much if those 215 children actually existed or not, since we have the names of 3,500 other children that can be trotted out for the same purpose—so, at worse, we’re still batting 94% on dead-child statistics.
As my deliberately crude wording here is intended to suggest, the rhetorical trick the Globe is playing here isn’t just misleading, it’s also grotesquely reductionist. The documented deaths at residential schools were largely the result of tuberculosis. While the elevated tuberculosis death rates at residential schools represent a stain on Canada’s national conscience, the issue of substandard public-health amenities is completely distinct from lurid fairy tales in which mass murdering Catholic clerics intentionally dispatch 215 children into shallow graves. Every morally aware adult knows this, notwithstanding the Globe’s effort to blur the two categories.
It is probably best if you do not actually read this post.
“Nourishing Justice” is a report produced by a charity (not the sort of charity that runs on voluntary contributions from the public) called “Eating Better” (Registered Charity No. 1175669). The Executive Director of Eating Better is Sarah Wakefield, the Green candidate for the Makerfield by-election upon which so much hangs. Sarah Wakefield wrote the foreword for the “Nourishing Justice” report.
I found out about the report from a GB News article called “Green candidate in Makerfield by-election wants farming to be ‘decolonised’ with ‘inclusive spaces'”. The idea that British farming needed to be decolonised confused me. Who from, the Romans? I was not convinced that GB News was giving a fair account of Eating Better’s charitable work, so I decided to check for myself. GB News was giving a fair account. “Eating Better” did indeed host a decolonial decision-making workshop called “The Gathering Table” in August 2025, co-facilitated by Diana Garduño Jiménez of a charity called “Nourish Scotland”.
“Nourish Scotland” (Registered Charity No. SC048239) is funded by a similar mixture of state money and grants from philanthropic foundations as “Eating Better”, but with the addition of some money from the Scottish government. To be clear, the organisation “Nourish Scotland” did not produce the Nourishing Justice report. “Nourish Scotland” might also be easily confused with, but is separate from, another body and another report mentioned on page 8 of the Nourishing Justice report, which says,
“The contemporary UK food system generally lacks the ability to apply race, gender, and class analysis to how food systems should change. The Sankofa Report: British Colonialism and the UK Food System delves into the numerous layers of inequalities in the current UK food system, stemming from the legacies of colonialism and exploitation. It highlights issues such as underrepresentation in the sector, food insecurity, lack of access to green space for marginalised communities and to the dominance of western epistemologies (theory of knowledge) in food research. Most importantly, the report emphasises that in order to create meaningful and lasting shifts, we must confront and address the forces that have shaped our present food system.
The “Sankofa Report” to which Nourishing Justice links is the rather grand title given to a fourteen page report on “British Colonialism and the UK food system” written by an intern called Jada Phillips at “Food Matters” (Registered Charity No.1178078). The organisation “Food Matters”, you may be surprised to learn, is a registered “charity” funded by by a mixture of public sector grants, National Lottery money, and most of the same charitable trusts and foundations as fund “Eating Better” and “Nourish Scotland”. The name of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation turns up in all three.
I think. Maybe it was only two out of three, or maybe I was thinking of another charity called Eat Scotland or a trading card game called Charity: The Gathering. Gimme a break, I’ve got three tabs up from the Charity Commission, two Annual Reports, four responses from two different AIs (at least one of which is a lie), and a splitting headache.
It’s easy to get confused between the all these bodies with wholesome-sounding words to do with food and eating in their names, but it is very important that you distinguish between them because otherwise you might think that they are functionally identical bodies whose employees get to eat pretty well by being paid to quote each other by the taxpayer.
Ten seconds after I wrote a comment to this Guardian story, “Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’”, it was gone. Oh well. My comment was no great loss to the world (I forget the exact words, but it was something about how the New York Times and the Guardian didn’t report it when Biden fell asleep in meetings either) and, of course, a newspaper has every right to delete whatever it wants from its comment section.
But the sheer speed of its deletion made it obvious that it was done by A.I. That happens a lot these days, and not just at the Guardian. Some people on Twitter write “unalive” when they mean “kill” to avoid having their post automatically censored. Cens*red. Cenrosed. There are so many other instances of workarounds to avoid the robot censor that I begin to think we may be evolving something like the avoidance speech that is a feature of languages that originate as far apart as Australia and China.
The current state of Artificial Intelligence is particularly likely to result in pervasive stupid censorship; censorship that does not even serve the objectives of the censors. Four or five years ago the programs caught single words. “Unalive” dates from this period. Sometimes the algorithm caught utterly harmless instances of a given word, for example when a mention of a blue tit – the bird – would be deleted for obscenity. But one could work round it. In five years’ time, or maybe sooner given the speed at which this technology is developing, the A.I. will no longer mistake a blue tit for a tit. We’ll still have the political censorship, of course, and the system will be cleverer than we are when it comes to spotting evasive wordplay. Pray for Elon Musk’s health.
For several years the Guardian automatically deleted any reference to Hunter Biden’s laptop. As I said in this post, for some reason they briefly lifted the prohibition in January 2025:
What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop in a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.”
MJuma2018’s comment is still up, but when I have tried mentioning the laptop on a few occasions since then out of a maternal concern for the imprisoned brains of Guardian readers, my comments did not get through.
However in my experiments during those four, now five, years it was always comments relating to Hunter Biden that got the chop. My comment of today only referred to “Biden”, as dozens of other comments in the thread also did. For such a general comment to be deleted is a new development. Before you ask, no, they do not delete all my comments. Nor do they delete all my comments that refer unfavourably to Joe Biden. It looks like the AI is just sophisticated enough to recognise a criticism of the Guardian’s own coverage.
The simple fact is that the Ofcom Fees Duties are expressed to be binding, they are a functional burden on American speech, and they are imposed for the purpose of funding an official censor.
The Ofcom Fees Duties are a British censorship tax on American speech, no matter what language Ofcom chooses to dress it up in. In the United States, those are unconstitutional. See Grosjean v. American Press Co. or Minneapolis Star v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue.
– Preston Byrne
Musa al-Gharbi is an American academic – a sociologist and a professor of journalism – who is an occasional columnist for the Guardian. He describes himself as a Democrat.
If you were asked to guess from the information in the sentence above what he would say in a talk giving an overview of sociological research about American voters in the era of Trump, you’d probably be wrong, just like I was.
I found his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production” informative and entertaining, particularly the section that starts at 28:02 and continues until about 40:00 on what is commonly called “the public loss of trust in science”.
(As Professor al-Gharbi points out, there has scarcely been any public loss of trust in science.)
Yes, really. It’s in the Guardian: Anti-Trump sentiment being examined as motive for White House press dinner shooting
Do you think they’ll find any? I’ve got a few ideas as to where the investigators might look. Real out-of-the-box, blue-sky thinking.
Remember this map, put out by Sarah Palin’s Political Action Committee in late 2010?
In case the image goes away, it is headed “20 House Democrats from districts we carried in 2008 voted for the health care bill. IT’S TIME TO TAKE A STAND” and shows a map of the states of USA with clip art images of crosshairs over those districts. Below that is a list of the representatives of those districts.
Here are three different Guardian articles published on one day, 9th January 2011, linking that map to the shooting spree by Jared Loughner in which he attempted to murder Representative Gabrielle Giffords and did murder six others.
Ewen MacAskill: Gabrielle Giffords shooting reignites row over rightwing rhetoric in US
Jessica Valenti: The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords highlights the ‘man-up’ culture in US politics
Chris McGreal: Arizona shooting: ‘Does she have any enemies?’ ‘Yeah. The whole Tea Party’
The metaphor of targeting is very common in politics. A few days before the last-but-two attempt to assassinate Donald Trump, President Biden said it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye”, without anyone thinking Joe Biden put Thomas Crooks up to it.
But that map, Sarah Palin’s map, is different. No evidence was ever presented that Jared Loughner ever even saw the map (which had been put out by the failed vice-presidential candidate’s Political Action Committee several months previously and was about a specific political issue, Obama’s healthcare bill, in which he had no documented interest) – let alone that he was moved to murder by the clip art of a target over Gabrielle Gifford’s district.
Yet the New York Times, no less, told us that the link between The Map and political incitement was clear. In an editorial called America’s Lethal Politics the NYT said,
“Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, greviously wounded Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarh Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that puts Ms Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”
Actually, it put the places they represented under the cross hairs, not the representatives themselves, but that is beside the point. The point is behold the power of the map.
Obviously the use of the metaphor of a target cannot explain why people try to assassinate Donald Trump, or else Joe Biden would be in the crosshai- sorry, in the frame, now. Equally obviously, the endless stream of claims in left wing media that Donald Trump is a “pedophile, rapist and traitor” cannot explain why people try to assassinate Donald Trump, or else left wing media outlets would be bad like Sarah Palin.
Wake up, sheeple. It’s that accursed map. It wasn’t just Palin’s PAC that published it, it was re-published by a zillion left-wing newspapers and websites. Every left-winger in America must have seen it. A smart CalTech-bound kid like Cole Tomas Allen would certainly have been politically aware at the age of sixteen. He must have seen it. We already know of its power to reach across time and space to penetrate and warp vulnerable minds. Just watch The Ring and you’ll understand.
Suspect in custody after shots fired at White House correspondents’ dinner, reports the BBC:
Gunshots were fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington DC on Saturday night. The suspect was arrested. An officer was shot at close range, but his bullet-proof vest saved him.
Here’s a recap of what happened:
The annual event was held at the Washington Hilton hotel, with Trump attending for the first time as president
First Lady Melania Trump, Vice-President JD Vance and hundreds journalists, media personalities and government officials were also there
A suspected gunman ran into the hotel foyer, trying to get past security officers and metal detectors, at about 00:45 GMT
Loud bangs were heard, prompting security service personnel to immediately escort the president and other officials from the venue
Hundreds of guests stayed behind for about an hour before the ballroom was cleared
Trump shared images and a video of the suspect on social media
Cole Tomas Allen, 31, is reportedly the suspect
Allen is expected to be charged on Monday with several offences, including using a firearm during a crime of violence
Trump told reporters afterwards, “I can’t imagine many professions that are more dangerous” when reflecting on several shooting attempts over the past three years
Update: As usual, everyone is rushing to find out the suspect’s politics. So far he’s weakly linked to the Democrats – a $25 donation to Kamala Harris and the fact that he’s a teacher. I do not, in fact, blame the entire Left for one man trying to assassinate Donald Trump. But I come damn close to blaming the entire “liberal” media for the unseemly haste to look up the would-be killer’s political donations. The haste is actually quite rational given the propensity of both old and new media to highlight or hide a suspect’s background depending on political convenience. These media double standards go back a long time. Here’s a Samizdata post from 2011: Two contrasting articles by Michael Tomasky on spree killers. Here are two quotes from different articles by Mr Tomasky:
Quote No.1 from this article: In the US, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time:
… You don’t have to believe that alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is a card-carrying Tea Party member (he evidently is not) to see some kind of connection between that violent rhetoric and what happened in Arizona on Saturday.
Quote No.2 from this article: American, for better or worse:
We should assume until it’s proven otherwise that Hasan was an American and a loyal one, who just snapped, as Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds and political persuasions do.
I will start by saying that there is no doubt whatsoever that Jeffrey Epstein carried out multiple sex offences against children. He was justly convicted in 2019, and should have been brought to justice earlier than he was.
But I was disturbed by one aspect of the way this story about Epstein that appears on the BBC website was reported: Epstein housed abuse victims in London flats, BBC reveals
Sex-criminal financier Jeffrey Epstein housed women who say he abused them in several London flats in the years after UK police decided not to investigate him, the BBC can reveal.
We found evidence of four flats, rented in the affluent borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in receipts, emails and bank records contained within the Epstein files. Six of the women housed in them have since come forward as victims of Epstein’s abuse.
Many of them – from Russia, eastern Europe and elsewhere – were brought to the UK after the Metropolitan Police decided not to investigate Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 allegation that she had been a victim of international trafficking to London.
The Met said it followed “reasonable lines of inquiry” at the time, interviewing Giuffre on multiple occasions following her complaint and co-operating with US investigators.
Some of the women housed in the London flats were coerced by Epstein to recruit others into his sex trafficking scheme, as well as regularly transported to Paris by Eurostar to visit him, according to emails in the files.
The BBC searched through millions of pages of records gathered by the US Department of Justice in its investigation of the disgraced financier, and released as part of the Epstein files, in order to piece together the most detailed picture yet of his operation in the UK.
It shows how the operation grew more extensive than was previously known – with more victims, established infrastructure such as housing, and frequent transportation of women across borders – right up to Epstein’s death, despite warnings to UK police.
We are not publishing any details about the young women to protect their anonymity as the victims of sexual abuse.
Our investigation found British police had other opportunities to open an inquiry into the disgraced financier’s activities in the UK, in addition to Giuffre’s complaint that she had been trafficked and forced to have sex with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in 2001. Mountbatten-Windsor has always denied any wrongdoing.
Just a few months before his arrest on charges of trafficking children for sex, and his death in jail awaiting trial, our investigation found that Epstein was messaging a young Russian woman on Skype who was living in one of the London flats he paid for.
He sent her an image which is not included in the files but which seems to have been a picture of himself. The woman jokingly asked who the good-looking man in the picture was.
Epstein said it was her landlord – but said that unlike most landlords, he pays rather than collecting the rent.
The woman later went on to ask Epstein for money to pay for her English classes in London and to help buy cutlery and furniture for the apartment. She also asked for visa advice for another Russian woman who was due to come and stay.
The 2019 exchange reveals how Epstein remained in touch with the women he housed in London right up until his arrest and death in jail, and how involved he was in the detail of their lives.
In contrast to the photos released in the Epstein files, which are often decades old, we found the women housed by him in London pictured in Instagram posts, on Russian social media and in high-end fashion shoots.
The exterior of the flat mentioned in the Skype chat is pictured in one of these photographs. In the background a doorbell with the name of the building is visible, which enabled us to find the tenancy agreement in the Epstein files.
A shipment of gifts recorded in the files led us to another apartment. Details of yet another, rented in 2018 and 2019, were buried in a 10,000-page credit card bill. It also recorded the daily living expenses of the woman staying there, who had her own card on Epstein’s account with a $2,000 (£1,477) monthly allowance.
The thing that disturbed me about the BBC’s reporting was the uncritical way in which these adult women were described as “victims” and the way that their claim to have been coerced was reported as absolute fact.
Why should that disturb me? Not because I think that Epstein was incapable of such a crime: we know he was a twice-convicted sexual predator. I also know that sexual coercion can be combined with lavish gifts and a luxurious prison. And I utterly reject the barbaric belief that sexual coercion “does not count” if the victim had previously agreed to sex, including sex that was paid for. Allegations of this type of crime must be taken seriously. As I have said many times, “taken seriously” means “carefully investigated”, not “automatically believed”.
A pity my first reaction upon reading this story was to laugh.
Related posts:
Believe or disbelieve individuals, not whole groups – about Neil Gaiman.
The feminist movement denies rape victims justice
If you don’t care whether a rape really happened, you don’t care about rape
The Iranian Islamic Republic’s strategy is obvious: simply remain in power by gunning down or hanging any internal opposition, and inflict as much global economic damage as possible to increase pressure on the USA and Israel until Trump lives up to his TACO nickname.
The USA strategy is rather less obvious as pretty much any result that leave Iran as a hostile Islamic Republic is an Iranian political win even if their military capabilities are degraded.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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