Epstein has successfully polluted many powerful people and it looks like he was built for the task of compromising others, where everything in Epstein's sphere seems designed, arranged and executed for such purpose. Epstein's immense wealth appears to come from nowhere. He operated with a bold posture of impunity.
Maxwell's family is highest-level states intelligence, media control, and arms trade. Robert Maxwell, died in an unfortunate boating accident on yacht named for his daughter!
Epstein's sexploitation crimes seems relatively innocuous compared to the costs of war and value of the kompromat, which reaches into the highest state offices of U.S. and UK (I choose the word kompromat for its literal meaning not for its national connotations, although Epstein's network is said to include Israeli, UK, and Russian intelligence services).
The way the Epstein files are being managed seems designed to generate maximum confusion, distress and distraction, which is a helpful modality for burying the hatchet once the conflict has served its purpose; make a big mess so there will be no getting to the bottom of it.
I watched some of the videos and you could see DNA paternity tests sitting around on the tables in front of the dancing girls his Manhattan townhouse ( example- 24 seconds in - https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01648...) . Interestingly if you change the last couple of digits in the video links to just any random number combo it unlocks a ton more (many awful, disgusting) videos.
Changing the file names from .mp4 to .mov also opens up more, and changing file names in the links from .pdf to .mp4
Edit- also, to add, the craziest part of the entire files to me was how much awful stuff I could find just merely poking around. If you put in the name of any of his multiple girlfriends/victim recruiters - for example natalie malyshev you can find them sending him photos of underage girls with him replying ranking them - too old, too asian (many were rejected for being too asian), too fat. There is one being evaluated who is only 10!
Also this one from a Silicon Valley VC Masha Drokova who says Jews are much smarter than other races and they should DNA test everyone to find the smartest people will have the highest % Jew:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA009355...
They seem to be having trouble holding on to enough personnel to make these changes reliably. Probably also internally have trouble getting people to do it.
It's very easy to believe that Epstein cultivated a massive quantity of relationships with any sort of rich, famous, influential, or powerful person he could. It's very easy to believe that many of them, for much of his existence, had no idea what was really going on. It's very easy to believe that plenty of "normal" (for relative values of normal here) people had no idea how to act when this all came to light and just shut up and avoided it and hoped none of this ever surfaced.
But we also know a whole fucking lot of them did know exactly what was going on and partook in some manner.
And as an everyday person who can realistically make zero impact on any of these people? Fuck if I've got the time to try and sort out which person falls into which group. The courts can figure that out if they actually start doing anything about all of this.
"Noam’s email to Epstein, in which Epstein sought advice about the press, should be read in context. Epstein had claimed to Noam that he [Epstein] was being unfairly persecuted".
and
"2019 did we learn the full extent"
Full extent? So what did you know before? All of this does not make any sense.
Honestly, the reactions I am seeing suggest exactly this issue. I personally like the guy and have some level of respect of the work he has done over the course of the years, but I see no need to automatically defend him from scrutiny.
This is the part that annoys the crap out of me in today's environment -- and if more people had more sense, it would annoy them too. Sufficiently radioactive accusation is enough to make person not available for public consumption. Like.. if he he guilty ( there is a good evidence suggesting that ), charge him and see where it lands.
Prevalence of a court of public opinion indicates a real problem with real courts.
Although I'm not a fan of Chomsky, neither of his political-philosophical, nor his linguistic work, he's never come across as dishonest, and I won't believe implications until corroborated by hard evidence.
The last 10ish years of his intellectual life were unfortunately not great.
He took the wrong positioning on the war in Ukraine. Along with others.
And it looks here like he made a series of personal relationship mistakes.
The man can't speak for himself anymore, but it's not a good look and I don't think his partner has done him any favours here by deflecting responsibility.
Chomsky is very well known for the fact that his anti-US imperialism stance is strong enough that he becomes a standard bearer for any malodorous regime the US is against, starting from his denial of the Cambodian genocide and attempted habilitation of the Pol Pot regime through to, most recently, his denial of any Russian atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine (his last major public commentary before his stroke).
It is entirely in line with Chomsky's historical pattern that Epstein could walk up to him, say "the US government hates me and claims I'm a pedophile" and for Chomsky to then treat him like his best friend. It is also worth noting that when he eventually recanted his Cambodian genocide denial, he basically said something along the lines of "how could anyone have possibly known just how bad the regime was?" which is... essentially what this response is attempting to be, "how could we have possibly known that Epstein was actually a pedophile?"
I always got the feeling Chomsky went for "the big picture" so to speak, and ignored the details. At least, that would be consistent between his political and his linguistic work. In the latter, he built systems that were simply too complex to be representative of the human mind. I can imagine that he saw himself as a kind of continuation of Marx and Hegel, where the system matters, and human life is just a detail.
Chomsky spent the latter half of his career decrying the capitalists and telling us that we should be suspcious of them. It certainly shows that he didn't walk the walk.
I don't think Chomsky's relationship with Epstein is in any way defensible, but I've seen similar comments to yours all over the interwebs and I'm confused by them. Chomsky never decried capitalists or told us to be suspicious of them on a personal level. Or at least, not in any of his political work that I've ever read. He was anti-capitalist, but he didn't have a simplistic view of the world where individual capitalists were inherently evil.
Amazing when it comes to Epstein (and other controversial actions/decisions) how detailed and open minded we are when it comes to someone we liked and supported, and how cut and dry we want things to be when it's someone we don't like.
I am not a fan of any person as idol or hero, we are all children of the same flesh, but I am a fan of Chomskys work and thought processes. But even if you disagree on his positions, any involvement in Epsteins narcissistic games just don’t fit his life story and his writings at all, whereas it makes perfect sense to me that he and his wife fell for it and really assumed good faith. Which is, ultimately, at the core of his belief system and transpires from all his writing. I did in the past, until I got hit hard by how cruel and dark some people can be who I considered to be close friends. So, overall, I totally believe them, I wish them all the best to recover, from deep in my heart, and I am certain they will learn a hard lesson from this, and will try to make up for their mistake of putting too much trust in other people’s hands. Which is sad but the reality of the broken state of humans who have survived unspeakable cruelty in their childhood and have not received the necessary support to process it. Like Epstein and Trump, to only name two.
>In order to clarify the check: Epstein asked Noam to develop a linguistic challenge that Epstein wished to establish as a regular prize. Noam worked on it, and Epstein sent a check for US$20,000 as payment. Epstein’s office contacted me to arrange for the check to be sent to our home address.
This part honestly makes no sense. There is no 'Chomsky linguistic challenge'. I guess the claim is that Chomsky was paid as a consultant to develop the supposed challenge which was then to be administered by Epstein (who – guess what – did nothing of the sort). But it sounds an awful lot like an entirely spurious reason for sending someone $20k.
Taking the narrative as presented in this article seems plausible Epstein just crumpled it up and threw it out. He just wanted a way to further endear himself to Noam in order to have someone credible vouching for him. Work like this is a good way to do that, like that old Ben Franklin trick of having someone do something for you.
Yeah, of course. But the question is what Chomsky thought about all this. His wife seems to want us to think that Chomsky genuinely believed he was being paid $20k to develop a 'linguistic challenge'. I think what's nearer the truth is that he was happy to receive mystery money from rich financiers without asking too many inconvenient questions. And this is someone who we know was very good at asking inconvenient questions when he had a mind to.
TBH, if you are a top scientist, or whatever, and you meet a rich admirer who wants to donate some $$$, it is very easy to accept. Chomsky probably knew this was just a way to give $$$ to him, but he didn't see anything wrong with it.
Chomsky won't be the first or the last person to be tempted by offers of free money from dodgy gentlemen. There are consequences to accepting such offers, as we now see.
Why do you find it implausible that he got money to develop this challenge? I work in the non profit space and we get these kind of gifts all the time, with minimal strings attached or sometimes the deliverables don't see the light of day. 20k is actually small in my experience and they often come from random people who support our mission. Sure we do investigate and sometimes refuse based on findings, but we don't know or find everything. Taking money doesn't mean you know and support everything the person who have the money ever did, thought, said...
Primarily because there is no evidence that the challenge exists, and it's hard to imagine what it could even be. Chomsky's own research interests didn't really lend themselves to setting some kind of math olympiad style 'challenge'. If he was excited about setting up prizes or challenges in linguistics, you have to wonder why he never once did it. He certainly could have if he'd wanted to.
Noam strikes me as someone deeply attached to their "art", honestly this "linguistic challenge" feels like a nerd-snipe and Noam might have even done it for free.
I think the payment aspect works more in favor of Epstein than Noam. I don't think Epstein was oblivious to the "we go down together" nature of some of his relationships, quite the opposite.
The talent of Epstein was to offer to each prominent people things they cared about. To Chomsky it was "linguistics"; to Jack Lang (a very public figure, former Cultur Ministry, who just resigned from his position yesterday because of the scandal) it was to make an "art foundation" of some sort, and a movie about his (Lang's) life work.
Bezos paying tens of millions to Trump's current wife to make a "documentary" about her hats is similar. The only difference is, Bezos is not (yet?) accused of statutory rape. But the idea is the same.
You never "bribe" people up front, offering them money in a direct, obvious quid pro quo. You're sincerely excited to contribute to their pet project.
But wait, there's more, also a strange explanation about 270000 dollars being sent from Epstein to Chomsky. Apparently something had happened to Chomsky's retirement fund, and Epstein was helping him recover money?!
It makes no sense to me.
Honestly, Chomsky I am willing to believe unconditionally. He has spent his entire life speaking out on US imperialism, and Israel. His career is longer than Epstein's whole life.
Tinfoil hat on, I'd rather believe this was Israels attempt to discredit Chomsky, through Epstein.
> Regarding the reported transfer of approximately $270,000, I must clarify that these were entirely Noam’s own funds. At the time, Noam had identified inconsistencies in his retirement resources that threatened his economic independence and caused him great distress. Epstein offered technical assistance to resolve this specific situation.
Yeah. What? This paragraph answers nothing and just raises more questions. Epstein just magically walked Noam through making 270k just reappear in his account? This is played off like he accidentally sent a quarter of a million dollars to his checking account instead of his savings account and Epstein told him how to use the bank's website to transfer funds between the two.
I don’t even see what would be incriminating about receiving money? Is the implication that it’s some kind of hush money? Why would that be necessary? Surely Chomsky received similar amounts as speaking or consultancy fees or grants all the time?
It would be another matter if Chomsky had paid Epstein for mystery services or whatever.
Chomsky, like most involved in arguing for or against Post-modernism/post-structuralism/Neo Marxism, was likely doing it on purpose to neuter any meaningful left wing opposition to US policy and keep them in "fashionable nonsense" territory. Anyone engaging with them in anyway is suspect by definition.
There's so much more evidence than just this. I'm tired of always linking it all and getting me that much deeper into shit with people who I hopefully will never meet face-to-face.
Chomsky is about as far from post-modernist and post-structuralist as you can get in terms of the American left. He spent his career insisting on rational & logical discourse and using reason as a tool and opposing the postmodernist turn in the left.
He believed in true and false, and insisted those were tools to be used to disarm the powerful. Which... man that would be nice right about now.
I don't always like the guy or agree with his arguments, but this is a bizarre claim from you.
Reading comprehension (for OR against). Engaging at all is what flags him as part of this. Really intelligent people just write them off and don't engage.
One of the crazy things about these files is: it’s clear that the root motivation for a huge number of these guys is just to get with very young girls (and sometimes boys).
Nothing sophisticated. Nothing inspired. Just what the most atavistic parts of the brain stem want.
They were billionaires and high ranking academics and politicians. They could have done so many things but that’s where a huge portion of their energy went. It was clearly one of the most important things to them.
Makes me think of the paperclip maximizers idea. We are paperclip maximizers. This is how a paperclip maximizer would behave. They could extend health and life and explore the universe, but paperclips. Must make paperclips.
I also get the impression that the reason a lot of these guys are attracted to authoritarian right wing ideology, neo-monarchism, etc. is the same. It’s because it would let them have little girls without pesky enlightenment notions like rights or woke nonsense about equality getting in the way.
Gotta make paperclips. Burn the world to make paperclips.
That's the thing though. Paperclips transcend ideology.
That and I'm not sure what Chomsky actually advocated. He was a tireless critic of American and Western imperial ambitions, but what would he replace them with? I get the impression it'd be some kind of authoritarian command economy socialism, which anyone with half a brain knows will turn into a totalitarian system where the ones running it are "more equal" than everyone else. These days, knowing what I know now, I wonder if he's always just been a Russian asset or useful idiot.
I've never been a Chomsky fan anyway. His criticisms are sometimes valid but it's easy to criticize. It's orders of magnitude harder to propose better alternatives. Being a witty and incisive critic is easy compared to fixing.
LLMs have also indirectly proven a lot of his linguistic theories wrong. We didn't crack natural language with NLP and grammars. We cracked it by loosely imitating biology.
> Noam and I were introduced to Epstein at the same time, during one of Noam’s professional events in 2015, when Epstein’s 2008 conviction in the State of Florida was known by very few people, while most of the public – including Noam and I – was unaware of it.
I hate when people act like there was no way they could have known about Epstein's criminal behavior. It was widely reported in the New York Times ( https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/us/questions-of-preferent... ), and there was more extensive coverage in the Palm Beach Post ( https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2006/08/14/had-ever... ) among other sources. There was also another wave of coverage when Epstein was indicted for child trafficking in 2010. We're expected to believe that none of these powerful and intelligent people could have ever bothered googling the name "Jeffrey Epstein".
> We had lunch, at Epstein’s ranch, once, in connection with a professional event; we attended dinners at his townhouse in Manhattan and stayed a few times in an apartment he offered when we visited New York City. We also visited Epstein’s Paris apartment one afternoon for the occasion of a work trip. In all cases, these visits were related to Noam’s professional commitments. We never went to his island or knew about anything that happened there.
There's no way they could have visited Epstein's townhouse without thinking that something seriously wrong was going on there. Chomsky also knew about Epstein's island, there's an email where he said that visiting it was his "special fantasy". https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02465...
> Noam’s email to Epstein, in which Epstein sought advice about the press, should be read in context. Epstein had claimed to Noam that he [Epstein] was being unfairly persecuted, and Noam spoke from his own experience in political controversies with the media. Epstein created a manipulative narrative about his case, which Noam, in good faith, believed in. It is now clear that it was all orchestrated, having as, at least, one of Epstein’s intentions to try to have someone like Noam repairing Epstein’s reputation by association.
From looking at the email, Chomsky clearly knew about the accusations (this was after the Miami Herald exposé in 2018) and still decided to stick with Epstein and help him defend himself https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA010325... .
I also find it disappointing that the article doesn't even try to explain Chomsky palling around with Steve Bannon at all. Chomsky publicly referred to the Republican party as the "most dangerous organization in human history" and a "serious danger to human survival" ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/noam-choms... ) while secretly hanging out with the man most responsible for Trump's rise. I think it casts a shadow over Chomsky's legacy that he chose to abandon his values to spend his last few good years being a court jester intellectual performing for a billionaire pedophile and a right-wing propagandist.
Aren't leftist male intellectuals notorious for having loose morals when it comes to their personal relationships with women? I thought that was like a stereotype for a reason. I'm talking about the guy with the pony tail, or otherwise long hair, the Russel Brand types...
Hmm, yes they are. There's always at least one pony tailed guy, late 20s early 30s, at the local gathering of whatever stands for your progressive party, basically preying on gullible 18 year olds.
I'm not even coming at this from a political angle since I'm more left than right. I just stay true to my perception of the world. Being left of center does not make you somehow morally superior and there are many areas of life where left leaning people have worse morals. And in particular when it comes to intimate relationships, I do feel like many of them have rather loose morals, including around areas of what counts as consent. Maybe that's also the reason why predominantly leftist women are so outspoken about the topic, because they have had so much experience with it. Whereas more conservative leaning women tend to just not fall prey to the sleazy pony tailed guy.
the "we didn't know" trope is actually somewhat believable in the cases of people that casually met a socialite at the behest of others. Less so in the case of somebody like Chomsky who was getting emails from Epstein asking him about how to defend himself in the media and responding with commentary about "the hysteria that has developed about the abuse of women"
The nicest spin you can put on it is that it wouldn't be the first time that Chomsky had endorsed something without too much scrutiny because it aligned with his personal beliefs about who were motivated to manufacture lies, and the others involved politics rather than paedophiles
If I'm tasking someone to move over a quarter million dollars in funds for me, you bet I'm gonna Google the living crap out of them first. I just can't believe someone as intelligent as Chomsky would be so blindly trusting. $270k is still a lot of money for a guy like Chomsky.
My perspective from watching people a generation older than me become elderly (parents, friend's parents, etc.) is that judgement is one of the more unfortunate and first things to really decline.
I've watched people taken in by online and phone scammers who would have been way more distrustful in their younger years.
I don't want to make excuses for Chomsky here on that basis though. Especially because I think his partner is doing him a disservice with this non-apology and also probably her role in these decisions. Being a partner or child etc to an elderly person involves caretaking this aspect and helping them make decisions.
In fact it's the whole of any spouse or loved one to help check the decisions of those they love.
$20.000 + $270.000 of which were Chomsky's own, somehow, as
Epstein "recovering the funds for Noam" ... whatever recovering means,
one suspects it's just Epstein's money but everyone was happy that it was "recovered" Chomsky's money.
There must be a template going round for these "Epstein scammed us we knew nothing" attempts at deflecting. Doesn't surprise me at all the Noam Chomsky was on team Epstein.
Mate, the entire political class around the world is involved. The fact that you focus on “socialists” which Chomsky is not, says more about your commitment to ideology than anything else.
I read the first 5 paragraphs which were all "Noam", "Noam", "Noam" and then lost interest. The letter should have started by first acknowledging the heinous crimes committed against innocent children.
What crimes did Noam commit against children?? The only thing we know is that he got involved with Epstein. There’s no evidence or suggestion in anything that was divulged so far about Noam having been directly involved or even knowing about Epstein’s exploitation of young girls.
Epstein has successfully polluted many powerful people and it looks like he was built for the task of compromising others, where everything in Epstein's sphere seems designed, arranged and executed for such purpose. Epstein's immense wealth appears to come from nowhere. He operated with a bold posture of impunity.
Maxwell's family is highest-level states intelligence, media control, and arms trade. Robert Maxwell, died in an unfortunate boating accident on yacht named for his daughter!
Epstein's sexploitation crimes seems relatively innocuous compared to the costs of war and value of the kompromat, which reaches into the highest state offices of U.S. and UK (I choose the word kompromat for its literal meaning not for its national connotations, although Epstein's network is said to include Israeli, UK, and Russian intelligence services).
The way the Epstein files are being managed seems designed to generate maximum confusion, distress and distraction, which is a helpful modality for burying the hatchet once the conflict has served its purpose; make a big mess so there will be no getting to the bottom of it.
"his townhouse in Manhattan" and didn't find the pictures and the massage tables strange.
I watched some of the videos and you could see DNA paternity tests sitting around on the tables in front of the dancing girls his Manhattan townhouse ( example- 24 seconds in - https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01648...) . Interestingly if you change the last couple of digits in the video links to just any random number combo it unlocks a ton more (many awful, disgusting) videos.
Changing the file names from .mp4 to .mov also opens up more, and changing file names in the links from .pdf to .mp4
The most interesting thing I've found is the word "don't" is often randomly redacted in emails which makes me think they ran a script to auto-redact "Don T" among other things. Example: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02440...
Edit- also, to add, the craziest part of the entire files to me was how much awful stuff I could find just merely poking around. If you put in the name of any of his multiple girlfriends/victim recruiters - for example natalie malyshev you can find them sending him photos of underage girls with him replying ranking them - too old, too asian (many were rejected for being too asian), too fat. There is one being evaluated who is only 10!
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01743...
https://jmail.world/thread/87deba98c8c69cd51dfe905889862ce2?...
Also this one from a Silicon Valley VC Masha Drokova who says Jews are much smarter than other races and they should DNA test everyone to find the smartest people will have the highest % Jew: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA009355...
They seem to be having trouble holding on to enough personnel to make these changes reliably. Probably also internally have trouble getting people to do it.
It's very easy to believe that Epstein cultivated a massive quantity of relationships with any sort of rich, famous, influential, or powerful person he could. It's very easy to believe that many of them, for much of his existence, had no idea what was really going on. It's very easy to believe that plenty of "normal" (for relative values of normal here) people had no idea how to act when this all came to light and just shut up and avoided it and hoped none of this ever surfaced.
But we also know a whole fucking lot of them did know exactly what was going on and partook in some manner.
And as an everyday person who can realistically make zero impact on any of these people? Fuck if I've got the time to try and sort out which person falls into which group. The courts can figure that out if they actually start doing anything about all of this.
For me? I'm writing 'em all off.
The question never is: Did you know? But: Should you have known? Willfully ignoring things is not a defense.
I don't have enough information to answer that or the time to research it, and indeed, this is part of my point.
And thus why I'm writing the whole lot of them off it looks like they had real interaction with Epstein.
At least we can rest knowing that all of these rich, famous, powerful people will face consequences for their disgusting actions....
We didn't know anything.
"Noam’s email to Epstein, in which Epstein sought advice about the press, should be read in context. Epstein had claimed to Noam that he [Epstein] was being unfairly persecuted".
and
"2019 did we learn the full extent"
Full extent? So what did you know before? All of this does not make any sense.
This is your third top-level comment on this thread, when you're still in the edit window for the first. These are also pretty poor comments.
Did you have some prior beef with Chomsky?
You're always hit hardest when it's your idols. Also: Nothing better to do.
<< You're always hit hardest when it's your idols
Honestly, the reactions I am seeing suggest exactly this issue. I personally like the guy and have some level of respect of the work he has done over the course of the years, but I see no need to automatically defend him from scrutiny.
This is the part that annoys the crap out of me in today's environment -- and if more people had more sense, it would annoy them too. Sufficiently radioactive accusation is enough to make person not available for public consumption. Like.. if he he guilty ( there is a good evidence suggesting that ), charge him and see where it lands.
Prevalence of a court of public opinion indicates a real problem with real courts.
Although I'm not a fan of Chomsky, neither of his political-philosophical, nor his linguistic work, he's never come across as dishonest, and I won't believe implications until corroborated by hard evidence.
The last 10ish years of his intellectual life were unfortunately not great.
He took the wrong positioning on the war in Ukraine. Along with others.
And it looks here like he made a series of personal relationship mistakes.
The man can't speak for himself anymore, but it's not a good look and I don't think his partner has done him any favours here by deflecting responsibility.
Clearly awful mistakes were made.
Chomsky is very well known for the fact that his anti-US imperialism stance is strong enough that he becomes a standard bearer for any malodorous regime the US is against, starting from his denial of the Cambodian genocide and attempted habilitation of the Pol Pot regime through to, most recently, his denial of any Russian atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine (his last major public commentary before his stroke).
It is entirely in line with Chomsky's historical pattern that Epstein could walk up to him, say "the US government hates me and claims I'm a pedophile" and for Chomsky to then treat him like his best friend. It is also worth noting that when he eventually recanted his Cambodian genocide denial, he basically said something along the lines of "how could anyone have possibly known just how bad the regime was?" which is... essentially what this response is attempting to be, "how could we have possibly known that Epstein was actually a pedophile?"
I always got the feeling Chomsky went for "the big picture" so to speak, and ignored the details. At least, that would be consistent between his political and his linguistic work. In the latter, he built systems that were simply too complex to be representative of the human mind. I can imagine that he saw himself as a kind of continuation of Marx and Hegel, where the system matters, and human life is just a detail.
He has been intellectually dishonest in his political writings for a long time.
How so?
The guy is literally photographed inside a plane with Epstein. And supported him after accusations had been made.
Did this letter change anything for you? Being on his plane is by itself a crime?
Chomsky spent the latter half of his career decrying the capitalists and telling us that we should be suspcious of them. It certainly shows that he didn't walk the walk.
I don't think Chomsky's relationship with Epstein is in any way defensible, but I've seen similar comments to yours all over the interwebs and I'm confused by them. Chomsky never decried capitalists or told us to be suspicious of them on a personal level. Or at least, not in any of his political work that I've ever read. He was anti-capitalist, but he didn't have a simplistic view of the world where individual capitalists were inherently evil.
Amazing when it comes to Epstein (and other controversial actions/decisions) how detailed and open minded we are when it comes to someone we liked and supported, and how cut and dry we want things to be when it's someone we don't like.
Nah, anyone associating with Epstein can get flushed down the toilet. Maybe it's a generational thing.
Let's hope you never wind up in the massive email history of a terrible person because people like you will wish you dead.
I am not a fan of any person as idol or hero, we are all children of the same flesh, but I am a fan of Chomskys work and thought processes. But even if you disagree on his positions, any involvement in Epsteins narcissistic games just don’t fit his life story and his writings at all, whereas it makes perfect sense to me that he and his wife fell for it and really assumed good faith. Which is, ultimately, at the core of his belief system and transpires from all his writing. I did in the past, until I got hit hard by how cruel and dark some people can be who I considered to be close friends. So, overall, I totally believe them, I wish them all the best to recover, from deep in my heart, and I am certain they will learn a hard lesson from this, and will try to make up for their mistake of putting too much trust in other people’s hands. Which is sad but the reality of the broken state of humans who have survived unspeakable cruelty in their childhood and have not received the necessary support to process it. Like Epstein and Trump, to only name two.
(For transparency: I met Chomsky twice.)
>In order to clarify the check: Epstein asked Noam to develop a linguistic challenge that Epstein wished to establish as a regular prize. Noam worked on it, and Epstein sent a check for US$20,000 as payment. Epstein’s office contacted me to arrange for the check to be sent to our home address.
This part honestly makes no sense. There is no 'Chomsky linguistic challenge'. I guess the claim is that Chomsky was paid as a consultant to develop the supposed challenge which was then to be administered by Epstein (who – guess what – did nothing of the sort). But it sounds an awful lot like an entirely spurious reason for sending someone $20k.
Taking the narrative as presented in this article seems plausible Epstein just crumpled it up and threw it out. He just wanted a way to further endear himself to Noam in order to have someone credible vouching for him. Work like this is a good way to do that, like that old Ben Franklin trick of having someone do something for you.
Yeah, of course. But the question is what Chomsky thought about all this. His wife seems to want us to think that Chomsky genuinely believed he was being paid $20k to develop a 'linguistic challenge'. I think what's nearer the truth is that he was happy to receive mystery money from rich financiers without asking too many inconvenient questions. And this is someone who we know was very good at asking inconvenient questions when he had a mind to.
TBH, if you are a top scientist, or whatever, and you meet a rich admirer who wants to donate some $$$, it is very easy to accept. Chomsky probably knew this was just a way to give $$$ to him, but he didn't see anything wrong with it.
Chomsky won't be the first or the last person to be tempted by offers of free money from dodgy gentlemen. There are consequences to accepting such offers, as we now see.
Yes there is. There is always the other side of the equation.
Why do you find it implausible that he got money to develop this challenge? I work in the non profit space and we get these kind of gifts all the time, with minimal strings attached or sometimes the deliverables don't see the light of day. 20k is actually small in my experience and they often come from random people who support our mission. Sure we do investigate and sometimes refuse based on findings, but we don't know or find everything. Taking money doesn't mean you know and support everything the person who have the money ever did, thought, said...
Primarily because there is no evidence that the challenge exists, and it's hard to imagine what it could even be. Chomsky's own research interests didn't really lend themselves to setting some kind of math olympiad style 'challenge'. If he was excited about setting up prizes or challenges in linguistics, you have to wonder why he never once did it. He certainly could have if he'd wanted to.
Noam strikes me as someone deeply attached to their "art", honestly this "linguistic challenge" feels like a nerd-snipe and Noam might have even done it for free.
I think the payment aspect works more in favor of Epstein than Noam. I don't think Epstein was oblivious to the "we go down together" nature of some of his relationships, quite the opposite.
The talent of Epstein was to offer to each prominent people things they cared about. To Chomsky it was "linguistics"; to Jack Lang (a very public figure, former Cultur Ministry, who just resigned from his position yesterday because of the scandal) it was to make an "art foundation" of some sort, and a movie about his (Lang's) life work.
Bezos paying tens of millions to Trump's current wife to make a "documentary" about her hats is similar. The only difference is, Bezos is not (yet?) accused of statutory rape. But the idea is the same.
You never "bribe" people up front, offering them money in a direct, obvious quid pro quo. You're sincerely excited to contribute to their pet project.
But wait, there's more, also a strange explanation about 270000 dollars being sent from Epstein to Chomsky. Apparently something had happened to Chomsky's retirement fund, and Epstein was helping him recover money?!
It makes no sense to me.
Honestly, Chomsky I am willing to believe unconditionally. He has spent his entire life speaking out on US imperialism, and Israel. His career is longer than Epstein's whole life.
Tinfoil hat on, I'd rather believe this was Israels attempt to discredit Chomsky, through Epstein.
> Regarding the reported transfer of approximately $270,000, I must clarify that these were entirely Noam’s own funds. At the time, Noam had identified inconsistencies in his retirement resources that threatened his economic independence and caused him great distress. Epstein offered technical assistance to resolve this specific situation.
Yeah. What? This paragraph answers nothing and just raises more questions. Epstein just magically walked Noam through making 270k just reappear in his account? This is played off like he accidentally sent a quarter of a million dollars to his checking account instead of his savings account and Epstein told him how to use the bank's website to transfer funds between the two.
I don’t even see what would be incriminating about receiving money? Is the implication that it’s some kind of hush money? Why would that be necessary? Surely Chomsky received similar amounts as speaking or consultancy fees or grants all the time?
It would be another matter if Chomsky had paid Epstein for mystery services or whatever.
Chomsky, like most involved in arguing for or against Post-modernism/post-structuralism/Neo Marxism, was likely doing it on purpose to neuter any meaningful left wing opposition to US policy and keep them in "fashionable nonsense" territory. Anyone engaging with them in anyway is suspect by definition.
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theor...
https://indecentbazaar.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/deleuze-and-...
There's so much more evidence than just this. I'm tired of always linking it all and getting me that much deeper into shit with people who I hopefully will never meet face-to-face.
Chomsky is about as far from post-modernist and post-structuralist as you can get in terms of the American left. He spent his career insisting on rational & logical discourse and using reason as a tool and opposing the postmodernist turn in the left.
He believed in true and false, and insisted those were tools to be used to disarm the powerful. Which... man that would be nice right about now.
I don't always like the guy or agree with his arguments, but this is a bizarre claim from you.
Reading comprehension (for OR against). Engaging at all is what flags him as part of this. Really intelligent people just write them off and don't engage.
See the foucault chomsky debate.
One of the crazy things about these files is: it’s clear that the root motivation for a huge number of these guys is just to get with very young girls (and sometimes boys).
Nothing sophisticated. Nothing inspired. Just what the most atavistic parts of the brain stem want.
They were billionaires and high ranking academics and politicians. They could have done so many things but that’s where a huge portion of their energy went. It was clearly one of the most important things to them.
Makes me think of the paperclip maximizers idea. We are paperclip maximizers. This is how a paperclip maximizer would behave. They could extend health and life and explore the universe, but paperclips. Must make paperclips.
I also get the impression that the reason a lot of these guys are attracted to authoritarian right wing ideology, neo-monarchism, etc. is the same. It’s because it would let them have little girls without pesky enlightenment notions like rights or woke nonsense about equality getting in the way.
Gotta make paperclips. Burn the world to make paperclips.
Ah yes, Noam Chomsky, the famous right wing authoritarian.
That's the thing though. Paperclips transcend ideology.
That and I'm not sure what Chomsky actually advocated. He was a tireless critic of American and Western imperial ambitions, but what would he replace them with? I get the impression it'd be some kind of authoritarian command economy socialism, which anyone with half a brain knows will turn into a totalitarian system where the ones running it are "more equal" than everyone else. These days, knowing what I know now, I wonder if he's always just been a Russian asset or useful idiot.
I've never been a Chomsky fan anyway. His criticisms are sometimes valid but it's easy to criticize. It's orders of magnitude harder to propose better alternatives. Being a witty and incisive critic is easy compared to fixing.
LLMs have also indirectly proven a lot of his linguistic theories wrong. We didn't crack natural language with NLP and grammars. We cracked it by loosely imitating biology.
> Noam and I were introduced to Epstein at the same time, during one of Noam’s professional events in 2015, when Epstein’s 2008 conviction in the State of Florida was known by very few people, while most of the public – including Noam and I – was unaware of it.
I hate when people act like there was no way they could have known about Epstein's criminal behavior. It was widely reported in the New York Times ( https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/us/questions-of-preferent... ), and there was more extensive coverage in the Palm Beach Post ( https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2006/08/14/had-ever... ) among other sources. There was also another wave of coverage when Epstein was indicted for child trafficking in 2010. We're expected to believe that none of these powerful and intelligent people could have ever bothered googling the name "Jeffrey Epstein".
> We had lunch, at Epstein’s ranch, once, in connection with a professional event; we attended dinners at his townhouse in Manhattan and stayed a few times in an apartment he offered when we visited New York City. We also visited Epstein’s Paris apartment one afternoon for the occasion of a work trip. In all cases, these visits were related to Noam’s professional commitments. We never went to his island or knew about anything that happened there.
There's no way they could have visited Epstein's townhouse without thinking that something seriously wrong was going on there. Chomsky also knew about Epstein's island, there's an email where he said that visiting it was his "special fantasy". https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02465...
> Noam’s email to Epstein, in which Epstein sought advice about the press, should be read in context. Epstein had claimed to Noam that he [Epstein] was being unfairly persecuted, and Noam spoke from his own experience in political controversies with the media. Epstein created a manipulative narrative about his case, which Noam, in good faith, believed in. It is now clear that it was all orchestrated, having as, at least, one of Epstein’s intentions to try to have someone like Noam repairing Epstein’s reputation by association.
From looking at the email, Chomsky clearly knew about the accusations (this was after the Miami Herald exposé in 2018) and still decided to stick with Epstein and help him defend himself https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA010325... .
I also find it disappointing that the article doesn't even try to explain Chomsky palling around with Steve Bannon at all. Chomsky publicly referred to the Republican party as the "most dangerous organization in human history" and a "serious danger to human survival" ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/noam-choms... ) while secretly hanging out with the man most responsible for Trump's rise. I think it casts a shadow over Chomsky's legacy that he chose to abandon his values to spend his last few good years being a court jester intellectual performing for a billionaire pedophile and a right-wing propagandist.
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Aren't leftist male intellectuals notorious for having loose morals when it comes to their personal relationships with women? I thought that was like a stereotype for a reason. I'm talking about the guy with the pony tail, or otherwise long hair, the Russel Brand types...
No, far less than rightwing incels and "nice guys" who want to subdue women because they think that "they deserve to have the attention of any woman"
Weird tangent. Let's quantify it in number of rapes / demographic.
no, they are not.
Hmm, yes they are. There's always at least one pony tailed guy, late 20s early 30s, at the local gathering of whatever stands for your progressive party, basically preying on gullible 18 year olds.
I'm not even coming at this from a political angle since I'm more left than right. I just stay true to my perception of the world. Being left of center does not make you somehow morally superior and there are many areas of life where left leaning people have worse morals. And in particular when it comes to intimate relationships, I do feel like many of them have rather loose morals, including around areas of what counts as consent. Maybe that's also the reason why predominantly leftist women are so outspoken about the topic, because they have had so much experience with it. Whereas more conservative leaning women tend to just not fall prey to the sleazy pony tailed guy.
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the "we didn't know" trope is actually somewhat believable in the cases of people that casually met a socialite at the behest of others. Less so in the case of somebody like Chomsky who was getting emails from Epstein asking him about how to defend himself in the media and responding with commentary about "the hysteria that has developed about the abuse of women"
The nicest spin you can put on it is that it wouldn't be the first time that Chomsky had endorsed something without too much scrutiny because it aligned with his personal beliefs about who were motivated to manufacture lies, and the others involved politics rather than paedophiles
If I'm tasking someone to move over a quarter million dollars in funds for me, you bet I'm gonna Google the living crap out of them first. I just can't believe someone as intelligent as Chomsky would be so blindly trusting. $270k is still a lot of money for a guy like Chomsky.
He knew. He felt he was immune to consequences. They all feel immune to consequences.
My perspective from watching people a generation older than me become elderly (parents, friend's parents, etc.) is that judgement is one of the more unfortunate and first things to really decline.
I've watched people taken in by online and phone scammers who would have been way more distrustful in their younger years.
I don't want to make excuses for Chomsky here on that basis though. Especially because I think his partner is doing him a disservice with this non-apology and also probably her role in these decisions. Being a partner or child etc to an elderly person involves caretaking this aspect and helping them make decisions.
In fact it's the whole of any spouse or loved one to help check the decisions of those they love.
$20.000 + $270.000 of which were Chomsky's own, somehow, as
Epstein "recovering the funds for Noam" ... whatever recovering means, one suspects it's just Epstein's money but everyone was happy that it was "recovered" Chomsky's money.
There must be a template going round for these "Epstein scammed us we knew nothing" attempts at deflecting. Doesn't surprise me at all the Noam Chomsky was on team Epstein.
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Mate, the entire political class around the world is involved. The fact that you focus on “socialists” which Chomsky is not, says more about your commitment to ideology than anything else.
I read the first 5 paragraphs which were all "Noam", "Noam", "Noam" and then lost interest. The letter should have started by first acknowledging the heinous crimes committed against innocent children.
What crimes did Noam commit against children?? The only thing we know is that he got involved with Epstein. There’s no evidence or suggestion in anything that was divulged so far about Noam having been directly involved or even knowing about Epstein’s exploitation of young girls.