"Some argue this blurriness unfairly implicates those who were simply mentioned in the files. I take the opposite view: It unfairly protects those who abused minors." This seems like a weird distinction to make, and the fact that he sees these as being in conflict kind of ruins the article for me. For instance Ro Khanna revealed six names of people in the Epstein files but then it turned out four of them had just had their photos used in a photo lineup and had no other connection (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/13/four-men-unr...) so obviously yes, there are some perfectly innocent people in the files. Then later in the article he says "There’s a solution to the Epstein problem, and it’s called a perp walk. It doesn’t matter what we get them for, but someone very rich and very famous needs to be seen in handcuffs. It could be Gates, it could be Dershowitz, it could be Clinton, it could be Summers, I don’t really care." Which once again is missing the point, assuming that anyone mentioned there is guilty and worthy of punishment of a public shaming. And while honestly I wouldn't be upset if any of these famous men were shamed that way, the fact remains that's not how justice works. He sees a problem, a lack of justice for these crimes and then instead of coming to the solution as being that we need justice, which includes trials and the presumption of innocence, that we just need to start punishing at random. That not only is a failure of justice, but it also isn't a good deterrent and I think will ultimately fail to accomplish his goals.
I know people hate Citizens United, but to me, if the debate on this is ever to progress: what's the alternative? Say I and a bunch of my friends donate money to promote some cause; let's say "Black Lives Matter", for the sake of argument. Is that also off the table? Is there to be no ability for people to associate & collectively argue for change (e.g., by buying an ad to raise awareness)?
Or, is it fine when I do it, but not when others do it? Where do I draw the line, between what association for the purposes of political advocacy is fine, and what association isn't fine?
Campaign finance laws were set up tell you where the line is. There needs to be a line because the amount of reach you have should not grow with your wealth. But Citizens United made the money as speech an unlimited right. Spending $250 is a completely different category than spending $250 million.
I both agree with the sentiment, and believe it won't happen because the USA is past the point of no return.
I mean this with no direspect or cynisism, and hope I'm wrong, but I think that country has rotted too much for saving. You let it go too far for too long.
Then again the UK (repeatedly) went through some very dark times, and whilst not exactly a bastion of justice, we're doing a lot better now.
Correct me if I'm on a limb here, but didn't the UK truly embrace stupid, only after it lost its Empire status? While the US does it at its peak, which seems much more dangerous for, well everybody actually.
Yes, the rich and powerful have increasingly captured and profited from the police and carceral state while being completely free to, for instance, build an island dedicated to the rape of children. Justice should absolutely be served here. Arrest more rich people, arrest more politicians, and hell arrest all of the "royalty" (for this and other reasons).
But this rant's "solution", which seems to be "let's empower the police state to do more excesses" - yeah, no. Maybe let's just ensure that everyone gets the same due process?
We are in a battle of top 0.01% vs. the bottom 99.99% where the top 0.01% has convinced us that our enemy is the "right" or the "left" such that we are distracted from our actual oppressors.
Yeah, remember occupy wallstreet? They got spooked and pretty much whipped up the whole identity-politics thing overnight in response. And unfortunately it did work.
This is not an either or issue. There are policy issues all around. The "left" isn't creating an magical "other" in the form of panic about "woke"/"immigrants"/"terrorists cells"/"trans people"/"welfare queens"/"libs"/"gay agenda" etc.
The US government in general is not prioritizing the reality and needs of the people, it is supposed to be in service to. Instead it is serving the needs of the few, but there are many many fronts of injustice, as there are many different people in power with their own agenda. It's not necessarily a single unified agenda.
Edit: The astro-turfing in this thread is going to be interesting based on the bot comment just below my comment...
Nope. The right explicitly supports the policies that lead to the direct concentration of wealth and power and rise of fascism. If the right constantly sides with the oppressors, they are the oppressors. This should be trivial to see just by looking at voting records. It's all very public and you've got decades of history worth of it to review. Both sides are not the same. The right chooses to align with the top 0.01% making them firmly part of the problem.
I believe it's a bit more nuanced than that. Both democrats and republicans have had enough power to make meaningful changes to prevent such a wealth gap and thus the wealthy play both parties. I do see democrats trying to help people have a better life (medicare for all, etc), but the wealth gap grew nometheless. Though I do agree with you that republicans don't seem to give a flying fuck about the people these days, which does make it worse IMHO. Regardless, both parties enabled the wealth gap and is why the fight is the 99.99% against the 0.01%. The US needs to kill citizens united and take money out of politics, I think that'd be a huge step forward...and yet, it is basically impossible because the 0.01% have the power.
Tell me you don't know how US legislation gets passed without telling me you have no idea how legislation is passed. I agree Democrats have been failures at what they've attempted to do. But it's a cop out or disingenuous to say both sides have had enough power to make meaningful changes.
How often has either side had a filibuster-proof majority in the last 30 years? Once. Democrats had it in 2009-2010 for 72 working days. During that window they passed the ACA sans a public option thanks to Joe Lieberman. They have not had an opportunity like that since. And we live in a time when Republicans explicitly state they will do everything they can to oppose a Democratic president. Even filibustering their own bills.
Now take a step back and consider what each party is actually trying to accomplish and the mechanisms available to them. Budget reconciliation only requires a simple majority, but it's limited to taxing and spending. Tax cuts, the core of the Republican agenda, fit neatly into reconciliation. They don't need 60 votes for their top priority.
Democrats' goals... expanding healthcare, strengthening labor protections, voting rights, are substantive policy changes that don't fit reconciliation's rules. They need 60 votes they haven't had. So when you say "both parties enabled the wealth gap," what you're really describing is a system where one party can pass tax cuts for the wealthy with 51 votes while the other needs 60 to do almost anything about it.
Well, dethroning the 0.01% seems more feasible than starting and winning a civil war against the right. I think the right is not so pro 0.01% as you think, the killing of the United Healthcare CEO had strong bipartisan support, at the level of ordinary people.
the 0.01% have access to both the left and the right. They can fund and lobby both, however electors have considerably less flexibility given the paucity of options and how either of those options are to some extent; in thrall to the 0.01%.
Nope, it's 0.01% vs 99.9%. First, because they themselves are at the top — or, what, was Biden some sort of proletarian? Second, the left is okay with left-flavored dictatorships — just think, recently, of poor, poor Maduro. Third, from the outside, the drones kept coming whether red or blue happened to be in power.
when you couch it as a left vs right instead of a top vs down problem you will lock yourself (and your immediate circle) up in the hardline media items the people who lobby both sides will control.
as disclosure: i am socially liberal and fiscally conservative except in matters relating to education, which i believe should be free (and tuition rate controlled). never voted for trump, never will. wanted to write in bernie for the first pass until he dropped, then threw for the queen of england. i didn't vote in the last election. i consider ice to be an illegal and fascist arm of too large a state.
the most arresting argument i've heard a leftist say (which i agree with) is: there is a distribution of wealth at which a free market fails and we are long past that, especially given our failure to bust monopolies and enforce antitrust law.
that enables entities who lobby both sides of the policy spectrum to position us against each other. epstein played this well: how else do you get neoconservatives bubbling out of 4chan as an answer to thundercat tumblr kids? it's all divide-and-conquer (and over the most inane issues).
now, tell me: do you want to support eurasia or oceania? or do you want to put the puppeteers in jail?
This is such a fucking stupid argument because the "right" explicitly aligns itself with the 0.01%. If they are cheerleading it and voting for it and celebrating it, what the fuck makes you think they are on the side of the 99%. It's counterfactual. There is no evidence of it. Look at their support for Trump for fucks sake. He has made over $3B from his presidency ripping people off, and they fucking love him for it. They are on his side, not ours! Again. Look at how they consistently vote before pretending they are any sort of ally.
you flip on the news and you see the fat red faced wal-mart alcoholics raving about the latest ice raid and iran bombing. it's a pretty disgusting thing, isn't it? but count that number of people you see on the news and compare it to the number represented by 49.81 percent of people who are duped into leaning right in a two party system. then what you see on the news is an insipid and vocal minority by comparison.
they seem loud because they were born and raised in a 4chan cesspool, and relative to our ears (as we see them online), the 'enemies' are everywhere (ie overrepresented by our algorithms, since our outrage makes them money).
meanwhile both parties (in various states and layers of government) have made ranked voting either illegal or impossible to implement.
both parties (as well throughout the world) have pushed for greater government surveillance technologies and laws.
both parties have gone to the island, shot kids in sarajevo, staged military coups throughout the world, destroyed democracies, left migrant children starving at night in detention centers, sleeping on mattresses thrown into the mud. you think biden was blameless in that? i've seen those kids.
i hear you, and i am just as angry. but remember that there are a variety of reasons why people vote in the way that they do. they may come to regret those decisions when they send their kids to war, and perhaps that is some apt and just punishment.
however, don't fall into the trap of mistaking those people in your relative socioeconomic group from having entirely different needs and wants as yourself and your family.
if you vilify them, you will have aided and abetted in our dividing. the people needing to be put in jail are outliers in our system by far. they corrupt the islands, stage sarajevos, trade diamonds in war torn villages, and laugh their way to the bank while we squabble with ourselves as to 'whodunnit'. don't fall for it.
Nope. The left explicitly supports the policies that lead to the direct concentration of wealth and power and rise of communism. If the left constantly sides with the oppressors, they are the oppressors. This should be trivial to see just by looking at voting records. It's all very public and you've got decades of history worth of it to review. Both sides are not the same. The left chooses to align with the top 0.01% making them firmly part of the problem.
I just want to be very clear in understanding you: are you saying that these women (who are known and named) who were victims when underage (factually, not ""), should not be viewed as victims because it's a way/fact of life that powerful people will abuse girls?
I think the case he's making is that it should not be viewed as victims because it's "normal" or traditional in underdeveloped third world countries.
It's of course one of the most messed up things to read, but it's a common thought process of people influenced by propaganda from those countries regimes, or are actively spreading propaganda: the framing of "so called western countries/first world countries/etc" is the first red flag.
And then of course the angle is that western countries are decadent and are denying traditional values. This is a common thread of the Russian regime propaganda for example... Because when the regine destroyed everything else, with no prospects of a good future, it's traditional misery that has to make up for the rest.
So to sum it up, OP is actually making a case for the false traditional values of the regimes from the most corrupt and broken societies - where sex trafficking and marrying underaged children is part of the status quo, because it's "traditional ".
Somehow this propaganda works with some people in the west lol
I keep rereading your comment and every time I understand that you think the problem isn’t that the girls were underage but that “Western democracies” needlessly criminalize this when they could be more like Russia or Muslim nations where you think that’s fine.
My most charitable interpretation is that you are justifying such sexual abuse of children.
But don’t get too excited yet (pun intended), in many parts of Russia or the Muslim world getting caught sexually abusing a child will make you wish for jail.
You can see by the Iranian violent reaction that’s spread far and wide over most of the Middle East countries about what exact kind of stability it brings to the area.
Amongst the countries attacked by Iran now are Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait and Saudia Arabia; indirectly, it’s dragging kicking and screaming into the conflict also Yemen (surely soon), Lebanon (already) and Iraq (already).
> Tomahawk cruise missiles are the new AI.
I'd say AI is the new AI.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/03/iran-war-...
"Some argue this blurriness unfairly implicates those who were simply mentioned in the files. I take the opposite view: It unfairly protects those who abused minors." This seems like a weird distinction to make, and the fact that he sees these as being in conflict kind of ruins the article for me. For instance Ro Khanna revealed six names of people in the Epstein files but then it turned out four of them had just had their photos used in a photo lineup and had no other connection (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/13/four-men-unr...) so obviously yes, there are some perfectly innocent people in the files. Then later in the article he says "There’s a solution to the Epstein problem, and it’s called a perp walk. It doesn’t matter what we get them for, but someone very rich and very famous needs to be seen in handcuffs. It could be Gates, it could be Dershowitz, it could be Clinton, it could be Summers, I don’t really care." Which once again is missing the point, assuming that anyone mentioned there is guilty and worthy of punishment of a public shaming. And while honestly I wouldn't be upset if any of these famous men were shamed that way, the fact remains that's not how justice works. He sees a problem, a lack of justice for these crimes and then instead of coming to the solution as being that we need justice, which includes trials and the presumption of innocence, that we just need to start punishing at random. That not only is a failure of justice, but it also isn't a good deterrent and I think will ultimately fail to accomplish his goals.
It begins to look like Citizens United [1] cost us democracy.
"That government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich shall not perish from the earth."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
I know people hate Citizens United, but to me, if the debate on this is ever to progress: what's the alternative? Say I and a bunch of my friends donate money to promote some cause; let's say "Black Lives Matter", for the sake of argument. Is that also off the table? Is there to be no ability for people to associate & collectively argue for change (e.g., by buying an ad to raise awareness)?
Or, is it fine when I do it, but not when others do it? Where do I draw the line, between what association for the purposes of political advocacy is fine, and what association isn't fine?
Campaign finance laws were set up tell you where the line is. There needs to be a line because the amount of reach you have should not grow with your wealth. But Citizens United made the money as speech an unlimited right. Spending $250 is a completely different category than spending $250 million.
As an individual you can. Not as a corporation.
Is this "Black Lives Matter" running for President?
I both agree with the sentiment, and believe it won't happen because the USA is past the point of no return.
I mean this with no direspect or cynisism, and hope I'm wrong, but I think that country has rotted too much for saving. You let it go too far for too long.
Then again the UK (repeatedly) went through some very dark times, and whilst not exactly a bastion of justice, we're doing a lot better now.
Correct me if I'm on a limb here, but didn't the UK truly embrace stupid, only after it lost its Empire status? While the US does it at its peak, which seems much more dangerous for, well everybody actually.
Yes, the rich and powerful have increasingly captured and profited from the police and carceral state while being completely free to, for instance, build an island dedicated to the rape of children. Justice should absolutely be served here. Arrest more rich people, arrest more politicians, and hell arrest all of the "royalty" (for this and other reasons).
But this rant's "solution", which seems to be "let's empower the police state to do more excesses" - yeah, no. Maybe let's just ensure that everyone gets the same due process?
> But this rant's "solution", which seems to be "let's empower the police state to do more excesses" - yeah, no.
What led you to believe this is the solution presented in the article? Much less try to pass those statements off as quoting or paraphrasing.
> Maybe let's just ensure that everyone gets the same due process?
That is the actual solution presented in the last two sections of the article.
We are in a battle of top 0.01% vs. the bottom 99.99% where the top 0.01% has convinced us that our enemy is the "right" or the "left" such that we are distracted from our actual oppressors.
Yeah, remember occupy wallstreet? They got spooked and pretty much whipped up the whole identity-politics thing overnight in response. And unfortunately it did work.
This is not an either or issue. There are policy issues all around. The "left" isn't creating an magical "other" in the form of panic about "woke"/"immigrants"/"terrorists cells"/"trans people"/"welfare queens"/"libs"/"gay agenda" etc.
The US government in general is not prioritizing the reality and needs of the people, it is supposed to be in service to. Instead it is serving the needs of the few, but there are many many fronts of injustice, as there are many different people in power with their own agenda. It's not necessarily a single unified agenda.
Edit: The astro-turfing in this thread is going to be interesting based on the bot comment just below my comment...
hah, dang, did i fall for that?
Nope. The right explicitly supports the policies that lead to the direct concentration of wealth and power and rise of fascism. If the right constantly sides with the oppressors, they are the oppressors. This should be trivial to see just by looking at voting records. It's all very public and you've got decades of history worth of it to review. Both sides are not the same. The right chooses to align with the top 0.01% making them firmly part of the problem.
I believe it's a bit more nuanced than that. Both democrats and republicans have had enough power to make meaningful changes to prevent such a wealth gap and thus the wealthy play both parties. I do see democrats trying to help people have a better life (medicare for all, etc), but the wealth gap grew nometheless. Though I do agree with you that republicans don't seem to give a flying fuck about the people these days, which does make it worse IMHO. Regardless, both parties enabled the wealth gap and is why the fight is the 99.99% against the 0.01%. The US needs to kill citizens united and take money out of politics, I think that'd be a huge step forward...and yet, it is basically impossible because the 0.01% have the power.
Hard to blame the 99.99% when only 48% of voters voted for Hillary Clinton who had "undo Citizens United" explicitly on her platform.
Tell me you don't know how US legislation gets passed without telling me you have no idea how legislation is passed. I agree Democrats have been failures at what they've attempted to do. But it's a cop out or disingenuous to say both sides have had enough power to make meaningful changes.
How often has either side had a filibuster-proof majority in the last 30 years? Once. Democrats had it in 2009-2010 for 72 working days. During that window they passed the ACA sans a public option thanks to Joe Lieberman. They have not had an opportunity like that since. And we live in a time when Republicans explicitly state they will do everything they can to oppose a Democratic president. Even filibustering their own bills.
Now take a step back and consider what each party is actually trying to accomplish and the mechanisms available to them. Budget reconciliation only requires a simple majority, but it's limited to taxing and spending. Tax cuts, the core of the Republican agenda, fit neatly into reconciliation. They don't need 60 votes for their top priority.
Democrats' goals... expanding healthcare, strengthening labor protections, voting rights, are substantive policy changes that don't fit reconciliation's rules. They need 60 votes they haven't had. So when you say "both parties enabled the wealth gap," what you're really describing is a system where one party can pass tax cuts for the wealthy with 51 votes while the other needs 60 to do almost anything about it.
Well, dethroning the 0.01% seems more feasible than starting and winning a civil war against the right. I think the right is not so pro 0.01% as you think, the killing of the United Healthcare CEO had strong bipartisan support, at the level of ordinary people.
the 0.01% have access to both the left and the right. They can fund and lobby both, however electors have considerably less flexibility given the paucity of options and how either of those options are to some extent; in thrall to the 0.01%.
Nope, it's 0.01% vs 99.9%. First, because they themselves are at the top — or, what, was Biden some sort of proletarian? Second, the left is okay with left-flavored dictatorships — just think, recently, of poor, poor Maduro. Third, from the outside, the drones kept coming whether red or blue happened to be in power.
hard disagree
when you couch it as a left vs right instead of a top vs down problem you will lock yourself (and your immediate circle) up in the hardline media items the people who lobby both sides will control.
as disclosure: i am socially liberal and fiscally conservative except in matters relating to education, which i believe should be free (and tuition rate controlled). never voted for trump, never will. wanted to write in bernie for the first pass until he dropped, then threw for the queen of england. i didn't vote in the last election. i consider ice to be an illegal and fascist arm of too large a state.
the most arresting argument i've heard a leftist say (which i agree with) is: there is a distribution of wealth at which a free market fails and we are long past that, especially given our failure to bust monopolies and enforce antitrust law.
that enables entities who lobby both sides of the policy spectrum to position us against each other. epstein played this well: how else do you get neoconservatives bubbling out of 4chan as an answer to thundercat tumblr kids? it's all divide-and-conquer (and over the most inane issues).
now, tell me: do you want to support eurasia or oceania? or do you want to put the puppeteers in jail?
This is such a fucking stupid argument because the "right" explicitly aligns itself with the 0.01%. If they are cheerleading it and voting for it and celebrating it, what the fuck makes you think they are on the side of the 99%. It's counterfactual. There is no evidence of it. Look at their support for Trump for fucks sake. He has made over $3B from his presidency ripping people off, and they fucking love him for it. They are on his side, not ours! Again. Look at how they consistently vote before pretending they are any sort of ally.
yeah, i hear you.
you flip on the news and you see the fat red faced wal-mart alcoholics raving about the latest ice raid and iran bombing. it's a pretty disgusting thing, isn't it? but count that number of people you see on the news and compare it to the number represented by 49.81 percent of people who are duped into leaning right in a two party system. then what you see on the news is an insipid and vocal minority by comparison.
they seem loud because they were born and raised in a 4chan cesspool, and relative to our ears (as we see them online), the 'enemies' are everywhere (ie overrepresented by our algorithms, since our outrage makes them money).
meanwhile both parties (in various states and layers of government) have made ranked voting either illegal or impossible to implement.
both parties (as well throughout the world) have pushed for greater government surveillance technologies and laws.
both parties have gone to the island, shot kids in sarajevo, staged military coups throughout the world, destroyed democracies, left migrant children starving at night in detention centers, sleeping on mattresses thrown into the mud. you think biden was blameless in that? i've seen those kids.
i hear you, and i am just as angry. but remember that there are a variety of reasons why people vote in the way that they do. they may come to regret those decisions when they send their kids to war, and perhaps that is some apt and just punishment.
however, don't fall into the trap of mistaking those people in your relative socioeconomic group from having entirely different needs and wants as yourself and your family.
if you vilify them, you will have aided and abetted in our dividing. the people needing to be put in jail are outliers in our system by far. they corrupt the islands, stage sarajevos, trade diamonds in war torn villages, and laugh their way to the bank while we squabble with ourselves as to 'whodunnit'. don't fall for it.
Nope. The left explicitly supports the policies that lead to the direct concentration of wealth and power and rise of communism. If the left constantly sides with the oppressors, they are the oppressors. This should be trivial to see just by looking at voting records. It's all very public and you've got decades of history worth of it to review. Both sides are not the same. The left chooses to align with the top 0.01% making them firmly part of the problem.
This is good satire
There is a real argument about the rise of fascism and the equivalent about the rise of communism is too silly for the bit to work
[flagged]
I just want to be very clear in understanding you: are you saying that these women (who are known and named) who were victims when underage (factually, not ""), should not be viewed as victims because it's a way/fact of life that powerful people will abuse girls?
I think the case he's making is that it should not be viewed as victims because it's "normal" or traditional in underdeveloped third world countries.
It's of course one of the most messed up things to read, but it's a common thought process of people influenced by propaganda from those countries regimes, or are actively spreading propaganda: the framing of "so called western countries/first world countries/etc" is the first red flag.
And then of course the angle is that western countries are decadent and are denying traditional values. This is a common thread of the Russian regime propaganda for example... Because when the regine destroyed everything else, with no prospects of a good future, it's traditional misery that has to make up for the rest.
So to sum it up, OP is actually making a case for the false traditional values of the regimes from the most corrupt and broken societies - where sex trafficking and marrying underaged children is part of the status quo, because it's "traditional ".
Somehow this propaganda works with some people in the west lol
our friend "DivingForGold" has clearly hit a whataboutism bonanza here. Can you also tell us about CO2 on Venus?
I keep rereading your comment and every time I understand that you think the problem isn’t that the girls were underage but that “Western democracies” needlessly criminalize this when they could be more like Russia or Muslim nations where you think that’s fine.
My most charitable interpretation is that you are justifying such sexual abuse of children.
But don’t get too excited yet (pun intended), in many parts of Russia or the Muslim world getting caught sexually abusing a child will make you wish for jail.
smdh at these woke moralists and their virtue-signaling opposition to checks notes child sex trafficking.
yikes
Indeed just heard that "Epic Fury" is an anagram of "Epstein Files" (FBI-redacted I guess)
That does not make sense.
Yes it does: Epic Fury is the name of the operation that's been started on Saturday. Granted, it takes some nimble to keep up.
Do you know what an anagram is?
It was a pun...NO WAIT! Whats that thing where it spells the same backwards and forwards?
palindrome
He is being tongue-in-cheek. To explain the joke, Trump is fumbling around for anything to distract from the fact that he is in the Epstein Files.
Sometimes the wrong people do the right thing for whatever reason and the war in Iran is precisely that.
This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t
https://theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mi...
You can see by the Iranian violent reaction that’s spread far and wide over most of the Middle East countries about what exact kind of stability it brings to the area.
Amongst the countries attacked by Iran now are Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait and Saudia Arabia; indirectly, it’s dragging kicking and screaming into the conflict also Yemen (surely soon), Lebanon (already) and Iraq (already).
The authors really nailed it on the timing if you look at when ISIS peaked
How about we wait more than three days to see if this really was “the right thing” before rolling out the Mission Accomplished banner, yeah?