International Does the Epstein scandal make the West look bad?

[helltoupee]

That is the reality of it. In most of the world, they wouldn't give 2 shits about this so long as it's consensual. And consensual means the girl agrees or, in some places, the parents agree. But the actions themselves aren't some evil thing to them.

What those people do care about is when the West runs up in their country and wags its fingers saying "You can't do that. You're not a civilized nation if you do that. There's no admission to international governing bodies if you that. Etc., etc."

It's the cultural moralizing that takes a hit. Some dude in Africa or Asia or the Middle East with 2 wives, both of whom he married at 16, isn't going to suddenly change his perspective on his lifestyle choices.

This is almost as bad as when you tried to convince the forum in 2015 that Trump would be a great choice for President because he was a "good businessman". As if all things of social value must submit to a profit motive. And as if he wasn't known as an idiot for decades before he got in to politics. I mean seriously, had you never heard the man talk? And you were impressed by that stunningly articulate stable geniusness?

You wanna know the gigantic hole in your argument? People aren't electing some "dude from the Middle East with 2 16yo wives" as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world.

I mean, you probably can find some example from some piss poor 'stan nation, but no 1st world country in Asia has someone as uniquely unintelligent or outright narcissistic as Trump. Nor were they grabbing them by the pussy. And if they were, they sure as hell weren't being put on a pedestal as leader of the free world.

If you don't think all this bullshit doesn't make the US look like complete idiots, you must have some pretty low standards. "Hey, at least we aren't any worse than some guy in Cambodia who married a 16yo because the rest of the world has no standards of decency whatsoever and of course they won't be bothered by sex trafficking rings and the circus of protecting them at all costs". Sheesh

 

[Fox by the Sea]

It does look like the euro-atlantic world is ruled by a cabal of murderous philes.

 

[tastaylvr]

That is the reality of it. In most of the world, they wouldn't give 2 shits about this so long as it's consensual. And consensual means the girl agrees or, in some places, the parents agree. But the actions themselves aren't some evil thing to them.

What those people do care about is when the West runs up in their country and wags its fingers saying "You can't do that. You're not a civilized nation if you do that. There's no admission to international governing bodies if you that. Etc., etc."

It's the cultural moralizing that takes a hit. Some dude in Africa or Asia or the Middle East with 2 wives, both of whom he married at 16, isn't going to suddenly change his perspective on his lifestyle choices.

I think of most you really oversell the 2 wives and 16 year old thing. Everyone is human and you thinking parents are just giving away their daughters so they can get married young to a man with a wife is fucking crazy.

Don’t start quoting the law too. It’s legal to have sex with a 14 year old in Europe but do you honestly think grow men are walking around in relationships with 14 year olds?

This is probably the worst post I’ve ever seen you do.

 

[Ruprecht]

"The West"?
Seems a little broad.
Of course everyone knew about the hypocrisy of supposed "blind justice" in the majority of nations, but not every nation has been it's loudest proponent while being it's most transparent failure.
Prince Andrew might have gotten a slap on the wrist (and sadly that's more than most of the culprits here), but it's not like the British have ever renounced class privilege.

 

[panamaican]

I think of most you really oversell the 2 wives and 16 year old thing. Everyone is human and you thinking parents are just giving away their daughters so they can get married young to a man with a wife is fucking crazy.

Don’t start quoting the law too. It’s legal to have sex with a 14 year old in Europe but do you honestly think grow men are walking around in relationships with 14 year olds?

This is probably the worst post I’ve ever seen you do.

It's just an uncomfortable truth. Do I think parents are just giving their daughters away as 2nd wives? No. But that's also not what I said. I said most of the world doesn't care about polygamy as a moral evil, so long as it's consensual.

We shouldn't conflate those things.

It's the same thing with age of consent. We use age 18 as the federal definition of a minor in the US. But Hawaii and Kansas both allow marriage at 15 with parental consent. And several states have no minimum age, with judicial consent.

There's a huge gap between what we, in the West, find morally objectionable vs. the lived reality in a lot of the world. Take your example where the age of consent is 14 in many European countries. It's 12 in some countries, Japan was 13 until recently. So, when people in those countries or people who grew up in older times hear about an older economically successful man engaging in these behaviors, they are likely not hearing something that falls outside the norms of their world.

What you're objecting to is right and I'd agree with you. But I'm not going to pretend that it's a worldwide position. This is an area of life that is only recently changing as social mores adapt. But laws and new generations adopt perspectives much faster than prior generations change theirs.

 

[panamaican]

This is almost as bad as when you tried to convince the forum in 2015 that Trump would be a great choice for President because he was a "good businessman". As if all things of social value must submit to a profit motive. And as if he wasn't known as an idiot for decades before he got in to politics. I mean seriously, had you never heard the man talk? And you were impressed by that stunningly articulate stable geniusness?

You wanna know the gigantic hole in your argument? People aren't electing some "dude from the Middle East with 2 16yo wives" as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world.

I mean, you probably can find some example from some piss poor 'stan nation, but no 1st world country in Asia has someone as uniquely unintelligent or outright narcissistic as Trump. Nor were they grabbing them by the pussy. And if they were, they sure as hell weren't being put on a pedestal as leader of the free world.

If you don't think all this bullshit doesn't make the US look like complete idiots, you must have some pretty low standards. "Hey, at least we aren't any worse than some guy in Cambodia who married a 16yo because the rest of the world has no standards of decency whatsoever and of course they won't be bothered by sex trafficking rings and the circus of protecting them at all costs". Sheesh

The questions was if the West looks bad. Looks bad to who? Whose opinion of these actions are we soliciting? Other members of the West? Or the rest of the world? S.America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East? Because in the rest of the world, there's far less handwringing about this type of behavior generally than there is in the West.

And I was pretty open on my opinion on Trump. My stance then was "I always think we need to a businessperson in office. Therefore, I want to see how this works out." I never advocated that he was a "great choice" and you'd be hard pressed to find posts from me that frame it that way.

 

[PeterGriffin]

The Epstein files don't make the West look bad. People being protected for their participation in crimes sure does though.

Especially when it's "supposedly" the leader of the free world doing it.

 

[The XL]

The Epstein files don't make the West look bad. People being protected for their participation in crimes sure does though.

Especially when it's "supposedly" the leader of the free world doing it.

When the West bases everything they do on morality and democracy, and it turns out that we live in a corporatocracy where elites are allowed to openly rape, murder, sex traffic, kidnap etc openly with impunity, it kind of blows our facade right out of the water in the open. Everything that the West stands for is basically a lie. Even our justice system is a fraud if you dig deep enough. Take the elite of the elite out of it, those who are reasonably wealthy have much better outcomes than those who are poor or working class in the so called 'justice' system, cops are one of the lowest ranks of government and basically have immunity to do what they want, etc.

 

[Fox by the Sea]

The questions was if the West looks bad. Looks bad to who?

to us, the people living here.

Whose opinion of these actions are we soliciting?

our own.

 

[William Huggins]

Apparently Jerky can walk.......

 

[PBAC]

Yeah but I think it is just a front for things happening across the board not some grand conspiracy. It's easier to tackle one high profile issue and pretend action is being taken while the others just continue. It reaks of that "omg I can't believe a celebrity would cheat on his wife" outrage, as if rappers haven't been literally putting the lyrics for sexual abuse into their lyrics.

 

[panamaican]

to us, the people living here.

our own.

I don't think that's what the OP means. I think he's asking if the West looks bad to people who are not "the West".

 

[MidgardSerpent]

It's just an uncomfortable truth. Do I think parents are just giving their daughters away as 2nd wives? No. But that's also not what I said. I said most of the world doesn't care about polygamy as a moral evil, so long as it's consensual.

We shouldn't conflate those things.

It's the same thing with age of consent. We use age 18 as the federal definition of a minor in the US. But Hawaii and Kansas both allow marriage at 15 with parental consent. And several states have no minimum age, with judicial consent.

There's a huge gap between what we, in the West, find morally objectionable vs. the lived reality in a lot of the world. Take your example where the age of consent is 14 in many European countries. It's 12 in some countries, Japan was 13 until recently. So, when people in those countries or people who grew up in older times hear about an older economically successful man engaging in these behaviors, they are likely not hearing something that falls outside the norms of their world.

I think you're really off the mark here.

First of all, law and socially accepted norms are two consistently shifting plates; these won't simply won't always perfectly line up across the timeline. There's often the obvious aspect of bureaucratic red tape creating lag and long or short term obstructions. Second of all, the national law of age of consent being 13 in Japan doesn't mean it's legal from that age on, it just means it's illegal below that age. The bottom legal floor is not the same as a green light, cultural or otherwise.

The crucial missing piece of information that most seem to miss is that there are additional prefectural laws on the regional level that raise the actual age of consent to 16-18, even before the recent reforms on the national level.

A 40 year old celebrity dating a 13 year old becoming public knowledge would almost certainly mean social and career suicide. It would be highly ostracized, even among the elderly, since this was already considered a taboo well over a century ago. You're talking about lived reality, but you're basing your cultural anthropology on an surface level soundbite of foreign statute books and conflating that as the same as how non-Western people experience life. Similar situations can apply to other parts of the world before one flattens the complexities of whole societies into a 'age of consent is low' one-liner.

 

[Kassitus]

There are guys on my social media posting exactly this. Stuff like "Westerners condemning terrorism and child marriage, meanwhile *picture of Epstein*"

 

[SKYNET]

It makes the elite/ rich class look bad. All of them.

It's book of revelations bad at this point.

 

[Sinister]

Someone uploaded this video on Vimeo and it got me thinking...



Did Trump, Clinton, Stahmer, etc., lose credibility by being implicated in Epstein's sex trafficking bullshit?

The answer is yes, but not because it's a true statement.

See the problem is this online neo-fascist sentiment that has become "The West." Which seems to actually have been astro-turfed by d*ckheads like Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein and rignt wing Stans and Chuds alike all over the internet. This figurative, specific, "West" which consists of rignt wing politically aligned Governance in Europe and the Americas, it absolutely makes them look HORRIBLE. And the more that comes out, the worse it gets. But asking this is akin to asking if the Templar Knights made all of Europe look bad during the Crusades. You could argue they did, but even Christian Kings came down on them.

The entire US looks bad right now because we had a good chunk of our population loudly screaming online conspiracy theories about an anti-democratic, pro-censorship Cabal of elite philes who were trafficking children and trying to disrupt the global order. And then it turned out that this Country twice voted one of them into the Presidency, and the Administration is currently doing literally nothing to the people who have already been implicated.

 

[Natural Order]

Of course it does. It adds tremendous fuel to the fire of America being a modern day Sodom & Gomorrah, a vile society of selfish desires and depraved sexual addictions.

If America is defined by her progress and a beacon to the world of "what can be", this isn't helping anything at all, clearly.

And if the corruption and illegal coverup stuff is just allowed to fade away without repercussions, it'll look like a hypocritical farce (moreso than it already does).

 

[panamaican]

I think you're really off the mark here.

First of all, law and socially accepted norms are two consistently shifting plates; these won't simply won't always perfectly line up across the timeline. There's often the obvious aspect of bureaucratic red tape creating lag and long or short term obstructions. Second of all, the national law of age of consent being 13 in Japan doesn't mean it's legal from that age on, it just means it's illegal below that age. The bottom legal floor is not the same as a green light, cultural or otherwise.

The crucial missing piece of information that most seem to miss is that there are additional prefectural laws on the regional level that raise the actual age of consent to 16-18, even before the recent reforms on the national level.

A 40 year old celebrity dating a 13 year old becoming public knowledge would almost certainly mean social and career suicide. It would be highly ostracized, even among the elderly, since this was already considered a taboo well over a century ago. You're talking about lived reality, but you're basing your cultural anthropology on an surface level soundbite of foreign statute books and conflating that as the same as how non-Western people experience life. Similar situations can apply to other parts of the world before one flattens the complexities of whole societies into a 'age of consent is low' one-liner.

I'm speaking generally and I didn't introduce the age of consent into the conversation, it was in response to someone else. My general perspective is:

"No, it does not make the West look bad because this type of behavior, where rich powerful men have consensual sexual relations with young females, is normal everywhere in the world. The exact age of the women varies but post-puberty young is not abnormal (prepubescent is a different conversation). Additionally, people already know that rich powerful men from the West are doing this. They've been doing it forever. It surprises no one. What it does do is highlight the hypocrisy of the West moralizing to those other countries about their treatment of women, sexual mores, etc."

 

[The XL]

It's not as if these people are just having sex with slightly underage girls. As bad as that would be on its own, it doesn't come close to the depravity in those files.

 

[Brigfa2]

If you think this only happens in the west, you are retarded. It's just exposing things like that is so much easier there