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Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

nytimes.com

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Re: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

#651

Post by danso »

blub wrote: post #508
jakelazaroff wrote: post #3

Good. Here’s a particularly damning passage from Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article [1]: > According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room. >…

A model from Eastern Europe is someone that does fashion modeling and is from that area. Euphemistically it could be someone from EE that has sex for money, but you don't want to beat around the bush when describing child sex abuse. So they should either clearly say underage-looking girls or remove that paragraph because it's irrelevant and confusing. I mean this is a story about child abuse and the author didn't thi…

Why should the New Yorker remove that paragraph? It’s the observation from someone who became a whistleblower on this matter. She tells the reporter that the situation bothered her staff so much that they suspected the women might be trafficked. Whether they “looked underage” is still conjecture and doesn’t make the situation significantly worse than what the whistleblower alleges.

Re: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

#652

Post by [deleted] »

csallen wrote: post #645
cjbprime wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky It just sounds like you haven't been paying attention at all. Are you aware that a woman has claimed that she was forced to have sex with Marvin Minsky by Epstein on his island? https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef... Are you aware that Pinker has flown on the "Lolita Express" and helped with Epstein's legal defense, a legal defense that led to him avoiding a pri…

> Are you aware that Pinker has flown on the "Lolita Express" (1) This happened in 2002, (2) Pinker didn't know Epstein personally at the time and the ticket was booked by his literary agent, (3) the flight was to a science-related event in California and included other scientists who were also booked by the same literary agent. Simply saying, "Pinker has flown on the Lolita Express" and leaving it at that is an inte…

[deleted]

Re: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

#653

Post by paganel »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #635
paganel wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 38 and afaik nobody has ever sent me underage women for me to have sex with them, that way I could have boasted to an external third party that “I refused”. When you’re 88 years old (so when biologically sex is one of the last things you should be thinking about) and when one of your close friends “sends” you an under-age woman that only means that that close friend of yours knew what you liked and what you were…

Please forgive me for presupposing that your life is nothing close to the lives of the people we are discussing here and your intuition is not a useful model for figuring out what is normal and what isn't.

Yes, I did actively avoid until now to befriend convicted paedophiles, apparently for people like Ito or Minsky that was too much to ask.

Re: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

#654

Post by colechristensen »

jknoepfler wrote: post #601
colechristensen wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we expect the republic to survive if some of the most capable people try so actively to not pay attention to what's going on outside their bubble?

This might surprise you, but I'd prefer people be up to speed on matters of public policy (school funding, environmental regulation, labor laws, etc.) I can't imagine what relevance you think this case has to the lives of most people on this forum, or even to most people living in the USA. It doesn't impact their future, their well-being, the well-being of people they know or are likely to know, or have (any? much?)…

Epstein wasn't just gossip or a one-off terrible person. He was a network, he provided services, and his clients/friends/co-conspirators were some of the most prominent people in the country. Not because they were popular but because they were powerful.

Corruption at the highest level that goes far and wide. You shouldn't ignore it because it's "just" sex abuse and not anything important. When you shine light on any kind of high level corruption, you get corrupt people out of their positions. The collateral damage is that the other corrupt things they do which might be more "important" and honest people who don't do those sorts of things get promoted into the spots vacated.

Not to mention validating the many victims of similar abuse around the country who are most often the prey of powerful people.

If you don't care and think there are more important things than that... well ok, but I think that not caring about that kind of corruption and ignoring it is a real threat to the stability and longevity of the republic.

Re: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

#655

Post by paganel »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #610
paganel wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they’re too busy counting their money. We’re the lackeys of the mighty and powerful and when the “common people” sometime try to react to the visible power imbalances some of us feel the need to obey and defend our masters. Source: me, a desilusioned programmer approaching my 40s

> too busy counting their money. Or lack of money. The current economy, even for those in the professional class (given the absurd costs of living in tech cities), is designed to maximize precarity and force people into such a hustle mentality that they can barely pay attention to the world around them. It is truly the billionaire class vs the rest of us. We're all in this together.

You would think so from the outside but given the current level of technological development today's billionaires would be nothing without us, IT people (I include here everything from devops, to programmers to QA etc etc), without some lawyers and some medical professionals. Even the billionaires' goons are almost nothing without the technological-heavy guns they employ to potentially carry out their goon-related stuff, and said technology depends, like I said, on us, IT people.

Re: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

#656

Post by AndrewBissell »

paganel wrote: post #561
anon2947 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a few more of Xeni's tweets, and wanted to get HN's honest opinion on them. It seems (to me) like a lot of people on Twitter (and HN?) are over-reacting. For example, Xeni's pinned tweet references this other tweet ( https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1165266579560521728 ), which implies that anybody who was ever at a dinner with Epstein should be considered complicit in Epstein's crimes. Take this quote, for exa…

Marvin Minsky was directly named by one of the victims in documents that were published a couple of days before Epatein’s convenient death, and those documents were mentioning that Minsky had directly sexually profited from an under-age woman. In other words he was a paedophile. I submitted an article detailing all this stuff on the day of Epstein’s death, it had reached the top links of HN in less than an hour but t…

I have also noticed HN mods engaged in blatantly political flagging, probably driven by deference to YC's tech industry pals. My link to the Bloomberg article about all the WeWork CEO's utterly scammy self-dealing shot to #1 on the front page, then was flagged by mods as "dupe" even though another link to the article was nowhere to be found. Totally killed off the discussion.

Re: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

#658

Post by AndrewBissell »

qazpot wrote: post #612
anon2947 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a few more of Xeni's tweets, and wanted to get HN's honest opinion on them. It seems (to me) like a lot of people on Twitter (and HN?) are over-reacting. For example, Xeni's pinned tweet references this other tweet ( https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1165266579560521728 ), which implies that anybody who was ever at a dinner with Epstein should be considered complicit in Epstein's crimes. Take this quote, for exa…

It seems that a lot of people are of the opinion that Epstein did not get due punishment for his crimes and whatever jail time was given to him he tried everything to reduce it's severity by using his money. This is true but instead of acting or speaking out against these loopholes in the justice system which to be fair are exploited by every rich/influential person convicted of a crime, what is happening is that peo…

The issue of the two tiered justice system which exists for the benefit of plutocrats is separate from and in addition to the issue of plutocrats associating with a known and confessed child predator, in exchange for god knows what favors. Whether or not they did anything criminal, these individuals' "mere association" with Epstein after his 2008 conviction demonstrates extremely poor character judgment at best, and makes it completely reasonable to wonder whether something more sinister was at work. Why did people like Gates and Hoffman, for whom the amounts Epstein donated were a rounding error, have anything to do with him in the first place?

Re: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

#659

Post by bbanyc »

nullc wrote: post #512
cjbprime wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky It just sounds like you haven't been paying attention at all. Are you aware that a woman has claimed that she was forced to have sex with Marvin Minsky by Epstein on his island? https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef... Are you aware that Pinker has flown on the "Lolita Express" and helped with Epstein's legal defense, a legal defense that led to him avoiding a pri…

> Are you aware that a woman has claimed that she was forced to have sex with Marvin Minsky by Epstein on his island? Yet the her deposition does not actually make that claim, but rather that she was directed to approach Minsky for sex. A third party witness reports that that he turned her down and was apparently complaining about the incident. https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/339725/ If you were not aware of these th…

Why should we believe Benford? How do we know there weren't other incidents?

Given Minsky's well-established long-running ties to Epstein, I don't think we can afford not to believe the allegations against him. I find it especially painful because I was once a student in one of his courses, it was a great experience and I didn't suspect a thing about him - but you never know.

Never meet your heroes. Never have heroes.

Re: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

#660

Post by DataWorker »

burtonator wrote: post #615
areoform wrote: post #364

This is gossip, but it’s well founded gossip as I am one or two hops away from him. Epstein was very upfront with the people he worked what that he liked “young woman” while giving them money and invited them to his parties etc. I think it was his way to enmesh them and make them unwitting partners in his systemic abuse. Most people just went along, and were eventually given a massage from a child at his behest to fu…

I thought you were going to mention that comment about Trump saying that Epstein liked "his girls on the younger side". I think what's interesting is the ethical dilemma here. You have 1000s of people around you. No one is saying anything. Then they offer you money. Do you take it? Everyone else is? Then the counter to this is that of the 1000s of people that come crashing down why is it just Joi Ito and a few others…

It adds an interesting dimension to Steven Pinker’s thoughts about common vs shared knowledge.
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