The thing to understand about Summers is that he is basically the guy that charted the course to where America is today.
Enormously influential, he provided the intellectual gravitas as well as the raw policymaking muscle for a version of the US economy that was financialized, globalized, and monopolized.
If you're broke in 2025, Larry Summers probably had something to do with it.
Anything that will knock this guy down many many pegs is worthwhile imo.
I don't think anybody knew the extent of relationships with Epstein that were revealed when 20k email messages were dumped onto the world.
I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.
Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.
All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.
I mean, there are other harward people making very similar consultations with Epstein. It seems to be more of "influencial harward people support each other" situation.
Plus, there are harward people who complained about these harward people for years and claim to not be surprised.
MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
> It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide."
Nonsense.
"...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0]
"...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1]
etc.
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
not sure where you are looking but Rasmussen polls have been showing Trump hemorrhaging support since June among his base. if you visit X this is where many of them converse, and they are quite openly unhappy with the admin lately
This is what I expect as well, the cultish members will never see him for what he is no matter what happens. I've seen similar sentiment toward dictators in other countries as well, especially if you talk to the older civilians who really bought into the system, even years after the dictator was overthrown.
There has been a very public split between MTG and Trump in the past week or so over the Epstein issue. It has been causing a rift in the MAGA base for a while though, it seems to be coming to a head now though.
> Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was.
Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?
Just throwing it out there, but forget Epstein, I'm sure most of us would not believe what NYT is sitting on in general. This is effectively a defacto global intelligence gathering service. I bet if we could read through a lot of that we'd all be gobsmacked and just stop believing in humanity altogether.
I understand most of what we haven't seen is uncorroborated, but it would still make for interesting reading if we didn't have to worry about falling down an elevator shaft onto some bullets.
MAGA was pushing for it when they believed it was a liberal conspiracy, with the Clintons trafficking children and "harvesting their adrenochrome" (see Comet Pizza incident). Now MAGA luminaries are suggesting grown men abusing minors isn't that creepy if the victims are teenaged - so much for protecting the kids.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you both are in a bubble.
They're just different bubbles.
Liberals and conservatives have methodically and deliberately avoided holding their leaders accountable for decades. The only people who can't see that, are, frankly, liberals and conservatives.
What we have now is an opportunity to sweep everyone from Trump on down out of office. Anyone who would work for Trump or Clinton should have their judgement questioned at a minimum. And they should pray we don't look any further into what they've been getting up to.
This is a golden opportunity to scrub the walls clean and put in new people en masse. But I'm not naive. I know the corruption of the incumbent power brokers and parties will undoubtedly win the day. You can bet your bottom dollar that conservatives and liberals are cooperating and they've got the courts, Homeland security, CIA, everything.. out cleaning up for them. I just wish they'd get what's coming to them for once.
I did say the "uniparty", right? So on what basis do you make this claim?
In case you're not familiar with the term, it refers to both the Republicans and the Democrats, viewing them as effectively one party with two factions (with the former merely trailing behind the latter, typically).
In this particular case, MAGA is showing that it's okay with hypocrisy, because, hey, didn't Democrats rationalize Clinton's misdeeds and throw his victims under the bus for the sake of the party?
Cannot count the number of times people forget how powerful algorithmic bubble making is. It isnt a “you are in a bubble so ur dumb” it is more of, “all of our information is algorithmically fed to us be aware!”
To add to this, I have a friend who has two kids. One is lefty trans and the other is becoming a christian conservative. They are Indian zoomers. Two totally different algorithms at work. One got the Charlie and the other got Hassan. Really makes one wonder what is in your own information feed.
The one-time head of the most elite academic institution as well as the US Treasury is an insecure 12 year old boy at heart. Summers clearly saw Epstein as aspirational for his "success" with "women". But this isn't really new information about him. In 2005 he went in front of an audience including top women scientists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and essentially said the lack of women at the top of science was mostly about their lack of innate aptitude, not discrimination [1] (he gave multiple alternate "theories" but it was clear which one he actually believed). People immediately saw that for what it was: a powerful guy projecting his own hang-ups about women. That he's maintained his status over the last 20 years does not speak well of the US's most prestigious institutions.
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
The big question here is are they involved with Epstein because they are in power, or did they get power because they had Epstein pull in favors for them. From the emails he seems like the big spider in a spider web. Both parties and so many people in power referred to him for critical problems, pulling strings in critical places (Bannon on behalf of Trump was getting his advice on how to discredit Kavanaugh opponents and Epstein obliged with medical information on one of the opponents to bring up at a hearing). Beyond Clinton, Obama’s attorney is mentioned a bunch as well. I’m sure the democrats had plenty of favors in too.
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
It is reassuring that I am not the only one that sees this. These emails reveal a much bigger conspiracy than just the sex trafficking- that was just an in house blackmail material generator for him that he was using to control powerful people around the world. The emails also suggest he was selling blackmail material on US politicians to foreign adversaries.
I mean that's the point -- blackmail powerful and influential people to do his bidding.
That his madam (Ghislane) was the daughter of the guy who got Israel nukes and had some deeeeep ties to the Mossad is no surprise. FWIW said guy also had ties to UK Intelligence and the KGB, and he died mysteriously on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.
> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.
Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
I burst out laughing when I read the following excerpts, one after the other:
> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.
> ...
> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.
If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
I appreciate that I'm not the only person here seeing this and I think the last part of your comment is what some people are missing here. He can be a misogynist pedophile and still make funny jokes sometimes and it's weirdly reductive to pretend otherwise.
I thought his emails to Esptein asking for dating advice about how to "get horizontal" with the "yellow peril" were particularly cringe. “Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor” ... poor guy!
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein
You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
> You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
Yes, it would in that context make sense as something akin to A Modest Proposal, but directed at the World Bank's liberalization policies.
The problem, of course, is that Summers was not an opponent of the World Bank's liberalization policies, he was the chief economist of the World Bank, and a supporter of those policies, and actively seeking stronger support for them, so it doesn't work that way coming from him.
That’s what he claimed it is, but I don’t buy it. I’m a big fan of satire and deadpan humor, and that’s just not what this is- the tone is serious, and he put a lot of thought in how to argue the point. Monsters exist, and this guy is one.
If you project the other things you know about this guy to color everything he did, sure. Reading it made the tone obvious, well before I got to his defense in the wiki article. The memo on its own is painfully obviously a joke but I'm really not surprised that the audience of HN has difficulty interpreting tone.
The consistent mistake people did last years, including those on HN was to pretend to themselves that odious people are "just joking" and "totally not serious". Again and again. Starting with 4chan and 8chan that were just a trolls and no one was ever nazi, until nazi became normalized, the top government and leadership of a major party.
No one was sexist ever, they were just joking and all feminists were stupid not understanding that, until their quite sexist messages got released by inside a pack of messages to known abuser. This is literally the case of Larry Summers.
And you want to play that game again, with literally the same person. Of course no one believes it, it is not being sophisticated, you are asking people to pretend they are stupid. Nothing in Summers career suggests he would sarcastic out of care for Africa or environment. That is not what his work was, at all.
We disagree about the tone, but that aside- a person capable of writing this essay as a dry satire would need to possess a level of empathy and introspection that the rest of his life personally and professionally demonstrates that he does not. He’s not Voltaire or Johnathan Swift, he’s just a sociopath that tried to play it off as a joke when he got in trouble.
I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.
I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.
Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.
You don’t need to. The target audience was people to whom that’s obvious in the first few lines and then who keep reading to see how far he can take it with a straight face.
Yes, he was “joking”- he is what the Internet calls a “Schrödinger's dbag,” it was only a joke if people don’t agree, but if they do it’s what he really believes- a cowardly way of communicating. In the context of his career, his actual beliefs are along the lines of the essay.
Summers very often does this sort of earnest "kidding on the square" and he's quite proud of it, which was revealed extensively in the Epstein emails. Summers earnestly believes that the villain has very good reasons to tear down the orphanage, and will defend them in whatever way he can in polite society.
I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.
If it had been tongue in cheek or satire, that would suggest he also had enough capacity for introspection and empathy to see what is wrong with it. Looking at both his career and personal life suggests that he does not.
I mean this is presumably why it wasn't a publicly published memo or policy recommendation. If structural adjustment and economy management is part your job, you might have some steam to let off about it in private, and plenty of draft ideas and documents that need refinement. It does become a mistake when it's made public, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a joke originally.
See elsewhere where I've quoted parts of it in this thread but if you read "Actually, I don't think Africa is polluted enough!" and take the person saying it seriously instead of reading it as a joke, then you might need to touch grass.
I think you missed the joke. The thing that was funny about it to him when he said it was he knew it was a natural extension of his public position, yes an extreme version of it, but he knew it was also true and’s logical and it was funny to get away with saying it behind closed doors. An honest person would recognized the truth behind the joke and change the position that it stemmed from because they cared about making the world better. The fact that he recognized he was making the world worse AND continued in that path is what is so blatantly evil and revealing about this memo.
If Kevin Spacey had written a private note to Woody Allen that said, "Now that we've been chased out of the film industry, let's become day care workers," then it would be a very different kind of "joke" than The Onion writing the same as a headline.
Chief Economist of the World Bank and top level bureaucrat in the Clinton administration? He and his buddies were tip of the spear doing an end-run around hard-won labor, environment, and human rights laws and permitting corporations to outsource their poisoning and exploitation. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-clintons-true-legacy_b_1...
Just because he claimed to have been sarcastic about something, doesn't mean he is not also guilty of it.
And instead this will go unappreciated for how gruesome it is if we're meant to take any of the above accusations seriously, but hey - he's been here for at least 11 years, one of ours, right?
Does the following sounds like a joke to you? I mean, does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?
And if it's a joke, what is the punchline?
DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP
'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
> does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?
> what is the punchline?
It's akin to saying "This establishment's high Google/Yelp ratings indicate it's leaving money on the table. There's clearly room to raise prices, cut costs, and really degrade the customer experience."
I don't know if Summers is telling the truth about his intent. But as far as jokes go, it's decent.
The whole thing is the punchline. If you're missing something, read strken's response elsewhere in this thread, because he put it in a better way than I have anywhere else here - none of it is serious, and if you read it seriously, you are the other punchline:
> argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated.
It's not a joke. He didn't even say it was a joke. He said (as quoted on the Wikipedia page for the memo!) that it was “a comment on a research paper that was being prepared by part of my staff at the World Bank” and that it “sought to clarify the strict economic logic by using some rather inflammatory language”.
The closest it gets to being a joke is that it is mockery and derision directed at underlings as a form of feedback on work product.
“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”
Kind of what I mean. I hadn't heard of this guy before today, and this memo openly laments that it's challenging to bring Africa into the world pollution economy because moving solid waste there is a logistical challenge. If this memo was about how cool it is to traffic and rape children, as some people in this thread and a few others today seem to be interpreting it, I'd probably be less inclined to lend it the benefit of this tone, but I'm just not sold on the premise that someone who is demonstrably evil in some dimension is incapable of making honestly benign bureaucratic jokes in a presumably private context. It kind of knocks the legs out of genuine criticism if the dude can't chew bubblegum without taking flack.
Sure but in the most polite way, that's almost saying nothing at all. I just think it kneecaps any real criticism and real issues associated with this guy to go "okay that might be a joke, but it probably isn't because <legitimate evil reason>". Though I guess it encroaches on the definition of what a joke is and if it's defined by intent. If he meant it as one, but nobody took it as one, is it?
My brother in Christ, you keep tumbling yourself to see nuance where there is none. The guy is a piece of shit. Why such magnanimous effort? I suggest you take some time off.
I've mostly repeated the same perspective to people on this thread who would rather virtue signal than read what I've already written, and what I'm saying is not hard to wrap your head around unless you're the type of person to believe in caricatures as I've described above. I think they may need some time off from news, the internet, etc, if anyone.
I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.
The joke is that it looks like a joke but isn’t in the same way a sociopath will explain in detail exactly how they’re going to fuck you before they do knowing you won’t believe them because it’s all a joke in a joke that isn’t real.
So it's okay for people who have the power and connections to actually impact the world in the horrible ways they're "joking"about to make jokes about doing just that?
I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.
That's the great thing about "invention", there are other ways to 0 pollution besides historic ones.
Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire.
Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
Electrification is a necessary but not sufficient step to zero pollution.
Necessary, because using any other way to cook is polluting, and no matter what else you eliminate you can't eliminate cooking. (And good luck convincing everyone to not live where heating is needed).
Even wood fires for cooking is a way to get all the lung damage of heavy smoking for all the same reasons, just without the nicotine addiction.
Not sufficient, because while renewables can be made in non-polluting ways, those might not be the cheapest, and people vote with their wallets.
That, plus all the chemical processes that just pollute directly, like cement and steel currently do.
A good many people I know and have known for 60+ years would, do, and yearn for civilisation as you know it to back the f off and get its foot from their neck.
Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport.
Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
Contrary to your thoughts on the matter the Pintupi Nine and their relatives the Richter family spring to mind as the most extreme examples.
Both groups from my neck of the woods, both groups I've spoken to, both groups with significant time spent sans modern society. Both groups with members that turned back to isolation and non western lifestyle after a few years exposure.
Many more similar people have been exposed to society with electricty, phones, etc and happy to live as far apart from that as they can still manage - it's hard to escape such things - Starlink has polluted the skys once untouched in the Murchison.
No sympathy for Larry here! Just the point that development is going to coincide with some level of increased pollution. Even an electrified economy with 0 carbon emissions is going to be ecologically devastating after all the mountain top removal mining has gathered the materials to make it possible.
> Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.
> And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."
The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.
> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.
I remember hearing about the variance thing ages ago. Back when I was young enough and naïve enough to trust statements said in official voices without critically assessing them.
With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
I'm not touching the variability thing with a 10 foot pole except to say that the further out on each extreme of the IQ "scale" you go the less reliable the scores are. The whole idea of using IQ as a ranking of ability rather than a diagnostic tools is bogus. I do think it's clear now though that Summers was simply being a misogynist (you lose the presumption of good faith when you disclose that you'd been lying all along.)
I remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking.
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
> how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
>It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
I wouldn't say we've made zero progress. There are always ups and downs, temporary wins and losses, but I think that over the long term, there's more skepticism and scrutiny now than in the past.
I think this is a side effect of having "paid law enforcement", it's not that the cops are bad, but their bosses are. The people who fund the law enforcement are ultimately at the mercy of the "rich and powerful" in some way or another, so basically people of a certain status get a pass.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
It used to be that any citizen could approach a grand jury and allege a crime. The purpose of the grand jury was to decide if tax dollars should be spent to hire a prosecutor for that (single) case.
"Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case.
It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into.
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
> As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance.
(Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.)
On what basis do you say that Epstein was pretty talented at finance? This guy was a math teacher with no actual degree. The only reason he got his gig in finance was by schmoozing up the dad of one of his students, who was CEO of Bear Stearns.
The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now).
They know they above the law from the minute that reach a certain level of status, they don't care about the emails and if people see them, they know there will be next to zero repercussions for them.
He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated.
It’s interesting that only now he is stepping back now that he’s been found out. It demonstrates that it’s not about ethics or morals, but about publicity and damage control.
The tax paying class of the world just have to watch all this horseshit go on, watch the institutions and the law enforcement agencies protect these people with our hard earned money, meanwhile if we break a single law, there are consequences for us, sometimes massive.
It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
One metric of change would be that statutory (underage) rape wasn't a crime anywhere 200 years ago. In some countries, it still isn't. Mass rape and kidnapping is going on right now from Nigeria to Sudan. Wealthy old men can still marry 12 year olds across much of the Middle East. The fact that sex with minors has become relegated to something like a luxury designer drug for the elite hypocrites in the US and UK, and the fact that they're now being exposed for it, is in many ways an unexpected victory for humanity. The previous 5k years of recorded history, and probably the whole million years before that, were wall to wall with war, slavery and raping children. As well as the elites having such rights as prima nocta and simply executing anyone they wished. So I think we are making progress.
I'm talking about disease prevention, maternal mortality, infant mortality, access to clean water, anesthetic(!!) and access to things like reading glasses and hearing aids and oh, I don't know, refrigeration.
What does your precious Harvard and US Treasury Department have to say about that?
Admittedly, I only read a brief review of the book, but it was suggesting the opposite.
And example: we tend to inject too much of our modern viewpoint onto the old monarchies—that Henry VIII would not have thought himself ruler of the "state" of England although we talk about him in that regard from our modern perspective.
Yeah I agree with that. And I'd argue that it is still the same nowadays. People at the top probably knows clearly which interest group they are in, and which group they can rally up, and which ones they need to fight to the death -- even if they all belong to the same nationality -- and I'm not surprised if local interest groups ally with "foreign" interest groups to fight another local interest group. It is blurred.
That book is "rethinking" history but that rethinking curiously fits extremely well with a particular modern narrative. Some people eat it up. But separate a few decades in the future and it will seem like an extremely fad-driven interpretation of things.
The book makes a point of how historical analysis was already fit extremely well into particular contemporary fad narratives of the time. It does as much deconstruction of that (and of the idea that those contemporary fads were timeless elements of human nature) as it does construction of new ones. The former is a very interesting part of the book you’re not addressing. I don't know what you add to this conversation with such breezy dismissal...
> It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
> It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
This category of malcontent (about out-of-touch elites engaging in all sorts of depraved perversions while the poor starved) at Versailles eventually caused most of the former to lose their heads during the French Revolution.
The smart ones know that they need to keep up appearances, the dumb ones behave like they will never face consequences.
The smart ones are building bunkers to escape the hell that the US will become when the civil war actually starts. They're not hoping to survive the apocalypse, they're just hoping to ride out the 20 or 30 years of war and return as actual Lords for the serfs that are left after we kill each other.
Yes I know of someone who willingly gave up their US citizenship for tax reasons but has EU, Israeli, and a bunch of other citizenships. They get to live a good life in the Netherlands + traveling the world while the US tears itself apart and then when it is time to retire in 30-40 years, the country will be ripe of the picking..they will buy their citizenship back through one of the multiple buy your way into the US visa programs...and retire in Montana.
I understand you want to highlight this, but you don’t have to begin your sentence with "It's interesting that..." because this is not interesting or novel in the slightest.
It's interesting to me because how the hell did he think this was going to end? "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work in the court of public opinion. So, if one was even peripherally associated with Epstein, it would seem like that would be a hell of a liability.
On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?
This guy Epstein modus operandi of cozying up and becoming wingman to powerful people confirms that he was some kind of spy. But it's still weird to see a well known professor of 61 years texting about gurlz to his middle aged wingman. Who does that and is this really what millionaires do, reliving high school?
Money and power have been seen as corrupting influences since the dawn of humanity.
Those who seek those things -- money for money's sake, power for power's sake -- often tend to see their success as somehow making them "above" others. They derive perverse pleasure in seeing just how much they can flaunt society's rules. 'The rules don't apply to me' is like a drug in itself.
I think it depends on how they got rich. From the outside to me it looks like the ones who sacrifice their 20's to the grind and getting rich never get that shit out of their system like the rest of us do and end up as emotionally stunted adults trying to recapture their lost youth.
I grinded fairly well enough in my 20s, just as many other people I know who did. We're much better off than 99.99% of the world. That doesn't make us think of sexually abusing children and adolescents one bit because we need to "flush that shit out of our system" and "recapture our lost youth". I have better ways of recapturing my lost youth, by computer games, more time for hobbies and fucking closer to my age like rabbits.
PS:- being in the upper echelon does mean you have a somewhat easier access to the circles that engage in these vile activities, and yes you'll be completely excluded if you say no to them. Many are okay with that, while those who aren't are the ones in the files.
people who miss out on life experiences often try to overcompensate them or live vicariously, or never find out how to do it naturally. people who have much leisure time in college and 20s come to understand their demons, discover their true character... as opposed to silitron vale or wall st types
guy who never made football team bullies his kid into football
guy who never dated in his 20s makes tonnes of money by working 100 hours a week and in 30s fumbles into bad relationships created from status flexing with no depth, never experienced adolescent loves with womans his own age
woman who grew up poor gorges herself on mcdonalds binge once a month due to repressed trauma of always missing out on mcd as a child
you see this with extravagant childrens birthdays a lot too
I mean, that is made up psychology, not even a real one.
> guy who never made football team bullies his kid into football
That is much less of a think you are making it to be. A guy who values football, was good at it is significantly more likely to force kids into football.
> guy who never dated in his 20s makes tonnes of money by working 100 hours a week and in 30s fumbles into bad relationships created from status flexing with no depth, never experienced adolescent loves with womans his own age
You made up that guy!
> woman who grew up poor gorges herself on mcdonalds binge once a month due to repressed trauma of always missing out on mcd as a child
Not a thing either.
> you see this with extravagant childrens birthdays a lot too
I really think there is so much variance to how people live. Looking at some of the Epstein emails I'm floored by the behavior. It really seems like middle schoolers. And the racist chats that came out from the Young Republican group earlier this year -- I can't imagine ever being a part of a chat group like that. I would literally think I was being pranked or they were genuinely crazy racists, but they were actual early leaders of one of our two major political parties.
The thing that perplexes me is that these people aren't in poverty or victims of some violent trauma. They are among the elites of the country -- and yet this is still how they behave -- are these people a niche group or am I?
Unfortunately, the racist worldview on display in those chats is extremely widespread- and you are in a uniquely small privileged group if you’re neither on the receiving or delivering end.
A lot of middle class and wealthy people are victims of trauma. If you grow up in a house with violently racist and hateful authoritarian parents you will be deeply traumatized, and likely end up just like your parents. Wealth does not protect people from emotional trauma.
Most people are followers whose belief systems are spoon fed to them by the largest village willing to accept them. Understanding cult psychology and the agendas of the people driving the bus is typically enough to understand their worldviews and subsequent behavior. That’s just my gut read on it..
It opens up the possibility but hardly confirms it. I would be happy to see some convincing evidence to the contrary though. He seems more like a plain old con man and pervert to me, Occam's razor.
A thing to remember is that Chamath Palihapitiya is a billionaire but spends his time on Twitter trying to convince people he has a big dick[0].
> i'll bet your entire net worth x 10. the anaconda is the worst kept secret of silicon valley...
I think the truth is probably that insecurity does not prevent success. Some argue that it might be the source of it. But probably the truth is there are secure billionaires and insecure billionaires and the latter are very obviously insecure because despite their success they do things like this.
- Epstein connecting Summers with other important people
- Dishing on Trump and his inner circle
Given there were many more prominently featured people with more dirt in here, I wonder if Summers is worried there's a lot more that's about to be revealed.
Epstein seemed to be a power broker and a political fixer. If so, naturally many high-profile people would have interacted with him and even have confided in him. It does not mean everyone associated with him knew or participated in his criminal activities, right?
An example of one of the typical meetings Epstein was able to finagle with Summers:
> this week, thiel, summers,bill burns, gordon brown, jagland,
( council of europe and nobel chairman ). mongolia pres , hardeep puree ( india), boris ( gates). jabor ( qatar). sultan ( dubai, ), kosslyn ( harvard), leon black, woody. you are a welcome guest at any.....also if you
>think there are interesting people in town, everyone here for climate summit, clinton ,security
council, holy shit im on for next 30 minutes
Not sure where you are getting this from. He regularly connected people with each other. The sex trafficking was just a small part of his nefarious power network
Not to defend Epstein, of course, but just to comment on the power brokering side. My understanding is that a power broker gets power by staying close to the power and by connecting people. I don't understand why powerful people need such broker, even though history shows other wise.
I saw the email correspondence between him and Epstein. The sense that I got is he's pursuing some young girl half his age. And he actually thinks that she is attracted to him. Powerful, ugly men are so stupid sometimes.
Men who don't pursue women don't get laid. This is an extremely important gendered asymmetry in heterosexual dating. Most men aren't attractive to most women, and if you want to be successful at dating as a heterosexual man you have to have to display a certain amount of boldness in pursuing women. Maybe the girl in question really does find Larry Summers old and ugly and wants nothing to do with him, but in general men who assume this is the case and don't even try, or who heed the words of outsiders that it is stupid to think that a girl might be attracted to you, are putting themselves at a systematic disadvantage in dating.
Fully aware of the evolutionary forces that make men act stupid and think women more attractive than them want to jump their bones.
It doesn’t make it any less grotesque though. What I was really commenting on is the men in positions of power who think that that power is enough to get them laid. Nope. Turns out that women are attracted to... can you believe it? LOOKS!
But then you see them fumbling around like this doofus. He doesn't even know what the hell he’s doing. It’s sad.
That's a charitable take. It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship. Also the woman's dad is the founding president of some major Chinese bank (AIIB) that he was cozying up to.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
> "It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship"
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
Reading about the case, you get the sense that this is the general disposition from these abusers. They know what they're doing is wrong, and they understand the power imbalance, but they sort of excuse it and justify it by softly believing that the women actually want them. That they are actually sexy. And that they are helping the women, somehow.
It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
She was attracted to his power, which is why she spent time with him. Don't pretend she was an innocent protege. She was a nepo child playing the same game of stays climbing.
I cannot overstate the potential significance of what's going on in Congress currently and it has global implications.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sit at the nexus of an international pedophile ring that threatens to bring down many billionaires and even some governments. There is a concerted effort to prevent the release of this information and we're far from done yet.
A lot of effort was made by the administration to prevent the discharge petition reaching 218 signatures. For anyone unfamiliar with how the House of Representatives works, the majority party chooses the Speaker and the Speaker decides what bills get a vote. But if a majority of the 435 representatives (so 218) want the House to have a vote, there's a procedure called a discharge petition. If it gets 218 signatures, the Speaker has to schedule a vote within a week or so (I forget the exact time line).
The Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as basically putting the House in recess for 8+ weeks to avoid this happening. He avoided wearing in an Arizona congresswoman for that same period because she was going to be the 218th signature. The government was literally suspended to avoid this outcome.
Then the Speaker changed tactics to try to pass the bill with a procedure called "unaminous consent". Basically, if no House member objects, the bill passes. Why would he do this? To avoid having votes on the record. This was good politics to force a role call.
The Speaker continues to play defense here because carve outs were added to the bill to exempt files for "national security" reasons and anything under active investigation. That's brazen obstruction and the least surprising thing is that the president announced an investigation this week. It's explicitly to prevent the release of some evidence. Make no mistake.
It's not unique to this administration either. the previous administration sat on all of this for 4 years doing absolutely nothing.
Where doe sthis lead? Foreign governments and intelligence agencies who were not only aware of what was going on but they (allegedly) actively benefit from and participated in this trafficking ring to get access to and/or blackmail powerful people. That's the "national security" interest.
As many of us are aware by now, Ghislaine Maxwell's father was the British media mogul Robert Maxwell who was a Mossad asset and got a state funeral in israel for his contributions to the state of Israel going back to suplying militia wth weapons in World War Two that were ultimately used for ethnic cleasning. And how did Maxwell die? He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
If this stuff gets out, many heads will roll in government, in business and in prestigious colleges. Look no further than one Alan Dershowitz. Harvard in particular has unclean hands and is elbow deep in all of this. And certainly whatever you do don't look into how Kimble Musk met one of his "girlfriends".
The likely most damning/embaressing thing that has led to Summers resignations -- being a powerful 65-year-old man trying to pressure a 37-year-old mentee into having sex/relationship with you -- is considered (by me too) icky and unethical and an abuse of power, undoubtedly a violation of many ethics codes and depending on how it's done possibly some laws -- but is not actually anything to do with pedophilia or child abuse at all.
i know we like expanding the categories of all sins and then only refering to things by category name without the specifics, but.
>He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
Maxwell had been stealing from his worker's pension fund and it was all starting to come out. It is plausible that he killed himself to avoid the consequences. He was a monster.
Alternatively, there is no justice, and even the truth is lost to partisan politics. I have a strange feeling this benefits foreign intelligence, not harms it. Mossad, for example, knows who slipped through the cracks. Knows how much worse the "truth" is beyond the code names and vague emails. Now they have more power, not less.
This kind of thing can only exist in a climate of apathy and nihilism. The powerful want you to think the situation is hopeless and nothing will change. But remember this: at no point in history has a steady state been maintained for significant periods of time. Ever.
We are at a dangerous point in history. I personally believe that inequality is inevitably going to end in violence and we're beyuond the point of avoiding this with electoral politics. People are struggling to eat and survive at a time where we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. This simply can't continue.
I'm personally for outing wealthy and powerful pedophiles who are meaningfully making all of our lives worse to accrue completely unnecessary extra wealth.
I meant that this event, like many events in American history, will be remembered through the lens of the party in power. At least for a long time. Only now are we beginning to understand Vietnam and Watergate, for example. I suspect the truth about Epstein will never come out, but what will come out will be made partisan by those releasing it, now or in the future.
They already bought off Ghislaine Maxwell by moving her to minimum security prison with unearned privileges, so she won’t spill what she knows about people in current administration. Not sure why you seem optimistic, she is possibly the most informed person left alive and she’s gotten kid glove treatment from Trump.
There was nothing particularly suspicious about Maxwell's death. The music was up, the noose was tightening around him, and he was about to start eating shit for the consequences of his fraud.
The people he robbed in that fraud were regular Joes who were cheated out of their pensions, not some kind of shadow-government-global-conspiracy types who have the means to remote-program your toaster to kill you.
Him killing himself is not the most surprising way out of that situation.
It's not only that he (allegedly) killed himself. It's the manner in which it happened.
First, extremely wealthy people are by and large sociopaths. It's how they get rich. They will never view themselves as responsible or deserving or prosecution. Many are so rich they never consider getting prosecuted a realistic possibility. They will use various legal means to hide assets from being reclaimed by victims. Alan Bond, an Australian entrepreneur, also raided pension funds (which he ultimately went to jail for) but he mysteriously got divorced from his wife (who got a large property settlement) before it all went south and he stayed on good terms with her even after the divorce. Weird, huh?
Second, it's weird that nobody on his yacht noticed he was gone. For hours. That... just doesn't make sense if you know how luxury yachts work. The principal or the owner will dictate the entire schedule of the boat. If they get up at 6am, staff will get up at 5am to make sure their needs are being met. Beverages, breakfast, whatever. At all times the bridge will be manned (ie have someone on watch) who will be looking out for hazards but also at cameras on the boat. They are on alert for things like a fire breaking out or a VIP being up so they can alert other staff.
So could he have slipped through that net to throw himself overboard? Sure, it's possible. It's not icnredibly likely however. Also, is that how a rich and powerful man who was once an arms dealer commits suicide? Again, it's possible but it doesn't seem like the most likely method.
Lastly, if you're going to kill somebody but don't want it to be seen as a murder, this tops the list of how you'd do it. Why? Because, being in the water is going to wash away evidence and there are multiple ways of inducing a heart attack that are essentially undetectable (eg potassium overdose). And the delay in the body being found will likely get rid of any potential evidence there too.
Careful you don't go full Qanon on this one. If anything the fact this thing passed is an indication that there's very little unexploded ordnance left in the unredacted files. Though of course i will reserve my judgement.
The irony here is that the QAnon people were right, just not in the way they thought they were. There's no child trafficking pizzeria where Democrats were using "cp" to mean, well, something that isn't "cheese pizza". That's all crazy.
I also don't believe Epstein was murdered. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there's no such evidence of the murder claims. More to the point, the onus is on people making such claims to provide the evidence, not everyone else to disprove it.
But Robert Maxwell's history is well-documented and verifiable. And there's so much evidence that Epstein was mysteriously well-connected. The jobs he got. A match teacher at a prestigious school without a college degree. Power of attorney over Leslie Wexner's assets. The access he had to the wealthy, world leaders and academics. The fact that nobody really knows how he made his money. He's been dubbed a financier but this just isn't documented. There are thousands of bank accounts that haven't been scrutinized for where money was going and why.
And of course Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking people to... absolutely no one. Nobody has been named let alone charged. Her conditions on jail aren't appropriate for someone with her charges. She has a bunch of privileges in a Club Fed prison she shouldn't be in. The president fired the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York so only his former personal lawyers met with Maxwell for a proffer session.
And of course the connections to intelligence agencies and certain governments is both entirely believable and it fits a ton of evidence. There are credible claims why this is why he got the most lenient sweetheart plea agreement in 2006 despite Palm Beach police having the testimony of dozens of underage victims.
Why? He was one of the most prominent economists of his era. This is in the news because it's newsworthy, not because he's been radioactive this whole time.
Why not? He was a part of a pretty radioactive network of people. I doubt that he just happened to hang with Epstein by mere coincidence, and it does raise some questions about how much Sheryl knew about it.
I think it's very silly to suggest that Sandberg would have known anything at all about Summers personal life a decade before he had dealings with Epstein, simply because he was an undergraduate adviser to her. He was already one of the most famous economists in the country in the late 1980s, when that happened.
He is a economist who served as the Secretary of Treasury, as the president of Harvard University, and as director of the National Economic Council. Seems like he would be able to give them some good advice.
Pretty helpful person to have on your board if you are aiming (as Sarah Friar, OpenAI CFO, mentioned) to get the government to guarantee $100B - $1T in infrastructure loans.
He was terrible at 2 out of three of those jobs. He ruined many people's lives. He was corrupt as hell. He shouldn't be welcome in polite society.. well I guess Epstein's inner circle isn't exactly polite society.
I was referring to his stints as treasury secretary and on the NEC, during which he championed a worldview that saw economics as being science, with immutable laws, that inevitably led to policy outcomes that caused the explosion in income inequality that we've seen since 2008 especially. The U.S. would be in a better place if he was never in the Obama or Clinton admins.
But now that I think about it, the email leaks show that he was sexually harassing women while he was at Harvard too. So he was terrible at all three jobs.
In general he was not a fan of regulating banks, although he walked back some of his beliefs after 2008. Although iirc he still supports combining investment and commercial banks. Various shenanigans involving privatization of Russian industry. Pushing for tax cuts at the expense of infrastructure spending. He didn't like that the US capped exec pay at banks that received bailouts (banks that gave him millions in speaking fees, which seems a lil bit sketch)
All of them lol. Summers pushed aggressively for the free trade agreements (including allowing China into the WTO) that, in practice, shuttered American manufacturing, he pushed for cuts to capital gains tax, he lobbied aggressively against regulating derivatives and in favor of repealing glass-stegall, both of which directly led to the 2008 crisis, and then after the crisis he caused, he architected a recovery package that prioritized bailing out banks (but not enough to dig the economy out of recession quickly). He's one of the most damaging American figures of all time, he basically got us Trump if you ask me.
Two of the committee resigned in protest, Kissinger almost turned it down because it was also being awarded to Lê Đức Thọ, Lê Đức Thọ actually turned it down because the peace it was supposed to be about hadn't happened yet, Kissinger accepted in absentia as he did not want to be targeted by anti-war protestors when getting the peace prize, then he later tried to return it only for the committee to say no.
> It's one of the few Trump grievant that is legitimate.
Hardly. What does it have to do with Trump? The only reason it's a "grievance" is that Trump feels he should get the prize. While he supports a genocidal nation and tries to start wars.
They gave Arafat the prize as well. Basically for promising to stop murdering jews. A promise he reneged upon almost immediately to be clear. But of course the bar had already been set impossibly low by awarding the prize in chemistry to Fritz Haber, the guy who literally invented chemical warfare. At least to Kissingers credit he did try quite hard to make peace and sometimes succeeded.
Then they give the prize to guys who don't deserve it like Obama and overlook Trump, who even his biggest haters cannot claim hasn't done a lot of war ending over 2 terms.
Haber invented the process for artificially creating ammonia. Since ammonia is a critical fertilizer, this invention has fed billions of people. On the other hand, it’s also critical for the manufacture of explosives. His work on chemical weapons was practically irrelevant by comparison. This was an astounding feat of chemistry, and well worth rewarding.
But fundamentally I don’t think we should make moral judgements over things like chemistry. A chemical process to create ammonia is a tool, and tools can always be used for good or evil. Even explosives are just tools that can be used for good or evil. Sometimes those explosives are even the same substance that is used for fertilizer. The morality of the use of the tool is provided by the user of the tool, not the creator of the tool.
We can celebrate the people who make the tools while saving our condemnation for the people who use tools for evil.
I agree about the Peace prize though, that one’s generally worthless.
John Carreyrou's book "Bad blood" is extremely good. Full of suspense, amazing revelations. I highly recommend it. It explores a lot of Elizabeth Holmes' and Sunny Balwani's insanity.
I have loathed Larry Summers since the repeal of Glass-Steagall. He has consistently treated the American public like he treats women in the Epstein emails. So glad he's finally getting his comeuppance.
He was working at the Center for American Progress to ensure if the Democrats got back in power they would be committed to not fixing anything, fulfilling any promises, or doing anything beyond Clinton/Obama/Biden managed decline.
I hardly think a millionaire stepping away from his job is “comeuppance”.
Don’t forget Epstein’s circle of rapists and rapist-enablers still had friendly communication with him long after he was convicted and known pedophile.
I have doubts about officials’ ability to get real justice. I’ll still me shouting for blood in the streets, though.
Well, good to see Hahhvuhhhd is not above the British monarchy when it comes to eventually ejecting sex pests! A low bar to clear, but well done!
Now, just for certain ex-Brit colonies to follow their example! Quick... who can think of a popular leader who is, ehhhm, quite intricately linked to the same, ehh, gentleman with pretty specific tastes?
In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.
>We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Not that I wholly disagree, but in the interests of robust conversation, I feel compelled to ask:
"Cook controversially dines with Saudi Crown Prince at White House"
Now, I'm no Saudi Crown Prince stan, but would the word 'controversially' have been used if Cook dined with Biden - who funded and supported a genocide, in which hundreds of journalists were killed? Why was the word 'controversially' not used to refer to also being at the table with Trump there?
Yes, it's controversial that Cook had dinner with the Saudi Crown Prince. In my view it's even more controversial to be having dinner with Trump.
This is just the most recent headline I can give as an example. But there are many like this.
> In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
There's nothing that quite makes me feel like humanity has undergone speciation than the fact that this STILL HAS TO BE FUCKING SPELLED OUT FOR PEOPLE.
Hero worship is sycophancy of the highest order. Ugh, and I know you're so right.
And, to be less coy, how is the opposition party the one that treats Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman? It's somehow Epstein all the way down. Glad I'm a left-wing Chomskyite, cynical about all of those corrupt, elite institutions. Wait...
tl;dr: Because there were ongoing investigations (which was true) and it's generally considered bad to release your evidence before trial, or something like that, IANAL.
This will also be Trump's (false) reason for not releasing them.
IMO the most egregious reason is the July 2025 memo from DOJ/FBI saying there was nobody else to investigate, after months of public interest and official statements they were working on it. If they now flop back to claiming they can’t release because of investigations, then that’s unequivocally a false reason.
> Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman?
Huh? Bill Clinton has been a relatively invisible ex-president compared to the other modern ones (aka Carter & Obama, Biden hasn't been gone long enough for data).
Perhaps that's because he didn't want to overshadow Hillary, but it's at least partly because of the Lewinsky affair.
> "In other exchanges, Mr. Summers appeared to ask Mr. Epstein’s advice on how to pursue a romantic relationship"
That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the woman into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”"
I think it remarkable how the NYT buries (far down on the page), and CNBC omits altogether, the underlying story about what Larry Summers was actually doing. CNBC euphemizes the whole thing away to vapor (there were mails—the end). These aren't good expositions.
(Speaking of the NYT' coverage, there's a new revelation one of their reporters actually helped Epstein evade scrutiny—it's another bit from the recently-disclosed email tranches. Their reporter Landon Thomas secretly tipped off Epstein that one of his NYT coworkers was "digging around" into Epstein—even gave Epstein the guy's name).
> That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the undergraduate into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
What undergraduate? According to the link you provide, she graduated in 2004 and was the subject of discussion between Epstein and Summers in 2018.
Why is this on the front page of HN other than the mention of OpenAI? The article barely even mentions how this is related to OpenAI. What’s notable about this event other than this person is disliked by many?
It's newsworthy because he's a prominent economic leader who has been at the center of U.S. economic policy, elite academia, and global finance for decades. He's held almost every marquee job an economist can have, Treasury Secretary under Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council under Obama, Chief economist of world bank, president of Harvard, connected at IMF and an influential voice on inflation, interest rates, fiscal policy, and banking regulations. He's a trusted voice in the VC world, was on the board of Square, an advisor at A16z/Andreessen Horowitz and involved in crypto/blockchain as an advisor to one of the major crypto VCs.
If there's one big surprise in my adult life, as in, a thing I didn't expect when I was a kid, it was the seemingly pervasive extent of sexual exploitation done by powerful men, and the fact they they seem to all help each other in doing this.
I always thought that powerful guys got laid without really having to force anyone to sleep with them. You know, the stereotypical "be confident, look prosperous and healthy" and women will be attracted to you. The weird thing is, I think that actually does work! Even if you're not famous, having a few of those qualities has seemed to work for most guys I know.
So why are there so many famous guys who end up getting caught forcing themselves on multiple people? If you look at how few cases end up going to trial, there must be even more guys who are getting away with it. Not only that, the extent of the numbers. A guy like Weinstein must have been a full-time sex criminal. Constant, multiple times a day, like a busy salesman who meets clients three times a day. I don't want to make a joke of something so serious, but don't you get enough? Isn't it tiring and tedious?
The other side of this is the club. How can it be that they all seem to know each other? Most people tend to keep their sex lives private. If you're committing a crime, AND you're a public person, why would you find other people to do that with? It that part of the power trip?
I think the scarier thing is that this is actually happening in all walks of life, but it only gets widely publicised when it concerns rich, powerful or famous men.
The thing that surprised me most growing up was learning how inevitable sexual assault is for basically all women. I've never been close to any woman who couldn't tell me multiple stories of being harassed, assaulted or coerced.
In related news, Harvard is also launching its own investigation into its former president Summers: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/19/harvard-opens-...
I find it hard to believe that they’re only finding out now.
The thing to understand about Summers is that he is basically the guy that charted the course to where America is today.
Enormously influential, he provided the intellectual gravitas as well as the raw policymaking muscle for a version of the US economy that was financialized, globalized, and monopolized.
If you're broke in 2025, Larry Summers probably had something to do with it.
Anything that will knock this guy down many many pegs is worthwhile imo.
I don't think anybody knew the extent of relationships with Epstein that were revealed when 20k email messages were dumped onto the world.
I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.
Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.
All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.
I mean, there are other harward people making very similar consultations with Epstein. It seems to be more of "influencial harward people support each other" situation.
Plus, there are harward people who complained about these harward people for years and claim to not be surprised.
Better to be _seen_ to be doing something later, than to have it pointed out.
OMG the correspondence described there is disgusting: Summers seeking advice from Epstein on how to turn a mentoring relationship into a romantic one.
MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmat...
Nicholas Tartaglione
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2019/09/23/feds-how-n...
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
> It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide."
Nonsense. "...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0] "...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1] etc.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/us/politics/trump-epstein... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/trump-epstein...
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
not sure where you are looking but Rasmussen polls have been showing Trump hemorrhaging support since June among his base. if you visit X this is where many of them converse, and they are quite openly unhappy with the admin lately
I believe it has nothing to do with sexual offense and that the higher prices of goods is really affecting people.
So he's still immune the anything that's horrendous.
I think most people are talking to the core 30-40% of his voters see him as messianic that will go down with the titanic no matter what
guess you can believe what you want but data shows the Epstein topic has been damaging his base support
Some indicators suggest that, but we don't really know until the rubber meets the road.
The real test is how people vote. With this much confusion I think it is perfectly valid to take a few opinion polls with a grain of salt.
Much like how Dems rate their party poorly but still turn it against Trump, I'm not sure MAGA discontent with have any real impact on elections.
MAGA will follow Trump off a bridge. The America First collective pushed for this and many of them have given up on Trump.
This is what I expect as well, the cultish members will never see him for what he is no matter what happens. I've seen similar sentiment toward dictators in other countries as well, especially if you talk to the older civilians who really bought into the system, even years after the dictator was overthrown.
There has been a very public split between MTG and Trump in the past week or so over the Epstein issue. It has been causing a rift in the MAGA base for a while though, it seems to be coming to a head now though.
> Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was.
Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?
Isn’t NYT complicit and sat on a lot of Epstein files before the 2016 election.
Um..
Just throwing it out there, but forget Epstein, I'm sure most of us would not believe what NYT is sitting on in general. This is effectively a defacto global intelligence gathering service. I bet if we could read through a lot of that we'd all be gobsmacked and just stop believing in humanity altogether.
I understand most of what we haven't seen is uncorroborated, but it would still make for interesting reading if we didn't have to worry about falling down an elevator shaft onto some bullets.
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
This doesn't accord with experience. MAGA is notorious for rationalizing anything Trump says or does.
The uniparty is a rotten, spiraling race to the bottom.
Usually true, but the MAGA base was truly pushing this.
MAGA was pushing for it when they believed it was a liberal conspiracy, with the Clintons trafficking children and "harvesting their adrenochrome" (see Comet Pizza incident). Now MAGA luminaries are suggesting grown men abusing minors isn't that creepy if the victims are teenaged - so much for protecting the kids.
"Hypocrisy is okay if we do it, because they did it first!"
Only because Trump told them to push it first. His problem is that he changed his mind.
Then you're in a bubble.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you both are in a bubble.
They're just different bubbles.
Liberals and conservatives have methodically and deliberately avoided holding their leaders accountable for decades. The only people who can't see that, are, frankly, liberals and conservatives.
What we have now is an opportunity to sweep everyone from Trump on down out of office. Anyone who would work for Trump or Clinton should have their judgement questioned at a minimum. And they should pray we don't look any further into what they've been getting up to.
This is a golden opportunity to scrub the walls clean and put in new people en masse. But I'm not naive. I know the corruption of the incumbent power brokers and parties will undoubtedly win the day. You can bet your bottom dollar that conservatives and liberals are cooperating and they've got the courts, Homeland security, CIA, everything.. out cleaning up for them. I just wish they'd get what's coming to them for once.
The Dems have the progressive caucus primarying moderate candidates constantly. The GOP has Massey and Paul
> you both are in a bubble.
I did say the "uniparty", right? So on what basis do you make this claim?
In case you're not familiar with the term, it refers to both the Republicans and the Democrats, viewing them as effectively one party with two factions (with the former merely trailing behind the latter, typically).
In this particular case, MAGA is showing that it's okay with hypocrisy, because, hey, didn't Democrats rationalize Clinton's misdeeds and throw his victims under the bus for the sake of the party?
So, yes, the uniparty is rotten.
Thank you!
Cannot count the number of times people forget how powerful algorithmic bubble making is. It isnt a “you are in a bubble so ur dumb” it is more of, “all of our information is algorithmically fed to us be aware!”
To add to this, I have a friend who has two kids. One is lefty trans and the other is becoming a christian conservative. They are Indian zoomers. Two totally different algorithms at work. One got the Charlie and the other got Hassan. Really makes one wonder what is in your own information feed.
The one-time head of the most elite academic institution as well as the US Treasury is an insecure 12 year old boy at heart. Summers clearly saw Epstein as aspirational for his "success" with "women". But this isn't really new information about him. In 2005 he went in front of an audience including top women scientists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and essentially said the lack of women at the top of science was mostly about their lack of innate aptitude, not discrimination [1] (he gave multiple alternate "theories" but it was clear which one he actually believed). People immediately saw that for what it was: a powerful guy projecting his own hang-ups about women. That he's maintained his status over the last 20 years does not speak well of the US's most prestigious institutions.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript...
A nice list of Summers' many crimes from over 10 years ago:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/why-larry-summers-sh...
Let's not forget this gem in a memo from Summers:
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
Thank you for that tldr. Wow
What laws were broken here?
Parent post is being metaphorical. In this case you can read 'many crimes' as 'many incredibly, unbelievably stupid decisions'. Hope that helps
No, the parent comment is just false and possibly libelous. Hope that helps.
Any former resident of Soviet Union thinks Larry Summers is huge crime
Sounds more like incompetence.
The big question here is are they involved with Epstein because they are in power, or did they get power because they had Epstein pull in favors for them. From the emails he seems like the big spider in a spider web. Both parties and so many people in power referred to him for critical problems, pulling strings in critical places (Bannon on behalf of Trump was getting his advice on how to discredit Kavanaugh opponents and Epstein obliged with medical information on one of the opponents to bring up at a hearing). Beyond Clinton, Obama’s attorney is mentioned a bunch as well. I’m sure the democrats had plenty of favors in too.
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
It is reassuring that I am not the only one that sees this. These emails reveal a much bigger conspiracy than just the sex trafficking- that was just an in house blackmail material generator for him that he was using to control powerful people around the world. The emails also suggest he was selling blackmail material on US politicians to foreign adversaries.
I mean that's the point -- blackmail powerful and influential people to do his bidding.
That his madam (Ghislane) was the daughter of the guy who got Israel nukes and had some deeeeep ties to the Mossad is no surprise. FWIW said guy also had ties to UK Intelligence and the KGB, and he died mysteriously on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
Remember when it used to be a conspiracy theory to say that the elites and politicians were all part of one big Eyes Wide Shut cult?
And now all their only remaining defense is "our masks don't even look like that."
Let's not forget that time he advocated for dumping toxic waste in poor countries.
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.
> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.
Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
I read the memo. Maybe just me, but I don't see any indication that it was tongue in cheek.
I burst out laughing when I read the following excerpts, one after the other:
> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.
> ...
> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.
If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
I appreciate that I'm not the only person here seeing this and I think the last part of your comment is what some people are missing here. He can be a misogynist pedophile and still make funny jokes sometimes and it's weirdly reductive to pretend otherwise.
I thought his emails to Esptein asking for dating advice about how to "get horizontal" with the "yellow peril" were particularly cringe. “Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor” ... poor guy!
https://archive.ph/hSc5Z
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
Probably, I don't make a habit of reading this kind of thing. In any case I'm not sure what this has to do with the rest of the thread.
You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
> You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
Yes, it would in that context make sense as something akin to A Modest Proposal, but directed at the World Bank's liberalization policies.
The problem, of course, is that Summers was not an opponent of the World Bank's liberalization policies, he was the chief economist of the World Bank, and a supporter of those policies, and actively seeking stronger support for them, so it doesn't work that way coming from him.
That’s what he claimed it is, but I don’t buy it. I’m a big fan of satire and deadpan humor, and that’s just not what this is- the tone is serious, and he put a lot of thought in how to argue the point. Monsters exist, and this guy is one.
If you project the other things you know about this guy to color everything he did, sure. Reading it made the tone obvious, well before I got to his defense in the wiki article. The memo on its own is painfully obviously a joke but I'm really not surprised that the audience of HN has difficulty interpreting tone.
The consistent mistake people did last years, including those on HN was to pretend to themselves that odious people are "just joking" and "totally not serious". Again and again. Starting with 4chan and 8chan that were just a trolls and no one was ever nazi, until nazi became normalized, the top government and leadership of a major party.
No one was sexist ever, they were just joking and all feminists were stupid not understanding that, until their quite sexist messages got released by inside a pack of messages to known abuser. This is literally the case of Larry Summers.
And you want to play that game again, with literally the same person. Of course no one believes it, it is not being sophisticated, you are asking people to pretend they are stupid. Nothing in Summers career suggests he would sarcastic out of care for Africa or environment. That is not what his work was, at all.
We disagree about the tone, but that aside- a person capable of writing this essay as a dry satire would need to possess a level of empathy and introspection that the rest of his life personally and professionally demonstrates that he does not. He’s not Voltaire or Johnathan Swift, he’s just a sociopath that tried to play it off as a joke when he got in trouble.
I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.
> would need
I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.
Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.
> but I don’t buy it
You don’t need to. The target audience was people to whom that’s obvious in the first few lines and then who keep reading to see how far he can take it with a straight face.
Yes, he was “joking”- he is what the Internet calls a “Schrödinger's dbag,” it was only a joke if people don’t agree, but if they do it’s what he really believes- a cowardly way of communicating. In the context of his career, his actual beliefs are along the lines of the essay.
Summers very often does this sort of earnest "kidding on the square" and he's quite proud of it, which was revealed extensively in the Epstein emails. Summers earnestly believes that the villain has very good reasons to tear down the orphanage, and will defend them in whatever way he can in polite society.
I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.
If it had been tongue in cheek or satire, that would suggest he also had enough capacity for introspection and empathy to see what is wrong with it. Looking at both his career and personal life suggests that he does not.
I mean this is presumably why it wasn't a publicly published memo or policy recommendation. If structural adjustment and economy management is part your job, you might have some steam to let off about it in private, and plenty of draft ideas and documents that need refinement. It does become a mistake when it's made public, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a joke originally.
Stiglitz is a worthless clown who was actually dumb enough to think Venezuela had good economic policy.
What’s the joke?
See elsewhere where I've quoted parts of it in this thread but if you read "Actually, I don't think Africa is polluted enough!" and take the person saying it seriously instead of reading it as a joke, then you might need to touch grass.
I think you missed the joke. The thing that was funny about it to him when he said it was he knew it was a natural extension of his public position, yes an extreme version of it, but he knew it was also true and’s logical and it was funny to get away with saying it behind closed doors. An honest person would recognized the truth behind the joke and change the position that it stemmed from because they cared about making the world better. The fact that he recognized he was making the world worse AND continued in that path is what is so blatantly evil and revealing about this memo.
If Kevin Spacey had written a private note to Woody Allen that said, "Now that we've been chased out of the film industry, let's become day care workers," then it would be a very different kind of "joke" than The Onion writing the same as a headline.
And yet that's exactly what he and his ilk have been doing ever since western countries began to demand workers' rights and environmental protections.
I know it's boring but I always want sources to go with stuff like this. What did he do?
Chief Economist of the World Bank and top level bureaucrat in the Clinton administration? He and his buddies were tip of the spear doing an end-run around hard-won labor, environment, and human rights laws and permitting corporations to outsource their poisoning and exploitation. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-clintons-true-legacy_b_1...
Just because he claimed to have been sarcastic about something, doesn't mean he is not also guilty of it.
It was tongue-in-cheek, but the cheek belonged to an underaged girl.
And instead this will go unappreciated for how gruesome it is if we're meant to take any of the above accusations seriously, but hey - he's been here for at least 11 years, one of ours, right?
He was literally part of a ring of rich and powerful pedophiles who trafficked underage women.
Evil people can make jokes too, and mimicking the formal tone of an official document is a bit as old as time.
Does the following sounds like a joke to you? I mean, does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?
And if it's a joke, what is the punchline?
> does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?
> what is the punchline?
It's akin to saying "This establishment's high Google/Yelp ratings indicate it's leaving money on the table. There's clearly room to raise prices, cut costs, and really degrade the customer experience."
I don't know if Summers is telling the truth about his intent. But as far as jokes go, it's decent.
The whole thing is the punchline. If you're missing something, read strken's response elsewhere in this thread, because he put it in a better way than I have anywhere else here - none of it is serious, and if you read it seriously, you are the other punchline:
> argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated.
It's not a joke. He didn't even say it was a joke. He said (as quoted on the Wikipedia page for the memo!) that it was “a comment on a research paper that was being prepared by part of my staff at the World Bank” and that it “sought to clarify the strict economic logic by using some rather inflammatory language”.
The closest it gets to being a joke is that it is mockery and derision directed at underlings as a form of feedback on work product.
It seems dead serious to me, and is consistent with everything else we know about him.
> Does the following sounds like a joke to you?
Yes. See also:
“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
I'm not really in a charitable mood with this guy right now.
I’m with you. Stuff that seems cartoonish to regular people does often seem to be serious from him.
> Does often seem to be serious
Kind of what I mean. I hadn't heard of this guy before today, and this memo openly laments that it's challenging to bring Africa into the world pollution economy because moving solid waste there is a logistical challenge. If this memo was about how cool it is to traffic and rape children, as some people in this thread and a few others today seem to be interpreting it, I'd probably be less inclined to lend it the benefit of this tone, but I'm just not sold on the premise that someone who is demonstrably evil in some dimension is incapable of making honestly benign bureaucratic jokes in a presumably private context. It kind of knocks the legs out of genuine criticism if the dude can't chew bubblegum without taking flack.
I don't think it requires being charitable to acknowledge nuance.
"I know I'm wrong, but still I have to double down on this to save face"
That wasn't the implication.
It's certainly a possibility but I also wouldn't put it past him to advocate for something that evil.
Sure but in the most polite way, that's almost saying nothing at all. I just think it kneecaps any real criticism and real issues associated with this guy to go "okay that might be a joke, but it probably isn't because <legitimate evil reason>". Though I guess it encroaches on the definition of what a joke is and if it's defined by intent. If he meant it as one, but nobody took it as one, is it?
My brother in Christ, you keep tumbling yourself to see nuance where there is none. The guy is a piece of shit. Why such magnanimous effort? I suggest you take some time off.
I've mostly repeated the same perspective to people on this thread who would rather virtue signal than read what I've already written, and what I'm saying is not hard to wrap your head around unless you're the type of person to believe in caricatures as I've described above. I think they may need some time off from news, the internet, etc, if anyone.
Wow. That text is wild! Another excerpt:
Being familiar with economist jargon, this looks like a joke.
The joke is that it looks like a joke but isn’t in the same way a sociopath will explain in detail exactly how they’re going to fuck you before they do knowing you won’t believe them because it’s all a joke in a joke that isn’t real.
So it's okay for people who have the power and connections to actually impact the world in the horrible ways they're "joking"about to make jokes about doing just that?
I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.
That's the great thing about "invention", there are other ways to 0 pollution besides historic ones.
Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire.
Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
Electrifying the economy is not a path to 0 pollution.
Electrification is a necessary but not sufficient step to zero pollution.
Necessary, because using any other way to cook is polluting, and no matter what else you eliminate you can't eliminate cooking. (And good luck convincing everyone to not live where heating is needed).
Even wood fires for cooking is a way to get all the lung damage of heavy smoking for all the same reasons, just without the nicotine addiction.
Not sufficient, because while renewables can be made in non-polluting ways, those might not be the cheapest, and people vote with their wallets.
That, plus all the chemical processes that just pollute directly, like cement and steel currently do.
A good many people I know and have known for 60+ years would, do, and yearn for civilisation as you know it to back the f off and get its foot from their neck.
Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport.
Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
They have not lived without society not using u those things though, unless they live in Siberia or something.
Contrary to your thoughts on the matter the Pintupi Nine and their relatives the Richter family spring to mind as the most extreme examples.
Both groups from my neck of the woods, both groups I've spoken to, both groups with significant time spent sans modern society. Both groups with members that turned back to isolation and non western lifestyle after a few years exposure.
Many more similar people have been exposed to society with electricty, phones, etc and happy to live as far apart from that as they can still manage - it's hard to escape such things - Starlink has polluted the skys once untouched in the Murchison.
Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.
And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
"Bad" people can still have good ideas or well-thought arguments. It happens often enough to have become became a clichéd meme.
https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
No sympathy for Larry here! Just the point that development is going to coincide with some level of increased pollution. Even an electrified economy with 0 carbon emissions is going to be ecologically devastating after all the mountain top removal mining has gathered the materials to make it possible.
> Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.
> And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
The /s was supposed to be implied.
And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.
Jonathan Swift was a writer and known satirist with publicly known views that were opposite to the absurdist views expressed in his famous satire.
> And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.
If you're going to engage in satire, its best the satire be obvious.
I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically.
Also known as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
> there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically
And Summers himself is one of them- he spent most of his career making things analogous to that essay actually happen
Sorry, did you mean "Summers unironically wrote" or "capitalist economist types unironically believe" ?
Or, for that matter, "I unironically believe"? ;)
From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."
The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.
> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
This is dumber than "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke.
He also famously gave a speech declaring that one of the reasons women were underrepresented in science and engineering faculty positions was "issues of intrinsic aptitude". - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/science-jan-june05-summ...
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.
I remember hearing about the variance thing ages ago. Back when I was young enough and naïve enough to trust statements said in official voices without critically assessing them.
With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
I'm not touching the variability thing with a 10 foot pole except to say that the further out on each extreme of the IQ "scale" you go the less reliable the scores are. The whole idea of using IQ as a ranking of ability rather than a diagnostic tools is bogus. I do think it's clear now though that Summers was simply being a misogynist (you lose the presumption of good faith when you disclose that you'd been lying all along.)
Oh indeed, on all counts. I'd just like to know if it was purely his own BS, or the reproducibility crisis.
(I don't know why I'd like to know, thinking about it at a meta level…)
I remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking.
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
Surely he could not possibly be sexist, nah.
That memo redefines himself as toxic waste.
To me that memo is pretty clearly a sacarstic version of reductio ad absurdum.
There's an interesting list of criticisms about Larry Summers here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15320922
Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?
It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
Telling people in power what they want to hear.
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
> how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
so... this might be the pattern.
>It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
Someone (maybe Charlie Munger) said that the presence of a woman he has lust for reduces a man's IQ by 20 points.
Seems anecdotally true.
The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I think ladder climbing is its own skill only loosely correlated with intelligence.
> Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?
"Funnily", if you read Epstein's contributions to a lot of his emails, he also gives off that same vibe.
Don't get me started on Trump
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
I know we're never going to fix this problem, but it's depressing how we seem to have made zero or negative progress on it.
I wouldn't say we've made zero progress. There are always ups and downs, temporary wins and losses, but I think that over the long term, there's more skepticism and scrutiny now than in the past.
I think this is a side effect of having "paid law enforcement", it's not that the cops are bad, but their bosses are. The people who fund the law enforcement are ultimately at the mercy of the "rich and powerful" in some way or another, so basically people of a certain status get a pass.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
It used to be that any citizen could approach a grand jury and allege a crime. The purpose of the grand jury was to decide if tax dollars should be spent to hire a prosecutor for that (single) case.
"Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case.
It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into.
Why pays cops and orders then to pick fights with innocent people
What do you mean? I assumed he was cozied up to by the likes of Epstein because he had already ascended the ladder.
I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things.
According to wikipedia:
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...
> As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance.
(Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.)
On what basis do you say that Epstein was pretty talented at finance? This guy was a math teacher with no actual degree. The only reason he got his gig in finance was by schmoozing up the dad of one of his students, who was CEO of Bear Stearns.
The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now).
Reminds me of the pictures[1] of Stephen Hawking on Epsten's island. Depressing stuff.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking/113...
They know they above the law from the minute that reach a certain level of status, they don't care about the emails and if people see them, they know there will be next to zero repercussions for them.
He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated.
He just supported the status quo. Look how much money he lost during the 2008 crisis.
Summers is just weather vane for current economic thinking. He's not a particularly brilliant at anything.
When has he been right about economics?
Sounds like you might have bought into some baseless PR.
"Winklevoss twins are assholes [but I have nothing substantive to say against their claim of product theft]" - LS
It’s interesting that only now he is stepping back now that he’s been found out. It demonstrates that it’s not about ethics or morals, but about publicity and damage control.
it's the good old eleventh commandment, "thou shalt not get caught"
How do we know that whoever asked him to step down already privately knew?
most of what we know today we knew years ago, too
The tax paying class of the world just have to watch all this horseshit go on, watch the institutions and the law enforcement agencies protect these people with our hard earned money, meanwhile if we break a single law, there are consequences for us, sometimes massive.
It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
It's a big club, and we ain't in it.
(I know you're referencing Carlin, but) a big club it is not. You might even say it's just the "top 1%" or even less.
Top 0.1% is still a VERY big club, just in the US > 300.000.
This is the 0.1% of the 0.1%
By most metrics, it's almost always been worse. But that doesn't make the modern era suck any less.
And would most of those metrics you allude to happen to have been brought to us by institutions like Harvard, or the US Treasury Department?
Taking a longer view of history...
One metric of change would be that statutory (underage) rape wasn't a crime anywhere 200 years ago. In some countries, it still isn't. Mass rape and kidnapping is going on right now from Nigeria to Sudan. Wealthy old men can still marry 12 year olds across much of the Middle East. The fact that sex with minors has become relegated to something like a luxury designer drug for the elite hypocrites in the US and UK, and the fact that they're now being exposed for it, is in many ways an unexpected victory for humanity. The previous 5k years of recorded history, and probably the whole million years before that, were wall to wall with war, slavery and raping children. As well as the elites having such rights as prima nocta and simply executing anyone they wished. So I think we are making progress.
I'm talking about disease prevention, maternal mortality, infant mortality, access to clean water, anesthetic(!!) and access to things like reading glasses and hearing aids and oh, I don't know, refrigeration.
What does your precious Harvard and US Treasury Department have to say about that?
I think the topic though was corrupt abuses of power, lack of justice or accountability for the wealthy—those kinds of things.
Brought to you by Steven Pinker, another one of Epstein's associates.
Not according to the metrics proposed by Graeber & Wengrow in the last chapter of Dawn of Everything
> The three freedoms that most of our ancestors enjoyed, but which most modern humans lack are:
> The freedom to leave.
> The freedom to disobey an order.
> The freedom to create new ways of relating to one another.
https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/the-three-fundamental-hu...
Eh, there's a tremendous amount of projecting a particular modern viewpoint onto the past in that work. It's a bit nonsense.
Admittedly, I only read a brief review of the book, but it was suggesting the opposite.
And example: we tend to inject too much of our modern viewpoint onto the old monarchies—that Henry VIII would not have thought himself ruler of the "state" of England although we talk about him in that regard from our modern perspective.
Yeah I agree with that. And I'd argue that it is still the same nowadays. People at the top probably knows clearly which interest group they are in, and which group they can rally up, and which ones they need to fight to the death -- even if they all belong to the same nationality -- and I'm not surprised if local interest groups ally with "foreign" interest groups to fight another local interest group. It is blurred.
That book is "rethinking" history but that rethinking curiously fits extremely well with a particular modern narrative. Some people eat it up. But separate a few decades in the future and it will seem like an extremely fad-driven interpretation of things.
The book makes a point of how historical analysis was already fit extremely well into particular contemporary fad narratives of the time. It does as much deconstruction of that (and of the idea that those contemporary fads were timeless elements of human nature) as it does construction of new ones. The former is a very interesting part of the book you’re not addressing. I don't know what you add to this conversation with such breezy dismissal...
"The big thieves hang the little thieves"
> It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
> It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
This category of malcontent (about out-of-touch elites engaging in all sorts of depraved perversions while the poor starved) at Versailles eventually caused most of the former to lose their heads during the French Revolution.
The smart ones know that they need to keep up appearances, the dumb ones behave like they will never face consequences.
The smart ones are building bunkers to escape the hell that the US will become when the civil war actually starts. They're not hoping to survive the apocalypse, they're just hoping to ride out the 20 or 30 years of war and return as actual Lords for the serfs that are left after we kill each other.
Yes I know of someone who willingly gave up their US citizenship for tax reasons but has EU, Israeli, and a bunch of other citizenships. They get to live a good life in the Netherlands + traveling the world while the US tears itself apart and then when it is time to retire in 30-40 years, the country will be ripe of the picking..they will buy their citizenship back through one of the multiple buy your way into the US visa programs...and retire in Montana.
And the US never revolted against our domestic aristocracy, as they never revolted against our clergy.
Wonder how it would have turned out if the French revolution happened before the American Revolution? What could we have learned from them?
I understand you want to highlight this, but you don’t have to begin your sentence with "It's interesting that..." because this is not interesting or novel in the slightest.
You are entitled to your opinion and they theirs.
I assume that someone begining a sentence that way is implying "It is interesting to me that…" and I cut them some slack.
It's interesting to me because how the hell did he think this was going to end? "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work in the court of public opinion. So, if one was even peripherally associated with Epstein, it would seem like that would be a hell of a liability.
On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?
This guy Epstein modus operandi of cozying up and becoming wingman to powerful people confirms that he was some kind of spy. But it's still weird to see a well known professor of 61 years texting about gurlz to his middle aged wingman. Who does that and is this really what millionaires do, reliving high school?
Money and power have been seen as corrupting influences since the dawn of humanity.
Those who seek those things -- money for money's sake, power for power's sake -- often tend to see their success as somehow making them "above" others. They derive perverse pleasure in seeing just how much they can flaunt society's rules. 'The rules don't apply to me' is like a drug in itself.
I think it depends on how they got rich. From the outside to me it looks like the ones who sacrifice their 20's to the grind and getting rich never get that shit out of their system like the rest of us do and end up as emotionally stunted adults trying to recapture their lost youth.
What the actual fuck logic is this?
I grinded fairly well enough in my 20s, just as many other people I know who did. We're much better off than 99.99% of the world. That doesn't make us think of sexually abusing children and adolescents one bit because we need to "flush that shit out of our system" and "recapture our lost youth". I have better ways of recapturing my lost youth, by computer games, more time for hobbies and fucking closer to my age like rabbits.
PS:- being in the upper echelon does mean you have a somewhat easier access to the circles that engage in these vile activities, and yes you'll be completely excluded if you say no to them. Many are okay with that, while those who aren't are the ones in the files.
I read that as being more a claim about the "professor of 61 years texting about gurlz to his middle aged wingman" rather than how old the girls were.
there is a perverse logic to it
people who miss out on life experiences often try to overcompensate them or live vicariously, or never find out how to do it naturally. people who have much leisure time in college and 20s come to understand their demons, discover their true character... as opposed to silitron vale or wall st types
guy who never made football team bullies his kid into football
guy who never dated in his 20s makes tonnes of money by working 100 hours a week and in 30s fumbles into bad relationships created from status flexing with no depth, never experienced adolescent loves with womans his own age
woman who grew up poor gorges herself on mcdonalds binge once a month due to repressed trauma of always missing out on mcd as a child
you see this with extravagant childrens birthdays a lot too
I mean, that is made up psychology, not even a real one.
> guy who never made football team bullies his kid into football
That is much less of a think you are making it to be. A guy who values football, was good at it is significantly more likely to force kids into football.
> guy who never dated in his 20s makes tonnes of money by working 100 hours a week and in 30s fumbles into bad relationships created from status flexing with no depth, never experienced adolescent loves with womans his own age
You made up that guy!
> woman who grew up poor gorges herself on mcdonalds binge once a month due to repressed trauma of always missing out on mcd as a child
Not a thing either.
> you see this with extravagant childrens birthdays a lot too
Those are status competition among adults.
He was killed in maximum security custody, so an Intel operation.
I really think there is so much variance to how people live. Looking at some of the Epstein emails I'm floored by the behavior. It really seems like middle schoolers. And the racist chats that came out from the Young Republican group earlier this year -- I can't imagine ever being a part of a chat group like that. I would literally think I was being pranked or they were genuinely crazy racists, but they were actual early leaders of one of our two major political parties.
The thing that perplexes me is that these people aren't in poverty or victims of some violent trauma. They are among the elites of the country -- and yet this is still how they behave -- are these people a niche group or am I?
> they were genuinely crazy racists, but they were actual early leaders of one of our two major political parties
Why not both?
Unfortunately, the racist worldview on display in those chats is extremely widespread- and you are in a uniquely small privileged group if you’re neither on the receiving or delivering end.
A lot of middle class and wealthy people are victims of trauma. If you grow up in a house with violently racist and hateful authoritarian parents you will be deeply traumatized, and likely end up just like your parents. Wealth does not protect people from emotional trauma.
Most people are followers whose belief systems are spoon fed to them by the largest village willing to accept them. Understanding cult psychology and the agendas of the people driving the bus is typically enough to understand their worldviews and subsequent behavior. That’s just my gut read on it..
It opens up the possibility but hardly confirms it. I would be happy to see some convincing evidence to the contrary though. He seems more like a plain old con man and pervert to me, Occam's razor.
High school never ends.
>This guy Epstein modus operandi of cozying up and becoming wingman to powerful people confirms that he was some kind of spy
Ah yes, no one else has ever tried to ingratiate themselves into the world of the rich and famous. It's spies all the way down!
I think you mean forever trying to be cooler than he was(n't) in high school.
A thing to remember is that Chamath Palihapitiya is a billionaire but spends his time on Twitter trying to convince people he has a big dick[0].
> i'll bet your entire net worth x 10. the anaconda is the worst kept secret of silicon valley...
I think the truth is probably that insecurity does not prevent success. Some argue that it might be the source of it. But probably the truth is there are secure billionaires and insecure billionaires and the latter are very obviously insecure because despite their success they do things like this.
0: https://x.com/chamath/status/1931039584672186651?s=20
So far, what has been revealed in the documents is embarrassing, but not necessarily implicating: https://searchepsteinfiles.com/person/163
For the most part, the threads are a mix of:
- Really cringe dating advice
- Epstein connecting Summers with other important people
- Dishing on Trump and his inner circle
Given there were many more prominently featured people with more dirt in here, I wonder if Summers is worried there's a lot more that's about to be revealed.
really cringe dating advice about pursuing an affair with a student almost 40 years younger than he is
it's way beyond cringe
27 years younger.
She is approximately 43 (college grad '04) and he is 70.
The text messages were 6 years ago.
Has the name of the woman come out? She's not directly named in their communications.
Actually she is really smart. Lex had an episode with her.
Keyu Jin.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
Yes, it has.
her name was front page news in several US tabloids today
And in the Harvard Crimson.
Epstein seemed to be a power broker and a political fixer. If so, naturally many high-profile people would have interacted with him and even have confided in him. It does not mean everyone associated with him knew or participated in his criminal activities, right?
Agreed, but continued communication after he was found guilty of sex crimes is definitely a bright red flag.
hang loose, young lady, i have to ask this sex criminal how best to respond to your latest message
absolutely
An example of one of the typical meetings Epstein was able to finagle with Summers:
> this week, thiel, summers,bill burns, gordon brown, jagland, ( council of europe and nobel chairman ). mongolia pres , hardeep puree ( india), boris ( gates). jabor ( qatar). sultan ( dubai, ), kosslyn ( harvard), leon black, woody. you are a welcome guest at any.....also if you >think there are interesting people in town, everyone here for climate summit, clinton ,security council, holy shit im on for next 30 minutes
https://searchepsteinfiles.com/file/text/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028...
He also regularly provided research funding for universities.
he didn't have any power or ability to fix anything that didn't involve trafficking young girls
he can "fix" you up with a teenager who will give you a private "massage"
Not sure where you are getting this from. He regularly connected people with each other. The sex trafficking was just a small part of his nefarious power network
Not to defend Epstein, of course, but just to comment on the power brokering side. My understanding is that a power broker gets power by staying close to the power and by connecting people. I don't understand why powerful people need such broker, even though history shows other wise.
Same as any broker of stocks, houses, spouses, jobs, airline tickets.
The broker connects people, especially in the pre-Internet / young Internet days . The clients at ebsuy doing their main activity.
he can "fix" you up with a teenager who will give you a private "massage"
... while being videotaped. Those recordings provide him an immense amount of power and ability.
> Epstein seemed to be a power broker and a political fixer. If so...
If so we are getting a window into a world we rarely see. For some of us this is confirming our priors, for others this will be profoundly shocking.
It's a pity he hung himself. Otherwise he might have been induced into giving over a lot of secrets about lots of rich and powerful people....
> - Dishing on Trump and his inner circle
At this moment in time, this is the most serious crime to those in charge
According to nypost news that Larry Summers sought guidance on how to get "horizontal" with Keyu Jin in emails to Jeffrey Epstein.
I saw the email correspondence between him and Epstein. The sense that I got is he's pursuing some young girl half his age. And he actually thinks that she is attracted to him. Powerful, ugly men are so stupid sometimes.
Men who don't pursue women don't get laid. This is an extremely important gendered asymmetry in heterosexual dating. Most men aren't attractive to most women, and if you want to be successful at dating as a heterosexual man you have to have to display a certain amount of boldness in pursuing women. Maybe the girl in question really does find Larry Summers old and ugly and wants nothing to do with him, but in general men who assume this is the case and don't even try, or who heed the words of outsiders that it is stupid to think that a girl might be attracted to you, are putting themselves at a systematic disadvantage in dating.
It was woman who was presenting her scientific work. Just to clarify the situation. I dont think these events are supposed to be about getting laid.
It was not the "fair play in bar" kind of situation at all.
Fully aware of the evolutionary forces that make men act stupid and think women more attractive than them want to jump their bones.
It doesn’t make it any less grotesque though. What I was really commenting on is the men in positions of power who think that that power is enough to get them laid. Nope. Turns out that women are attracted to... can you believe it? LOOKS!
But then you see them fumbling around like this doofus. He doesn't even know what the hell he’s doing. It’s sad.
He has no game.
That's a charitable take. It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship. Also the woman's dad is the founding president of some major Chinese bank (AIIB) that he was cozying up to.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
> "It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship"
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
Reading about the case, you get the sense that this is the general disposition from these abusers. They know what they're doing is wrong, and they understand the power imbalance, but they sort of excuse it and justify it by softly believing that the women actually want them. That they are actually sexy. And that they are helping the women, somehow.
It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
She was attracted to his power, which is why she spent time with him. Don't pretend she was an innocent protege. She was a nepo child playing the same game of stays climbing.
I cannot overstate the potential significance of what's going on in Congress currently and it has global implications.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sit at the nexus of an international pedophile ring that threatens to bring down many billionaires and even some governments. There is a concerted effort to prevent the release of this information and we're far from done yet.
A lot of effort was made by the administration to prevent the discharge petition reaching 218 signatures. For anyone unfamiliar with how the House of Representatives works, the majority party chooses the Speaker and the Speaker decides what bills get a vote. But if a majority of the 435 representatives (so 218) want the House to have a vote, there's a procedure called a discharge petition. If it gets 218 signatures, the Speaker has to schedule a vote within a week or so (I forget the exact time line).
The Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as basically putting the House in recess for 8+ weeks to avoid this happening. He avoided wearing in an Arizona congresswoman for that same period because she was going to be the 218th signature. The government was literally suspended to avoid this outcome.
Then the Speaker changed tactics to try to pass the bill with a procedure called "unaminous consent". Basically, if no House member objects, the bill passes. Why would he do this? To avoid having votes on the record. This was good politics to force a role call.
The Speaker continues to play defense here because carve outs were added to the bill to exempt files for "national security" reasons and anything under active investigation. That's brazen obstruction and the least surprising thing is that the president announced an investigation this week. It's explicitly to prevent the release of some evidence. Make no mistake.
It's not unique to this administration either. the previous administration sat on all of this for 4 years doing absolutely nothing.
Where doe sthis lead? Foreign governments and intelligence agencies who were not only aware of what was going on but they (allegedly) actively benefit from and participated in this trafficking ring to get access to and/or blackmail powerful people. That's the "national security" interest.
As many of us are aware by now, Ghislaine Maxwell's father was the British media mogul Robert Maxwell who was a Mossad asset and got a state funeral in israel for his contributions to the state of Israel going back to suplying militia wth weapons in World War Two that were ultimately used for ethnic cleasning. And how did Maxwell die? He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
If this stuff gets out, many heads will roll in government, in business and in prestigious colleges. Look no further than one Alan Dershowitz. Harvard in particular has unclean hands and is elbow deep in all of this. And certainly whatever you do don't look into how Kimble Musk met one of his "girlfriends".
This is only the beginning.
The likely most damning/embaressing thing that has led to Summers resignations -- being a powerful 65-year-old man trying to pressure a 37-year-old mentee into having sex/relationship with you -- is considered (by me too) icky and unethical and an abuse of power, undoubtedly a violation of many ethics codes and depending on how it's done possibly some laws -- but is not actually anything to do with pedophilia or child abuse at all.
i know we like expanding the categories of all sins and then only refering to things by category name without the specifics, but.
I'm having extreme difficulties visualizing Kash Patel holding powerful people to account.
>He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
Maxwell had been stealing from his worker's pension fund and it was all starting to come out. It is plausible that he killed himself to avoid the consequences. He was a monster.
Alternatively, there is no justice, and even the truth is lost to partisan politics. I have a strange feeling this benefits foreign intelligence, not harms it. Mossad, for example, knows who slipped through the cracks. Knows how much worse the "truth" is beyond the code names and vague emails. Now they have more power, not less.
This kind of thing can only exist in a climate of apathy and nihilism. The powerful want you to think the situation is hopeless and nothing will change. But remember this: at no point in history has a steady state been maintained for significant periods of time. Ever.
We are at a dangerous point in history. I personally believe that inequality is inevitably going to end in violence and we're beyuond the point of avoiding this with electoral politics. People are struggling to eat and survive at a time where we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. This simply can't continue.
I'm personally for outing wealthy and powerful pedophiles who are meaningfully making all of our lives worse to accrue completely unnecessary extra wealth.
What’s partisan about what your OP described? Democrats and republicans alike were entangled in Epstein’s crimes.
I meant that this event, like many events in American history, will be remembered through the lens of the party in power. At least for a long time. Only now are we beginning to understand Vietnam and Watergate, for example. I suspect the truth about Epstein will never come out, but what will come out will be made partisan by those releasing it, now or in the future.
They already bought off Ghislaine Maxwell by moving her to minimum security prison with unearned privileges, so she won’t spill what she knows about people in current administration. Not sure why you seem optimistic, she is possibly the most informed person left alive and she’s gotten kid glove treatment from Trump.
There was nothing particularly suspicious about Maxwell's death. The music was up, the noose was tightening around him, and he was about to start eating shit for the consequences of his fraud.
The people he robbed in that fraud were regular Joes who were cheated out of their pensions, not some kind of shadow-government-global-conspiracy types who have the means to remote-program your toaster to kill you.
Him killing himself is not the most surprising way out of that situation.
It's not only that he (allegedly) killed himself. It's the manner in which it happened.
First, extremely wealthy people are by and large sociopaths. It's how they get rich. They will never view themselves as responsible or deserving or prosecution. Many are so rich they never consider getting prosecuted a realistic possibility. They will use various legal means to hide assets from being reclaimed by victims. Alan Bond, an Australian entrepreneur, also raided pension funds (which he ultimately went to jail for) but he mysteriously got divorced from his wife (who got a large property settlement) before it all went south and he stayed on good terms with her even after the divorce. Weird, huh?
Second, it's weird that nobody on his yacht noticed he was gone. For hours. That... just doesn't make sense if you know how luxury yachts work. The principal or the owner will dictate the entire schedule of the boat. If they get up at 6am, staff will get up at 5am to make sure their needs are being met. Beverages, breakfast, whatever. At all times the bridge will be manned (ie have someone on watch) who will be looking out for hazards but also at cameras on the boat. They are on alert for things like a fire breaking out or a VIP being up so they can alert other staff.
So could he have slipped through that net to throw himself overboard? Sure, it's possible. It's not icnredibly likely however. Also, is that how a rich and powerful man who was once an arms dealer commits suicide? Again, it's possible but it doesn't seem like the most likely method.
Lastly, if you're going to kill somebody but don't want it to be seen as a murder, this tops the list of how you'd do it. Why? Because, being in the water is going to wash away evidence and there are multiple ways of inducing a heart attack that are essentially undetectable (eg potassium overdose). And the delay in the body being found will likely get rid of any potential evidence there too.
The whole thing just stinks to high heaven.
Careful you don't go full Qanon on this one. If anything the fact this thing passed is an indication that there's very little unexploded ordnance left in the unredacted files. Though of course i will reserve my judgement.
The irony here is that the QAnon people were right, just not in the way they thought they were. There's no child trafficking pizzeria where Democrats were using "cp" to mean, well, something that isn't "cheese pizza". That's all crazy.
I also don't believe Epstein was murdered. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there's no such evidence of the murder claims. More to the point, the onus is on people making such claims to provide the evidence, not everyone else to disprove it.
But Robert Maxwell's history is well-documented and verifiable. And there's so much evidence that Epstein was mysteriously well-connected. The jobs he got. A match teacher at a prestigious school without a college degree. Power of attorney over Leslie Wexner's assets. The access he had to the wealthy, world leaders and academics. The fact that nobody really knows how he made his money. He's been dubbed a financier but this just isn't documented. There are thousands of bank accounts that haven't been scrutinized for where money was going and why.
And of course Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking people to... absolutely no one. Nobody has been named let alone charged. Her conditions on jail aren't appropriate for someone with her charges. She has a bunch of privileges in a Club Fed prison she shouldn't be in. The president fired the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York so only his former personal lawyers met with Maxwell for a proffer session.
And of course the connections to intelligence agencies and certain governments is both entirely believable and it fits a ton of evidence. There are credible claims why this is why he got the most lenient sweetheart plea agreement in 2006 despite Palm Beach police having the testimony of dozens of underage victims.
Well it's a good thing that the DOJ and FBI have highly qualified and totally non-partisan bosses that will see to it that justice will be done /s
I'm sure I don't know what you mean. The FBI director is such a good guy he even writes children's books.
> This is only the beginning.
And perhaps the end. If its as serious as you claim it is nothing will come out of it.
[flagged]
Why? He was one of the most prominent economists of his era. This is in the news because it's newsworthy, not because he's been radioactive this whole time.
Why not? He was a part of a pretty radioactive network of people. I doubt that he just happened to hang with Epstein by mere coincidence, and it does raise some questions about how much Sheryl knew about it.
I think it's very silly to suggest that Sandberg would have known anything at all about Summers personal life a decade before he had dealings with Epstein, simply because he was an undergraduate adviser to her. He was already one of the most famous economists in the country in the late 1980s, when that happened.
Why was he even on the board to begin with?
He is a economist who served as the Secretary of Treasury, as the president of Harvard University, and as director of the National Economic Council. Seems like he would be able to give them some good advice.
Pretty helpful person to have on your board if you are aiming (as Sarah Friar, OpenAI CFO, mentioned) to get the government to guarantee $100B - $1T in infrastructure loans.
He was terrible at 2 out of three of those jobs. He ruined many people's lives. He was corrupt as hell. He shouldn't be welcome in polite society.. well I guess Epstein's inner circle isn't exactly polite society.
Neither should people who shoot over eager puppies, but hey what're you gonna do? Not shoot puppies?
Could you elaborate? Which two was he bad at? How did he ruin people's lives? Honestly asking.
I was referring to his stints as treasury secretary and on the NEC, during which he championed a worldview that saw economics as being science, with immutable laws, that inevitably led to policy outcomes that caused the explosion in income inequality that we've seen since 2008 especially. The U.S. would be in a better place if he was never in the Obama or Clinton admins.
But now that I think about it, the email leaks show that he was sexually harassing women while he was at Harvard too. So he was terrible at all three jobs.
Which policies contributed to income inequality?
In general he was not a fan of regulating banks, although he walked back some of his beliefs after 2008. Although iirc he still supports combining investment and commercial banks. Various shenanigans involving privatization of Russian industry. Pushing for tax cuts at the expense of infrastructure spending. He didn't like that the US capped exec pay at banks that received bailouts (banks that gave him millions in speaking fees, which seems a lil bit sketch)
God I forgot about shock therapy! The Russian oligarchs owe their fortunes to Mr. Summers.
All of them lol. Summers pushed aggressively for the free trade agreements (including allowing China into the WTO) that, in practice, shuttered American manufacturing, he pushed for cuts to capital gains tax, he lobbied aggressively against regulating derivatives and in favor of repealing glass-stegall, both of which directly led to the 2008 crisis, and then after the crisis he caused, he architected a recovery package that prioritized bailing out banks (but not enough to dig the economy out of recession quickly). He's one of the most damaging American figures of all time, he basically got us Trump if you ask me.
How quickly we forget. He was a compromise in resolving the board coup.
One big club, etc. etc.
He's part of the military industrial complex
FriendFeed shutdown same day Facebook was incorporated - these things are important for continuity
Helen Toner was doing her job.
Here's another POV: why did Micro$oft $ide again$t the PhD$? Hmm, I gue$$ it make$ $en$e why they cho$e $ummer$.
Actual unedited title: "Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board after release of emails with Epstein"
Title as interpreted by me: "Larry Summers was on the OpenAI board this whole time"
“This whole time” - didn’t the OpenAI board get cleaned out after they failed to fire Sam?
Echoes of Kissinger on Theranos' board (and many other examples, no doubt).
I still haven't got over war criminal Kissinger getting a Nobel Peace Prize.
Such a weird history, that one.
Two of the committee resigned in protest, Kissinger almost turned it down because it was also being awarded to Lê Đức Thọ, Lê Đức Thọ actually turned it down because the peace it was supposed to be about hadn't happened yet, Kissinger accepted in absentia as he did not want to be targeted by anti-war protestors when getting the peace prize, then he later tried to return it only for the committee to say no.
The Peace Prize is weird one. It is a political tool to pressure people toward peace. That's why Obama got one strictly for not being George W Bush.
It's one of the few Trump grievant that is legitimate.
> It's one of the few Trump grievant that is legitimate.
Hardly. What does it have to do with Trump? The only reason it's a "grievance" is that Trump feels he should get the prize. While he supports a genocidal nation and tries to start wars.
They gave Arafat the prize as well. Basically for promising to stop murdering jews. A promise he reneged upon almost immediately to be clear. But of course the bar had already been set impossibly low by awarding the prize in chemistry to Fritz Haber, the guy who literally invented chemical warfare. At least to Kissingers credit he did try quite hard to make peace and sometimes succeeded.
Then they give the prize to guys who don't deserve it like Obama and overlook Trump, who even his biggest haters cannot claim hasn't done a lot of war ending over 2 terms.
Haber invented the process for artificially creating ammonia. Since ammonia is a critical fertilizer, this invention has fed billions of people. On the other hand, it’s also critical for the manufacture of explosives. His work on chemical weapons was practically irrelevant by comparison. This was an astounding feat of chemistry, and well worth rewarding.
But fundamentally I don’t think we should make moral judgements over things like chemistry. A chemical process to create ammonia is a tool, and tools can always be used for good or evil. Even explosives are just tools that can be used for good or evil. Sometimes those explosives are even the same substance that is used for fertilizer. The morality of the use of the tool is provided by the user of the tool, not the creator of the tool.
We can celebrate the people who make the tools while saving our condemnation for the people who use tools for evil.
I agree about the Peace prize though, that one’s generally worthless.
I had to look this up. That is absolutely insane…
John Carreyrou's book "Bad blood" is extremely good. Full of suspense, amazing revelations. I highly recommend it. It explores a lot of Elizabeth Holmes' and Sunny Balwani's insanity.
If you don't have time for the book, there's a decent documentary available
It might have gotten flagged as political content if the full title was used.
Reid Hoffman already resigned so I guess, kudos to him for getting ahead of the curve!
Next up will be selling of shares to finance defense teams
I have loathed Larry Summers since the repeal of Glass-Steagall. He has consistently treated the American public like he treats women in the Epstein emails. So glad he's finally getting his comeuppance.
Not enough, if you ask me. He should be publicly shamed and humiliated. Truly one of the most evil maniacs of our time.
Is that not what is happening?
I haven't seen any tar or feathers yet
I mean, he’s still teaching. For now.
Just announced,He is not completing his class.
Gotta be a matter of time unless the place he teaches truly has no principles.
He teaches at Harvard.
Harvard has principles. They're spelled d-o-l-l-a-r-s.
No such place. Not in today's world.
If you give a school enough evidence. Like, say, this email. Your career there is done.
And that's any school.
He was working at the Center for American Progress to ensure if the Democrats got back in power they would be committed to not fixing anything, fulfilling any promises, or doing anything beyond Clinton/Obama/Biden managed decline.
Good riddance.
I hardly think a millionaire stepping away from his job is “comeuppance”.
Don’t forget Epstein’s circle of rapists and rapist-enablers still had friendly communication with him long after he was convicted and known pedophile.
I have doubts about officials’ ability to get real justice. I’ll still me shouting for blood in the streets, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVG5V7FzB_Q
On the contrary, he's the perfect man to be on OpenAI's board; before and after these extra revelations.
Well, good to see Hahhvuhhhd is not above the British monarchy when it comes to eventually ejecting sex pests! A low bar to clear, but well done!
Now, just for certain ex-Brit colonies to follow their example! Quick... who can think of a popular leader who is, ehhhm, quite intricately linked to the same, ehh, gentleman with pretty specific tastes?
Anyone?
In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.
>We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Not that I wholly disagree, but in the interests of robust conversation, I feel compelled to ask:
When?
It's in everyday things.
Like this most recent headline from AppleInsider:
"Cook controversially dines with Saudi Crown Prince at White House"
Now, I'm no Saudi Crown Prince stan, but would the word 'controversially' have been used if Cook dined with Biden - who funded and supported a genocide, in which hundreds of journalists were killed? Why was the word 'controversially' not used to refer to also being at the table with Trump there?
Yes, it's controversial that Cook had dinner with the Saudi Crown Prince. In my view it's even more controversial to be having dinner with Trump.
This is just the most recent headline I can give as an example. But there are many like this.
> In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.
There's nothing that quite makes me feel like humanity has undergone speciation than the fact that this STILL HAS TO BE FUCKING SPELLED OUT FOR PEOPLE.
Hero worship is sycophancy of the highest order. Ugh, and I know you're so right.
And, to be less coy, how is the opposition party the one that treats Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman? It's somehow Epstein all the way down. Glad I'm a left-wing Chomskyite, cynical about all of those corrupt, elite institutions. Wait...
Bill Clinton hasn’t been relevant in politics for like twenty years. Nobody on the left thinks about or cares about him.
He's still extremely relevant, if only to derail discussions as demonstrated here. I'm waiting for someone to bring up Al Franken!
Don't forget Ted Kennedy!
Depends on how deep the pillow talk went during the Obama admin.
> its most valuable elder statesman
That's Barack Obama. Among other things, he's not 80 and still has the vigor of youth. Clinton is just old at this point.
Pretty sure Obama is the MVES of the Democratic party.
As someone who voted for Bill Clinton. If Bill Clinton is implicated, then he needs to suffer for it.
I think the real question is why didn't the Biden administration release the files. How many very powerful people left and right are in there?
> I think the real question is why didn't the Biden administration release the files. How many very powerful people left and right are in there?
If I had to guess it's because there's nothing incriminating about Trump in them. Otherwise we all know they would have been leaked a long time ago.
tl;dr: Because there were ongoing investigations (which was true) and it's generally considered bad to release your evidence before trial, or something like that, IANAL.
This will also be Trump's (false) reason for not releasing them.
Why was t true before but false now?
I suspect it's been the false reason the whole time.
No one is investigating anything, only wiping hard drives and tying up loose ends
IMO the most egregious reason is the July 2025 memo from DOJ/FBI saying there was nobody else to investigate, after months of public interest and official statements they were working on it. If they now flop back to claiming they can’t release because of investigations, then that’s unequivocally a false reason.
> Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman?
Huh? Bill Clinton has been a relatively invisible ex-president compared to the other modern ones (aka Carter & Obama, Biden hasn't been gone long enough for data).
Perhaps that's because he didn't want to overshadow Hillary, but it's at least partly because of the Lewinsky affair.
> "In other exchanges, Mr. Summers appeared to ask Mr. Epstein’s advice on how to pursue a romantic relationship"
That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the woman into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”"
I think it remarkable how the NYT buries (far down on the page), and CNBC omits altogether, the underlying story about what Larry Summers was actually doing. CNBC euphemizes the whole thing away to vapor (there were mails—the end). These aren't good expositions.
(Speaking of the NYT' coverage, there's a new revelation one of their reporters actually helped Epstein evade scrutiny—it's another bit from the recently-disclosed email tranches. Their reporter Landon Thomas secretly tipped off Epstein that one of his NYT coworkers was "digging around" into Epstein—even gave Epstein the guy's name).
https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3m5hn... ("Fall 2017: Then-NYT reporter literally warning Epstein that someone is "digging around again.")
> That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the undergraduate into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
What undergraduate? According to the link you provide, she graduated in 2004 and was the subject of discussion between Epstein and Summers in 2018.
I got some of basic facts very wrong; I've removed that error.
Why is this on the front page of HN other than the mention of OpenAI? The article barely even mentions how this is related to OpenAI. What’s notable about this event other than this person is disliked by many?
It's newsworthy because he's a prominent economic leader who has been at the center of U.S. economic policy, elite academia, and global finance for decades. He's held almost every marquee job an economist can have, Treasury Secretary under Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council under Obama, Chief economist of world bank, president of Harvard, connected at IMF and an influential voice on inflation, interest rates, fiscal policy, and banking regulations. He's a trusted voice in the VC world, was on the board of Square, an advisor at A16z/Andreessen Horowitz and involved in crypto/blockchain as an advisor to one of the major crypto VCs.
Thank you for the context! I genuinely didn’t know anything about this person until recently
lmao computer programmer failing to understand social relations
If there's one big surprise in my adult life, as in, a thing I didn't expect when I was a kid, it was the seemingly pervasive extent of sexual exploitation done by powerful men, and the fact they they seem to all help each other in doing this.
I always thought that powerful guys got laid without really having to force anyone to sleep with them. You know, the stereotypical "be confident, look prosperous and healthy" and women will be attracted to you. The weird thing is, I think that actually does work! Even if you're not famous, having a few of those qualities has seemed to work for most guys I know.
So why are there so many famous guys who end up getting caught forcing themselves on multiple people? If you look at how few cases end up going to trial, there must be even more guys who are getting away with it. Not only that, the extent of the numbers. A guy like Weinstein must have been a full-time sex criminal. Constant, multiple times a day, like a busy salesman who meets clients three times a day. I don't want to make a joke of something so serious, but don't you get enough? Isn't it tiring and tedious?
The other side of this is the club. How can it be that they all seem to know each other? Most people tend to keep their sex lives private. If you're committing a crime, AND you're a public person, why would you find other people to do that with? It that part of the power trip?
I think the scarier thing is that this is actually happening in all walks of life, but it only gets widely publicised when it concerns rich, powerful or famous men.
The thing that surprised me most growing up was learning how inevitable sexual assault is for basically all women. I've never been close to any woman who couldn't tell me multiple stories of being harassed, assaulted or coerced.