I'm kind of surprised to see the Koch's invoked as true evil that upstanding people accept money from rather than, say, Saudi royalty. There are many examples of direct murders that universities, corporations, and governments glibly partner with... But maybe I'm not up-to-date on the Koch's.
The details and the timeline of the donor disqualification in the New Yorker article sounded odd to me-- in particular, that it juxtaposed conjecture and unsupported claims with emails to make it sound like the request for anonymity was a workaround for MIT policy yet it didn't actually introduce any factual support for that conclusion.
In particular, when was he disqualified (e.g. before or after things being discussed) and how was this communicated in the institution? These were obvious and surprising omissions in the article. For Joi's sake I hope Lessig's belief on this point is based on more than just the writing smelling suspicious. Regardless, the absence of clarity on details like this is why investigations are superior to lynch mobs.
Considering the Kochs a level below Epstein is pretty disgusting. I don't think anyone in the Koch family or Koch industries has ever been accused of breaking any criminal laws - although their factories regularly break civil laws. This so called lawyer is intentionally blurring that line. This is definitely a new low for Lessig. We should expect more from influential lawyers.
They might just be the core reason why America didn’t react on climate change and without the US there can be no relevant global reaction. So at the end... they could well be the reason if we walk off that cliff...
So yes I think they are on a different level especially for a university, a university that accepts money from people that are actively trying to fight science to harm everybody...
If Epstein had limited himself to taking advantage of young girls who had reached the age of consent, so that his relationships were not breaking any laws, would you no longer have a problem with Epstein?
Whether or not what someone does breaks the law often his almost nothing to do with the morality of that action or whether or not that action causes harm.
That section of the article was more about the taint upon money donated from various types of donors than about the donors themselves. The distinction it is drawing is between people who do bad things but do not derive their money from those bad things (such as Epstein) and people that do bad things and those bad things is the source of the money they are donating (Koch). It's not saying that donors of the former type are necessarily less immoral or evil than donors of the latter type--just that taking their money is not benefiting directly from their immorality or evil.
Is your respect for people correlated with how much you agree with them? If so, are you able to have deep respect for people you disagree with? What if you're wrong?
That's a bit of a straw man you're attacking there. To me, the parent's comment reads as "I'm disappointed he's defending something I consider morally reprehensible", not "I disagree with him".
I lost some respect for Lessig on reading it, and it has nothing to do with disagreeing with him. It's that his essay presents itself as a tortured apologia for his support of Ito, but is an implausible, badly-reasoned rationalization. His arguments are terrible. He's supposed to be brilliant, and then shovels twaddle like this on a topic on which he could be an authoritative voice.
He fails to note that Ito's apology was incredibly selective and self-serving and was basically a lie of omission in furtherance of the longtime covering up of the conspiracy to take Epstein's money.
He accepts as self-evident that Epstein's money was not morally tainted itself by dismissing the most implausible explanation for it (i.e., blackmail).
He ignores Ito's personally profiting from facilitating Epstein by also taking Epstein's money for his own ventures.
Lessig tells a story of a "sweet soul" taking dirty money at the institution's direction and failing to consider the possible future damage of the revelation of same, and then castigates the rest of us because now when someone commits a comparably innocent error, they'll have no motive to confess, apologize and repair. Everything we've seen so far screams that this is a dark, corrupt, wide-ranging affair full of venal people using each other for mutual benefit, and what we get from Lessig is a puff piece on par with Ito's apology.
i stopped reading when he classifies epstein as a "type 3" person. i think it's quite bold, especially without any evidence whatsoever, to claim that epstein's money came from non-criminal activities. and this is coming from a "top" law expert. epstein's previously upcoming trial would have sorted through some of this, but it isn't clear at all that his money wasn't funded directly by his own criminal activities or indirectly by others' criminal activities. in fact, it's one of the biggest open questions: where did epstein get his money from?
also, his type 1 examples are laughable. tom hanks makes movies. taylor swift makes music, and vindictive music at that. what is it about those professions that is "doing good"? they aren't about doing bad, but they're just jobs.
the people really doing good in this world don't make any money at all.
all this epstein stuff and the avalanches caused by his actions and associations is just giving us a peek into how the world really works: a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing who think they do are running things in complete, total self and those like their self interest. nobody really cares about anyone else, and people prop up their decisions in the context of institutions with an inability to step outside and ask "what am i really doing here"?
> i stopped reading when he classifies epstein as a "type 3" person. i think it's quite bold, especially without any evidence whatsoever, to claim that epstein's money came from non-criminal activities. and this is coming from a "top" law expert. epstein's previously upcoming trial would have sorted through some of this, but it isn't clear at all that his money wasn't funded directly by his own criminal activities or indirectly by others' criminal activities. in fact, it's one of the biggest open questions: where did epstein get his money from?
He addresses the questions around this directly...
> It may be that we’ll discover that Epstein got rich by blackmailing people whom he had encouraged or enabled to commit abuse. I doubt it, but it’s possible.
> also, his type 1 examples are laughable. tom hanks makes movies. taylor swift makes music, and vindictive music at that. what is it about those professions that is "doing good"? they aren't about doing bad, but they're just jobs.
They're not doing a whole lot of good, they're just not doing anything particularly bad. He's not holding them up as examples of perfect people, just examples of people with no toxic publicly known behaviors that an institution like MIT might want to avoid.
>> He addresses the questions around this directly...
> It may be that we’ll discover that Epstein got rich by blackmailing people whom he had encouraged or enabled to commit abuse. I doubt it, but it’s possible.
providing a loose supposition and then immediately dismissing it is not addressing something directly. i am not an expert on the epstein situation, but from what i understand, lessig’s supposition is a rather naive one. it seems it is much more likely that epstein was making money from the services he provided and even more likely that he was bankrolled by some other entity or entities.
the fact that lessig, as a supposed law expert, is just grasping at straws with unrealistic guesses to recover his and his friend’s position is really depressing.
I dunno. Lessig's description of the case seems overly generous to Joi. For starters, he claims Joi's private defense to him was that he'd heavily researched Epstein's behavior and made a personal call that he was reformed and should be given a second chance. That might be a decent defense if Joi had actually made it publically, but its basically the opposite of what Joi said in his attempt at an apology, where he basically claimed to be in the dark regarding Epstein's behavior.
Secondly, he makes it sound like Joi wanted to keep Epstein's contributions secret to keep Epstein from getting any benefit from them. But almost all the reporting on the issue make it pretty clear that Epstein used the donations, and his relationship with Joi, to publically associate himself with the lab, visit the researchers there, present himself to Gates and others as an unofficial go-between, etc. The relationship went far beyond Epstein cutting a check and no one knowing about it.
Thirdly, Lessig's defense is largely based on the claim that Farrow's reporting is factually incorrect, and that MIT told him to take the $, and thus Joi was making a moral compromise in service of his employer. We'll have to wait and see if he or Farrow is correct here, but Farrow's article was obviously drawing on internal MIT docs, so I'd be pretty surprised if that was the case.
Finally, Lessig skips over the fact that Joi took on the order of a million dollars from Epstein for his personal projects. This makes the claim that Joi was just doing what MIT told him to do pretty weak. It also bypasses what I thought was the most damning implication of the Farrow article, which was that Epstein basically bribed Joi to help him get around MIT's prohibition on taking his money.
But see, he knows Joi. And naturally, nobody he knows would be the type of person to do something as terrible as enable a notorious abuser of children for profit!
This is the deep rot at the heart of the American elite system: once you're in the club, it's effectively impossible for anything you do to get you kicked out of it. You become anointed as the Right Sort of Person, and everybody accepts that when the Right Sort of Person does something terrible, it's not because they're actually not the Right Sort of Person. It's just an oversight, an oopsie, an opportunity for Learning and Growth. You're operating among friends, and standards among friends are more forgiving than they are among the public at large.
(Even worse, not only are you anointed as the Right Sort of Person, but your children automatically are as well. And they have even less justification for being treated that way than you did.)
Which is why a lot of people are misunderstanding the root problem in the Epstein case. It's not that Epstein corrupted everything and everyone he touched, it's that an Epstein could only exist in an environment where everything was corrupt already. Epstein was the symptom, not the disease.
"One should be willing to display forgiveness, as flawed human beings make occasional mistakes, and we need to be willing to look past them at the good person underneath"
Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to debate among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein. Has your boss ever put you in a position like that? Ito did, in order to retain favor with Epstein. That this was going to happen was so predictable that Ito worked to keep Ethan Zuckerman out of the building the day Epstein arrived, because Zuckerman had already been on Ito's case about Epstein.
Worse still, Farrow has Epstein brokering donations from billionaires like Bill Gates. Lessig retcons Ito's actions into accepting anonymous donations from a "class 3" donor; at least Ito wasn't accepting public donations from "class 4" donors like the Koch Brothers. But Epstein is, in Farrow's telling, literally functioning as an agent for Ito and the Lab. Anonymous? He's got the highest possible profile the Lab can offer with precisely the set of people whose influence he hopes to buy.
Presumably, that level of influence peddling is what enabled Epstein to obtain a 1-year work-release sentence in Florida years earlier. In this telling, Epstein isn't "laundering" anything. He's purchasing the influence he hopes to bank to shield himself from further scrutiny. He's enlisting the Lab to protect him. And the Lab complies, for a pittance†, for a tellingly low amount of money, so low, in retrospect and context you have to wonder if the directorate of the Lab gave a shit at all.
† apparently, and maybe double check because i could be wrong, less than the amount ito also collected from epstein for his own private venture fund.
> Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to debate among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein.
AFAIK there was no reason cited for their trafficking suspicion. It is not known whether the women with him at the time appeared to anyone to be underage.
Epstein at the time was known to be convicted of sex trafficking in 2008. That alone is sufficient reason to suspect that a couple young escorts are part of a continuing crime, but Zuckerman said that people generally believed that Epstein continued to be a sex trafficker.
You made this point on a previous thread, at length, in repeated back-and-forth with other commenters. I also doubt the escorts were "trafficked" in the lurid sense we generally mean by the word, or that they needed or would have been receptive to a rescue. That is not at all the point I'm making, and you know that.
Your rebuttal is even less relevant to this thread, which simply contends that there was no meaningful anonymity about Epstein's donations; in fact, there was infamy over them.
> You made this point on a previous thread, at length, in repeated back-and-forth with other commenters. I also doubt the escorts were "trafficked" in the lurid sense we generally mean by the word, or that they needed or would have been receptive to a rescue. That is not at all the point I'm making, and you know that.
You were absolutely making that point. You literally said:
> Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to debate among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein.
I don't know how much more clear your intent could be.
The whole thing is so strange. Why would Lessig accept Ito's rationalization?! Why enable Ito to enable Epstein?! Why would MIT want Epstein's money?! What on Earth was going on?
31 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 74.6 ms ] threadThe details and the timeline of the donor disqualification in the New Yorker article sounded odd to me-- in particular, that it juxtaposed conjecture and unsupported claims with emails to make it sound like the request for anonymity was a workaround for MIT policy yet it didn't actually introduce any factual support for that conclusion.
In particular, when was he disqualified (e.g. before or after things being discussed) and how was this communicated in the institution? These were obvious and surprising omissions in the article. For Joi's sake I hope Lessig's belief on this point is based on more than just the writing smelling suspicious. Regardless, the absence of clarity on details like this is why investigations are superior to lynch mobs.
So yes I think they are on a different level especially for a university, a university that accepts money from people that are actively trying to fight science to harm everybody...
Whether or not what someone does breaks the law often his almost nothing to do with the morality of that action or whether or not that action causes harm.
That section of the article was more about the taint upon money donated from various types of donors than about the donors themselves. The distinction it is drawing is between people who do bad things but do not derive their money from those bad things (such as Epstein) and people that do bad things and those bad things is the source of the money they are donating (Koch). It's not saying that donors of the former type are necessarily less immoral or evil than donors of the latter type--just that taking their money is not benefiting directly from their immorality or evil.
He fails to note that Ito's apology was incredibly selective and self-serving and was basically a lie of omission in furtherance of the longtime covering up of the conspiracy to take Epstein's money.
He accepts as self-evident that Epstein's money was not morally tainted itself by dismissing the most implausible explanation for it (i.e., blackmail).
He ignores Ito's personally profiting from facilitating Epstein by also taking Epstein's money for his own ventures.
Lessig tells a story of a "sweet soul" taking dirty money at the institution's direction and failing to consider the possible future damage of the revelation of same, and then castigates the rest of us because now when someone commits a comparably innocent error, they'll have no motive to confess, apologize and repair. Everything we've seen so far screams that this is a dark, corrupt, wide-ranging affair full of venal people using each other for mutual benefit, and what we get from Lessig is a puff piece on par with Ito's apology.
also, his type 1 examples are laughable. tom hanks makes movies. taylor swift makes music, and vindictive music at that. what is it about those professions that is "doing good"? they aren't about doing bad, but they're just jobs.
the people really doing good in this world don't make any money at all.
all this epstein stuff and the avalanches caused by his actions and associations is just giving us a peek into how the world really works: a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing who think they do are running things in complete, total self and those like their self interest. nobody really cares about anyone else, and people prop up their decisions in the context of institutions with an inability to step outside and ask "what am i really doing here"?
"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out." -- Honore de Balzac (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/09/fortune-crime/)
He addresses the questions around this directly...
> It may be that we’ll discover that Epstein got rich by blackmailing people whom he had encouraged or enabled to commit abuse. I doubt it, but it’s possible.
> also, his type 1 examples are laughable. tom hanks makes movies. taylor swift makes music, and vindictive music at that. what is it about those professions that is "doing good"? they aren't about doing bad, but they're just jobs.
They're not doing a whole lot of good, they're just not doing anything particularly bad. He's not holding them up as examples of perfect people, just examples of people with no toxic publicly known behaviors that an institution like MIT might want to avoid.
> It may be that we’ll discover that Epstein got rich by blackmailing people whom he had encouraged or enabled to commit abuse. I doubt it, but it’s possible.
providing a loose supposition and then immediately dismissing it is not addressing something directly. i am not an expert on the epstein situation, but from what i understand, lessig’s supposition is a rather naive one. it seems it is much more likely that epstein was making money from the services he provided and even more likely that he was bankrolled by some other entity or entities.
the fact that lessig, as a supposed law expert, is just grasping at straws with unrealistic guesses to recover his and his friend’s position is really depressing.
What is vindictive music?
Secondly, he makes it sound like Joi wanted to keep Epstein's contributions secret to keep Epstein from getting any benefit from them. But almost all the reporting on the issue make it pretty clear that Epstein used the donations, and his relationship with Joi, to publically associate himself with the lab, visit the researchers there, present himself to Gates and others as an unofficial go-between, etc. The relationship went far beyond Epstein cutting a check and no one knowing about it.
Thirdly, Lessig's defense is largely based on the claim that Farrow's reporting is factually incorrect, and that MIT told him to take the $, and thus Joi was making a moral compromise in service of his employer. We'll have to wait and see if he or Farrow is correct here, but Farrow's article was obviously drawing on internal MIT docs, so I'd be pretty surprised if that was the case.
Finally, Lessig skips over the fact that Joi took on the order of a million dollars from Epstein for his personal projects. This makes the claim that Joi was just doing what MIT told him to do pretty weak. It also bypasses what I thought was the most damning implication of the Farrow article, which was that Epstein basically bribed Joi to help him get around MIT's prohibition on taking his money.
This is the deep rot at the heart of the American elite system: once you're in the club, it's effectively impossible for anything you do to get you kicked out of it. You become anointed as the Right Sort of Person, and everybody accepts that when the Right Sort of Person does something terrible, it's not because they're actually not the Right Sort of Person. It's just an oversight, an oopsie, an opportunity for Learning and Growth. You're operating among friends, and standards among friends are more forgiving than they are among the public at large.
(Even worse, not only are you anointed as the Right Sort of Person, but your children automatically are as well. And they have even less justification for being treated that way than you did.)
Which is why a lot of people are misunderstanding the root problem in the Epstein case. It's not that Epstein corrupted everything and everyone he touched, it's that an Epstein could only exist in an environment where everything was corrupt already. Epstein was the symptom, not the disease.
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/11707895922635161...
"Lol debunked"
Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to debate among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein. Has your boss ever put you in a position like that? Ito did, in order to retain favor with Epstein. That this was going to happen was so predictable that Ito worked to keep Ethan Zuckerman out of the building the day Epstein arrived, because Zuckerman had already been on Ito's case about Epstein.
Worse still, Farrow has Epstein brokering donations from billionaires like Bill Gates. Lessig retcons Ito's actions into accepting anonymous donations from a "class 3" donor; at least Ito wasn't accepting public donations from "class 4" donors like the Koch Brothers. But Epstein is, in Farrow's telling, literally functioning as an agent for Ito and the Lab. Anonymous? He's got the highest possible profile the Lab can offer with precisely the set of people whose influence he hopes to buy.
Presumably, that level of influence peddling is what enabled Epstein to obtain a 1-year work-release sentence in Florida years earlier. In this telling, Epstein isn't "laundering" anything. He's purchasing the influence he hopes to bank to shield himself from further scrutiny. He's enlisting the Lab to protect him. And the Lab complies, for a pittance†, for a tellingly low amount of money, so low, in retrospect and context you have to wonder if the directorate of the Lab gave a shit at all.
† apparently, and maybe double check because i could be wrong, less than the amount ito also collected from epstein for his own private venture fund.
AFAIK there was no reason cited for their trafficking suspicion. It is not known whether the women with him at the time appeared to anyone to be underage.
Your rebuttal is even less relevant to this thread, which simply contends that there was no meaningful anonymity about Epstein's donations; in fact, there was infamy over them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20906541
You were absolutely making that point. You literally said:
> Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to debate among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein.
I don't know how much more clear your intent could be.
Fuck these people, burn down the Media Lab, salt the earth.
He not only personally offended with minors, but amplified that offense by supplying them to others.
This was certainly done for either direct profit, or for buying or paying off favors.