In defense of Cancel culture: from the surrealists to twitter

Cancel culture was born on October 18, 1924, when a pamphlet was thrust upon the world entitled: A Cadaver. The subject of the pamphlet was Anatole France, a Nobel prize winning author whose death, on October 12, 1924, was announced on the front page of the New York Times under the headline: Anatole France Great Author dies … Author of “Thais” and “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame” Classed as Leader of Modern Stylists”. The writers of A Cadaver (Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, etc.) were having none of this. The pamphlet was a surrealist action of the most violent and definitive kind. Breton classed Anatole France with the “cops”, and wrote: “With Anatole France, a little human servility goes out the door.” Eluard, under the heading, An Old man Like the Others,  wrote mockingly to France: “The harmony, ah, the harmony, the knot of your tie, my dear corpse, your brain on the side, everything arranged beautifully in the coffin and the tears that are so sweet, aren’t they?” But it was Louis Aragon who really ripped poor Anatole France’s corpse another asshole. Under the heading: “Have you ever slapped a dead man?” Aragon attacked the whole idea, the stink and the shallowness of “beautiful writing”, and wrote: “I declare that every admirer of Anatole France is a degraded being.” It is polemic in the highest ranting style:

What flatters you in him, what makes him sacred, please leave me in peace, is not even the talent, which is arguable, but the vileness, which permits the first louse that comes along to exclaim : How is it that I never thought of this before !

And, the peroration:

“Today I am in the center of that mildew, Paris, where the sun is pale, where the wind entrusts its horror and its inertia to the smokestacks. All around me I see a dirty, poor busy-ness, the movement of the universe where all greatness becomes an object of derision. The breath of my interlocutor is poisoned by ignorance. In France, they say, everything ends up as a song. Let he who dies in the heart of the general beatitude go up in smoke in his turn! There is little that remains of a man. It is even more revolting to imagine that one, who was, in any case, a man. On certain days, I dream of an eraser that could wipe out all of this human stain.”

This is how you do cancellation, my droogs.

In this case, the surrealists succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. By 1930, literary lights like Blaise Cendrars were claiming that France was “boring,” and Andre Gide put in the boot by saying that his oeuvre was “not considerable”. Yet when he was alive, Anatole France held a position in the overlapping worlds of literature, culture and politics that was similar to that held by, for instance, Saul Bellow in the U.S. It is hard to imagine Saul Bellow being spit on to this enormous extent when he died…

Except that Bellow did, in a sense, imagine it. Bellow sampled his own heckling by students in 1968 by working up a similar scene in Mr. Sammler’s planet:

“A man in Levi’s, thick-bearded but possibly young, a figure of compact distortion, was standing shouting at him.

“Hey! Old Man!”

In the silence, Mr. Sammler drew down his tinted spectacles, seeing this person with his effective eye.

“Old Man! You quoted Orwell before.”

“Yes?”

“You quoted him to say that British radicals were all protected by the Royal Navy? Did Orwell say that British radicals were protected by the Royal Navy?”

“Yes, I believe he did say that.”

“That’s a lot of shit.”

Sammler could not speak.

“Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It’s good he died when he did. And what you are saying is shit.” Turning to the audience, extending violent arms and raising his palms like a Greek dancer, he said, “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He’s dead. He can’t come.”

At the time Mr. Sammler’s Planet came out, George Orwell had already assumed a rank at the top of the pantheon of brave “truth-tellers”, so the cancellation of Sammler and of Orwell together in one taunt – such a bearded and testosteroned one too! – was loaded with voltage. Of course, Bellow’s characters are always haunted by a ghost at the heel, taunting them with the idea that they are only ham actors, all of their beautiful thoughts only occasions for various big wig louses to say, how had I never thought of that before! Charley Citrine has Von Humboldt Fleisher, and Herzog of course is in flight from Valentine Gersbach. But in this gallery Sammler is special, since his cancellation moment is so entirely public, and so entirely on terms that Bellow felt were the only real terms – such was Bellow’s problem with women.  

Twitter has become, for the media establishment, what the heavily bearded young man was for Artur Sammler – an emblem of the end of the world in sheer barbarism and blasphemy and insulting of George Orwell. Of course, in the media establishment, it is very hard to get canceled. Noam Chomsky managed to do it by criticizing American foreign policy after the Vietnam war, when the wound was healed and all bien-pensant American “thought leaders” agreed that America had the most adorable and charming plans for the rest of the world (and was only being misunderstood as it spent trillions on the military and put these plans into effect by invading Panama City here, helping the stray Salvadorean death squad there, droning (accidentally!) some Yemeni wedding over in the corner, and so on). Otherwise, you will never find the deck chairs changing very much on the opinion pages of the great dailies, nor will you find Meet the Press or that ilk of tv inviting on anybody ‘foreign” or really anybody except its usual quota of great white male politicos and pundits. Even when a figure, like Mark Halperin, is discovered to be a serial groper and goes down, his media friends have a hard, hard time letting him go – as do his friends in both party establishments – and they keep campaigning to uncancel that pitiful mook.
Read the rest at Willetts!

Review of Behemoth: the history of the factory and the making of the modern world

1.

As a kid, I worked in my father’s ice factory. It was not a grandiose enterprise –  it consisted of an outer office, an inner office, a floor on which there were nine regular icemakers and one cube icemaker, and a freezer. Outside, in the pebble and dirt driveway, there were three ice delivery vans. The only employees were family. My mom, in the summer, my two brothers, from the time they were in the fifth grade, me, from the time I was in the seventh grade, and one summer my sister, who was the secretary.

We hired a few of my friends from highschool for the high sales seasons of spring and summer, but this rarely worked out. They had a hard time getting a grip on the process of bagging ice. It was simple, but it needed a certain meditative agility. The ice makers were all gray shiny machines that delivered a load of ice every twenty minutes or so, which piled ice up in the bins. You didn’t want the ice to pile up completely, but sometimes it did. You took your ice scoop and you dug into the bin, and you deposited the ice in a plastic bag hanging from a rack on your cart. My Dad made the cart. It was an ingenious thing, with the rack for the bags and a tape machine for the sealing and a scale. You took the bag off the rack once you had ten pounds in it, or about, you put it on the scale to check – after a while you could eye it and skip this step – and then you twirled the bag around, made a neck, and guided it forcefully through the tape machine, which would wrap the tape closely around the neck. Then you’d toss the bag into another cart, a metal one, and when you had done enough, or you judged that the bags were melting, you wheeled the cart into the freezer, which usually took a run with the cart, since the freezer was mounted a bit up from the floor. The things you did not want to do were: 1, leave too much ice on the floor; 2, fail to put in a full ten pounds; 3., fail to seal the bag completely; and 4, run crookedly at the freezer. Easy, but unfortunately many people failed at 1-3 a lot, and some even at 4.

It was cold work, and you had to wear gloves. Otherwise, you’d begin getting all scratched up and bleeding over the ice. That was no good. Also, though you could be very careful, as this work had to be done speedily in rush times, inevitably you were soon standing in a puddle of cold water. Myself, I got what I called white lung sometimes – bad pneumonia like colds. But mostly, it was a cool job. I’d keep the radio on loud, and I’d think about things for the time it took to bag. Usually, the day started at nine and ended at four. Of course, there were times that that had to be extended.

Also, I have left out of this the fifteen pound cube ice, cause that was a bitch, involving getting the ice to slide from its aluminum containers into a special bag. You would always bang up your fingers on that thing.

Also, there were the twenty pound bags, which were, unfortunately, reinforced paper, and they tended to break.

Sometimes I rode with Dad or Mom when they delivered ice; mostly that was the job of my brothers.

The business finally folded in the seventies when my father finally conceded that he was never going to make any money at it. It was a tough market, since we were competing with Southland, which not only made ice – yucky ice – but also owned all the Seven-Elevens.

That experience has made me that, on some level, I am in solidarity with factory workers in bigger factories, made me feel related, on some deep teen level, to the hands on the assembly lines and the sewing lines and the meat packing plants. I have never worked since the ice baggin’ days in a factory, but I have always been fascinated by factories: by the songs about them (like Adam raised a Cain, or Piss Factory), to movies about factory workers (for instance, Metropolis or – especially - Blue Collar) or the rare literature. Which includes Henry Green’s Living, and Beryl Bainbridge’s Bottle Factory Outing. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. But, oddly, nothing outsized, nothing in the War and Peace department, even though the factory is one of the great social facts of modernity. Although I suppose there is Marx’s Capital. Marx understood the scale of the factory as a social form. He understood that it just didn’t make steel or tools or thread – the factory was making world history.

2.

We are all so proud to have a whole geological epoch named after us: the Anthropocene. It isn’t the first time that organic matter has had a planetary aspect. About 2.5 billion years ago, according to scientists (those very important members of the Anthropoids, without whom our epoch would not have been named – in fact, wouldn’t have existed at all!) Cyanobacteria began photosynthesizing and in the process excreted a poison, oxygen, and in such quantities! You can’t imagine. The oxygen mixed with the rest of the gases in the atmosphere, competitor bacteria that couldn’t use oxygen and were in fact poisoned by it died out, the continents were rained on and leaked more of their minerals into the water, and the rest is natural history.

If some creature evolves that has an interest in writing the history of this planet after the Anthropocene destroys the Anthropoids, they should take a look at certain structures they will find in many different continents: factories. While Pyramids and cathedrals, Eastern Island carved heads and Roman aqueducts have had immense influence on the societies from which they emerged, factories have, arguably, been the most creative and destructive structures ever made. You, sitting there reading this, can look around you and spot, if you are like me and in a nice room, such things as lamps, furniture, cups, chairs, tables, doorknobs and even your clothes – socks, shirts, shoes – that can all be traced back to factories. That tracing back, once upon a time, was not so hard – if you lived in France, you’d trace back the clothes to textile factories in Lyon, and the lightbulbs to, perhaps, a factory in Ivry-sur-Seine, owned and run by the Compagnie générale des lampes. You can even go to the factory – which is now not a factory, but a historic site. As well, there is no CGL any longer. It has long been swallowed up by other companies, and its trace is only found in the portfolios of certain rentiers, or in the memories, bitter or sweet, of its dying employees.

As we all know, the old treadmill of production, which once scattered the peasants of Europe to the wind, built the weapons and the trains, made consumer society possible and created a proletariat that was supposed to seize the means of production in due time – is defunct. This isn’t to say that the factory is defunct. There are factories that are even more gigantic than those of the twentieth century, but they have gone to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other places. In France – as well  as in the U.S. and other countries – the writing was already on the wall for the factory worker in the 70s. The seventies was a curious decade, hated by your true blue conservative even more than the sixties. The reason is that the seventies witnessed a last stand, so to speak, of organized labor power. The story of the Lip watch factory, in Besançon, is typical. Since this isn’t a well known story in the U.S., I think I’d like to start here on my factory journey – a journey which will eventually link up with Joshua Freeman’s book, Behemoth: a history of the factory and the making of the modern world, which I’d like to urge on my readers. Even those who might not want to read about factories, who’d rather not think about factories, who are glad that they don’t work in factories.

You can’t escape them so easily, you know.

But back to the seventies. In 1973, the workers in the Lips watch factory in Besançon heard a rumor that their company, a French firm that at one time was one of the world leaders in watch making, was going to sell out to a Swiss firm. And the Swiss firm intended to fire all the workers and shut down the factory – as is the way of firms that buy other firms, a sort of ritual potlach they perform in order to show the neighborhood how tough and mean they are.  

Besançon is in the Eastern part of France. It was never a communist hotbed, but its factories had been radicalized in the sixties. In 1967 there’d been a famous series of actions at a nylon manufacturer which Chris Marker filmed. He also showed films made in the Soviet Union in the early thirties, which documented working conditions and worker attitudes. Fast forward to 1973.  Half of the workforce at the Lip factory was female. The CGT and the CFDT were the big unions. On June 12, 1973, having a prevision of what was up, the workers sequestered the management and went through the paperwork they had on them, discovering plans for a mass lay-off. It was then that they decided to do something that used to be done quite a bit once upon a time: and occupy the factory. But they went further than a sitdown strike. They decided to expropriate the expropriaters in real time.They declared that they were now going to manufacture and sell the watches and clocks themselves. As Andrew Kopkind, who reported on the takeover for Ramparts Magazine, put it:

“… workers at Lip seized control of their factory, made off with the large inventory of watches and parts, and began running the business themselves. Operating capital came from sale of the expropriated stock. The bosses gave up without much of a fight and the French and European Left began a campaign of support. Thousands of liberated watches were sold on the streets of Paris, in London, Rome, Berlin, and Zurich. The central unions—both Communist, Socialist and Catholic—belatedly tailed along on the tide of popularity for the Lip action, and the Left political parties also threw in their support. Mostly, however,  the energy and imagination of the action came from inside the Lip workers' committee, where "ordinary" employees—that is, not political organizers—took the lead, planned strategy, delineated the risks.”

All good things come to a bloody end in the struggle between labour and capital. President Pompidou’s Prime Minister, Messmer – a name from some expressionist film of the 20s - sent in the police, who stormed the factory and tossed out the workers. 20 to 100 thousand people came to protest. The Lip takeover then made it way into the popular consciousness, where it has had a surprisingly enduring life. A documentary about the Lip uprising was made in 2006, and a graphic novel, with a preface by the French Left’s leader, Jean-Luc Pierre Mélenchon, was issued a few years ago.

Read the rest at Willetts!

Epstein

There’s a moment in that wild interview Stuart Pivar gave Mother Jones about his friend, Jeffrey Epstein. Pivar was trying to give an idea of what he found “charming” about Epstein, as well as what he found sick about him. Pivar is an art dealer, among other things, and this is the anecdote he told: 

Jeffrey had numerous residences. And he used to rely on me to help him furnish them with art. I was sort of his art consultant, you might say, not that he ever took my advice. Because he pretended to be interested in art, but he was really more interested with—Jeffrey was so perverse. “Perverse,” that word, haha. You have to use it. What is perversion? You want to examine that.

Jeffrey was amused to have in his house fake art which looked like real art. Because of the fact that he was putting one over, so to speak. He thought that he was—how do you describe that? When you walked into this house, for example, there was a Max Weber or something like that, and it was a fake. And it amused him that people didn’t realize that. He was able to furnish his house with the fake paintings. Jeffrey had a collection of underage Rodins, for example, because what difference does it make if it’s real or not real?

This was, to me, a very telling story, a tell, even.  It was not just a story about fakery – although the whole of the Epstein story is about fakery on one level or another. It is also a story about complicity. For think of it: you have a guest in your house and you have what you know is a fake painting. And you point it out as a real painting. On the one hand, maybe your guest doesn’t know much about Max Weber – doesn’t know much about cubists period. So they nod along. They might like the painting or not. On the other hand, say your guest does know about Max Weber. And sees something isn’t right. Well, what is guest number two going to say? You have a fake there, buddy?

Guest number two knows just enough that by nodding, going along, he’s trapped. Or she’s trapped. A pact of complicity has been silently forged.

This is what Epstein was all about – not just fakery, but getting beyond that, where the person being faked out becomes complicit in the whole enterprise. This was on one level what getting girls who had been raped to go out and find other girls and lie to them about massage. This is tied to the science obsession. Just as, being a drop-out schmuck, he wasn’t going to get within miles of the scientists whose names graced the covers of pop science books, so, being a drop out with supposed billions, he could make those scientists smile and smile and he said drop out-y things. His website – assuming that the posts were written or at least dictated by Jeffrey Epstein – is a mishmash of rewrites from Wikipedia articles and platitudes. Sometimes you can hear the man:

“[Martin]Gardner’s numerous books and articles on recreational articles always inspired me, and I would like to share with you some fun and recreational mathematics that I have come across that are in the fun and inspirational spirit of Martin Gardner.

Pivar has a more blunt assessment of Epstein’s science abilities:

But Jeffrey didn’t know anything about science. Nevertheless, in his peculiarly inquiring mind, let’s say, like a child who is fresh to the world—because he has no compunction about approaching people—he brought together the most important scientists like Stephen Gould, like Pinker, like all of those people, and myself even, at dinners, and would propose interesting, naive ideas.. He would say, “Oh, what is gravity?”   I mean, to bring together a bunch of scientists and say, what is gravity? …Which is ridiculous in a way, even though it’s a question nobody can answer. But he would do that kind of stuff. Just for the sake of, I don’t know what. And Jaron Lanier and all that group, the greatest thinkers that they were, he brought together with a purpose of thinking, rightfully or wrongfully, that he was going to introduce some kind of logic or something—some special kind of a thought process, which others hadn’t thought of, which of course is absurd.

While everybody was watching, we began to realize he didn’t know what he was talking about. Then after a couple of minutes—Jeffrey had no attention span whatsoever—he would interrupt the conversation and change it and say things like, “What does that got to do with pussy?!”

So much for putting up the fake painting. But these people, hearing this question, are really being presented with a choice: shall I continue to associate with this guy. And they all, or most of them, did. He’d write incoherent, platitudinous or plagiarized texts on his site, he’s interrupt discussion to ask, what does that got to do with pussy, and he was treated to a stream of praise by scientists as if he was Medici and Einstein rolled into one. Richard Axel, who won the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine, said this, according to Epstein’s site: 

“Jeffrey Epstein has the ability to make connections that other minds can’t make. He is extremely smart and probing. He can very quickly acquire information to think about a problem and also to identify biological problems without having all the data that a scientist would have … He also has an extremely short attention span. Why?—it’s not that he’s bored. He has enough information after fifteen minutes so that you can see his mind thrashing about, as if in a labyrinth. And even to doubt an expert’s statements.” – 

Apparently, Axel was impressed with the question, what does this have to do with pussy. Very impressed. Too impressed.

Fakery and complicity form an interesting pair, as every con man knows. What you want, above all, is to induce fakery into your associate, your sucker, your victim. This is made easier when the victim doesn’t care about what he knows about your character, even your crimes, even your raping teen girls. What they care about is: well, being around wealth. Being in the glamorous world where Eastern European-seeming models of ambiguous age and origin are around. As they always were. Thus giving a certain aura to your association. Con men are great on tests – they need to test the mark. They need the mark to see enough that the mark has to make a decision: do I keep on with this? Do I believe my eyes? And his scientist friends were a perfect group for that type of thing. They’d self-selected themselves as “brilliant”. They were almost all male. And they shared, whether consciously or unconsciously, mucho contempt for women.

Epstein apparently greatly impressed men with his charm. A certain type of man – not your democratic socialist type, not your African-American type – his associates were almost all white –  but your millionaire or millionaire fluffer type. He was himself his own perfect front guy for journalists in that field.

Read the rest here: http://willettsmag.net/epstein/

shame of the universities 2: droit de seigneur in America

For the entire article, see Willettsmag.

There are scandals that fascinate but don’t educate. And then there are the other scandals, the ones that x-ray a social order, the ones that, in one flash of light, penetrate under the skin of the ruling class and show us the gaudy, gory connections that make up its structure and substance.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal, from his supposed suicide (the suicide of a man who spent 12 hours a day in his jail, meeting in a special meeting room with his lawyers; the man who supposedly despaired that the jig is up, without the thought crossing his head that he might have information that he could use to bargain with the prosecutors; the man who supposedly knelt and leaned so hard against the sheets conveniently provided for him by the prison system and tied to his bed post that he broke bones in his neck; that suicide) to his donations and friendships, showed what money can buy in America. It showed, even more, what money has bought in America: it has bought unaccountable private power that now rules us in ways that would astonish the aristocracy in 18^th century France.

Or maybe not.

Remember, the scandal about Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, known to all opera lovers. The plot concerns Figaro’s master’s desire to assert the droit de seigneur on Figaro’s bride-to-be: that is, the right of the master to have sex with the bride of the vassal on the first night of the marriage. A fiction, historians say. In Beaumarchais’s day, it was a common enough trope – considered archaic, but evidence of the ghastliness of feudal times.  In the play, the Count has already renounced the droit de seigneur in his own marriage – but he seeks to reassert it with Suzanne, Figaro’s bride-to-be, by buying her consent.

          “Tired of prowling among the rustic beauties of the neighborhood he returned to the castle… and endeavors, once more, secretly to purchase from her, a right which he now most sincerely repents he ever parted with.”

Napoleon, famously, called the play “the revolution already in action”. I don’t think anybody will call the Epstein affair the revolution in action, since we seem to be at a deadpoint in history where reaction rules on all sides. But the revolution, like the kingdom of heaven, can’t be said to be here, or there, but explodes – so who knows.

In my last post about the shame of the universities, I showed a streak of moderation that, a week after writing it, I am rather ashamed of. Before I rundown the farce of irresponsibility that is unspooling before our eyes, I should say, in my most dictatorial voice, that the larger scandal is that there is no SEC like regulatory body to police the concentrated private power of tax exempt universities. What regulation exists consists of mere nudgery. We have no body to force universities to be wholly transparent about their donations. We have no body to investigate the responsibility of the administration in covering up not only insalubrious relationships, but crimes. We allow universities and colleges an incredible leaway to investigate sexual assault, to investigate inside dealing by faculty, to allow deals with for profit corporations, etc. Just as allowing billionaires to flourish is like inviting dinosaurs to your five year old’s birthday party and expecting them not to eat the cake and the kiddies; similarly, allowing Harvard or Yale to be judge and jury of their own doings is not an invitation to corruption, it is corruption in action.

Yale, for instance. Let’s take the recent news about Yale. It too involves sexual assault and an island in the Caribbean – but, at least so far, without an Epstein in it. Instead, it involves Eugene Redmond, a professor at the medical school, who as long ago as 1994 was credibly accused of sexual abuse of students. These students were invited to study on St. Kitts Island, where Thomas seemed to run a private foundation. After hearing that Redmond was tricking students into having sex with him, this is what Yale, in its glory and its power, did:

“… the Yale School of Medicine launched an investigation in 1994 after students from Redmond’s summer internship program reported that he sexually molested and harassed two students. Redmond was reprimanded and signed a settlement agreement that required him to eliminate the program, cease recruiting and any supervising of students in St. Kitts and that he abide by a separate housing policy, the report said.”

If you rub your eyes and think, wow, a cab driver that isolated a customer and raped him would not only be fired by the cab company, but turned over to the police – you obviously do not fit in America. In America, Dr. Eugene Redmond was with Yale. And Yale is no mere cab company, but a trainer of, well, our Supreme Court. So what happened was a stern interdiction of sleeping together. And with that, Yale slapped together its mighty hands. Case solved!

shame of the universities

There’s been a lot of news about our elite universities lately. All of its been bad. Let’s do a rundown.

Tufts

On January 31, 2019, the Massachusetts Attorney General, Maura Healey, submitted a thick file to the court concerning the state’s case against the Sackler Family and Purdue Pharma, their private company. The suit takes cognizance of the fact that when the Sackler family began to market and distribute oxycontin, it did so with criminal disregard both for the way its delivery system could be easily hacked and with previous protocols about the administration of opioids for pain cases. This is well known. Less well known is the memoranda concerning the role Tufts university played in credentialing Purdue Pharma’s “philosophy” of pain management, ie credentialing propaganda for pushing the drug on millions of Americans via doctors.

Tufts, it seems, had developed a synergy with the Sacklers. After getting millions in Sackler money, Tufts was happy to allow Purdue personnel, like Dr. David Haddox, to lecture at the School of Medicine’s pain center. The brunt of Haddox’s lectures was that oxycontin was not addictive. Another Tufts professor, Dr. Daniel Carr, according to Stat magazine, which does investigative journalism in healthcare, reviewed the bountiful relationship Tufts had with the Sacklers in 2009 – after, one recalls, the first courtroom case against Purdue in Virginia in 2007. Carr founded the Sacklers wonderful, and he was able to make his views known at the Pain Center first as a faculty member and then as a director. Like the Sacklers, who apparently schemed to double their money with an anti-addiction drug that would parallel oxy, Carr jumped from propagandizing for the family to organizing conferences on addiction.

Given the gravity of the charges against Tufts, Tufts administrators have decided to investigate themselves. Who knows what they will find?

MIT

MIT ended an exciting year in 2018 when it also investigated itself. This happened after Jamal Khashoggie was dissected in vivo under the order of Prince Mohammed bin Salam. MIT had gladly given itself as a PR site for bin Salam’s tour of America, where no questions were asked about bin Salam’s strategy of starving to death the population of Yemen. After the investigation, MIT was satisfied that it had no reasons to cut ties with the Saudis.

This year, in fact last Friday, we learned a little something about the famed MIT AI laboratory and its director, the late Marvin Minsky. We learned that as a guest and friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Minsky, 76, was introduced to one of Epstein’s girls, 17, and had sex with her. Also called statutory rape. But this story, sensational as it is, rather disguises the fact that Minksy organized a couple of conferences on Epstein’s island even after he was convicted in 2008 of “soliciting” an underaged “prostitute”. Now a question one might want to pose, here, is what kind of setting is this for women in AI? Is it, perhaps, slightly, oh just slightly, discriminatory? Or did that matter because all the attendees were men? Here’s an account of one of the conferences from an attendee:

“Epstein’s former neighbor, the psychologist and computer scientist Roger Schank, describes another such event that he attended: a meeting of artificial-intelligence experts, organized by Marvin Minsky and held on Epstein’s island in April 2002. “Epstein walks into the conference with two girls on his arm,” said Schank. The scientists were holding their discussions in a small room, and as they talked, “[Epstein] was in the back, on a couch, hugging and kissing these girls.” 

Harvard

Harvard, of course, just keeps popping up in the Jeffrey Epstein narrative. But no larger questions seemed to be asked. So let’s broaden the scope.

Epstein gave his largest donation to Harvard in 2004. Who was president of Harvard in 2004? Larry Summers. Summers, it appears, was a plane mate of Jeffrey Epstein, and perhaps they talked about sex roles – after all, Epstein seemed to like to talk about how he’d like to inseminate a suitable 20 women with his genes on his New Mexico ranch. Whatever. In 2005, Summers got in trouble for suggesting that perhaps women are genetically deficient in mathematics in relation to men. He then proposed that women couldn’t be discriminated against in science at Harvard, for then they would go elsewhere, and in the perfect market of academia Harvard would lose out.

See the rest here.