The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    Jeffrey Epstein/Thomas Jefferson, Compare & Contrast

    By jollyroger on Thu, 08/15/2019 - 1:43pm |

     

    Amid the widespread revulsion appropriately manifested as the details of Epstein's predations emerge, ones mind is ineluctably drawn to his bother monster, Thomas Jefferson.

     

    Let us perform a (truncated) inventory:

     

    SEX SLAVERY: 

    Epstein, "sex slavery curious".  Ordered books on the topic from  Amazon.

    Jefferson: Repeatedly raped is actual  enslaved girl

     Advantage, Epstein

     

    AGE OF VICTIMS: 

    Epstein pursued teenage girls, manipulating them with large sums of cash and entre to fabulous parties to iinduce their participation (note that they retained the agency that required manipulation)

    Jefferson::  Began his serial rapes of Sally Hemings when she was 14 or 15

    Call it a tie

     

    CONSEQUENCES TO VICTIMS

    Epstein: Profound psychological damage resulting in multiple compensatory damage payments

    Jefferson: Lifetime bondage, also six children, likewise enslaved;

    Advantage, Epstein

     

    TERMINAL DEPRAVITY

    Epste​in: Had the decency to kill himself (disclaimer: maybe)

    Jefferson: Only freed his CHILDREN at his death.  Spent, therefore, every day of his life looking them in their eyes and continuing their enslavement.  HIS FUCKIN' CHILDREN!

    Advantage: Epstein.

     

    I could go on.

     

    You get my point..

    Comments

    Footnote:   Hemings was the half-sister of' Jefferson's late wife Martha.    It is offered in his defence, that he was devastated by Martha's death, and that Hemings bore striking resemblance to her.  Making, I suppose, Martha's father Jefferson's father-in-law redux.  Also, his model as a father of enslaved offspring of rape.


    by jollyroger on Thu, 08/15/2019 - 2:12pm

    Though Jefferson didn't bind his girls' feet as was rhe custom in China back then, nor fatten his concubines up at a trough til they couldn't move as done by Ugandan chieftains. We can probably pull some other now abhorred behavior out of the 1700s if you want to spin this parlor game a bit harder - even Ottomans in the Balkans, Catherine the Great stuff.

    BTW, it's 2019, and some are still using bonesaws while another friend of the US purportedly cutvhis brother up and fed him to the dogs. Guess Jeffrey wasn't that bad, relativistically speaking..


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 08/16/2019 - 2:53am

    We could talk about every historical figure and put them some where on graph. Jefferson at that point, Epstein at another, Genghis Khan there etc. We might even agree a lot on who goes where on the graph of most evil to most good. There's a lot of evil in homo sapiens and I'm not much into spending much time deciding who is more evil than who. Seems to me though that Epstein, and Jefferson, are some where on the evil side of that line.


    by ocean-kat on Fri, 08/16/2019 - 3:09am

    I know slavery is common in history. I haven't studied for example Roman history enough to know if there was any discussion among the intellectuals at the time on the morality of slavery or whether it was universally accepted without question. But there was significant discussion in Jefferson's time. He was surely aware of that debate and he still chose to keep slaves and even use them sexually. Many of his contemporaries did not. If we're going to judge him in the context of the time that's a big part of the context.


    by ocean-kat on Sat, 08/17/2019 - 10:25pm

    who'd thunk you'd be one to play a conservative, eternal, unchanging moral standards game rather than being a practitioner of relativism?


    by artappraiser on Fri, 08/16/2019 - 3:47am