by liberal japonicus
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested and in custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
A good time to watch Stewart Lee on Prince Andrew
https://youtu.be/MDUeO4lRhu4?si=N3cb873hkKF98w7-
I have to say that I am still shocked by the continuous revelations emerging from the Epstein files. It’s almost as if we are ruled by an at best amoral, unaccountable elite not governed by any law. Call me crazy, but I had a bit more faith in our leadership before, though I think the whole thing started with Bush I.
As a sidenote: interesting and shocking what has been revealed in France since MeToo. The sense of entitlement and the sheer depravity of anyone from Foucault to Duhamel is just astounding.
I really must take serious exception. Given the behavior on display, amoral seems like sane-washing. Immoral is what we’ve got here; there really isn’t any reason to attempt to whitewash it.
The “Andrew formerly known as Prince” will get a little accountability, but full accountability for the perverts that visited Epstein on his Kid Rock would require massive bloodshed, so unlikely.
Could be wrong!
It’s very good that this is happening. Also, what an illustration of how deeply unfortunate it is when stupidity, ignorance, and an entitled sense of impunity collide.
The King is saying and doing all the right things about it. But it is unsettling that the country is in a rather fragile and unstable state, with uncertainty about Keir and Labour, the Tories, and the malignant Farage waiting in the wings. On the whole, as far as one can tell over many years, Charles is a perfectly decent sort, and William seems to be OK too. But the Royal Family is not as popular as it was (understandably!), and in retrospect even the admired late Queen is responsible for some of this. What a mess.
As a sidenote: interesting and shocking what has been revealed in France since MeToo. The sense of entitlement and the sheer depravity of anyone from Foucault to Duhamel is just astounding.
In my experience, nothing that is coming out anywhere in the wake of MeToo is any surprise to a large proportion of women, particularly those who’ve had a life and are no longer young. I don’t know how much you all saw about the Gisele Pelicot case, but her husband arranged to have her raped, unconscious, by over 70 men he’d recruited online over 10 years. Of the 51 men who were identified and charged, they ALL came from a 30 mile radius around the small Provencal town the Pelicots lived in. And they were from every walk of life: journalists, firefighters, nurses, delivery drivers, labourers etc etc. Eminent thinkers and other famous and powerful men, not to mention soi-disant enlightened, decent, liberal or progressive ones, are hardly exempt from the qualities which make this possible.
novakant – As a sidenote: interesting and shocking what has been revealed in France since MeToo. The sense of entitlement and the sheer depravity of anyone from Foucault to Duhamel is just astounding.
Foucault is a tricky one for me. It’s hard to see anything at all positive about a monster like Epstein. Foucault, for all his manifest monstrosity, made important contributions to philosophy. There’s also the crucial difference between people weaponizing Foucault’s monstrousness in order to further demonize the LGBTQ+ community, and the elite circling-of-wagons around Epstein to protect those already well insulated by their wealth, power, and privilege.
Foucault being decades dead also takes a lot of the urgency out of the conversation. He can’t do any more damage than he already has.
And on a much lighter note, the post title immediately made me think of the Kuricorder Quartet’s version of the Imperial March.
The title reference was to Crown Imperial, thought I’m happy to make the connection to nous’ link.
A lot of interesting points. I had to check Foucault’s dates, he died in 1984, and I wonder if one problem/challenge is that we often live in an eternal present, and we can pull people into that even though they have been long gone. There is the famous letter of Machiavelli where he says:
“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold, I strip off my muddy, sweaty, everyday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them… there I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reason for their actions; and they, in their humanity, reply to me.”
When we can time travel like this, it is easier to subject everyone, living and dead, to our own moral codes.
Foucault, for all his manifest monstrosity, made important contributions to philosophy.
Are we talking about the gay leather, hardcore S/M Foucault – which is fine by me as long as consenting adults are concerned. Or the Foucault who according to several accounts of the time had sexually abused children in Tunisia (in a not uncommon post-imperial twist)? Which is of course not.
I’m afraid your argument that his contributions to philosophy – which I do recognise – might somehow be used as a counterweight in the moral calculus is at the heart of the problem currently being unravelled in France:
E.g., a figure like Matzneff would openly write about his pedophilia and be published for decades by Gallimard, the most prestitigous publishing house in France, his career supported by major writers and intellectuals. In the middle of this clip he is shown sitting in Bernard Pivot’s “Apostrophes” – the major intellectual talk show of the time – talking about illegal acts with children and hiding behind the “art excuse”. Everyone laughs it off and the one brave writer who challenges him was later vilified in the press.
There are numerous other examples where pedophilia and sexual abuse has either been legitimized altogether – ranging from Sartre/Beavouir et. al. in 1977 to Finkielkraut just recently- or artistic and intellectual achievement has been used to excuse or cover it up, e.g. Polanski, Haenel/Ruggia, Depardieu, Doillon etc.
As you can see, I am quite into French intellectual and cultural output, in fact it is one of my passions – but I am increasingly questioning much of the culture and society that it rests upon. I realise that all of this is catnip to the right who wants to roll-back the achievements of ’68 and of course hates people they consider deviant, but still we have to face up to some uncomfortable truths.
Now that Foucault is known to be bad, do we have to take down all his pendulums?1??
No arguments here, novakant. I struggle with the same questions about the institutions and culture. I’m struggling with those things on an ethical level at my own institution in this moment.
On the French front in particular, I’ve had a ringside seat while my graduate institution dealt with the passing of Derrida, and with the fallout from his having defended a friend and colleague of his for having coerced a grad student to sleep with him. Derrida (and his estate after his passing) threatened to move his archive elsewhere if his friend faced any discipline. I believe his friend ended up taking a position at another university. Meanwhile, his grad student left the program the year before I started my Ph.D.. I don’t know if she continued her studies elsewhere or if she left as an ABD. The wrangling and fallout from all that were background noise as I settled into my graduate work. Most of the people I was in class with had known all the involved parties.
Not as problematic as Foucault – at least everyone involved was an adult – but part and parcel of the same culture, and I can’t read Derrida without thinking about those things as well.
novakant, I’m also very sympathetic to what you say. And for clarity’s sake, although I often examine this kind of stuff for its effect on women, it is very clear that the kinds of men who can get away with it also take sexual advantage of any group that suits their taste, including children, boys and other men.
But the question of whether to judge such behaviour by today’s standards, or the standards of another time, is a different and difficult one. It may, for example, have been acceptable/legal until recently to rape your wife, but if she was trying to resist and in distress that still entails a kind of lack of empathy for the suffering of a fellow human that makes it possible to judge the perpetrator harshly.
And as for whether one can or should enjoy or appreciate the intellectual or artistic work of a moral degenerate, we have discussed that on ObWi many times. There is no easy answer. And whether the French (or any other) intellectual culture makes such behaviour more likely, or more tolerated, this is above my pay grade. It is noticeable, however, that more prominent women in France have found fault with the MeToo movement than those in other countries, so that’s a clue. And Macron continuing to staunchly defend Gerard Depardieu in the face of countless allegations is another one. It doesn’t stop Depardieu being (or having been) a great actor, however.
Where all of this will fail across the US, is on “You let me cheat on my taxes by $10M every year, and you’re going to draw a line at sex with 17-year-old?” That this will be largely successful is very depressing to me, even before we get to my granddaughters.
Some random thoughts. I don’t know all of the gory details about the French cases mentioned here, but we have had all kinds of revelations about various groups who one would imagine would be more introspective to behave badly/act immorally. Those two phrases highlight the problem, either you assign behavior to an immature lapse in judgement or you make a claim about how it is going against all societal values. And given that Foucault was always identifying flaws in societal thinking, one can see how this can seem like society pushing back, which then engenders its own pushback, etc etc.
One thing that I think is operative in the issues in France is that academia and the elite are siloed there to a great extent, maybe much more than in other countries, and it creates structures that make misbehavior more likely. I’m thinking of the issues that have recently arisen in philosophy with McGinn, Searle and others, the issues in classics (we discussed this article about Peralta who has since moved from Princeton to ASU) as well as in other areas. I tend to think that these problems are often defined as sexism or racism, but the underlying issue is the ability to rationalize. The fact that Chomsky appears to be friends with Epstein (and his quote “I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.”) seems like instantiations of that urge to rationalization.
I tend to think that these problems are often defined as sexism or racism, but the underlying issue is the ability to rationalize.
lj, I think your point about rationalisation is a good and important one. It enables people that way talented and inclined to make a logical case for their behaviour or opinions. But I think that this is in the service of their urges, or their instincts, which can indeed be racist or sexist.
On the Chomsky remark you quote, I think it is ambiguous. For example, saying he has no regrets about meeting war criminals does not to me imply any endorsement of their actions. It might mean that he has learnt something about their character and motivation which is useful for understanding how such people come to do what they have done, or got into the positions of power they reached. It could be to do with psychological, sociological or criminological understanding. And of course, it also displays a lack of concern for how it makes him look, which is not in itself a bad thing. Distaste or disgust at being known to have met someone terrible is not necessarily a sign of virtue.
I’d say that whether it’s ambiguous depends a lot on what’s in the (unquoted) rest of what he said. There might well be context that shows what he thinks of those people and their views. Good or ill.
But if the quote is the totality of his statement, it doesn’t seem all that ambiguous. At least to me.
If any of y’all are interested in the larger context in which Chomsky said that, it’s at The Harvard Crimson:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/5/3/epstein-nowak-chomsky-meeting-2015/
Chomsky is saying there that yes, he met with Epstein, and Chomsky places that in the context of institutional donors, noting that MIT has taken money from all sorts of horrible people, and that some have had buildings named after them (which Chomsky opines is worse than meeting with such a person because naming the building gives the person cultural prestige).
He appears to be saying something akin to the oft quoted “There is no ethical consumption under [late] capitalism.”
True enough, but a dodge nonetheless.
Chomsky’s relationship with Epstein went beyond that context of official meetings on campus. They were chummy in emails, and the substance of those emails gets pretty noxious. Not Lolita noxious, but more elitist Bond villain noxious – elites spreading their genes far and wide to improve society because they are genetically superior…that Bell Curve bullshit that Epstein and Musk and the rest of the insecure billionaire class eat up, and that the edgelord academic fringe love to dabble in whenever they want to prove how free-thinking and liberated from ideology they are.
Chomsky has always struck me as saying things that sound morally satisfying and have a kernel of truth, but doing precious little to try and effect any change. It’s like he aspires to be Cassandra because that relieves him of the responsibility of actually being a change-maker.
>It’s like he aspires to be Cassandra because that relieves him of the responsibility of actually being a change-maker.
a common affliction.
wj, if that is the totality of what Chomsky said, what do you take to be the unambiguous meaning (or implication) of it?
Nous, thanks for the full article. While the Cassandra envy is one reading, I see it as Chomsky being constitutional incapable of admitting he is/was in error. I’m most familiar with this pattern in linguistics and Geoff Pullum notes that it is not just that Chomsky is wrong, but that he creates a system (both with his rhetoric and his theory) that is immune to being proven wrong, even when core assumptions are proven wrong.
This is a recent article about this
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.00186.pul
Pullum also had this more accessible article in the National Review about it
https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/xml_20220307_Pullum_BookReview-1.html
With the first splash he made, reviewing Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, he had these traits, making me wonder if he ever changed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2223153/
Looking up those links revealed a few more and this one was particularly interesting
https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2019/3/30/my-response-to-chomskys-extraordinary-accusations-by-chris-knight
The most interesting section to me is the discussion of Chomsky working at MITRE, and the funding was a machine translation system that would allow “the possibility of translation of Russian language materials, particularly in scientific fields, into English by machine.”
which is incredibly ironic, given chomsky’s opinion on the development of LLMs
GftNC, if the totality of what Chomsky said was the quote (“I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.”), I would take the unambiguous meaning to be that he is perfectly comfortable spending time with the scum of the earth.
wj, thank you. I see that I am (at least theoretically) out of step with some of the people here. I say theoretically because once, in a diplomatic setting, I let it be known that I should not be introduced to William Kennedy Smith (whose mother was US ambassador to Ireland at the time) because I would not shake his hand.
But my opinion on the Chomsky comment is that it does not reveal or imply his view of the actions of the relevant people, although calling them “major war criminals” admits their guilt and its scale. Nor do we know in what circumstances he met them, whether he sought the meeting, knew in advance he was meeting them, or anything else. It is quite easy to imagine he might have met Kissinger, for example. And saying he doesn’t regret meeting them says nothing about his view of them, it says something about him, and not even that he is “comfortable spending time with the scum of the earth”. I take it to mean that in his view meeting them did not imply approval of them, and that he does not subscribe to the idea that meeting evil people involves the risk of moral contamination. If he had shared a platform with them I would view it somewhat differently, and if he had been friends with them (as he was with Epstein) different again.
We know much more about his relationship with Epstein.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/22/noam-chomsky-jeffrey-epstein-ties-emails
While he may not have expressed regrets for it, his wife has said it was a “grave mistake”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/08/noam-chomsky-epstein-ties-wife-apology
Being friends with Epstein after his first conviction and sentence is another matter, but one that is not entirely surprising to me in view of the fact that Chomsky is a) elderly and b) a man. It’s quite possible he didn’t know all the details, and didn’t think it necessary to find them out. In my experience, including with very left wing men around in e.g. les evenements in 1968, or in the US the Days of Rage, many or most would see nothing remotely reprehensible about adult men sleeping with teenage girls. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that they might have seen it as the right and proper way of the world.
If this does not apply to the right-on (as we used to say) men of ObWi, so much the more impressive. But for anyone who was a woman or a teenage girl in the 60s it is a truism.
I wonder if the hangmen after the Nuremberg Trials could also say that they “met some major war criminals, and don’t regret it.”
It all depends on context.
GftNC, certainly it depends on context. But my assumption was based on a lack of context. That is, a standalone remark. My thought being that, to advoid that assumption from listeners, it behoves the speaker to provide some context to counter the assumption.
Chomsky being constitutional incapable of admitting he is/was in error.
Another common affliction, lol. Especially among 50+ men or so it seems.
many or most would see nothing remotely reprehensible about adult men sleeping with teenage girls … If this does not apply to the right-on (as we used to say) men of ObWi, so much the more impressive.
I haven’t seen anyone even remotely doing such things in the 70s. It may be an “elite” thing which kind of proves the point we’re making here. (we were pretty normal).
And should anyone approach my daughter someday in this way I will not hesitate to show him what’s what.
novakant, I don’t know how old you are, andI don’t know for sure, but I think you might not be a woman. If so, that is significant.
As for the “elite” aspect, it’s possible there was some of that in it, since many (but not all) of those lefty revolutionaries of the 60s did come from very comfortable backgrounds. But I think it was absolutely baked into the culture, as many films and books suggest, and going back much further than the 60s of course. And women were heavily influenced by it too, in a kind of false consciousness. I brought that particular period up because of Chomsky, and because (as lots of first wave feminists can attest) men who were otherwise very aware of different types of exploitation showed a lack of insight into the oppression of women, and the power of the patriarchy. Misogyny, like anti-semitism, is always with us, and although nowadays considerable disparity in age and power is frowned on, today’s variety is just as (or more) toxic, as this anonymous piece by a teenager in today’s Guardian illustrates:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/23/15-year-old-girl-misogyny-social-media-online-abuse
Correction: second wave feminists, not first!
„Wer zweimal mit derselben pennt, gehört schon zum Establishment“ (he, who sleeps with the same twice, is already part of the establishment) was an (in)famous slogan of the German 68ers (“student revolution”). In theory this was about “free love” but in reality it put pressure on young women “to be available”.
add “woman” between same and twice (It was there when I posted but then diasppeared)
I’m constantly surprised and repulsed by the number of classic rock and pop songs I hear still being played today that are about jailbait (even on the satellite feed in Trader Joe’s). I don’t think rock and pop really started to reckon with that legacy until the grunge era. It’s still around in the music mainstream, but mostly in rap and hip-hop.