And general lack of basic respect for women as people, regardless of age.
When I was 26 or 27, I dropped out of a Bell Labs racquetball league because I couldn't stand listening to the locker room verbal mistreatment highly-educated men aimed at their female colleagues. Women with MS and PhD degrees, some of whom significantly outperformed** those same men in technical jobs, were spoken about as if they were subhuman.
** I had already been put into a mentor position, and had limited access to people's performance reviews.
I'm 73. I was a teen in the 1967 to 1971 era. A college student attempted to seduce me when I was about 15. I shudder to think now of all the trouble he could have gotten himself into if I hadn't been well trained in setting limitations. Statutory rape for starters and possibly paying child support instead of finishing his degree.
He's the only example of a toxic male that I have directly experienced myself. Sure, I've met guys who had some underlying attitudes about roles and expectations, but not to the point that it interfered with me being able to be myself. Sometimes a little assertiveness has been needed on my part, but I've never experienced anything that rose to the level of toxic.
I know the predators are there. I just haven't met them at anti-war protests or later as a public-school teacher or later yet as an in-home care provider. I haven't met any truly toxic men in my current life as a committee warrior in a HOA, either. Toxic people, sure. But not specifically toxic due to being male.
Most guys at this HOA seem to be aware that they don't want to be mansplainers or condescendingly superior assholes due to their gender, (Many are condescendingly superior assholes due to being Formerly Important People, but that's a different phenomenon). When I watched Mad Men, I was really shocked and I thought, "My god, my mother grew up with that as the norm. No wonder she was an alcoholic."
Of course, Mad Men assholery and toxic maleness are on a continuum, though it seems logical to me that a lot of one being present will enable some of the other. Both could be norm in social milieus that I have never experienced.
Not a lurker but FWIW I completely co-sign GFTNC's observations about older guys and underage women back in the day. And general lack of basic respect for women as people, regardless of age. And most definitely to include leftish and hippie types. Late 60's through the 70's.
Not discounting novakant's experience, just sharing my own
Animal House is honored in the Library of Congress, the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute's 100 best comedies. Everyone I knew in the '80s thought it was funny, but watching it now makes me squirm because it is so deeply embedded in rape culture. My squeamishness now is a good sign for mainstream culture, maybe, but I think its presence on these lists needs to be given some serious critical re-examination, especially in the light of all of the manosphere influencers trying to tell their confused adolescent viewers that this behavior is natural, manly, and nothing to be ashamed of. Nope. These views and behaviors are toxic to everyone.
I hardly even know where to begin with my male first-year students. There's so much online misogyny bullshit to cut through. They aren't bad at heart, but they are so misled and so heavily propagandized by the toxic grifters who can monetize their young viewers' insecurities.
f, as it seems, all of the regular male participants on ObWi find this a foreign concept, it makes them a rather unusual group. Who knows about the lurkers, however.
Nice as it is to be seen as special, I'm not entirely convinced that we are that anomalous. Not the pretend that there are not an appallingly large number of scum out there. But I think that, exactly because they are so horrid, they appear more numerous, more usual, than they actually are.
I recall a couple of social circles/groups I was in back in the 60s and 70s and 80s. Both included some high profile males (I decline to style them men) for whom "sexist" or "predatory" are mild adjectives. But, looking over the whole group, there were a host of men, from teenagers to elderly, whose behavior and language wouldn't distress anyone here. But we didn't stand out like the lowlifes did.
Tina Brown on Mandelson's arrest, Prince Andrew, the US Epstein situation etc:
The Erstwhile Ambassador, the Fallen Prince, and the U.S. Epstein Morass
Tina Brown
Feb 23, 2026
The stunning arrest of the former British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson will produce a blast radius in the UK that may be even bigger than Jeffrey Epstein’s. If you are drowned by the volume of the Epstein emails, just wait for the leaking of all the Mandy memorabilia, which will undoubtedly include revelations and scuttlebutt from 30 years at the beating heart of British politics. There is no one Mandelson hasn’t advised, conspired with, gossiped with, and, god help us, texted with in his high-flying life as a political homme du monde as much at home on oligarchs’ boats as at dinner parties at Chequers and 3100 Massachusetts Avenue.
The strategic architect of Tony Blair’s new Labour was dubbed the Prince of Darkness for his sinuous skills as a media spinmaster. He’s been up and he’s been down, but up to now, he’s never been out, and may not be yet as the charge of misconduct in public office is notoriously knotty to prove. Before he was sacked as ambassador last September, Lord Mandelson was forced to resign twice from cabinet positions: for failing to disclose an improper loan in 1998, and again, three years later, for helping a wealthy Indian donor to the Millennium Dome get a British passport. He kicked up more dust in 2005 when, as EU trade minister (admittedly, the world’s most boring job), he flew from Davos to Siberia with his friend Nat Rothschild to join the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska for a banya sauna session. Inappropriate was Peter’s middle name. But he always surfed back because the depth of his strategic know-how was unrivaled. It kept him relevant among power elites who valued his acerbic expertise. Even PM Gordon Brown, who hated him, gave him the post of business secretary. Brown is now incandescent at how casually Mandelson, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, was allegedly leaking real-time, market-moving information from their private meetings to Epstein.
It was considered a risky move in late 2024 for the usually excruciatingly cautious current Labour PM Keir Starmer handed Mandelson the prized diplomatic post of representing the UK as His Majesty’s ambassador to the US. It’s amazing now to think that Mandelson, then running a lucrative advisory agency, was in such cocksure form that he was simultaneously lobbying to be Chancellor of Oxford (he lost out to former Tory leader William Hague), and even had the nerve to think he could serve as both ambassador and chancellor. The outgoing US ambassador Dame Karen Pierce argued strenuously against choosing Mandelson to succeed her, but there was logic to the appointment that few want to recognize now. As a longtime appreciator of Peter’s gifts, I thought it was somewhat brilliant myself. It was precisely because of Mandelson’s iffy ethics and affection for money—he famously said he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”—as much as his sophisticated understanding of global trade, that the Prince of Darkness was seen as such an excellent fit for Trump-era Washington. And indeed he was. In his brief seven months in the post, he navigated the minefield of Trump tariff threats, closed a long-sought UK/US foreign trade agreement, and unexpectedly struck up a useful rapport with JD Vance. Mandelson was an instant star host at that most glamorous of embassies, with his urbane younger Brazilian husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, and his endearing “ambassadog,” the border collie Jock. I had tea with Mandelson in London after he was ejected as ambassador, and found him wounded but resilient, focused—I thought unrealistically—on finding a foreign benefactor who needed steerage through the corridors of power. But when the second Epstein tranche revealed Mandelson’s apparent breaches of official confidence, his loyal circle was properly gobsmacked. Bad judgment to maintain his friendship with Epstein, yes. But the whiff of semi-treasonous information sharing? Whoa! And for what? To prove his worth to the most worthless man on the planet?
Mandelson’s arrest was the second news meteor to hit British national life in a row, after last week’s historic apprehension of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The iconic news shot of Andrew slumped in the back of the Range Rover, with an expression of traumatized panic after a day in a police cell, gave the British public something that Americans are thirsty to see: a legal reckoning. After years of palace dithering and the murky 2022 payoff of Virginia Giuffre authorized by his protective mother, King Charles’s statement that “the law must take its course” made him look morally impeccable and decisive. It felt good, didn’t it, to see Andrew’s thick hide of royal prerogative finally being ripped away, his veil of ultimate privilege pierced at last. And it was gratifying that the photographer who caught the shot that was splashed on every front page in the world was the unpretentious Reuters journeyman Phil Noble, who, on a tip from a colleague, had driven six hours to Norfolk and raced to the unexpected location of Aylsham police station, where he caught the just-exiting car of Andrew’s security detail, pointed his camera at the back seat, and got the news moment of the year. In case there is anyone deluded enough to feel sympathy for Andrew, I submit the anecdotePaul Page, Andrew’s onetime royal protection officer, told in a 2022 documentary. When a random party girl not listed on the official log showed up at the palace to visit Andrew and was asked to wait for security clearance, the portly prince apparently blasted one of the guards on the phone as a “fat, lardy-assed c–t,” for not letting her through. Whether or not Queen Elizabeth’s epically dreadful second son ends up in the clink, Phil Noble’s picture was a thrilling karmic win for the people versus Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Double Jeopardy The two stunning arrests in the UK have cut through the endless inconclusiveness of the DOJ morass on the US side of the Atlantic. It’d be pretty incredible if, after all the sleaze oozing out from the Epstein files, the only judicial scalps are a hapless royal buffoon and a woefully heedless British ambassador. Over here, fourteen elite leaders, from Wall Street titans to celebrity scholars and white-shoe lawyers, have been shamed and cast into professional purgatory, but no one yet has been arrested, except the pixie-haired society pimp with the cut-glass British accent awaiting Trump’s pardon in the Bryan federal prison camp in Texas.
Perhaps the contents of the just-discovered six storage units Epstein owned across the US will give us something more tangible than a sinkhole of reputations. Thanks to enterprising Telegraph reporterswho noted payments to the locker companies on Epstein’s credit card bills in the files, we can now expect the rotting effluvia from all the stashed hard drives, computers, and photographs, hidden by Epstein’s private detectives from the FBI raids on his multiple mansions. Remember when he told the 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre, “I own the Palm Beach police department”? It was easy for him to be tipped off that a law enforcement sweep was coming. Perhaps the only time Epstein told the truth was in his answer to Steve Bannon’s startling question, “Do you think you’re the devil himself?” With his customary Cupid bow smirk, Epstein replied, “No, but I do have a good mirror.”
Maybe Epstein was the mirror himself. But his reflection gave an x-ray of other people’s moral weakness. In a society built on credit and credibility, a single evil actor who grasps the fallibility of his fellows can entangle all.
novakant, I'm saying that older men wanted to sleep with young girls (newsflash: very many still do), and if they were anywhere in life which facilitated that they took full advantage (cults, the music business, rock bands, revolutionary groups which attracted idealistic young people who were easy to manipulate, etc etc). And they regularly expounded on how it was the natural order of things, as many rich and powerful men still do today (you'd be amazed how often I have been given this talk in my life, and not only when I was young but also as an explanation of the "sense" it makes in evolutionary and biological terms). They don't, however, always treat the girls as disposable products like Epstein did.
The representation of this power dynamic was everywhere, in music, in literature, in films, in history lessons, in politics, and on and on -everywhere. And to a considerably lesser extent, it still is. Hartmut's quotation made me smile in recognition, it was so on the money. I'd be surprised if Chomsky wasn't steeped in it; almost everybody was in those days, even (and maybe especially in some ways) the counter-culture, the revolutionary groups, "free thinkers", "non-conformists", controversial academics etc etc.
If, as it seems, all of the regular male participants on ObWi find this a foreign concept, it makes them a rather unusual group. Who knows about the lurkers, however.
In this regard, Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fcf87c
is an interesting read, pointing out how women were often relegated to support roles in these movements while simultaneously being demonized by the media.
About jailbait in pop, you also have to take into account the whole structure of the industry, where bands do concerts and groupies flock backstage. My backstage adventures have been with classical music, a bit more sedate, but I remember that I had a 1st year student who was a huge fan of some relatively famous heavy metal band and she missed classes to attend multiple concerts on their Japan tour and she had been befriended by one of the guys in the band and was getting backstage. When she came back from the last concert, she had pictures of her, dressed like a demure Japanese uni student and the musician. Given that this was Japan, there were no drugs, but I didn't really ask what she actually did backstage, though she was clearly smitten. Multiply that by multiple groups and multiple concerts, mix in drugs, and it's probably a feature for a lot of groups.
GftNC, if you are saying that older men regularly slept with teenagers back then, I literally have no knowledge of that ever happening in the circles I grew up in. And I think that's perfectly compatible with your experience, since you seemingly grew up in a very different environment.
If you are saying that the representation of this power dynamic in the culture industry was more supportive and permissive then, you won't get any argument from me.
"Several classic pop and rock songs from the 1960s–1980s contain lyrics that reference “jailbait” (a slang term for someone under the legal age of consent) or imply romantic/sexual interest in young or underage females."
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).
It is perhaps less surprising (but no less repulsive) for those of us who were teens in the 60s and remember.
Or, although not jail bait, considered something like Surf City: "Two girls for every boy!" Even as a teenager when this came out, my first thought was "Doesn't really sound all that great for the girls". Even if you don't classify that as misogyny, it seems remarkably tone deaf.
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.
„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".
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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/
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
And general lack of basic respect for women as people, regardless of age.
When I was 26 or 27, I dropped out of a Bell Labs racquetball league because I couldn't stand listening to the locker room verbal mistreatment highly-educated men aimed at their female colleagues. Women with MS and PhD degrees, some of whom significantly outperformed** those same men in technical jobs, were spoken about as if they were subhuman.
** I had already been put into a mentor position, and had limited access to people's performance reviews.
"
I'm 73. I was a teen in the 1967 to 1971 era. A college student attempted to seduce me when I was about 15. I shudder to think now of all the trouble he could have gotten himself into if I hadn't been well trained in setting limitations. Statutory rape for starters and possibly paying child support instead of finishing his degree.
He's the only example of a toxic male that I have directly experienced myself. Sure, I've met guys who had some underlying attitudes about roles and expectations, but not to the point that it interfered with me being able to be myself. Sometimes a little assertiveness has been needed on my part, but I've never experienced anything that rose to the level of toxic.
I know the predators are there. I just haven't met them at anti-war protests or later as a public-school teacher or later yet as an in-home care provider. I haven't met any truly toxic men in my current life as a committee warrior in a HOA, either. Toxic people, sure. But not specifically toxic due to being male.
Most guys at this HOA seem to be aware that they don't want to be mansplainers or condescendingly superior assholes due to their gender, (Many are condescendingly superior assholes due to being Formerly Important People, but that's a different phenomenon). When I watched Mad Men, I was really shocked and I thought, "My god, my mother grew up with that as the norm. No wonder she was an alcoholic."
Of course, Mad Men assholery and toxic maleness are on a continuum, though it seems logical to me that a lot of one being present will enable some of the other. Both could be norm in social milieus that I have never experienced.
"
Not a lurker but FWIW I completely co-sign GFTNC's observations about older guys and underage women back in the day. And general lack of basic respect for women as people, regardless of age. And most definitely to include leftish and hippie types. Late 60's through the 70's.
Not discounting novakant's experience, just sharing my own
"
Animal House is honored in the Library of Congress, the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute's 100 best comedies. Everyone I knew in the '80s thought it was funny, but watching it now makes me squirm because it is so deeply embedded in rape culture. My squeamishness now is a good sign for mainstream culture, maybe, but I think its presence on these lists needs to be given some serious critical re-examination, especially in the light of all of the manosphere influencers trying to tell their confused adolescent viewers that this behavior is natural, manly, and nothing to be ashamed of. Nope. These views and behaviors are toxic to everyone.
I hardly even know where to begin with my male first-year students. There's so much online misogyny bullshit to cut through. They aren't bad at heart, but they are so misled and so heavily propagandized by the toxic grifters who can monetize their young viewers' insecurities.
"
Nice as it is to be seen as special, I'm not entirely convinced that we are that anomalous. Not the pretend that there are not an appallingly large number of scum out there. But I think that, exactly because they are so horrid, they appear more numerous, more usual, than they actually are.
I recall a couple of social circles/groups I was in back in the 60s and 70s and 80s. Both included some high profile males (I decline to style them men) for whom "sexist" or "predatory" are mild adjectives. But, looking over the whole group, there were a host of men, from teenagers to elderly, whose behavior and language wouldn't distress anyone here. But we didn't stand out like the lowlifes did.
On “Open Thread”
Tina Brown on Mandelson's arrest, Prince Andrew, the US Epstein situation etc:
The Erstwhile Ambassador, the Fallen Prince, and the U.S. Epstein Morass
Tina Brown
Feb 23, 2026
The stunning arrest of the former British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson will produce a blast radius in the UK that may be even bigger than Jeffrey Epstein’s. If you are drowned by the volume of the Epstein emails, just wait for the leaking of all the Mandy memorabilia, which will undoubtedly include revelations and scuttlebutt from 30 years at the beating heart of British politics. There is no one Mandelson hasn’t advised, conspired with, gossiped with, and, god help us, texted with in his high-flying life as a political homme du monde as much at home on oligarchs’ boats as at dinner parties at Chequers and 3100 Massachusetts Avenue.
The strategic architect of Tony Blair’s new Labour was dubbed the Prince of Darkness for his sinuous skills as a media spinmaster. He’s been up and he’s been down, but up to now, he’s never been out, and may not be yet as the charge of misconduct in public office is notoriously knotty to prove. Before he was sacked as ambassador last September, Lord Mandelson was forced to resign twice from cabinet positions: for failing to disclose an improper loan in 1998, and again, three years later, for helping a wealthy Indian donor to the Millennium Dome get a British passport. He kicked up more dust in 2005 when, as EU trade minister (admittedly, the world’s most boring job), he flew from Davos to Siberia with his friend Nat Rothschild to join the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska for a banya sauna session. Inappropriate was Peter’s middle name. But he always surfed back because the depth of his strategic know-how was unrivaled. It kept him relevant among power elites who valued his acerbic expertise. Even PM Gordon Brown, who hated him, gave him the post of business secretary. Brown is now incandescent at how casually Mandelson, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, was allegedly leaking real-time, market-moving information from their private meetings to Epstein.
It was considered a risky move in late 2024 for the usually excruciatingly cautious current Labour PM Keir Starmer handed Mandelson the prized diplomatic post of representing the UK as His Majesty’s ambassador to the US. It’s amazing now to think that Mandelson, then running a lucrative advisory agency, was in such cocksure form that he was simultaneously lobbying to be Chancellor of Oxford (he lost out to former Tory leader William Hague), and even had the nerve to think he could serve as both ambassador and chancellor. The outgoing US ambassador Dame Karen Pierce argued strenuously against choosing Mandelson to succeed her, but there was logic to the appointment that few want to recognize now. As a longtime appreciator of Peter’s gifts, I thought it was somewhat brilliant myself. It was precisely because of Mandelson’s iffy ethics and affection for money—he famously said he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”—as much as his sophisticated understanding of global trade, that the Prince of Darkness was seen as such an excellent fit for Trump-era Washington. And indeed he was. In his brief seven months in the post, he navigated the minefield of Trump tariff threats, closed a long-sought UK/US foreign trade agreement, and unexpectedly struck up a useful rapport with JD Vance. Mandelson was an instant star host at that most glamorous of embassies, with his urbane younger Brazilian husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, and his endearing “ambassadog,” the border collie Jock. I had tea with Mandelson in London after he was ejected as ambassador, and found him wounded but resilient, focused—I thought unrealistically—on finding a foreign benefactor who needed steerage through the corridors of power. But when the second Epstein tranche revealed Mandelson’s apparent breaches of official confidence, his loyal circle was properly gobsmacked. Bad judgment to maintain his friendship with Epstein, yes. But the whiff of semi-treasonous information sharing? Whoa! And for what? To prove his worth to the most worthless man on the planet?
Mandelson’s arrest was the second news meteor to hit British national life in a row, after last week’s historic apprehension of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The iconic news shot of Andrew slumped in the back of the Range Rover, with an expression of traumatized panic after a day in a police cell, gave the British public something that Americans are thirsty to see: a legal reckoning. After years of palace dithering and the murky 2022 payoff of Virginia Giuffre authorized by his protective mother, King Charles’s statement that “the law must take its course” made him look morally impeccable and decisive. It felt good, didn’t it, to see Andrew’s thick hide of royal prerogative finally being ripped away, his veil of ultimate privilege pierced at last. And it was gratifying that the photographer who caught the shot that was splashed on every front page in the world was the unpretentious Reuters journeyman Phil Noble, who, on a tip from a colleague, had driven six hours to Norfolk and raced to the unexpected location of Aylsham police station, where he caught the just-exiting car of Andrew’s security detail, pointed his camera at the back seat, and got the news moment of the year. In case there is anyone deluded enough to feel sympathy for Andrew, I submit the anecdote Paul Page, Andrew’s onetime royal protection officer, told in a 2022 documentary. When a random party girl not listed on the official log showed up at the palace to visit Andrew and was asked to wait for security clearance, the portly prince apparently blasted one of the guards on the phone as a “fat, lardy-assed c–t,” for not letting her through. Whether or not Queen Elizabeth’s epically dreadful second son ends up in the clink, Phil Noble’s picture was a thrilling karmic win for the people versus Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Double Jeopardy
The two stunning arrests in the UK have cut through the endless inconclusiveness of the DOJ morass on the US side of the Atlantic. It’d be pretty incredible if, after all the sleaze oozing out from the Epstein files, the only judicial scalps are a hapless royal buffoon and a woefully heedless British ambassador. Over here, fourteen elite leaders, from Wall Street titans to celebrity scholars and white-shoe lawyers, have been shamed and cast into professional purgatory, but no one yet has been arrested, except the pixie-haired society pimp with the cut-glass British accent awaiting Trump’s pardon in the Bryan federal prison camp in Texas.
Perhaps the contents of the just-discovered six storage units Epstein owned across the US will give us something more tangible than a sinkhole of reputations. Thanks to enterprising Telegraph reporters who noted payments to the locker companies on Epstein’s credit card bills in the files, we can now expect the rotting effluvia from all the stashed hard drives, computers, and photographs, hidden by Epstein’s private detectives from the FBI raids on his multiple mansions. Remember when he told the 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre, “I own the Palm Beach police department”? It was easy for him to be tipped off that a law enforcement sweep was coming. Perhaps the only time Epstein told the truth was in his answer to Steve Bannon’s startling question, “Do you think you’re the devil himself?” With his customary Cupid bow smirk, Epstein replied, “No, but I do have a good mirror.”
Maybe Epstein was the mirror himself. But his reflection gave an x-ray of other people’s moral weakness. In a society built on credit and credibility, a single evil actor who grasps the fallibility of his fellows can entangle all.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
novakant, I'm saying that older men wanted to sleep with young girls (newsflash: very many still do), and if they were anywhere in life which facilitated that they took full advantage (cults, the music business, rock bands, revolutionary groups which attracted idealistic young people who were easy to manipulate, etc etc). And they regularly expounded on how it was the natural order of things, as many rich and powerful men still do today (you'd be amazed how often I have been given this talk in my life, and not only when I was young but also as an explanation of the "sense" it makes in evolutionary and biological terms). They don't, however, always treat the girls as disposable products like Epstein did.
The representation of this power dynamic was everywhere, in music, in literature, in films, in history lessons, in politics, and on and on -everywhere. And to a considerably lesser extent, it still is. Hartmut's quotation made me smile in recognition, it was so on the money. I'd be surprised if Chomsky wasn't steeped in it; almost everybody was in those days, even (and maybe especially in some ways) the counter-culture, the revolutionary groups, "free thinkers", "non-conformists", controversial academics etc etc.
If, as it seems, all of the regular male participants on ObWi find this a foreign concept, it makes them a rather unusual group. Who knows about the lurkers, however.
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In this regard,
Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fcf87c
is an interesting read, pointing out how women were often relegated to support roles in these movements while simultaneously being demonized by the media.
About jailbait in pop, you also have to take into account the whole structure of the industry, where bands do concerts and groupies flock backstage. My backstage adventures have been with classical music, a bit more sedate, but I remember that I had a 1st year student who was a huge fan of some relatively famous heavy metal band and she missed classes to attend multiple concerts on their Japan tour and she had been befriended by one of the guys in the band and was getting backstage. When she came back from the last concert, she had pictures of her, dressed like a demure Japanese uni student and the musician. Given that this was Japan, there were no drugs, but I didn't really ask what she actually did backstage, though she was clearly smitten. Multiply that by multiple groups and multiple concerts, mix in drugs, and it's probably a feature for a lot of groups.
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GftNC, if you are saying that older men regularly slept with teenagers back then, I literally have no knowledge of that ever happening in the circles I grew up in. And I think that's perfectly compatible with your experience, since you seemingly grew up in a very different environment.
If you are saying that the representation of this power dynamic in the culture industry was more supportive and permissive then, you won't get any argument from me.
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"Several classic pop and rock songs from the 1960s–1980s contain lyrics that reference “jailbait” (a slang term for someone under the legal age of consent) or imply romantic/sexual interest in young or underage females."
Classic Pop Songs Referencing Jailbait
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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).
It is perhaps less surprising (but no less repulsive) for those of us who were teens in the 60s and remember.
Or, although not jail bait, considered something like Surf City: "Two girls for every boy!" Even as a teenager when this came out, my first thought was "Doesn't really sound all that great for the girls". Even if you don't classify that as misogyny, it seems remarkably tone deaf.
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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.
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add "woman" between same and twice (It was there when I posted but then diasppeared)
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„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".
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Correction: second wave feminists, not first!
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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
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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.
On “Open Thread”
i like that poem
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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/
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wj, if that is the totality of what Chomsky said, what do you take to be the unambiguous meaning (or implication) of it?
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