(08-14-2019, 08:41 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: Epstein has brought shame on America. But Sartre and his slut brought even bigger shame on Europe. First, it happened in less decadent times; second, at least nobody claimed that Epstein was a philosophical genius on a level with Voltaire.
Epstein has brought shame upon himself -- too much for him to personally handle. Of course, people can kill themselves just as much out of fear as of shame, and as a (formerly) rich Jew and pedophile he had much to dread in prison. We will never know why he killed himself... Jews are not a large part of the prison population, and in view of the neo-Nazi prison gangs, I wouldn't be talking about a bar mitzvah or trying to explain why I don't need Jesus if I were in prison and were Jewish. (I am not Jewish, but I can imagine neo-Nazis thinking that I am a Jew because I have a German-sounding surname, I am a liberal, I connect to an Enlightenment culture, and like anyone who claims any decency as a person I thoroughly despise everything Nazi. Affinities to German and Austrian culture? Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert seem not to be foci of neo-Nazi culture, but they are well received in Israel). Because he surely molested "Aryan" girls he committed the worst sin that a neo-Nazi can see in a Jew, Rassenschande, which was good for execution (for the Jew) in the Third Reich.
Then there is the pedophile angle... and even serial killers see themselves as better than those who mess with children. Part of this may be that many violent offenders were themselves violated early and see in pedophiles what they hated in someone who betrayed the usual trust that delicate little souls need.
Now his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell is in serious legal trouble for allegedly enabling his activities. I find it hard to imagine.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.