"nerd, tunnel vision" As An Intentional Product of Materialist Scientism - A very preliminary look

I wanted to have this big enough so you could easily see MIT computer scientist Richard Stallman's button that says "IMPEACH GOD."   I also wanted it to be in the center of the page but Blogger is all blogged up these days.

I wouldn't have brought this up after seeing RMJ's post about Stallman's idiotic, disgusting, MIT group e-mails exempting the late MIT computer-scientist Marvin Minsky from guilt for raping one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims because he asserts the children were consenting participants, even though they were below the age of consent, they had clearly been recruited and trafficked by Epstein and because the MIT computer scientist believes that children of that age are clearly fair game for older, powerful men.  Minsky was 73 and his victim 17 when she says Epstein compelled her to perform a sex act on the old goat.

As I started I wouldn't have gone into this again except that I did get quite a bit of flack from the last time I went into the identity of Jeffrey Epstein's inner circle, the result of "The Friendly Atheist" and various atheist blog rats trying to pin Epstein to Christians and religion when his story, from almost the start, was devoid of help from Christians and those who were religious while being mostly fueled by an unusual number of atheists.  Marvin Minsky was a quintessential example of the typical Epstein associate.

In the background reading on Marvin Minsky I found he was, rather typically of people involved in "artificial intelligence" a vocal and assertive atheist, like Stallman, and in the case of Minsky before he went to Phillips Andover and then the typical Ivy League schools, he started off in the atheist Ivy prep school, the "Ethical Culture" Fieldston School in New York City.   Considering that he is accused of raping an underage girl late in life, I couldn't resist pointing that out as a possible example of the kind of "ethics" he imbibed in his atheist formation.

Interesting for my themes here, Stallman has his own website which is quite a mix of puerility of a typical secular-atheist-play-lefty type.  The kind of idiocy that I've written about at lenght, everything from being a Green Party supporter to his championing of Bernie Sanders.   Apparently in his brilliance, in his involvement with the kind of stuff that "artificial intelligence" is promoted in, he can't imagine how a 17 year old girl in the power of Jeffrey Epstein experienced what was done to her, how she could be forced to give one of the great heroes of the "artificial intelligence" effort a blow job.

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I hadn't gone far into looking into this one angle of Jeffrey Epstein's saga before I found that it might be less surprising that Richard Stallman can't see what is so glaringly obviously because his university, his colleagues, his associates, enormously famous and influential scientists proved they are a bunch of whores for money but also fame and those who can connect them to both and, most of all, power.   The list is an incredibly long one of individual scientists, of university departments, even entire universities who he groomed and used and weaponized - none of them naive, inexperienced children - and who, reportedly, he ordered the girls he enslaved to have sex with.   His influence has been pervasive, as this Wired article shows

Epstein provided money, attention, access, or combinations of all that to scientists—among them biologist Stephen Jay Gould, biochemist George Church, evolutionary scientist Martin Nowak, linguist Steven Pinker, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, physicist Stephen Hawking, and AI researcher Marvin Minsky, among many others.

Epstein was, in the parlance of the sciences, a marker. Like the radioactive tracer you get injected with before an fMRI, his villainy illuminates how the connections among a relatively small clique of American intellectuals allowed them, privately, to define the last three decades of science, technology, and culture. It was a Big-Ideas Industrial Complex of conferences, research institutions, virtual salons, and even magazines, and Jeffrey Epstein bought his way in.

How did these geniuses find themselves cozying up to a child rapist? In putting his apologies on the record with Stat reporter Sharon Begley, Church chalked it up to “nerd tunnel vision.” Ito, who also let Epstein contribute to his personal technology investment funds, called it “an error in judgment.” (Two people affiliated with the Media Lab have announced their departures as a result.)

As reasons to associate with a child rapist, tunnel vision seems less likely than dollars and network effects. Epstein’s network had the literary agent and superconnector John Brockman as a prominent node, and Epstein’s money seems to have followed Brockman's edges. In addition to representing an elite crew of popular and well-compensated writers about technology and science, Brockman had been a fixture in the tech and culture worlds since his time running multimedia events alongside Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. He also runs Edge, a sort of salon that for 20 years, until 2018, asked an annual big question of intellectuals and published their answers. Data on decades of Epstein’s charitable giving acquired by the Miami Herald shows Epstein gave $505,000 to the Edge Foundation from 1998 to 2008.

As the writer Evgeny Morozov, himself a Brockman client, argues in The New Republic, the agent became an “intellectual enabler” for Epstein. Morozov shares an email thread in which Brockman encourages him to meet Epstein even though he got “into trouble” and landed in jail for a year. Morozov writes that he declined.

Epstein, it’s easy to surmise, hoped to launder his reputation by association with all this—to purchase secular indulgences from these intellectual high priests. Or maybe he just wanted to feel smart. According to one account, Epstein’s actual interest in science was at best dilettantish; he’d ask big questions but his attention would wander, and he’d change the subject by saying, “What does that got to do with pussy?"

As someone who had many an argument on the ScienceBlogs, PZ's, Orac's etc. I was less surprised than I might have been that Epstein and his pimpess were involved in its founding through its parent company, Seed Media Group and with other pop media efforts that produce probably more influential quasi-scientific media schlock.

But Epstein didn’t stop at socializing with scientists or giving them grants; he also helped spread their ideas. Mother Jones says that Epstein and his accused procurer-of-girls Ghislaine Maxwell were on the board of Seed Media Group, publisher of an influential science magazine and blog network of the early 2000s that featured many Brockman clients. And no influence peddler’s circuit is complete without a stop at TED, the then-exclusive, now-ubiquitous conference at which Brockman was a stalwart, always on the lookout for new clients. Brockman threw an annual dinner during TED, for a while called the Millionaires’ Dinner—and then, for a while, the Billionaires’ Dinner. Epstein sometimes flew Brockman’s chosen guests in a private Boeing 727 that The New York Times described in 2002 as “outfitted with mink and sable throws” and catered by Le Cirque 2000.

This rot goes deep. These men—it’s almost entirely men—have defined the way culture has thought about, absorbed, and acted on technological change. And their inner circle included a monster. 

I am thinking that following the trail of slime that spread out from Jeffrey Epstein and his inner circle is necessary to understanding how the secular-atheist-materialist play left is tied in with not only the worst and most invested parts of the big money right-wing establishment - as the Epstein scandal demonstrates, science has never passed up even the most dubious funding - but also some of the sleaziest of amoral criminality.  I am only just following his relationship with John Brockman so I won't say any more about that just now.

I will give Adam Rogers the author of the Wired article marks for confessing that Wired, itself, has an origin connection to Epstein.