In Defense of A$$holery

To paraphrase Henry Girard: I am not, by nature, interpersonally an asshole. But sometimes it is socially expedient for me to ask myself: what would an asshole do in this situation? Because whatever else you might say about it, assholery is almost never second-guessed. "You asshole!" Well, no, but I don't mind you thinking that if it beats the alternative.

Peachy Keenan writes of Colgan Air flight #3407 that crashed in 2009:

If you read the cockpit transcript, you will be shocked at how unsterile it is. Normally no non-essential conversation is allowed in the cockpit during takeoffs and landings. But this captain chatted the entire flight to Rebecca, regaling her with old flying stories, giving her pilot career advice, advising her on lifestyle choices, complaining about his own career decisions. To me, it’s obvious that the older man-younger woman dynamic was at play as he talked her ear off, perhaps in an effort to simply make conversation in an awkward, unnatural pairing, or perhaps to impress her, or perhaps because he just felt awkward around a cute young blonde."

Keenan writes this in the context of pointing out that this and the two recent commercial aircraft accidents all involved under-qualified female aircrew. But reading her account made me grateful that my job doesn't require me to interact with females. Who needs that sh!t.

The sad fact of the matter is that it is trivially easy for us men to be maneuvered into a headspace where we start trying to "impress" a woman. I recalled this scene from the 1996 movie "Beautiful Girls":

I hate this. I hate this enough that this is the point where I stopped watching the movie, and couldn't even get through this clip for the purpose of this post.

I must have trauma.

And lest this seem an exercise in hatin' de wimminz, let me clarify that I hate the degree to which I myself am susceptible, except by vigilant assholery, to the maneuvering.

I hate it for two reasons. I hate it because it's sterile. As a married man, I would not (I avow) be trying to cash this out, and in any case am fully aware how futile that would be anyway. That's probably true in general: like I said, I haven't seen the rest of this movie, but I predict that none of these poor guys has any interaction with Uma Thurman beyond the level we are seeing in this scene. We all of us know this. But here we are, tap dancing for loose change anyway.

The second reason I hate it is that however difficult it is to escape the "older man-younger woman dynamic" mentally, it is impossible to escape it socially. Let's take the Congan Air example. It is possible that Capt. Renslow is chatty by nature, and I'm not even judging. There is a reason that There-I-Was is a pilot cliche; we ALL do it to anyone who sits still for it, especially other pilots. But throw in a cute blond girl, and now the cliche gets mapped onto a template where That Creepy Guy Is Hitting On Me. It doesn't matter what Renslow's intentions actually were. You know that Rebecca spent the last hour of her young life thinking this; you know that the NTSB investigators listened to this tape, looked at each other, and rolled their eyes; and you know that it really sucks that Renslow's family had to mourn with this as their last memory of him. I cringe in embarrassment for all of them.

The Magical Kingdom of Little Saint James

So I see from my newsfeed that AG Bondi will start releasing The Epstein Files today.

Meh. We'll see.

A month or two ago I watched 2024's movie "Scoop" about the November 2019 Prince Andrew BBC interview in which he addressed the Epstein / Virginia Roberts allegations, and it made me realize that I have no intuitive feel for how such an interview will be broadly perceived. To summarize, during the interview Andrew denied any relationship with Virginia and claimed that the photograph of them together had to have been faked. He further expressed regret with how his friendship with Epstein had brought embarrassment to his family. This struck me as reasonable in the sense that it sounded like what an innocent person might say, but the fallout for Andrew was public excoriation and dismissal from any royal association. I guess the rule is: never submit to a media interview in which your own misbehavior is the principal subject.

I was also struck by the questions that were never asked.

The media is clamoring for the #flightlogs, which to me is the least interesting part of this story. The most interesting part is the answer to the questions:

• Who was he working for; and

• What was his agenda.

We in our corner of the internet have speculated for years that the answers to these questions are "Israeli intelligence" and "blackmail", but we don't actually know, the MSM has shown zero interest, and given that our own IC is almost certainly implicated, this is the least likely element to be included in Bondi's imminent doc-drop.

The second most interesting question is: what was it like to travel the Lolita Express?

My understanding is that Epstein would fly groups of prominent people out to Little Saint James for the purpose/pretext of discussing the Big Issues. How did the, um, sex thing happen?

1. Were the girls lined up for you to pick from? "I'll take that one."

2. Were the girls were just milling about, being friendly, flirting a little, waiting for you to make the first move?

3. Was a girl assigned to you in advance, and if so, what was that interaction like? a) Did she just tell you, "Jeffrey assigned me to you this weekend." Or perhaps b) she just flirts with you in particular, making herself look like an easy score?

What kind of reactions did these approaches get?

It seems to me that options 1 and and 3a ought to set off alarm bells. My sense is that the market for actual prostitutes is smaller than that for casual hookups, but maybe Epstein's guest list was pre-screened for people for whom this would not be a problem. (This seems plausible with respect to Prince Andrew.)

Options 2 and 3b maintains the possibility of plausible deniability / self-deception. But did anybody ever say to himself, "You know, I've never been quite this lucky, and . . . how old are you, exactly?" I recalled this scene from the movie "Heartbreakers".

I never watched past this scene. I know that "suspension of disbelief" is the attitude appropriate to a rom-com, but I can't overcome my sense of being insulted on behalf of the male half of the species when we are depicted in media as reduced to slobbering idiots by women. Wouldn't any remotely normal man in this situation slow down enough to wonder whether these girls' agenda is aligned with his own?

I must have trauma.

BTW, Mrs. Phi's theory is that the kind of people Epstein invited onto his airplane were the kind of people who (how can I put this) enjoyed a higher-than-average background level of availability signalling. (This is especially plausible with respect to Prince Andrew.) So when you're sitting there and a Virginia Roberts-level young woman is throwing herself at you, you reasonably say to yourself, "Huh, must be a Tuesday."

Were no normies ever guests? Let's suppose you're "the talent", e.g. a researcher at the MIT Media Lab invited to give a presentation. Of course you would be invited to the afterparty. And you're hanging out by the bar and you look over and there is a Prince Andrew-level celebrity sitting on the couch with a girl on his lap and his hand up her skirt. What do you do?

I would be uncomfortable. I would have multiple thoughts simultaneously. I would think that this is the kind of thing about which I would not want to be called to testify in a deposition. And at my age (now) and grouchy disposition, I would also think: this clearly isn't for me. Those of you here to hate-read are thinking this is merely envy, but if so it's envy operating a high level: I would be uncomfortable even if I had my own Epstein-assigned doxy trying to coax me onto the couch. Because everything in my Life Experience says this can't possibly be authentic.

Anyway, the point is, these are the kind of stories about Epstein I would want to read, and also the kind of stories the media does not want to tell us. Such stories would imply/recount female agency, and female agency is anathema: women can only ever be helpless victims of The Patriarchy, never mercenaries / novelty-seekers / subject to any other motivations that would have them volunteer for this kind of work.

The third most interesting question is: how did Epstein go about his grooming / recruiting? The man was a pimp, and pimping is a skill set.

And then, okay, sure, show me the flight logs. But remember that if they were subject to blackmail, they were also Epstein's victims.