Exactly. I’m not the person you were speaking with, but I agree he’s illustrating your point: even though I don’t directly believe any of that stuff, I’ve been around long enough to know that it’s all blatantly untrue and patently ridiculous until it’s not, and that when it comes right down to it I cannot possibly know what I don’t know.

So I leave space for what I don’t know even while marking it as unreliable in my own mental index, and in the meantime I try to look for whatever can be physically proven. There is actually quite a lot of documented whatthefuckery in our natural world, and the way you get to proving it one way or another is by throwing hypotheses at the group of facts until one starts to fit.

In everything you’ve mentioned there’s nothing that has been definitively disproven. And what the security people are doing by looking for commonalities is exactly what they should be doing, not hiding their heads in the sand and pretending nothing strange has ever happened while they call other people easy names for noting that it exists.

Imagine if all Epsteins accusers so easily “deemed not credible” were actually heard the first time. There was a reason he went after the most vulnerable, the least protected, many of them with problems of their own: they are easy to disregard, easy to write off, even easy to blame for their own abuse. And that asshole was right.