re: #213 goddamnedfrank

The bit about how Epstein was playing out a personal fantasy by having smart guys entertain his eugenic sex fantasies is a thought I’ve been struggling to articulate for weeks.

I keep talking about how power and wealth put you in a position to never here “No.” This applies to when they fund “science” and “research”: ultimately their interest is aesthetic and vain in ways that contradict the skepticism required to be empirical, so they’re going to both fund quacks and uncritically pursue wacky pie in the sky stuff that sounds grandiose. The point is their self-image and sense of power, not actually helping people.

…which is pretty much what we’re watching on billionaire social media. Jeff Bezos could do productive shit with his Smaug horde, but space travel is exciting and speaks to a kind of basic-bitch loftiness of purpose. It’s why they can hang out at Davos and talk about saving the world from climate change—a very publically-acceptable, sounds-good activity to perform—but be incapable of considering that it might not be a for-profit venture, to the point that they talk down to people that point that out.

This is why philanthropy is deeply fucked; even if their priorities are moral (no guarantee) they still might not be what generally needs a fucking ton of money thrown at it.