Is the critical thinking "Epstein did bad things. Therefore, everything Epstein did was bad"?
Critical thinking can tell you there is a higher chance the women were sex trafficked considering the employer and his immoral proclivities. It can't tell you if they actually were or not.
1) If a powerful man who has been accused of sex trafficking
2) shows up with two girls less than half his age,
3) who are from eastern europe (while he is an American, not exactly where he'd get girlfriends or assistants),
4) he passes them of like his "assistants",
5) while they look like models,
6) and they make everybody uncomfortable to the point of telling them to signal whether they're there against their will
then critical thinking says he's more probably than not indeed sex trafficking, and there's something really shady in his relationship with the two girls...
Not, "they're surely just his assistants, nothing to see here, why would anybody consider anything else going on without some written testimony, a full confession and perhaps lab evidence?"
This thread is amazing. Epstein could have confessed to personally trafficking children from the former Yugoslavia (an actual thing that Blackwater was involved in, btw), and if he showed up 5 years later with a couple of barely legal Eastern Europeans in tow, there'd be commenters ready to insist you never can tell for sure!
The amazing thing to me is and yet at the time nobody actually did anything. That is why he got away with it for so long, he could repeat the same thing that already got him convicted once with such impunity because everybody was willing to look away when confronted with the specifics.
Each and every one of those people underneath Ito who suspected something might be up had the opportunity to do something about it, including going to the board, and given their suspicions they should have. And yet, nobody did.
So you say "no", but then explain how critical thinking leads to "then critical thinking says he's more probably than not indeed sex trafficking". How is that different from the statement "Critical thinking can tell you there is a higher chance the women were sex trafficked considering the employer and his immoral proclivities" except putting that higher chance at >50%?
Sorry, but 1) is really the only valid indicator here (and it wasn't mentioned in the story). Otherwise you are denying attractive young women from Eastern Europe the ability to get work in the US.
I reckon it's a comment on your unwillingness to consider the context in this conversation. Epstein was a sex offender who had been convicted of raping children and he comes in flanked by young women, possibly children. Isn't that suspicious?
