From my understanding, the pedophilia was used as a means, not the ends. They wanted to be influential, and trying to get socially awkward scientific leaders who probably didn’t have great relationships with the opposite sex was probably particularly effective.
They tried to create an exclusive “social elite” men’s club, using prostitution and pedophilia as their tools, and sure it’s an example of misogyny and power imbalance, but frankly, I still wouldn’t respect them if we flipped around the genders or evened them out. Science doesn’t have an Epstein problem, it has a misogyny and power imbalance problem.
Maybe it also has a pedophilia and prostitution problem, but the article doesn’t really explore that, it’s just guilt by association. Which, fair enough, it’s Epstein, but I doubt being as manipulative as they were that they tried to sell themselves the same to everybody.
That’s true, but there’s several problems with that: the social bubble of the people who serve in those military usually have some distance from the societal norm, violence and chaos makes the country susceptible to be picked off by special interests, and it basically means that at the end of the day their leaders have to be willing to relinquish power.