Jerry Seinfeld likened the Free Palestine movement to the Ku Klux Klan — even saying those who use the phrase “Free Palestine” are worse than the white supremacist group — at a student event at Duke University meant to honor hostages who are being held in Gaza.
Seinfeld spoke at the school in Durham, North Carolina, to introduce a former Israeli hostage, Omer Shem Tov, when he made the remarks, according to the university’s student newspaper, The Duke Chronicle. He reportedly started by saying, in reference to the Free Palestine activist movement, “Just say you don’t like Jews.”
“By saying ‘Free Palestine,’ you’re not admitting what you really think. So it’s actually — compared to the Ku Klux Klan, I’m actually thinking the Klan is actually a little better here, because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ Okay, that’s honest,'" the Chronicle reported Seinfeld said.
still illegal
Unfortunately a majority(? cba counting) of states have age of consent below 18, New York, where this happened based on the snopes article someone else linked, is 17. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_in_the_United_States
Apparently it wasn’t:
I don’t understand why people feel the need to call others things they’re not and simultaneously want to be taken seriously in a debate. If words have no meaning then what’s the point? Jerry Seinfeld strikes me as a pretentious greedy immoral douchebag and his comparison with the KKK can stand on its own as a proper reason for ridicule.
While agree that words should have meanings, he definitely still was nearly 40 and apparently preferring the company of a 17 year old. Not a pedo by the evidence presented, ok, but that ice is thin.
The term is “sleazebag” or “pederast” if you want to get technical
That’s not thin ice. Paedophiles are attracted to prepubescent children, i.e., below the age of 13. Here’s where the ice is at its thinnest to diagnose someone as a paedophile, while ethically one is already submerged of course, when acted upon. It’s obviously not to be taken lightly with traumatic life-changing consequences when indulged. This is why it’s important to not throw terms around ignoring their meaning. People who actually are born with this condition should find ways to get psychological help to prevent it manifesting into reality. Irresponsibly throwing reputation destroying terms around causes people not to communicate, to suppress, and in the worst cases to satisfy their urges in secret which in turn increases the most wicked forms of suffering.
The aforementioned conditions are not at all present in Seinfeld-Lonstein’s case, where context matters. Here’s a quote from a book I’m reading which is an apt litmus test to decide if any relationship is weird or not.
Judging from the sources I’ve read Shoshanna and Jerry were able to talk to each other without one manipulating the other. While it’s statistically more unlikely considering their indeed unusual age gap, it does happen. They had a relationship for four years, so clearly it seems she was fine with it. Conversely, I’ve seen people in their thirties talk to each other where one was clearly dumbing themself down when talking to their significant other, which seemed quite weird.
TL;DR: there’s a night and day difference between actual indulging paedophiles who cause human trafficking and unimaginable suffering/death, and haphazardly being attracted to someone in their late adolescence. Conflating the two does the victims and the justice system a disservice. The former belongs to the most horrible forms of human depravity, while the latter, well, doesn’t. If one needs to manipulate another to form a connection, then it is ethically wrong regardless of age.
Ok, so the guy goes for as young as he possibly can and we’re going to assume that that confirms that he wouldn’t going any younger if he could? That’s the thin ice I’m talking about. I agree that we cannot call him a pedophile because there is no direct evidence of it, I’m on board with that, but his actions are not doing a lot for him. If he said “oh yea I like 24 year olds and older” that’s still weird for his age but it shows that his limit is a personal one and not a legal one.
It’s also weird that he says he could love someone whole-heartedly but also couldn’t properly communicate with her on more nuanced topics. Like, what made this minor so great and why could he not find that in anyone between 30-45y/o?
Oh it wouldn’t surprise me if many would go lower if the opportunity presented itself. Some of them, a small minority, will be paedophiles, and would go as low as they could. However, biologically the majority are simply attracted to fertility, attractiveness, i.e., young women, not girls. That’s exactly why there’s a need for an age or metric where ambiguity regarding potential harm/manipulation is decreased to a minimum, because obviously any kind of harm toward living beings is unethical; spare self-defence, but that’s neither here nor there.
Only aiming for as young as legally possible would be suspicious, but as far as I’m reading he’s still together with his wife Jessica Seinfeld who he met when she was 26, so I’m not yet sure what you mean by “his actions”. Anyway, what about what the women think in these situations? Shoshanna was on board for four years, and so were her parents. There’s no indication Seinfeld was inappropriate.
Women are as biologically wired as men are, and equally flawed—just look at how Justin Bieber was publicly salivated over at a similar young age, that’s clearly not okay. Meanwhile all of these discussions oftentimes sound as if women are always at the mercy of men. They aren’t.
If you were referring to “I can’t philosophize with her”, that’s a quote from a wholly different book about two siblings part of the youth resistance in Nazi Germany. I just found that sentence particularly apt to decide whether a relationship is right or not.
Oh god are you really bringing up a “women do it to” point completely unprompted?
As for the other quote, yes I clearly missed that. Still, I’m not sure what it has to do with the Seinfeld thing even though it is tangentially related.
As for “being attracted to fertility” and whatever…yea that’s not it, chief. Maybe I’m of the group that doesn’t see it that way but I’m 30 and I see someone ~25 and under and I see a child, not someone I should be sexually attracted to. Certainly not someone who I’d actually give that kind of attention to. I’m more than monkey brain, and maybe most people aren’t but we trust them to have jobs and shit so they should be able to handle this, too.
No. Merely stating that women aren’t as fragile with a need to be protected as discussion like these often make them seem, e.g., “advancing on her was grooming by default because all people of that age are vulnerable”. Seinfeld advanced, Shoshanna consented, and so did the parents. There was no vulnerability being exploited here. If it sounded like whataboutism then I should have phrased it better.
Perhaps this is the crux of the matter, more people than you’d like have monkey brains. Have you looked at human behaviour in general? In comparison Jerry and Shoshanna having been a thing at their ages is a triviality compared to the actually unethical harmful things we do as a society. And just to be sure, this isn’t a whataboutism again, because considering the quote mentioning her parents, there was no harm done.
Anyway, to bring it all back to my main point, it not being unethical doesn’t mean everyone should intentionally start dating younger people, but merely that calling Seinfeld a paedophile is an irresponsible and ironically childish unconstructive thing to do. Just like him saying “‘Free Palestine’ are worse than the Ku Klux Klan”.
Think about the number of words you have written on this particular subject. I’m not saying it automatically makes you a weirdo to think so long and hard about this but… I wouldn’t want to hang out with you.
If you were falsely accused of rape or murder, would you want a lawyer that analyzes your case long and meticulously or a zero-attention-span illiterate straight from Idiocracy that sifts TikTok’s “Ow-My-Ballz” videos all day?
Thinking long and deeply about oftentimes uncomfortable subjects or ethical dilemmas is why becoming a lawyer, doctor, judge, et cetera, is difficult, and accusing a person over the Internet is not. The latter unfortunately requires Brandolini’s law to refute: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”