Brainless Elites

~ Clarissa

Turns out thousands of addresses on Ashley Madison have .gov, .mil, and .edu  extensions. The realization that there are so many arrant losers among the elite who’d use an official work email to meet cheating partners is disturbing.

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Published by Clarissa

15 thoughts on “Brainless Elites”

  1. Clarissa, really? You didn’t see this article, did you? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/eric-schimdt-penthouse-new-york-photos-apartment.html

    Now, is the CEO of Google a loser? Financially, no; by other standards, debatable. Is he on the Ashley Madison list? Don’t know. If he is, the hackers might have edited him to avoid pissing him off. Having Google go to war against you could be dangerous.

    I’ve never cared for Ashley Madison, but the attraction is what Erica Jong described as the “zipless fuck” in her novels, and that appeals to a great many people.

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  2. My boggling is at the idea that you’d use an email address that anyone else knows about for clandestine activities, not that people cheat or pay to find other people to cheat with.

    I don’t do anything like that and I have email addresses set up for multiple purposes. If they really were so dedicated to cheating they paid money to find people, they could easily set up a burner phone to link their accounts to a site and use a prepaid credit card. Very simple.

    I’m not sure what point Vic was trying to make by mentioning the Google CEO.

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    1. Simple.
      (1) The behavior reaches to the highest levels of elites. Again, that’s the US. Other countries have a more honest attitude toward sex.

      What shows up in the media is only a small fraction of what’s there. I know 2 people who were dommes in the past and had Federal, state and local politicians and judges as clients. I never wanted to know the names and none of their clients were ever outed.

      One recent survey suggested that over 70% of single women in the US have slept with someone they knew to be married to someone else. I’m not going to vouch for the survey methodology, but the notion that this behavior is quite common and that Ashley Madison was only the proverbial “drop in the bucket” seems quite plausible.

      (2) People are absurdly trusting in Internet sites. The best security experts will tell you, if you want something to be confidential, you cannot put it on the Web, period. You can use prepaid phones, but playing with IP addresses is more difficult. Even if you create a hotmail account, if you use if from work or home, I can know where you are (IP address and latitude/longitude from which I can get a picture of the building where you are and any signage). In fact I’ve seen web survey data that included geographic coordinates — some collect that data routinely. And no, they don’t ask respondents for that.

      I’m sure the Ashley Madison scandal won’t be limited to government. I expect other institutions, including a bunch of universities, to get shaken.

      The downside of this is that there are people who signed up and never used Madison, but who didn’t want to pay the removal fee, who are going to be embarrassed by this. I feel bad for those folks.

      But then again, if Americans had a more honest attitude toward sex, there would have been no reason for Madison to exist.

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        1. Everybody has smart phones these days. Why use anything else?

          One has got to be insane to use it from the office where the bosses can see every site one accesses.

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        2. True. But there are VPNs and proxy servers you can use to hit email sites. And there’s Tor. And people have smartphones. Hiding stuff from your spouse/boss is different than hiding from the NSA or Verizon. For someone to be so stupid as to use an email address that the spouse/boss knows about means they don’t care if they’re found out or they’re just inept.
          Elites, by definition have web savvy or access to web savvy.

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          2. The entire discussion begs the question of definition of elite. I don’t see a police lieutenant or mid-level bureaucrat as elite anything. Access to Web expertise? Anything on the web can be hacked, no exception.

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          3. You are going through a gateway to get to the Internet; that’s a problem. It’s also the case that the military monitors cellphone traffic at military installations. I suspect NSA does as well. If you try to set up a device to work around security protocols, you will be in a world of hurt. These people aren’t entirely stupid. The options you suggest simply may not exist for many of them.

            Fraternization with the spouse of another service person is a problem for the military. I guess fraternization outside the service isn’t. I suspect may of these people won’t care about the leak. Apparently Ms. Dugger doesn’t either.

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  3. Are they arrant losers because they cheat or because of lack of caution?

    I suddenly felt sorry that the entire society, not only elites, is brainless enough for those revelations to probably affect professional lives of the people in question. I don’t care if a professor / gov worker is cheating on his wife, I care about quality of their job only.

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