07mk
2d ago
There is no "steelman" for pedophilia, unlike for racism (freedom of association), sexism (traditional gender roles), and homophobia (traditional sexual morality).
There absolutely is, and, somewhat ironically, it was something pushed by the pre-"woke" and even pre-"SJW" progressive leftists certainly in the late 00s. I still see some of it now, with the woke-natured push to retire that word and replace it with Minor Attracted Persons.
The steelman is pretty simple: pedophilia is a sexual orientation like any other, a sort of innate characteristic of someone that they're helpless to change, and finding something attractive doesn't imply actually doing anything to fulfill that attraction. As such, pedophiles deserve compassion, not condemnation, along with the structures to help them never make their attraction come to fruition in a healthy, non-shameful way. This wasn't a popular topic of discussion, but it absolutely was one among college leftists when I was a college leftist, involving things like future realistic androids or future VR experiences. I remember listening to a friend who was a psych major talking sympathetically about some therapy recording with a pedophile he heard in class, and how that man was clearly in pain and suffering due to his helpless feelings of attraction, which he knew he had to suppress.
Blood Rain, of course, is a video game that uses computers to generate imagery by modeling a virtual world, so it's pretty akin to the VR experiences mentioned above. Assuming that Evie were actually child-looking (a judgment I disagree with, but that's irrelevant here), it's perfectly defensible to have a game that overtly sexualizes her, and plenty of people have indeed defended such a notion.
07mk
2d ago
When someone posts an account of rape dogs being used by a group the median Motteposter finds sympathetic, we get posts explaining why trained rape dogs are almost certainly physically impossible. (In this case, probably correctly). When someone posts an account of rape dogs being used by a group the median Motteposter finds unsympathetic, we now have two people trying to defend the plausibility of rape dogs.
Who are those two people? I see just zeke5123a responding to your statement about rape dogs, and neither defended the plausibility of rape dogs. The point was pretty clearly to call out the reasoning that went into claiming some sort of equavalency in the plausibility of IDF rape dogs versus Pakistani rape gang rape dogs. Whether or not the latter is particularly plausible or even more plausible than the former is neither here nor there; it's the reasoning used to conclude that that's being criticized.
And I recall that there was actual discussion about the plausibility of IDF rape dogs when that was posted, with some people concluding that it was implausible, but at least one poster writing paragraph after paragraph about why he found the reports credible. That's what's supposed to happen when you attempt to rationally discuss something. Different people have different perspectives and they make their arguments, hopefully rationally. And when arguments fail at rationality or seem otherwise biased or unreasonable, others are supposed to call out that failure with the full confidence that their criticism of the reasoning will not be falsely interpreted as an attack on whatever object-level position is being discussed.
Be the change you want to see in the world Motte.
07mk
3d ago
My gut feeling would be the obvious - that a rape dog in an organisation with a tradition of dog training is less absurd than a rape dog in an organisation which eschews dogs ownership for religious reasons.
My gut feeling is that, for most people, the higher barrier that prevents them from having rape dogs is their dislike of committing or enabling rape, rather than their inability or dislike of training dogs.
07mk
3d ago
So it stands to reason that making it harder for women (and people in general) to secure student loans would reduce their attendance rates and would organically, downstream of that, lead to more relationships, marriage, and children.
That's simply not going to fly, for as long as people believe in blank statism. Unfortunately, the belief in blank statism has been self-reinforcing, due to policies under its belief leading to less competent people getting elevated to positions of status and power, leading to less rigor and more nonsense being taught as true, leading to more people believing in blank statism. Unfortunately, the beatings will continue until morale improves, or until enough of society is destroyed enough such that no one has the energy to carry out any more beatings than necessary to fend off starvation for one more day. I have no idea how to escape this cycle outside of maybe pinning my hopes on AI actually enabling fully automated luxury Communism, but that's a long shot.
This is why I've said that if I were to become emperor of Earth, one of my first decrees would be to outlaw all demographic-based statistical analysis, under penalty of summary execution, with all civilians being deputized to carry out this punishment. It probably wouldn't be enough to fix it either, but it seems like less of a long shot than AI saving us.
07mk
3d ago
I would say it's reasonable to expect an illustration of reasoning you disagree with to be a somewhat plausible application of that reasoning to a somewhat plausible scenario.
I would say it isn't reasonable, because that's actually not engaging with the reasoning. The thing with reasoning is that it's an abstraction that explains the interaction between real things, not an expression of real things in themselves.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I have long been sceptical of "intersectionality" and related ideas, but it's never led me to oppose trans people as a whole. If people share bad arguments in favour a position, or if bad people share arguments in favour of a position, that doesn't imply (in the sense of logical implication) that the position is wrong.
You seem to be implying that I "oppose trans people as a whole," which is plainly not evident in the comments that I wrote here (or anywhere - because I don't oppose trans people as a whole or even in any meaningful way - I oppose certain types of trans activists in their specific activism). It's also not that bad people make bad arguments in favor of a position, it's that the only arguments in favor of a position are bad arguments (whether they're from bad people or not is neither here nor there; some of them are bad, others aren't, but they all engage in bad reasoning when making these arguments).
07mk
3d ago
The tone of the entire paragraph certainly suggests that you disagree with what you have dubbed "dualism".
That suggestion you notice is accurate; I certainly do disagree with dualism in general and this form of dualism specifically. This doesn't imply that my statement:
e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now.
is a statement of complaint about some real events, rather than an illustration of the reasoning being explained.
If you don't mind sharing, what made you change your mind?
A combination of a lot of things, many little, a few big. The big/overarching ones would be: being tired of how much motivated reasoning I had to engage in; reading primary sources of the most highly-regarded "scholarship" that underpins intersectional feminism and realizing that there's no there there; noticing the complete lack of self-awareness by the supporters of the ideology in analyzing their own motivations for believing and supporting the ideology (i.e. searching for self-serving reasons that explain one's genuine belief in the ideology), which extended to punishing people for attempting to be self-aware themselves. This led me to conclude that this truly was a secular religion that was faith-based to its core, with, at most, one grain of truth (i.e. people sometimes treat other people unfairly due to their biases) which had already been incorporated into basic liberalism for decades anyway.
07mk
3d ago
A Communist incel angry about free internet porn going spree shooting, leading to a Canadian woman cop killing a Jewish figure hits so many culture war points that it basically proves the simulation hypothesis beyond a reasonable doubt.
07mk
3d ago
Broke: High status men are the real danger to society because they're too right-wing.
Woke: Incels are the real danger to society because they're too right-wing.
Bespoke: Incels are the real danger to society because they're too left-wing.
07mk
3d ago
It doesn't make sense to complain about some bad thing your opponents caused if it never actually happens. I find it most implausible that someone should have "years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret" and then come out as gay.
Who's complaining? Please point out to me where in my:
e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now.
implies in any way that this is a bad thing or that I'm complaining about it.
With all due respect, this suggests to me that you don't actually understand the other side very well. Trans activists, drag queens, and associated people draw a very clear distinction between trans women and drag queens. It is mostly anti-trans people who conflate the two.
With all due respect, this suggests to me that you haven't actually spoken to people on your "side" (an aside: what an ugly word to use in this sort of conversation). I'm basing this on actual conversations I had with actual trans activists who I was on the same "side" as all the way through around early 2020s. I used to be an intersectional feminist (still a feminist today, just not that kind) who was very much on the entire "break down all social norms and queer everything" train (heh) up to that point and know for a fact that, yes, trans activists do draw a very clear distinction between trans women and drag queens, but they certainly see the normalization of the latter as a good tool for normalizing the former, via attacking heteronormativity and opening up people's minds to the possibilities of human expression and sexuality and etc. that are being suppressed by our current oppressive system. My comment did not, in any way, conflate trans women with drag queens, nor did my comment imply such as a base assumption.
07mk
3d ago
I'm sure there's a range between 1x and 100,000x for any given victim, and the distribution of how many in each bucket in between is the real question. I honestly don't know if anyone has good data on what that distribution would be, since the people who have the tools and purportedly the societal responsibility to get the data required to model this sort of stuff accurately have pretty clearly intentionally avoided collecting the data. I'm just guessing, given how brazen these gangs seemed to have been, and the rather enormous numbers coming out in a number of anecdotal cases, roughly 1-2 orders of magnitude per victim as a mean seems reasonable. Maybe I'm wrong.
07mk
3d ago
I can believe that the UK has a higher rate of sex crimes than Ireland, but I do not believe it is over 100 times higher.
1383/100k vs 10/100k isn't based on comparing like-for-like, though. AFAICT, that report doesn't list it based on working-class grouping. And if we were to take an average of the 3 numbers you calculated instead of picking the lowest one (as the 1383 count is an average over multiple years, it's quite possible that it varied from 600/100k to 1800/100k in any given year, if the range was anything similar to Ireland), then it'd be about 60x.
Is 60x believable? Depends on your perspective, I suppose. I personally find 100x easily believable when comparing one particularly vulnerable subset of one population to the entirety of another (both being the <18 subset, of course) and would barely blink even if it were 1000x, because humanity is truly diverse. But if you find 100x unbelievable, perhaps 60x is unbelievable as well.
07mk
3d ago
How often does this happen?
Who knows? Doesn't matter, according to the "born this way" metaphysics of homosexuality.
Claims of "trans genocide" focus on alleged actual killings of trans people.
They focus on that, certainly, but focus doesn't mean exclusivity. Another common claim of "trans genocide" is that any microaggression against a trans person could be the marginal straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back that pushes them to suicide (which is famously common among trans people). And certainly, yet another is the but-for reduction of trans people by not allowing youths to transition. Which is why, e.g. pushes against "Drag Queen Story Hour" and similar activities have been labeled as part of "trans genocide" - the reasoning being that, if you don't normalize subversive gender expression like that among children, there will likely be at least some of them who would have discovered their innate transness but never did to due to not encountering such subversions, which reduces the population of trans people.
07mk
3d ago
Sure, but the thing about inhuman monsters is that they're often very good at having their way over the preferences of humans.
07mk
3d ago
One issue here for me is that there's likely a lot of repeat victims. I could easily believe that there were 14K victimizations of underage girls by organized Muslim rape gangs in the UK each year. But for there to be, on average, an additional 14K new such victims each year, given that many of these girls seem to have been raped dozens or even hundreds of times, it would require on the order of 100K - 1MM underage rapes per year, just from these rape gangs. Which is possible, but also, it's sufficiently high that I'd want to see the evidence and the math. Which are lacking. So the number is believable, but not credible.
07mk
3d ago
I think the part you don't understand about the argument - because it's hidden, even from the arguers themselves - is that the argument rests on a fundamental belief in dualism. That is, that a person has a soul that is some gender or another, which is only accessible to the person's mind and, as such, they are whatever gender that they believe they are. This form of argument was taken from the successful fight for gay marriage around the late 00s/early 10s, where it was deemed that gay people were "born that way," and as such, e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now. This, of course, also rested on a fundamental belief in dualism.
This is also why one common trans activist point of agreement is that babies can be trans before they're even verbal, which can be detected by their parents carefully observing their behaviors, a la facilitated communication. Interestingly, the belief in dualism and maximum autonomy also results in push for what seem like the complete opposite, that someone can change their gender at will, since their gender is entirely and only determined by the person's opinion.
So when a prepubescent person is confused about their gender identity, this isn't the result of them simply not having enough experience in life, or of them not having knowledge of what being a man or woman is like, or of them having been exposed constantly to social messaging about transness; it's necessarily only the result of their eternal soul expressing themselves in the truest, most genuine, real form. As such, denying them the ability to get on puberty blockers in order to transition their biology before their actual sex's puberty causes biological changes to them is cruelty. Furthermore, if they actually go through their natural puberty, they might believe that they "grew out" of their innate transness, which means one less trans person than there otherwise would have been, which is one of many forms that "trans genocide" takes place.
07mk
3d ago
I don't think it's a moral/ethical defense, but rather a sort of realpolitik analysis of why things are happening the way they are. Of course, once you enter that realm, then it follows that if enough anti-rape-gang Brits decide to implement what you say is deserved, there's no grounds by which to condemn them other than by gaining enough power to stop them. Which usually leads to bad results for everyone all around.
07mk
4d ago
It's kind of a meme or cliche in the gaming communities that any time someone talks about a woman speedrunner or pro e-sports player who performs at a world-class level, the odds are at least 9/10 that it's a trans male. That said, your comment reminded me of the YouTube channel Britta Food4Dogs, who, AFAICT, is just a regular old woman who seems to have genuine love for extremely nerdy JRPGs and other anime-related media, from watching some videos of her covering some very niche nerdy visual novels that I'm familiar with.
07mk
4d ago
Surely this can't be serious?
07mk
4d ago
I would contend that that falls under the "trade secrets or photos of victims or whatnot" where I outlined the exceptional cases where it could be reasonable to censor grids of pixels in scientific papers.
07mk
4d ago
Difference in preferences becomes difference in ability, which becomes difference in moral value, which becomes difference in rights. I am not exaggerating. The innate differences of men and women have been used to excuse systematic denial of women’s rights. Same for white vs. black.
This has been the standard excuse that I've kept encountered from those on the left who deny HBD or anything similar to it on ethical grounds, but I've found it to be rather lacking. As you write, it has been used to excuse denial of rights based on genetic categorization - which had been going on for literally centuries and likely millennia before anyone ever knew anything about genetic causes of average differences in behavior. And starting from a world where basically all of human history had unequal rights for women vs men and blacks vs whites (vs yellows vs reds vs etc), equal rights were achieved not through scientific arguments about genetics. Whether or not genetic reasoning would be successfully used to justify the implementation of such a denial of rights in an environment where such equal rights are already taken for granted is a very different question, and pointing to how some people in the past wrote essays reaching for genetics to justify the pre-existing millennia-old status quo of unequal rights as evidence that it would just doesn't look like anything other than paranoia to me. Anecdotally, but I've yet to see anyone who's sexist/racist enough to call for denial of rights to women/blacks who seem like they would have been egalitarian equal-rights-supporters but for their knowledge of HBD or similar scientific concepts. I'm sure some exist, but the evidence that such people are so numerous as to meaningfully affect political outcomes in terms of equal rights is something I'm rather skeptical of, and something I'd absolutely love to see actual good, rigorous scientific research done on, in order to better inform all of us with respect to the value of denying this science on ethical grounds.
07mk
4d ago
The only way I think in the US a woman might think that boys systematically get better nutrition than girls is if they have an eating disorder which they justify to themselves as "everyone does it."
I think you're underestimating the extent to which US education (all education?) involves telling students, "Who are you going to believe, the trusted experts or your lying eyes?"
07mk
4d ago
As funny as that comparison is, the reality is certainly far worse than that. Because "ethically modifying" a meme by changing its pixels also fundamentally alters the meme in such a way as not to present the reader with an accurate depiction of the actual thing being purportedly studied, in a way that using nicer-sounding words doesn't. It'd be more like talking about genital herpes while presenting pictures of mosquito bites because pictures of genital herpes is icky, and mosquito bites kinda look similar.
07mk
4d ago
I encountered this on Twitter over the weekend, and, as should have been predictable to almost anyone, it resulted in the "ethically modified schematic reconstructions" themselves birthing new memes. My favorite is probably the article 13 compliant frog, but there are others too that made me laugh. Should be interesting to see how this develops.
On the paper at hand, it's hard to think of a more harsh condemnation of the authors and the journal that published it and possibly the entire field that found this behavior acceptable than this sort of "ethical modification" of memes in a purportedly scientific paper. If it were trade secrets or photos of victims or whatnot, that would be one thing, but this is because a particular grid of pixels was deemed unethical to show other academics for the purpose of scientific research and discussion, due to the idea contents of that grid of pixels. It creates a complete abomination of the idea of scientific inquiry, which requires entertaining ideas and presenting facts as they are. I think the continuing self-discrediting of academia is likely to keep getting worse before it gets better, if ever. AIs performing automated research and producing automated papers gives me hope, but also, I think the same forces that created this abomination are likely to dominate those too. I just hope that automating scientific research and papers will become so cheap and accessible to the layman that it won't be possible to truly censor.
07mk
8d ago
Reminds me of the quite commonly expressed notion over the last decade all the way to today, that censorship of wrongthink is required for free speech, because for women/POCs/LGBTQ+/etc. to have free speech, they must be free from other people expressing opinions that "make them feel unsafe" or "deny their humanity/basic rights/existence/etc." Another case of people smashing a square peg through a round hole because the roundness is what's been declared as sacred.
As best as I can tell, there's like 2 non-wokes complaining about Evie replacing Eve because she's got a more boyish style and attempting to manufacture consensus to the effect, and everyone else is happy to have another sexy and hyper-sexualized female protagonist in a AAA video game industry that has been leaning away from that. I'm a huge fan of the first game, and the Stellar Blade subreddit which I check pretty often certainly has been close to 100% positive.
Funniest part to me, though, has been the entirely predictable reaction by the "wokes" to memory-hole their reaction to Eve (only 2 years ago!), which had itself involved an attempt to memory-hole their reaction to 2B, which had itself involved an attempt to memory-hole their predecessors' reaction to Bayonetta.
In terms of Evie's looks, many people have pointed out that young women in their 20s or late teens who look like Evie aren't all that uncommon in Korea and other East Asian countries, with women in their 30s and 40s looking like that not being unicorns either. I've seen at least a couple of cosplayers dress themselves up to look like her with convincingly similar facial features, though with filters and AI, it's hard to say how real those are.
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