DeepNeuralNetwork
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User ID: 799
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
18 seems like a young age to lose paternal authority over an unmarried daughter, if that's what you value. Somehow I don't think AOC laws actually are for this though. What about an age of consent of 15, but parents can veto their daughters' relationships until they are 18, or even 21? Veto means they can press charges against the man for violating their authority over their daughter.
The way the law works now, it doesn't protect paternal authority. Daughters will just do what they will with other teenagers, who are immune from AOC prosecution. Then when they turn 18, they will do whatever they please. The law mainly functions to prevent loving, family-condoned relationships between 20-something men and teenage girls.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
The law makes a very clear distinction between the two such that self-defense is not assault.
It would be even better if the law made a distinction where a loving relationship involving a 15 year old between could never be statutory rape. Only people who actually victimize should be prosecutable.
In many jurisdictions, it absolutely is.
I guess in mine it's not, because human nature is violent and we don't want to make every man who gets in a fight a felon.
A "15-year-old girl who loves her 20-year-old boyfriend" is not the same as "a 15-year-old victim of statutory rape".
It is if they have sex, even if she wanted it and is not victimized by it.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
This applies to marriage but not age of consent. You could just criminalize making a 15 year old pregnant, instead of sex itself. But I don't think that's even necessary because pregnancy at that age is not significantly more dangerous than at 20. Not enough to justify making it a felony. The historical demographic record is a testament to this.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
Assault is legal in some cases, such as self defense, plus it's not a felony to get in a fight, and on top of that if I punch someone, they're more of a victim than a 15 year old girl who loves her 20 year old boyfriend. Yet, the crime is less severe. That's illogical.
DeepNeuralNetwork
1d ago
My best answer to this is college students because 7 year age gaps are the most fertile according to the data. But also, whoever they want, since I can't find justification for ever making sex with a 15 year old a crime.
DeepNeuralNetwork
2d ago
The fact that the death threat people never seem very educated, and that smart people on this forum independently arive at the same opinions as myself, makes me think this topic is for some reason stratified mainly by intelligence.
DeepNeuralNetwork
2d ago
I don't have time to use this forum a lot, but I wanted insight from a more intelligent crowd than X on this topic. You don't have to engage.
DeepNeuralNetwork
2d ago
Is there any reason the age of consent should be higher than 15 in the United States? I've concluded from Twitter that it's extremely difficult to find and good arguments against this. Meanwhile there's a lot of evidence for the position. Academics seem to agree with an age of consent around 15 while 18 seems to be more of a grassroots idea.
The arguments for an age of consent of 15 are multitude. First there's evospych; studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls. Then there's ancient demography; the median age of marriage ranged from 16 to 18 for girls until 1600 AD and the minimum legal age of marriage ranged from 12-14 in most societies. Next there's the psychometric evidence: 15 year old girls demonstrate adult intelligence, while little children would be considered handicapped by adult intelligence standards, meaning the former should be able to understand sex and its consequences while the latter likely cannot. There's contemporary cross cultural evidence, specifically from Europe, which shows that wealthy modern countries can do just fine with age of consent set at 14 or 15. Example countries right now include France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Estonia, and more.
All of this evidence points to 9 being too young, but 18 being too high. It seems like 14 or 15 is the optimal sweet spot. This is important right now as we can't properly judge Epstein without thinking scientifically about the age of consent. All of his victims were over 14, and that's not underaged everywhere. It's probable he would he charged with prostitution in Europe, but seeing this as a pedophile situation is not necessarily the right way to look at it.
The counter evidence I have been shown is essentially nil. It usually is just a death threat, actually. The best evidence is that the brain develops until 25, but then why not have an age of consent of 25? Why not let 24 year olds date 15 year olds? It doesn't really matter logically when the brain is mature, just when it is mature enough, given that 18 year olds brains are still maturing but they are seen as mature enough by these people.
The other main piece of objective evidence is that fecundity peaks around 20. The issue with this is that sex and dating do not mean pregnancy. Furthermore ancient demography shows that teen pregnancy is good enough anyway. Finally, the data don't seem to indicate that teenage girls are too young for pregnancy; the negative causal effects on their pregnancy are extremely mild and don't justify banning a 20 year old from dating a 15 year old.
Finally there's subjective evidence, lived experience. Interlocuters swear up and down that they weren't mature enough to date at 15. Well, that's not my experience and the experience of a ton of other people, including entire countries with nuclear weapons. I'm not sure who is wrong here, or if it's just something that genuinely differs between people. Still, lived experience is really not how I hand out felonies to loving couples. I find that idea odious. Especially when the girl and her family testify that their lived experience is different from the American norm.
DeepNeuralNetwork
3yr ago
But why do you have a nightly shower? Are you so dirty that you must wash every night? Are you engaged in strenuous or muddy labour?
It's not mere hygiene at work, since if you have a conventional office job, you're not exerting yourself physically enough to require constant washing. It's the ideal of hygiene. If you skipped a night without showering, would you miss it? Would you feel, somehow, 'dirty'? Isn't there, in a sense, a moral obligation to keep yourself clean according to how you were raised?
I run over 3 miles almost daily and lift weights, and even if I don't do that I get greasy if I don't shower. I do it for purely physical reasons.
And if it were difficult for you to have that shower every night, if you didn't have access to a bathroom and heated water and convenient disposal of same, and easy to keep dry and warm afterwards, then would you shower every night?
No, so if you took me from the woods and put me in a house my change in showering behavior would be explained by physical environment.
So "poor people should have access to means of hygiene" does arise out of a particular political philosophy, and ends in you having a nightly shower as well as brushing your teeth, because 'this is just how it is done'.
I think it's pretty clear increases in hygiene are due to changes in physical environment, not John Locke's moral ontology ...
DeepNeuralNetwork
3yr ago
It's funny; two examples you highlighted are ones where the line of causality is fairly direct. Abolitionism came to the fore as the French constituent assembly debated the status of Free Colored and slaves in Saint-Domingue, with people pointing out that the Code Noir and slavery in general were illogical in light of the Assembly's liberal ideals. They ultimately eliminated the Code Noir and rubber stamped freeing the slaves (though the slaves did basically free themselves, first, the rebellion sparked by news of revolution at home). Then, a few years into the revolution, proto-socialists like the Enrages and Gracchus Babeu argued for the abolition of private property and social ownership of capital. They would ultimately lose the day, and uh, be killed; this drama of socialists emerging from the reeds after a liberal revolution to get smacked down would repeat in 1830 and 1848. There's a reason why Marx thought a liberal revolution was a necessary precondition of a socialist revolution.
The line of causality is fairly direct ... in the first instance what we have are people doing two different things. To establish a line of causality here is like establishing a line of causality between my nightly shower and teeth-brushing. It is to say that my tooth-brushing is caused by my shower, was made inevitable by it, because the shower established the principle of hygiene and it would be formally invalid for me to shower yet also go to be with a dirty mouth. Obviously the real reason why I shower and brush my teeth is to be found elsewhere. And besides, I don't apply the principle of hygiene in many ways. I could meticulously clean out each of my finger and toe nails, I could trim all hair on my body, I could clean the inside of my posterior orifice, pluck my nose, put swabs in my ears ... I'm sure many hygiene purists with OCD do all of these things nightly. And of course if you ask me why I shower and brush my teeth I would say hygiene. But the reality is that this means something other than that I am allegiant to some abstract principle. So too did the old liberals fail to "liberate" women for over a century. The American ones were also slow to recognize the equality of the slave and this slowness curiously varied tightly with one's economic interest in slavery. Only recently have we discovered that liberty also applies to homosexuals and transsexuals. It seems also that despite NAMbLA's best efforts in the 70s the rest of society has still not discovered the formal necessity of pedosexual rights given the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Nor have the furies been any luckier. Neither has it discovered the need for children's rights, or even 17.9 year old's rights -- public schools continue to be blatantly illiberal into the 21st century. Liberals decide what rights are formally valid as freely as they choose. We could easily enslave minorities, declare them 3/5ths human, get rid of women's suffrage, and ban LGBT and call ourselves liberal. We could even restrict none-property owning white men from voting, or simply restrict it to the top 6% of the population IQ wise, as in the early history of the U.S., most states allowed only white male adult property owners to vote (about 6% of the population).. Party idea -- the American Liberal Party. Platform: All men are create equal. Nonwhites are 3/5ths of whites. Only white male property owners should be allowed to vote. Women must wear dresses and cannot vote. Sodomy is illegal. Marriage is between a man and a woman. The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. No immigration from nonwhite countries.
If you fully absorb what people like John Locke claimed about moral ontology, the idea of keeping women in a subservient disenfranchised status is unsupportable. As is keeping slaves. But much like the Merovingian kings kept concubines for generations after converting to Christianity, it's taken generations for society to shed its traditions and let the logical consequences of classical liberalism seep in.
I don't think anyone's behavior is effected by reading John Locke's "moral ontology." We can model political behavior using behavior genetics. Let P_1,t, P_2,t, ... , P_n,t be the phenotypes of the politically relevant at some time t. Then assuming these people are all equals we would roughly expect the culture at time t, C_t = E[P_i,t] ~= (P_1,t + P_2,t + ... + P_n,t)/n. Now from behavior genetics for a quantitative trait like whatever political phenotype is under consideration, P = G + E, so P_i,t = G_i,t + E_i,t, and C_t = E[G_i,t] + E[E_i,t]. So you can see that C_t will change as G_i,t and E_i,t change amongst the politically relevant. During the French Revolution, both G_i,t and E_i,t changed a lot, there was a huge influx of the new bourgeoisie with their economic environment and everything. Now the question is, where do books, documents, principles come into play? To keep it simple I'll avoid introducing a notion of hierarchy, where what superiors think is introduced into the phenotype's environment, drastically shaping it through mechanisms which probably have more to do with wanting stuff and status than they do with the formal consequences of Locke's moral ontology. We'll just assume P_1,t, P_2,t, ... , P_n,t is sovereign, uncoordinated and equal. Any influence of ideas is purely intellectual. We'll even ignore the notion of political formula or noble lie and the competition for followers for now. Just let E_i,t = $_i,t , M_i,t, , T_i,t , and O_i,t for profit motives, ideas, technological environment, and everything else. Now C_t = E[G_i,t] + E[$_i,t] + E[M_i,t] + E[T_i,t] + E[O_i,t]. Is John Locke's moral ontology really the only changing factor among the politically relevant over time, or could their different behaviors over time be the result in changes of their genetic make up, their profit motives, their technological capabilities, and other things? When you add their suppression of HBD to the mix, are they really so influenced by information? How could they be when they censor information they don't like? If E[M_i,t] were so important we should expect affirmative action to be gone by now based on the findings of HBD, but it isn't, because belief in the blank slate never motivated it in the first place, it was genes, profit motive, etc.
DeepNeuralNetwork
3yr ago
I don't think society works that way. Socialism failed and so did fascism. Abolitionism wasn't inevitable, and it didn't happen because of some document from decades prior.
Even with no STDs, I support a common law age of consent. For example, if I were on a jury and a prosecutor was trying to convict a child molester of rape or sexual assault, I would vote guilty if the child is under an age of reasonable intelligence. All I would need as evidence is a psychological examination that shows the child does not understand sex or its consequences. I would never buy this for an intelligent adolescent.
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