DiscourseMagnus
1d ago
I agree that he blundered his way into an extremely fucked situation and that (contra the director's statements) the One Wish Willow company bears more responsibility than he does. But he still basically impulsively asked the devil to help him rape his crush and then spent most of the movie feigning ignorance about it. Medieval peasants would have an easy time condemning him for witchcraft and I think they would actually be 100% justified in doing so. I don't think the line of thought "it is so absurd to think that the One Wish Willow is real that I have no responsibility to consider that any anomalous events might be the result of it working" can coherently coexist with Bear's decision to use it in a private emotional fit in the first place. If it's real enough to make a wish on it's real enough to keep a fucking eye on.
DiscourseMagnus
1d ago
I don't think you need to be a feminist at all to see Bear as the villain of the movie and it's deeply disturbing to me how popular Bear-sympathetic interpretations have gotten. I want to say it's feminist-driven negative polarization.
DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
Democrats left and right are deleting all their fervent, avowed support for the man. He should brazen it out. Just refuse to drop out. What are they going to do? Take the L? His party would about face again in two weeks and slut-shame the accuser, just like the double-thought away the Nazi tattoo.
I'm reminded of Jay Jones.
DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
Perhaps the deciding factor here isn't the progressive's interpretation of the white Muslim convert's racial status directly, but rather whether the progressive perceives that the broader Muslim community has accepted them as part of the in-group.
DiscourseMagnus
12d ago
My perception is definitely that it's mostly cultural. There are severe underlying faultlines between the trans movement and the feminist movement, but most trans people still see themselves as allies to feminism, and they were trained to hate sexy stuff and hate themselves for being interested in it back when they still thought of themselves as men.
DiscourseMagnus
13d ago
This is an extremely underdiscussed point. The cognitive dissonance is bad enough that I've started seeing lots of people convince themselves that it isn’t even normal for fourteen year old boys to be attracted to fourteen year old girls in the first place.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Censorship is very dangerous and a very bright line needs to be drawn around any exceptions made to the general anti-censorship principle. Documentation of crimes in the real world is a much better place to draw this line than things like obscene subject matter or a prurient tone; there's much less room for slope-slipping and constant renegotiation of norms. (I would actually be in favor of much harsher treatment of the live action porn industry in general, though, for much the same reason - it's just a thin conceptual shell of "speech" over prostitution.)
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Maybe they think people should be allowed to say what they want because they don't think people should be allowed to want to say offensive things.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
there is a floor on how much the power of the word can erode since the central examples of pedophilia are just too abhorrent for the vast majority of people, unlike racism or sexism.
I'd consider Muhammad and Aisha a pretty central example of pedophilia, and they made a religion out of that which, in the present day, has about 2 billion adherents, nearly a quarter of the world's population. Humanity's moral floors are generally much further away than you'd like them to be.
DiscourseMagnus
21d ago
Oh, I'm sure, but that stat was about the girls. And I was already taking for granted that abusing the girls to that degree is going to indirectly fuck up the boys too; even if we unrealistically assume that you happen to be subjected to no violent crime yourself, what's it going to do to you to grow up as a boy in a community where the majority of your female peers are compelled into sex slavery by foreign invaders?
That's still an average of a small classroom full of new victims every day for fifty years, and I'm guessing it wasn't at a constant rate over those fifty years. (A regular-sized classroom if you're accounting for it just being the girls.)
Rephrasing: this is numerically roughly equivalent to if the UK had established a formal policy in the 1970s that every day, a random class would be selected by lottery and all of its white girls would be sold into sex slavery overseas, and that policy had continued ever since. Maybe it's an alternate timeline where the Ottomans won the World Wars. I don't know.
DiscourseMagnus
21d ago
I think this is one of the most important problems our civilization is facing, but I'd really like to get better backing for the 250k stat if we're going to use it; I think it might be true, but it's such an extraordinary claim that extraordinary evidence is merited to make it unimpeachable rather than merely shocking. That's approaching one percent of the current population of white British women, and easily far larger than a percent if we even begin to control for age cohort and affected region.
DiscourseMagnus
25d ago
Yeah, I personally find it somewhat alarming how many people seem eager to ignore the actual plot of the film in order to slot it into a preferred "bitches be crazy" gender war lens. I'm pretty sure it's going to be my favorite film of the year, and I personally found it extremely convicting; it's a very effective morality play about lust and the way that it poses as but is fundamentally incompatible with love. And the real, human lust in the film is Bear's, which led him to turn to the occult; "Nikki" is the demonic result of that. Sure, it sort of resembles a real type of mentally ill woman, but Bear did in point of fact impose that on her by calling on evil forces; he's a Faust figure.
I'm practically inclined to say that people are appreciating the film but desperately and disingenuously trying to reinterpret it as something less compatible with feminism, and I say that as someone with a pretty low view of feminism myself.
Yeah, I've been there before, to put it mildly. My adolescence was full of strife in that department. When I was younger than Bear (okay, a lot younger than Bear - I'm mostly thinking of an incident when I was ten years old), I might well have done the same thing he did. But I'd sure like to think, at least, that if I had and it had worked, I would have woken up to the situation more quickly. That doesn't even necessarily mean committing murder or suicide - getting a priest would be a decent start. At the very fucking least don't phone up the wish company and attempt to haggle your way into getting a nicer demon.
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