Markass
Not the worst
User ID: 3843
Markass
Not the worst
1d ago
I'm still confused. As I understand it, the Reason columnist didn't publish the alleged racist's address or employer, and only posted his name insofar as he was publicly posting under his name. If that's the case, does that mean that there's no way to criticise him that doesn't involve doxing, just because he posted under his real name? So it's fine to criticise pseudonymous people, but not people posting under their real names? Or is the problem that you have a large audience? What's the threshold at which you can't reply to people without (being considered to be) inducing harassment towards them because it's signal boosting and signal boosting is doxing? Is it 100,000 followers? 50,000 followers? 10,000? Should the media be prohibited from including people's names in their articles because doing that means they're going to be doxed, and subsequently, harassed?
I can't think of any way to consistently follow this principle that doesn't result in a huge prohibition on innocuous speech.
Markass
Not the worst
2d ago
I only agree with Scott's example because the signal booster basically said "let's ruin his chances at employment indefinitely." Again, that's a-logging behaviour. If she had just said "this man is racist," I wouldn't find that objectionable (besides that I disagree on the object level of racism being an issue). Obviously, if someone with a huge following tells her audience to contact his employer, they will probably go and contact his employer and harass them.
I don't agree that criticising someone, regardless of the way you frame it, especially when you have explicit disclaimers against harassment as we do on the Kiwi Farms, is somehow enabling or promoting harassment. That principle seems to imply that no one is allowed to criticise anyone for any reason, lest the criticism become a coordination point for harassment.
Markass
Not the worst
3d ago
The FBI discovered Dread Pirate Roberts via a years-old public forum post under is pseudonym (or used alternate construction, but still, it was possible).
If you're going to run a multibillion dollar drug empire, then you should take the appropriate opsec measures. In this regard, the feds have the ability to subpoena/EDR, effectively making all "private" data on the site accessible to them, but I don't think we should suspect alternate construction when his opsec was that bad.
On the Kiwi Farms, we take appropriate opsec measures to not get doxed, including using an alternate email address and not revealing personal details. We do want the ability to speak freely, but we also recognize that it's not really possible to do that under your real name in a world where saying "that" in your native language can earn the ire of the cancel mob. As Scott Alexander said, society is fixed, biology opsec is mutable.
And even then, limit the range so justice is reasonable (e.g. if someone mildly betrayed their friend, probably tell their friend but don’t ruin their life).
This isn't a useful or achievable maxim in practice. Once you tell someone, you can't really control what they do with that information. If the friend wants to ruin their life, you can say you don't want that, but you can't stop them from doing it. People are terrible at keeping secrets.
It's probably better for you to only tell the friend, because if the friend ruins their life in response, that's their responsibility and not yours. But the consequences are likely to be the same. Whether that means you're less morally culpable for what happens afterward depends on your moral philosophy.
Markass
Not the worst
3d ago
Making things easier to do facilitates it and, in practice, can drastically increase its prevalence, even if it is not impossible to do without your help. This is a common rationalist fallacy: "They could have done it ANYWAY". Things don't work that way.
But surely then you would direct your ire at the ones who actually make doxing possible, i.e. the data brokers who hoover up everyone's data without even the slightest resistance. A lot of American doxes happen because it's possible to type someone's name into a people finder site (like TruePeopleSearch) and get their address in seconds. I myself have done this many times when writing threads, it's shockingly easy. Furthermore, they make deleting this data impossible. You can send in removal requests, but this only happens temporarily and they will republish your data a few months later when they update their database with new dox. There are several paid services dedicated to regularly sending takedown requests so you don't have to do it yourself.
I can understand why people take issue with doxing, but whenever I confront people about this, they seem to not understand where doxes actually come from and it comes across as an isolated demand for rigor to complain about Kiwi Farms and spare not even a crumb of attention on data brokers. It promotes a false sense of security to paint this picture where the only problem is having a thread on the site, and if it was just gone, everything would be fine. Not so. The reality is that if you're an American (and you own a house, or have a job, or drive a car), you're one leak of your legal name away from having your address known to malicious actors. If you post under your legal name, then you should consider yourself already doxed.
I really cannot understate how uniquely an American problem this is, and how most of the problem is from data brokers. Most other countries have laws against data collection which at least attempt to mitigate people buying and selling people's data. Most of the people I've doxed are Americans and most of them were doxed using people finder sites. Sure, other countries have people finder sites, but they are limited in completeness or searchability. If data brokers disappeared overnight, 90% of the doxes posted on KF would not be possible anymore, and we would have to rely on good old-fashioned detective work (e.g. geolocation of images posted by the subject). The sooner people dispense with this fiction that doxing is some magic wand waved by dark wizards, the sooner people can direct their attention to the actual doxers, the data brokers who make doxing possible.
And who knows, if I'm being optimistic, maybe we can also have a conversation about how we ought to not collect people's data in the first place. I've said it before and I'll say it again, data leaks are inevitable. The only solution to data leaks is to not collect data. It's bad enough that KYC laws force companies to force customers to dox themselves to access money, that's just a vector to leak their identities. It's even worse when sites like Discord freely give in to age verification regimes and force people to take ID selfies. The gold standard should be services like Mullvad, which collect as little identifying information as possible. They don't even require an email address.
Also see Scott's article https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/29/against-signal-boosting-as-doxxing/
The central example in this post was obviously done with the intention of ruining his chances at employment. I don't like that, and I don't think that's in the spirit of the farms (that leans closer to a-logging territory), but surely I'm still allowed to discuss someone's posts without going full a-log like this. Obviously, nobody on the farms would care if someone made a racist joke, but I otherwise can't think of a principle that wouldn't preclude discussion of anyone on the Internet at all.
Observation of how human beings behave in similar contexts.
That's not evidence, that's just speculation. Granted, I suppose it's not as baseless, but I'm not impressed by this answer.
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
they're facilitating harm by other people.
How is it facilitating harm to post publicly available information? If someone wanted to use the information for harm, they wouldn't be stopped just because Kiwi Farms deleted it. It's public information, so they can find it anyway.
In fact, it's security theater to think that information, once published, can somehow be unpublished. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and it's better to accept that it's out there and deal with it accordingly. To do otherwise would be to delude yourself and operate under false beliefs.
it's easy to lie about that without being detected, and they probably are lying about it
Do you have any evidence for this or is this just baseless speculation? I can find countless examples where people who used the information to cause harm (a/k/a cowtipping) were summarily banned from the site. How is it possible to lie about that?
Markass
Not the worst
4d ago
Thanks for the AAQC! Sometimes I write posts and I think it will be AAQC'd, but worry that it's in a subthread from 3 days ago and no one will read it. So this is still a pleasant surprise.
I don't believe you. Not for a second.
Just look at the Kiwi Farms. One of the first attacks came from Jonathan Yaniv, a surprisingly powerful Canadian man who used transgender ideology to harass women into waxing his balls. When all criticism of his actions was censored from every corner of the Internet, you might have said:
"Build your own website!"
Ok, most documentation of Yaniv's activities got largely concentrated on the Kiwi Farms. But then Yaniv directly targeted its data center in Buffalo, NY and got them to physically unplug its devices by sending in false complaints.
"Build your own data center/ISP!"
Sure, whatever. It looks like Josh managed to get a dedicated ASN for KF and have found other ISPs that are fine peering with it. But now some random video game emulator developer committed suicide, therefore the domain name for the site must be terminated.
"Build your own domain registrar!"
It actually costs thousands of dollars a year to become your own domain registrar, so after getting dropped from DreamHost the domain was simply moved over to Cloudflare, but for the sake of argument, I'm ignoring that.
The next volley comes from a motivated group of trans activists, led by one particular trans activist (Keffals) gloating about deplatforming Destiny for wrongthink opinions. This group manages to get Cloudflare to #DropKiwifarms. Without Cloudflare, the Kiwi Farms is limited on options for DDoS mitigation.
"Build your own DDoS mitigation!"
Ok, sure. Josh managed to vibe-code Tartarus. It was that easy!
I'm just going to gloss over that after Cloudflare dropped, the site floundered around several DDoS mitigation solutions before Josh decided to roll his own, and Tartarus was actually only installed this year as the successor to several attempts.
I'm also going to super-gloss over the fact that DDoS mitigation is a lot more complicated than just "install X" and requires actual thousands of dollars in infrastructure to handle attacks! (If it was that easy, half the Internet wouldn't be gated behind Cloudflare right now.)
I think you see where this is going. I haven't even talked about:
"Build your own payment processors!" because they can just ban you and you have no appeal, you don't even get to know why you were banned. Building your own Internet cost thousands of dollars? Tough luck. Eat shit and do it without being able to raise funds from 99% of the population.
"Build your own forum software!" because yes, they can and will just revoke your license off of the word of an insane British man. (Josh is in fact trying to build his own forum software.)
"Build your own... legal firm?" Did you know that no one is going to stop you from filing frivolous lawsuits, forever, and you don't have to pay a dime for it, and the forum has been withstanding asinine litigation for years at this point, to the tune of several thousands of dollars in legal fees? And I haven't even talked about the threat actor who does have money to spend on lawfare? No? Well, now you do.
I think you get my point. Not a single time has the "start your own" argument ever been stated in good faith. Not a single proponent of such an argument actually wishes for their interlocutor to start their own website/ISP/data center/DDoS mitigation/payment processor/forum software/everything. This interpretation assumes that the problem of the censor (in this case, the trans activist) is merely that dissenting opinions are expressed on a platform they share with them, and that everything would be fine if those opinions were expressed elsewhere. The "we're just showing you the door!" school of censorship, in other words. This assumption is false.
No, what the "start your own" argument is actually saying is this: "I don't want your thoughts to be expressed, so I am going to censor you. However, I still want to have even the smallest of fig leafs that I somehow support free expression. To that end, I am going to point out that it is possible for you to start your own website/ISP/data center/yada yada. Nevermind the huge costs of doing this with few benefits in return, I do this to imply that because this option is theoretically available to you, you don't have anything to complain about. Now I don't have to concede that what I am doing is in fact censorship." And even this nanometer-sized fig leaf is proven false, when time after time, you build your own X and they do everything in their power to censor your X anyway.
So I am going to say no, @Jiro can't just start his own Wikipedia, and moreover, he shouldn't have to. When Wikipedia is still a frequently cited source seen as credible in the popular imagination, it ought to accurately reflect reality. That it doesn't and actively resists attempts to correct it is a travesty. And "just start your own Wikipedia bro" is not a credible counterargument to any criticism of Wikipedia not accurately reflecting reality, when it's highly likely to be targeted by trans activists and censored in the same way as the original.
Markass
Not the worst
9d ago
I saw that pattern of arguments a lot more in "free speech" debates, where one side would highlight something that suppressed viewpoints, stifled debate, and prevented the free flow of information, while the other side would dismiss it because the American government did not violate their First Amendment.
Once the government-only frame is accepted, it's really hard to get the debate out of it.
XKCD 1357 argues that free speech is the ultimate concession because your only defense is that it's not literally illegal to express a viewpoint. To this day, I'm still wondering why Randall Munroe didn't also apply this argument to censorship itself: Censorship is the ultimate concession because your only defense is that it's not literally illegal to get people fired for expressing thoughts you don't like.
Markass
Not the worst
12d ago
I don't even concede that there are hypothetical mass killings. If criticism of a group (even based on malicious falsehoods) is a prelude to them being mass killed, then Kiwi Farms users are about to be genocided. So is everyone on The Motte.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
So-called statutory rape. Which is not even its name in most places. Usually it's something like sexual misconduct with a minor.
That doesn't mean it's not real rape, it's still rape. We have statutory rape laws to cut the Gordian Knot and head off arguments about whether a raped child really consented, because they almost never do but can be tricked into saying they did out of fear, trauma bonding, or both. We hold adults to a higher standard in adult-minor interactions because they are the older party and are more mature, have more strength, and have more accountability, so it's going to be hard to make the case that an adult truly did nothing wrong by having sex with a minor. If you want to convince me otherwise, then you should cite cases where completely innocent people have been imprisoned under age of consent laws, which I notice you have yet to do.
So, for 14 year olds, which society are you talking about? My society has an age of consent of 14.
It's too bad, because such places exist and continue to exist, and most people are in them, including people on this forum. Sorry not everywhere is some backwards American state.
That doesn't mean any 20 year old can just hit on a 14 year old and have sex with them with no repercussions. The 20 year old would still face negative social consequences for doing this since 20 is viewed as a mature adult and 14 is not. Sure, there probably wouldn't be any legal consequences if 14 is the age of consent, but it's still not a good idea. A society is more than just the laws on the books, it's also the culture and social norms surrounding it. Hence why I'm not very convinced by the typical cultural relativism-esque arguments pointing to the different legal ages of consent in jurisdictions around the world.
Apparently Anglos think it is a problem, since they have tried to make it a „felony,“ as you say.
The "problem" I was talking about (and argued was not an actual problem) was the one you said was a problem, where you argued that age of consent laws result in an "extremely unnaturally restricted pool of available mates". Your response here confuses me. Are we talking about the same thing? It's not a felony to have a restricted dating pool.
Yes, well, I don't like to abridge liberties based on vibes.
Whose liberties are being abridged here, exactly? For people to have liberties in the realm of sex, it has to all be consensual. Therefore, no one is entitled to sex, because "no" is always a possible answer to consent. If you want to fuck, but the answer is "no", it's not your liberty that's being abridged, but rather it is the liberty of the nonconsenting party that is being protected. So you can't just fuck whoever you want. You especially shouldn't be able to fuck people who don't understand what's going on, who may feel coerced or fearful or as if there is no other choice, or who are otherwise unfairly disadvantaged, such as developmentally disabled adults... or, you know, children.
I'll spell it out explicitly. If you're prevented from fucking children, we don't consider that abridging your liberty, any more than we would characterize preventing you from punching a stranger (without good cause) as abridging your liberty either. In fact, if you're allowed to fuck children (or punch a stranger for a bad reason), it's the other party's liberties that are being abridged, namely, by you.
I highly doubt this actually. Rather I think the 20 year olds just more attractive.
How does that help your argument? If a 20 year old is more attractive doesn't that give them an easier ability to manipulate a 14 year old?
What if he marries her?
He's... still grooming her? I don't approve of child-adult marriages either.
Looking into those, the critiques are that the sample was all university students, and that scoring the experiences as negative, neutral, or positive was reductive. These aren't compelling critiques.
Why not? I think it's valid to point out the sampling bias. If you only looked at university students, then you're not looking at the CSA victims too traumatized to go to college. There are also the other contradicting studies and the failure to replicate which you didn't mention.
As I said earlier, studies are not a slam-dunk argument. Especially when you cite only one study, especially when that study is hugely controversial (because ideally studies should at least have consensus from the scientific community at large) and has multiple criticisms, contradicting studies, and fails to replicate. I don't think you need studies to prove that harm exists. I think you only need to look at what the victims have testified to to know that they have been harmed.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
Interestingly, your entire line of argument against consensual murder also boils down to this:
I think it's simplest to just not have consensual sex. The benefits are questionable and the costs are enormous.
No, it doesn't. I would never use the same logic to argue against consensual sex. The two don't even remotely compare.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
Not a problem because notaries are appointed by the state. How would you even have fake notaries?
You would have a notary appointed by the state, but one that's paid off so they can notarize fradulent consensual-murder documents. You seem to be lacking a security mindset and not at all thinking about the many ways consensual murder could go very, very wrong.
You can throw at me all the nitty gritty problems that might exist in some hypothetical poorly implementation version of them, and okay, I'll grant you that such a piss poor implementation is a really bad idea. I don't see how that changes anything at all.
No, I'm not bringing up some hypothetical poor implementation of the idea. I'm bringing up the challenges that every single implementation would have. These problems aren't avoidable by saying "just get a better implementation, bro". They're inherent and fundamental and will happen unless there's a solution for them. I'm not saying there aren't any solutions, either -- however, solutions aren't exempt from having knock-on effects as well. At what level of hackjob patches, fixes and workarounds, and workarounds to those workarounds will you admit that it's not worth it to have consensual murder anymore? I think it's simplest to just not have consensual murder. The benefits are questionable and the costs are enormous.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
But we already have laws against real rape.
I still don't know why you keep qualifying it with "real" rape. What kind of rape isn't real rape? All of the rape I'm talking about is real. Regardless, society has found that general laws against rape are insufficient to protect children from being raped, so it has enacted more. It's no different than having male and female-only locker rooms to prevent sexual harassment, even though sexual harassment is already prohibited. I don't think there's ever been a society that has found it so virtuous to have the fewest laws possible, and I don't think such a society would be workable in the long run.
Innocent people are put in prison for doing nothing wrong
The main cost is to young men. People put in prison for this are mainly under 21 (!), and almost all are under 25
This does not match the cases I've seen. Almost all of the cases I know of regarding people that have been put in jail for having sexual contact with a minor are pedophiles who are older than 30. I'm also curious to see exactly which cases you would point to to support the assertion that innocent people have been put in prison for doing nothing wrong, because I suspect that they, in fact, have done something wrong.
if you are a 20 year old man, and you have the preference that your mate be younger than you, which is a pretty universal preference, you face an extremely unnaturally restricted pool of available mates.
If you're college age, you're probably dating other college age adults and at basically any college you have a sufficiently big dating pool of them. I don't think this is an actual problem.
The most fertile age gap in marriage is 6 or 7 years, so in nature, 20 year olds will date down into the early teens.
How? Are college students regularly meeting and talking with high schoolers or something? Why can't they just date other college students?
Whereas for „creepy old men,“ the law is extremely lenient. They can be in their 50s and date their daughter's high school friend, as long as she turned 18 a few months ago. Then it's all clear!
Is this a problem for you? I thought by your position that you would be celebrating this fact.
They are if the laws and society are reasonable.
I don't think there has ever been a society that operated this way, even despite the massive amounts of people who want it to work that way. For example, the death of George Floyd resulting in the rise of calls to abolish the police. The police wasn't really abolished anywhere (thankfully) because we don't operate on the principle of "fuck up once = your institution/law gets abolished".
But laws that are unreasonable are unjust and a society that is unreasonable is wicked and stupid and should lose political power.
I think it should take a lot more than one counterexample before we declare a law unreasonable and unjust and the society that enforces that law unreasonable, wicked, stupid, and ought to be losing political power.
I haven't seen any evidence that the vast majority of 14 year olds are susceptible to grooming tactics.
What kind of evidence would convince you? Have you tried, you know, interacting with them?
Isn't weird that a bunch of politicians thought they could denounce an empirical study? Might as well denounce 2+2=4 or the existence of matter.
There are entirely valid reasons to dismiss empirical studies. It's not even nearly the same as denying 2+2=4 or the existence of matter. I don't think citing studies is quite the slam-dunk argument you make it out to be. There are many ways to go wrong with studies and this is especially true in the social sciences.
I don't think a reasonable woman feels raped from voluntary sex at 14. Tons of people agree with me, which is why the majority of polities on Earth allow 14 year olds to consent to sex with somebody.
That doesn't mean any adult is allowed to have sex with 14 year olds. I also don't think the standard by which we should have laws is "what are the other nations on Earth doing?"
If she isn't traumatized by banging a 16 year old then she won't be traumatized by banging a 20 year old.
This seems like a severe and unjustified leap in logic. 20 year olds are a lot more mature, and it's easier for them to manipulate a 14 year old than a 16 year old could. It's not as if the 20 year old is just the 16 year old but with "+4" added to the age. Getting older changes people and makes them different. Age is not just a number.
If anything, 16 year olds treat girls like shit while 20 year olds commit more.
A 20 year old guy "committing more" to a 14 year old girl just means he's grooming her.
It was an N=8500 meta-analysis. Yikes.
First, even the Wikipedia page you linked lists rebuttals and criticisms of the study, including studies that contradicted it. Beware the man of one study. Again, I don't think that citing studies is the slam-dunk argument you think it is when there are so many ways to go wrong with studies. I don't think this is a question that can be resolved with "just one more study, bro."
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
That's only one way to look at it, no? By demanding such "protection" we cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.
It's only "unnecessary suffering" if you ignore the suffering caused to loved ones when someone they knew and loved has died. Most people are distraught when a friend, family member, relative, etc. commits suicide.
If ad infinitum problems crop up, that's a bug of the legal system, not of the moral code behind the legal system. Not every legal system has this issue.
Was the notary licensed at the time of notarization? If so then it's legit. If not no. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes of the court's time with a sufficiently competent legal system.
No, you can't just ignore second-order consequences. Not every change you make to a system is isolated and affects only that one particular area of the system. Laws can interact in sometimes surprising ways. For example, if a state legalizes marijuana, then cops can no longer use the smell of marijuana alone to establish probable cause for searching a vehicle. Or if it's legal in a state to carry a concealed firearm (especially permitless carry) then cops can no longer "stop and frisk" a suspect based on someone saying they're armed, unless they also say they're committing a crime in some way (the standard is armed and dangerous).
Fixing the problems with using notaries as the basis of evidence is not so simple. If we allowed murder in the case of consent, there would be a huge incentive to create fake notaries or otherwise fake documentation supporting the murder. After all, it's easier than getting away with murder by killing witnesses, covering up evidence or the other usual means of doing it. And it's not like the victim can even testify against them. The short story "Infodeath" by Ben Sheffield provides a good example where (spoiler alert) someone gets tricked into signing paperwork saying they wanted to commit suicide by lethal injection, then gets forced to have said lethal injection, and dies nonconsensually.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
They vary in their cost/benefit and arbitraryness, and my position is this law is all cost, no benefit, and the most arbitrary one every dreamed up. So it's not worth keeping around.
The benefits are that 14 year olds don't get raped. What are the costs, exactly? That adults don't get to fuck 14 year olds? I think most adults are fine dating someone their age and not having sex with children. I don't think that people are entitled to sex in general nor should they be.
Okay but then I wasn't a child at 14 because I wasn't like this.
Society and laws are not like math where if you find one counterexample the entire premise is invalid. If you weren't like that at 14, then good for you. You were still a child, though, and that doesn't mean that the vast majority of children aren't susceptible to grooming tactics.
How would you know? How did you measure feelings?
The good thing about having a standard based on a reasonable person is that there's no need to measure the feelings of anyone to prove that a crime happened, we can just refer to what a reasonable person would feel instead. So if someone gets raped, we don't have to attempt to measure how exactly raped the victim was feeling by using brain scans or whatever science you think is applicable. We just say that a reasonable person would feel extremely traumatized and emotionally damaged from rape, and prosecute the crime accordingly.
The one study on this topic says trauma from consensual sex is fake.
Which study? And just because there may be only n=1 study in a topic doesn't mean it's accurate or reliable.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
But the former: what do you mean by "what they're agreeing to"? They're agreeing to stick their dick into someone they wanted to stick their dick into anyways.
They may have agreed to that. But they don't know about the complex emotions that comes with the act and their minds are not mature enough to handle it. It's more than just the raw physical act that takes place.
I don't see why this is a useful protection to grant.
The theory goes that suicidal people are not in their right mind and if they were cured of their afflictions would no longer wish to die. By giving up this protection we would be causing thousands or even millions of unnecessary deaths.
We're talking about the specific case of someone who no longer values their own life and actively wishes for it to be taken away.
We still do everything in our power to prevent suicidal people from taking their own lives. We don't just ignore them and leave them to their own devices or even actively encourage them to kill themselves.
This would be trivially solved by requiring a high bar of evidence for this defense. Can they produce the amount of documentation that Meiwes and Brandes had on hand, signed and notarized and what have you? 99.9% of murders are not going to have that on file.
It's not just being able to eventually adjudicate the claim, it's also the amount of judicial resources spent on frivolous claims (especially since, as you admit, the defense would only be successful in vanishingly rare scenarios). Do you know the saying, "the process is the punishment"? How the process for resolving disputes or incidents, and it being dragged out for a long period of time, is itself a punishment? Defendants can cause that sort of punishment too. The defendant and/or their lawyers will do absolutely everything they can to keep the defendant out of jail, and that includes claiming defenses that have no hope of success, but still result in delays and time, effort, and resources spent having to rebut the claim by prosecutors and witnesses.
As I said, allowing this sort of defense at all would result in the second-order consequences of spawning endless litigation over whether someone consented to being murdered, especially if there was a high bar of evidence.
"They totes consented to it, the document was notarized by this guy!" "Hang on, is that notary even licensed? Looks like his license expired." "Yes, but, he got it reinstated, so it's valid!" "Yeah but, look at this recent state law, says he has to renew in a month, and he didn't." "Hang on, what about..." and so on, arguments like that, ad infinitum. It's already hard enough to put away murderers, we don't need to make it harder.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
Arbitrary line.
So is every other law. That doesn't mean they're not useful or worth keeping around.
How is this different than the usual courting of women by well-off men?
An adult doesn't place the same value on gifts as a child would. A child would do literally anything for a copy of the latest hot video game franchise they enjoy. An adult knows there's more to life than shiny video games and if given the same gift, sure they might feel obligated to do something in return (such as sex) but it's not as overwhelmingly likely as a child would. In other words, an adult is mature.
Okay, then prosecute for forced rape then.
Rape, by definition, is forced. There's no such thing as "non-forced" rape. This is a confusing term to use.
Even causing emotional damage, feelings of powerlessness, lowered self-worth is not a felony level harm. Intelligent motte commenters and society make me feel like that all the time. Am I raped?
I don't think Motte commenters and society in general would cause (to a reasonable person) the extreme level of emotional damage, powerlessness, and lowered self-worth that someone gets from being raped. Is it a nonzero amount? Sure. Is it close in orders of magnitude? Not even in the same ballpark.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
I don't know what emotionally independent means
Having a strong sense of identity, of self-worth, being able to handle big problems like running out of money, not having to rely on your parents for typical socialization or emotional support. Things like that.
financial independence doesn't matter, 99% of people don't have this.
Are we speaking past each other? By financial independence, I mean not being dependent on anyone else for money, and the typical signs of this are things like having your own job and owning your own place. I bring up financial independence because a classic groomer tactic is to shower a child with gifts they wouldn't be able to attain themself. An adult is financially independent and can just buy whatever they want so such a tactic would not work on them.
I find it hard to believe that you at 14 years of age could just buy whatever you wanted and wouldn't be susceptible to a grooming tactic like that.
I hope all 14 year olds understand pregnancy and STDs. Is there any other harm? If a man wears a condom, what's the big harm exactly?
Sex is a hugely emotional and intimate act and there's more to it than just wearing a condom. A child is highly likely to feel complex emotions they hadn't felt before if they end up in a sexual encounter, and highly likely to want to back out and stop, but also highly likely to be too scared to say no. The harm is in having sex with the child when they don't want it, and the subsequent emotional damage, feelings of powerlessness, lowered self-worth, etc. not uncommon when someone gets raped.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
Sounds like wage theft to me, which is a problem distinct from what you've described. You don't need AoC laws to fix that, you simply need to enforce the existing ones.
The problem wasn't that they weren't being paid for their services. The problem was that they were being raped. No amount of payment makes it ok to have sex with someone who doesn't want it.
typically to their similarly-aged companion of the opposite sex
I wasn't talking about sex between people close in age, I was talking about the hypothetical scenario of a 30 year old having sex with a 14 year old.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
This is probably true for some 14 year olds, but not others.
I'd be hard pressed to find a 14 year old for which this isn't true. For it to be false, they would have to be already financially and emotionally independent, mature enough to know the full consequences of sex, have the self-worth and courage to say no, etc. which are all traits that vanishingly few 14 year olds have, if any.
Why do you need staturtory rape laws? On the basis of what harm?
The harm when a minor agrees to sexual acts without fully internalizing what they entail and then being too scared to say no once it starts.
„Onlyfans at 19 is a human right,“
I don't agree with the existence of Onlyfans.
The law does everything it can do to make sure her virginity is blown out by another man at marriage
I'm not aware of any laws in Western countries that prohibit premarital sex between consenting adults.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
Is it or is it not fine for a 14 year old who wants to fuck a 30 year old to be allowed to fuck the 30 year old? If not, where is the psychological harm coming from?
No. The harm comes from the 14 year old not knowing what they're agreeing to and being too scared to say no once it starts.
But why? Why should it be illegal if there's ample documentation that the person being killed actively consented to and wanted to be killed?
Because we as a society have agreed to grant as much protection as possible to everyone, even to people who are either stupid or mentally disturbed enough to want to be killed, because we generally value human life. There is also the fact that if consent was an exception, so many murderers would claim the "but they actually consented" defense which would drag out the (already unbelievably long) criminal justice process of putting murderers in prison.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
Is there evidence of 14 year olds being uniquely damaged in countries where the AoC is (or was) 14?
Yes. The origin of age of consent laws came about because Britain in the 1880s had literal child prostitutes who were constantly being raped, but no legal recourse could be taken since the defense was always "the 14 year old consented."
Until about 30 years ago the average age of virginity loss was around here, so this is obviously false.
Just because someone loses their virginity doesn't mean they consented to it.
Sure you can- break into a Texan's house. Though this is just splitting the difference over "breaking into a house defended by armed homeowner will definitely get you killed" and "all cases of self-defense are murder".
If you break into a Texan's house because you want to die, that's arguably just suicide that involves a third party, not murder. Suicide by cop, for example, is (sadly) a popular suicide method.
Markass
Not the worst
2mo ago
It's easier for a 30 year old to manipulate a 14 year old than a 70 year old can a 22 year old. In particular, young minds aren't fully developed and are susceptible to saying yes to things they don't actually want to do. This is why "but the kid consented!" is not a good defense, even if true. Further, pedophilia in general causes psychological harm to the vast majority of minors, so even if we grant for the sake of argument the many claimed cases of people saying they would've totally been fine if they had sex when they were 14 (or actually had done so), it would be enabling pedophiles who would then go on to harm the many people who are not fine with having sex at 14 years of age. This is similar to why you can't consent to being murdered, and murderers who only murder "consensual" victims are still murderers who are still imprisoned for murdering people. We also want to discourage rules lawyering, and if we allowed exceptions in the case of consent, that would open the door to endless litigation over whether the 14 year old really consented, which would result in adverse outcomes for many cases because most 14 year olds don't consent.
I'm largely in the same boat, at least depending on how much detail and depth is necessary in a topic. My philosophy is that simpler and shorter is better. If a post is long but each sentence is packed with detail, that's better than being a long post that could have been rewritten to be shorter. I've gotten used to skimming long posts that fall in the latter.
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