ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
No bio...
User ID: 822
Easier said than done.
You misunderstand: that norm is enforced merely by intentionally refusing to prioritize your version of safety.
reasons like "but predators are online" sound a lot like "I don't let my kid outside after 3 o'clock because a stranger might come and snatch her."
Yes, which is why they're both treated as absurd by psychologically-healthy individuals. Interestingly, the latter is espoused by more parents than it would naturally be since the stranger is far more likely to be the State, which is far more dangerous.
because arguably, kids shouldn't even be on the Internet at all
It is interesting to see the parallels between how the paranoid in our culture seeks to treat children and how fundamentalist Islamic cultures seeks to treat women. I'm not convinced it's good for their personal development, but personal development is not a terminal value in these cultures (Islam worships Allah, westerners worship Safety) and "but muh risk of predation" is merely a fig leaf over that.
or as a result of it
Which is then further complicated by statistics intentionally erasing the distinction between "getting laid was the participant's explicit intention" (and she made the mistake of disclosing it after the fact, or was pressured into such a confession), "had to put out for lodging/food", and "got far more than they bargained for".
The demand for abducted young women far exceeds its supply.
To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency.
For obvious reasons, I should hope.
I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example
It's in the article.
to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so
Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it? (Have you ever seen a child before, much less interacted with one?) Most people only grant access to their nudity behind a paywall because it is actively unpleasant to show it off [much like how most people won't labor unless they're getting something out of it]. Unless they're nudists, I guess, in which case it's questionable if they're being hurt at all (but that's an entirely different conversation).
impressionable
If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.
the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want
And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly? "Fuck me or I'll kill everyone you know" or "fuck me or I'll get you in trouble" has been part of the bog-standard predator playbook for ever; in my time as much as it is in theirs. The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.
The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.
For a playerbase in the tens of millions I don't think this constitutes "frequent". While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem (like the bomber, the predator will always get through), and the optimal rate of FAFO per year remains nonzero.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
4d ago
It's a huge WTF moment and makes you wonder what the end goal is.
Why? This behavior chain is quite comprehensible once you're willing to put the associated emotions aside.
Sure, you could go full Club Penguin and make the service as useless for actual communication as you can, but if you do that the ability for users to interact with each other more generally is severely curtailed. Once that happens, and they jump to other less-secure platforms like IRC[1], now all bets are off- and if you consider "it started here and then it moved to [X] platform" to still carry a risk of reputational damage (and we'll note the article validates this perspective) you're likely going to decide to thread the needle by attempting to keep your chat platform just functional enough that your users stick to yours, where you at least have control of content filtering (and again, you can't turn it up to max because if you do your users are more likely to take the cues and leave or find parallel methods of communication, so you're not going to put many resources into this and are going to focus on keeping a low profile).
saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators
Well, they kind of are- they foul up any actual investigation, intentionally antagonize existing users, and they actively encourage the bad behavior. "Wow, how horrible, people are willing to give you free Vbucks if you send them nudes" is not a meme I [as a platform] would want to encourage, because there are obviously plenty of kids willing to make that trade if prompted![2]
(The same argument can be made for not glamorizing mass killers/shooters- it puts the meme in public consciousness, much like "hey kid, want a ride in my van/some candy/to help me find my dog?" is, which is why even though kids are heavily inoculated against it those lines still get used by predators today.)
So then, in an environment of such inoculation, what could they possibly be doing? Well, about that...
It appears to me that there are a couple of pathways this stuff typically follows. Most of this is obfuscated for reasons- some honest, some not, but examining the nature of what happens is important if you actually want to reduce incidences of the actual problem.
The first one is the OnlyFans model, which works on anyone literate enough to read a DM. This can take a few forms- the "send me nudes and I'll send you Vbucks" one perhaps the most common, but can extend into non-monetary goods like gaining access to more exclusive social groups as well. This is a standard commercial transaction, and any kid who's ever run a lemonade stand understands how that works.
Now, how does that go wrong? Well, either the goods aren't ever delivered (and I'm more concerned about the contract violation than I am about what's being transacted), or the 'price' of entry to that club is raised (either 'send more nudes to continue' or 'because I know who you are, I'll tell everyone you know about this business') and the calculus now being made is 'send the nudes or lose all my friends'. The problems with that should be obvious- everyone hates getting ripped off that way.
Obviously the way to avoid that is simply by teaching kids to practice safe SECS with the end goal of making sure that, should they engage in this business, they retain the ability to disengage without further cost. You'll recognize that as the conceit of the "meh, sex isn't a big deal" point of view, and that's not an accident. The other way to do it is simply ensure your child artificially puts a price on their nudes that's so high there's no risk of them selling it, but this abstinence-only method tends to disappoint parents with its effectiveness. (Which, naturally, is why it's only these people that ever go pedo-hunting.)
The second one is the "secret romance"/"special friend" model, which only seems to work on young adults (13-16) and not actual children (<12), probably because their biology isn't demanding that from them yet. It's naturally more prevalent here than it is anywhere else because this is basically the only place left that age group can interact with older people with some low-barrier common cause and with relative safety to disengage.
Hardening your targets against that is... more complicated.
[1] Discord is literally just IRC, so the same complaints we had back in the 90s remain true today. The same mitigations do too- "don't use your real name or give out your address because if you do, your ability to control the engagement goes out the window"- but whoring for favors (and just... general stupidity) is pretty clearly perennial.
[2] One man's victim blaming is another man's disregard of obvious agency, and online is, perhaps paradoxically, obviously the most difficult place to try and rape someone specifically because your power is gone as soon as the victim reaches for that "off" switch (unless other conditions are met) in a way that really doesn't exist when they're right in front of you. This interaction takes two in a way most other environments do not, and ignoring that truth is not doing one's analysis any favors.
In a fight against "preventing pedophilia at all costs" and "making sure de facto freedoms for the under-18 set are not sacrificed on the pyre of protecting the stupid from themselves", I'm picking the latter. Bearing witness to the horrors that have been unleashed upon (and by) my generation that destroyed everything except for the Internet as that frontier has hardened my heart against those that would destroy that too.
so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures
They were going to do this anyway.
It's never about reducing kid-fucking, literally nobody cares about that, it's all about paying your supporters with the right to fuck kids (the "drain the swamp" people are directionally correct here). Quite literally, when we're talking about the UK.
If we assume all of that exists (which we have to, because, in this hypothetical, we're getting married) ... then how in the hell could the sex be bad?
Because the incentive/evopsych structures still dictate that sex is a job for women and a perk for men, and marrying someone where (for you) that isn't true but (for them) it is creates some interesting consequences. It's also not necessarily apparent, since the art of picking up women is delayed gratification, shelving the naked self-interest until after the contract is signed, and in dating (as a woman) you're evaluating whether or not the terms of the contract are acceptable.
One could, in my view reasonably, make the argument that there's only one way to find that out; especially when you notice that the entire traditionalist courting/dating/marriage structure is built around "job for women, perk for men". If you want to find someone who's a little more evolved than that, well...
and one of life's most insanely pleasurable activities.
Provided you care enough to be of that mindset. Many do not, and while being eager to have sex early might not necessarily be the best proxy to evaluate that, nobody's really come up with a better answer.
Only in the uncharitable case; more charitably, the inevitability of motherhood as an inescapable consequence of sex forms exceptional leverage when arguing for the cultural aesthetic they want.
If they can (unnaturally) impose the former condition, the latter naturally follows- it's the same thing the abortionists are doing when they argue for their aesthetic.
"More sex, less baby death" is not a goal the anti-sex side or the pro-baby-death side can publicly profess, since the anti-sex side promises less baby death as a consequence of less sex[1], and the pro-baby-death side promises more baby death as a consequence of more sex[1].
[1] Well, I say 'sex' but it's more 'choice', as in, which faction gets to write the social rules about how women get to leverage sex as a meal ticket. The "celebrate my abortion" stance is consistent with this, as is the "life begins at conception" one (but requires a bunch of other social context to fully understand why, since this is more a piece of a larger system that adds up to leverage rather than bestows it by itself).
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
9d ago
I have tried this, but it does not actually work. Maybe I need to upgrade my daki to a DHR7000 or something, but most fantasy centers around the closeness, etc. rather than just fucking.
I have no idea how people do it directly to pictures; I just lay on the bed and read them for the articles, so to speak.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
11d ago
I almost feel like they don't really have any convictions, don't really understand the current issues, and are just randomly throwing whatever elements they feel like together in episodes, while trying to pass it off as relevant political commentary.
I mean, they already had Cartman as their mouthpiece literally saying as such. The low-hanging political commentary is dead- how could it not be, when it's been 10 years since left and right changed places? It's all very confusing. Add the fact that pop culture took a 5 year sick day, and now, what's left? Even the Tegridy arc was more coherent than this, which is probably why they went in that direction in the first place.
The problem for them, much as it is for everyone else, is that traditional/what is popularly referred to as right-wing thought definitively died in late 2016. Nobody knows what to call themselves any more; partially because we're fighting over the labels (and partially because, as the woke showed, the way you win a [culture] war is not by dying for your country label, but by making the other poor bastard die for theirs- it is not in either faction's interest to relabel at this time, which is why you see a lot of extremely conservative/fortifying legislation from 'liberal' parties in countries that are not the US).
You see, the 2010s were a cutover point: the people born in the 1930s were the last generation to come of age before the Civil Rights Era- I call these people "traditionalists" instead of "conservatives", and most people use "conservative" as shorthand for people who are [either these people directly, or those who uncritically align themselves with them]. And in 2015 they were all dead.
Now, what's the actual definition of conservatism? Preserving power structures that worked in your youth and expanding them. They made you rich, after all. What were the power structures that worked for Boomers? Academics and education above all else, anti-racism, feminism, sexual liberation, and environmentalism- things that labelled themselves as left-wing, since they were in opposition to what the right-wing was at that time.
But the problem is that, as always, age and establishment power perverts. "Go to college" became "feed your youth to the system", "anti-racism and feminism" became "axiomatically, black > white and woman > man", "sexual liberation" became "castrate your children", and "environmentalism" became "degrowth".
It didn't help that '50s conservatism did have a bit of a resurgence in the '80s and '90s (generation in power turned 20 in the 1930s-1940s, so WW2 vets), since most of what those who call themselves left-wing today also tack that on even though the two really didn't have much to do with each other.
So how's any of that relevant to South Park? Well, South Park is fundamentally a 90s show, and thrives under a healthy/competitive political environment, and a healthy media ecosystem, so you had both lots of material and both sides could reasonably be mocked for its excess. Now, the problems are (and we know now, as hindsight is 2020) 100% factually caused by one side- the side that calls itself "left"- and the media ecosystem is no longer healthy for other reasons.
What's left to mock?
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
16d ago
I would nevertheless register an objection to him describing himself as "left-wing"
Being reflexively anti-right-wing is not the definition of left-wing, to the point he couldn't identify posts more friendly to left-wing thought.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
16d ago
They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships... attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship
You've successfully discovered the psychological foundation on top of which "being a liberal" resides: being capable of decoupling X from the rest of the cultural baggage around X (and being disagreeable enough to point that out).
Unless you're in the 1970s (and even then), this is generally a liability, because the logical conclusion of that with respect to sex is "you're OK with fucking 7 year olds", a liberal of this type is ultimately being dishonest if he answers "no"[1], and everyone knows that (and you stated it anyway). This is also the genesis of the traditionalist's "it's a slippery slope from the gays to pedophilia" (but it's only really valid when criticizing classical liberals, which is why progressives appear to be immune to this type of criticism).
What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace.
And the claim that this is "abuse" hinges on this point. As the risk incurred by having sex is nullified and the marketplace value of sex goes to zero (pornography helps with this), this fades into irrelevance, and "the woman wants to have sex, because having sex is neat" becomes the more salient point.
The fact that this is a childish view of sex is actually really relevant (and I do mean that in a literal sense; when kids- the kind closer to 7 than 17- have sex or do sex-adjacent things, I have it on good word that this is generally why they're doing them). Of course, this only results in a neutral to positive outcome if one or both of the participants can say "I'm done, and this sex was only fucking around", and in practice that's not guaranteed[2].
By contrast, a traditionalist or progressive will say that, because sex is the main thing of value women possess (for a bunch of deep-seated sociobiological reasons), that people being allowed to decouple sex from the cultural baggage around sex is devaluing sex -> destroying a woman's livelihood. And because the traditionalist viewpoint is centered around the willingness of men to pay top dollar for sex, and the progressive viewpoint is centered around forcing men to pay top dollar for sex, those types of people are going to argue that abuse occurs when you devalue sex in that way.
(Note that this doesn't actually consider the age of the participant- which makes sense; neither traditionalists nor progressives are particularly bothered about the subject's lack of age- for traditionalists, we can see that ages of consent higher than that are modern inventions so being married was the salient factor, and for progressives, they think 7 year olds can be meaningfully transgender.)
Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.
Only if you started from the traditionalist viewpoint: that the liberals are being dishonest about the above and trying to steal [literal] meal tickets from women. If a traditionalist did that, it would be a grave sin for them to do that: it would be exploitation, abuse, trickery given that they naturally understand sex to be a meal ticket in that way, so obviously, because everyone works like they do, the people not doing that must be lying. (Progressives do this too, just from the other direction because they started out in possession of the meal ticket.)
Of course, to the people who aren't lying about that but can't or won't acknowledge why the traditionalist viewpoint exists, that's going to cause some problems and damage their ability to trust traditionalist motives. After all, if the truth is one way, but they say it's the other way, then the only reason to do that must be hatred and stupidity... which, from the liberal viewpoint, it is.
[1] Which is why the more progressive-sympathetic liberals were very keen on the adoption of "consent" as a framework; it allows them to have their cake (we can do whatever we want) and eat it too (unless society has deemed the other partner sub-human), but is ultimately vulnerable to the fact that, when a society gets poorer and due to the fact the sexual marketplace is a marketplace, regulatory capture in the "declare competition illegal" direction occurs.
[2] Which is the main problem with fucking people who aren't necessarily able to judge that up front, or don't (in fact or perception) have the power to force a disengagement (which is why the "single mom's boyfriend discovered to be fucking the daughters too" thing exists, especially since the mother is herself making that calculation, consciously or otherwise).
That said, fucking people who don't believe they have that power, or are merely giving in, tends to result in dead-fish lays, which means the thing they "should" actually be after (described by faceh in a sibling comment) can't exist in that environment... which is an instant fail condition for someone genuinely interested in casual sexploration (and considering how obnoxious adult women are when they go passive like that, imagine how miserable that experience would be were it an actual kid on the other end- impressionability only goes so far). But that's basically just restating the slightly-hidden thesis that "molester/possessor" and "interested in casual/exploratory sex with for its own sake" are very different things.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
19d ago
It's also less efficient at distributing labor, a large slave owning operation is functionally a mini planned economy.
And now you know why all planned economies are indistinguishable from slave-owning operations.
It doesn't matter if you're less efficient at distributing labor when labor is not the limiting factor in your economy's growth. When labor is so worthless that laborers are actively competing to give it away, you (as a seller of labor) will find you must abide by more and more restrictions to sell that labor. This can include working longer hours, suffering quotas and beatings, not offending the master, actively making your job harder, and so on and so forth.
Note that, as you've identified, this labor isn't actually free to a buyer- you need to provide food and shelter (or the option to acquire those things). You don't even have to post guards if labor is sufficiently worthless (you do need them to ensure you're extracting the maximum potential from your slaves' labor)- there's nowhere for them to go, no better deal to be had, and they know that. It's more economically efficient if you provide these necessities yourself at the lowest resource cost possible, but they must be provided.
A minimum wage under slavery can be (especially when slaves are captured through conquest) zero, but zero is the lowest it can go. When the minimum wage for labor goes negative in an environment like this your slaves have no choice but to come after you for what's stored in your pantry- once enough people die of starvation, the supply of labor contracts, the wage goes back up to zero and equilibrium is restored.
Now, you might think that if something happened that grew agricultural productivity by an order of magnitude that the minimum wage would fall out, but it turns out that's not the case- instead, it freed up so many people to do so many different things that the supply of labor, then educated labor, started to become a limiting factor.
You may know that period as the Renaissance- typified by abolitions of slavery in European nations, AKA the first society-wide minimum wage law. Slavery wasn't abolished in the colonies for obvious economic reasons: the cost of labor was still basically zero there (and subsidized by colonial governments' conquest of those places).
Then add on that the market distortions of "free" labor adds less individual incentive for owners to invest in new technology that could clear up the workforce to do other economically productive things for someone else who still needs labor. Why spend hundreds of thousands investing in automation when you have a free work force subsidized by the police state? And yet this automation is what we need, so workers can go do jobs that can't be automated yet.
No, slave societies invest in automation as much as they're physically able. The reason a slave society becomes a slave society is to get enough food that the most powerful are able to fund this, because if it is unable or unwilling it quickly finds itself enslaved by a rival society. That is why
and one lazy layabout who captures most of the gains for themselves
is ultimately bullshit. While it is a meme for a reason, and market distortions such as 'no rival powers' can result in this- eventually a stronger society comes along and destroys them. The Confederate States lost to the Union because the Union outproduced them, and they outproduced them because their society was more industrious.
Finally, note that the inverse of that statement, "a system with five lazy layabouts who still get paid and one person who does the actual work", is an accurate characterization of unionized workplaces.
stuff like this is the balance shifting too much towards workers.
Note that the market forces that workers' ability to completely capture the regulatory apparatus also leads to depopulation- because said capture will always eventually make it too expensive for workers to produce more workers. This is the real reason TFR was an order of magnitude higher 200 years ago.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
19d ago
The creation of the word cisheteronormative innately destroys cisheteronormativity.
Or rather, the word is made specifically to attempt to contest it, and thus is meaningless outside that context.
The same thing goes when we asserting we currently live under conditions of transhomonormativity, or "globohomo" for short, since that word is intended to invoke the same.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
19d ago
It's honestly too bad that bad UX on Li-Ion powered electronics understandably soured people on electric cars.
It's a subtle thing, but when you're using your smartphone and the battery says 100% until it completely dies in the cold, or has enough energy to say "fuck you, powering down", that has consequences when companies want to put the same batteries in electric cars- people remember their devices were [either only in perception, or in actual fact] used to abuse them and think "oh, these cars have unreliable fuel gauges and their usable capacity runs into the ground after X time".
Honestly, though, I just want a Roadster. Best product Tesla ever made, mainly because the only parts they did make were the powertrain.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
20d ago
Only insofar as 'conservative' hides 'what men want', and only then insofar as 'what men want' is more acceptable than it was 5-10 years ago.
The thing which horrifies me about ancient marriages was the power imbalance.
Yes, the conditions in the state of nature are indeed horrifying. I wonder if the past 200,000+ years of human evolution had anything to do with the incentives, motives, and options typically leveraged by its participants? Surely modern peoples are trained to understand those core motivations, and are honest about them, at all times, and not forming their basis of what is and is not good and proper based solely around purely instinctual self-interest. (Now if you'll excuse me, a pig just flew past my window.)
So I think we can get a better picture- both of what's fair, and by how men and women should act and be biologically wired to be attracted to- by imagining our initial conditions and going forward solely from there.
And in the state of nature case, for women, power is "you get to eat, have a roof over your head, and strike the best deal for resource sharing", and consent is "you enter into a relationship that provides the above provided you cook the meals, maintain the household, and open your legs as desired".
Informed consent is "if you don't, you'll die, or take a serious haircut on your lifetime earnings and potential standard of living". From a modern lens, that seems unbalanced, until you notice that men die if they don't work too. Sexual dimorphism means that men have to contend with the environment to eat, and women have to contend with men to eat- in both cases, of course, you're still working.
Now that we've described the contract- one that inherently includes sex work, it's worth noting- now we'll look at the incentives. For men, they want someone as young and attractive as possible (they heal faster from childbirth and it's easier for them to have kids, sex is better without having to turn the lights off) at as low a standard as possible (so they can get away with paying them next to nothing compared to themselves, to the point they could afford more than one). For women, they want someone as old and powerful as possible (more secure, more resources, more even-keeled) with as little competition as possible (so they're not outflanked by younger, prettier competitors with lower standards[1]).
The thing that sets the lower limit on the age of the women participating in this, especially when there's an oversupply of them[2], is sexual maturity. It may shock you to know that most men aren't sexually attracted to little girls[3]. They can't do the domestic stuff as easily, they aren't developed enough/don't have the v1.1 firmware update you get at puberty that makes them particularly interesting in bed, and they don't quite get how to provide the whole SaaS (that's sex-as-a-service) experience that is attractive to men (that thing they do where they act as a desirable sex object: women do this, girls only cosplay it)- in short, they're still growing.
Now, let's apply that:
"No, he is not some creep who wants to fuck 13yo's, he just recognized that mentally I am already 18 and our souls fell in love with each other. It is so romantic!"
So those are the words that come out of her mouth, but what is she actually saying? A steady union-backed job is absolutely an attractive, freeing prospect for a man, why wouldn't [something a woman instinctively sees as the same thing] be highly desirable for a woman? I can see an interview process going badly, or the job not turning out to be what was agreed to, to be damaging just as much as it would be for a man to suffer that- but in terms of "my prospective employer firing me or discontinuing my contract", which is what [at a fundamental level] this is, I see no need to protect women from this more than we protect men from the same. Residuals (i.e. pregnancy) are a different matter, of course.
Child molesters could easily manipulate kids into all kinds of behaviors which will be demonstrably harmful for their normal development.
Yes, that's the female interest motte (but, again, see [3]). The bailey is "men could easily manipulate women into all kinds of behaviors, and as a result the only women who will get men's resources are those more willing to do things that men want, and that's a problem for us women who don't want to do those things but still want those resources". (The fact that this slots women into the "kid" position is relevant- in an environment of equality, women have equal agency, so they're just as resistant to being manipulated as men are.)
As far as "well, we want a blanket law because we don't want to pay attention to circumstances"... I think the criticism writes itself, but other laws, properly enforced, should cover most to all of these cases. The thing that makes this abuse in the first place is specifically "submissive has no ability to disengage" [the motte of the term "consent"- where the bailey is any degree of "I'm not getting paid enough for those acts of submission"], which is the same thing women are trying to control with blunt instruments like this (and it is important they be blunt so that judgments default in their favor- an age of consent is intended as a bracket under which All Women Are Believed [to have been seduced], which is why places where either women or fathers have outsized levels of social power have higher ages of consent in modern times.)
[1] The female talking point around "protecting women" is equal to the male talking point around "protecting the borders/protecting jobs". In both cases, their direct competition are other men/women willing and ready to take their job- we use words like "exploitation", "minimum wage", "human trafficking/illegal immigration" (when those people are foreigners)- it's just that for women, the job is sex work and being attractive.
[2] Which is the reason polygamy exists, why limits on it benefit young men at the expense of everyone else, and why young men are alone in enforcing any prohibitions thereon- if sharing a husband will be a better contract for a wife than going with someone poorer, and if young men are drastically poorer than old men, then the rational choice for a women is to share.
[3] As I've described, it's in the interest of women to conflate "grown women just beyond the male evolved optimal sexual attraction age" and "sexually immature girls", so this needs to be restated even though it should be obvious. Actual pedophilia is a maladaptive anomaly, men wanting just-mature women is not.
I have this idea that power imbalances in sexual relationships which do not stem from a sufficiently informed consent are bad.
And I get this idea from the pornography romance media that women watch where it involves a complete lack of "sufficiently informed consent" (but lots and lots of the instinctual dynamics I described above), so I suspect women are lying about this being a negative in and of itself. I'm also not surprised they'd never admit that, because screaming "I don't want a consentual relationship" is obviously not in women's sociofinancial/sociobiological best interest.
I am sure that there are some adult women who wish that they had lost their virginity at age 14 to a 40yo driving a Porsche instead of a 15yo driving a scooter, but I am also convinced that they are a small minority.
I am not convinced: groupies are a thing for this specific reason and the 60s-80s were rife with them for that reason. (What, you thought women throwing their underwear at Elvis was somehow not sexual?)
I do not think that the motivation of fathers and feminists to be against minors dating adults is that they fear that they will ruin the sexual marketplace for women.
I do not think the motivation of (implied: traditionalist) fathers and feminists are the same. I've discussed why feminists do it, but for fathers it's much simpler: that daughter is his property, and he will manage and discharge it as he sees fit. Non-virgin daughters are worth less to men than virgin ones are, and it is in the father's interest that the daughter fetch a man of maximum price (i.e. a man that is maximally fit to protect her, and a rich man is obviously better-positioned to do this).
Note that the moral hazard here doesn't actually exist in the way feminists think it does (property can be managed incompetently, yes, but it's still ultimately in the interests of the property holder to manage that property appropriately), and most of that is an artifact of conditions changing faster than male instinct was equipped to deal with. Which is a great argument for "daughters shouldn't be property", just like it is for humans more generally.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
20d ago
Sure, here you go. You'll have to excuse me from re-typing all that, though if I have time I'll re-state a good chunk of this later in this thread anyway.
A pedophile, in my book, is someone who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent kids. Often, the term might imply exclusive pedophilia, e.g. someone who is only attracted to pre-pubescent kids. This seems like the worst sexual attraction card to be dealt, while being straight, gay, bisexual, into MILFs, or into BDSM, or most other kinks means you have a decent chance of getting laid, the lack of adults who could pass as pre-pubescent means that there are no sex partners who could consent. If used as an insult, the unfortunate implication is that people are morally responsible for their sexual inclinations.
Your book is not the book most people are using. Most people don't think about sex in those terms (they don't really think 'straight' or 'gay' either)- otherwise, the group(s) that wants to impose those definitions/morality on everyone else wouldn't need words words words to do it.
For most people, "pedophilia" means "man on little girl" exclusively.
Men can't be raped, so we don't really care about man on boy (unless it's a political group we hate for other reasons that was covering it up, which in combination with that hatred is sufficiently scandalous to destroy them- we're not really after boyfuckers qua boyfuckers, that's a side-effect). As for woman on boy, our reactions range from Nice to "if we don't throw you in jail for this, society's standards might shift and allow man on girl, so off you go". And woman on girl is a statistical anomaly.
Feminists/gynosupremacists launder the moral disgust with "man on girl" into the "man on any woman" definition they've always wanted (though note that this is fundamentally a woman vs. woman thing about how best to exploit men rather than primarily being man-hating, which is how men perceive it). This is why they push to have older and older women be considered "children", and why white-knights (traditionalists and progressive men) accept that. It's also why all the "pedo" literature progressives use only features man on boy (or man on boy-dressed-like-a-girl).
As you noted,
I think that power discrepancy is why we have age of consent laws
is correct, but those laws aren't set up that way to protect children (they aren't the right tool for that). They're primarily for keeping young women out of the sexual marketplace and providing women-as-class a weapon to exploit men more powerful than them (to which they are inherently attracted).
Once you understand the concept of "consent" is a lie (and intended to confuse "raping little girls" with normal human behavior) you can start to understand how people actually think about sex. Then, you can also see that Rs have a better understanding of this than Ds do because they're more likely to reject this framework (to the point that even traditionalist Christian sexual ethics paint a better picture), so Rs are less likely to be concerned with "non-consentual" behavior than Ds are.
Also, a tangent:
It bears saying that a significant fraction of child molesters are not exclusive pedophiles but just men (mostly) with broader sexualities who use the opportunity of the power discrepancy between kids and adults.
Well, if you're only looking for physical penetration as a subset of "abuse with sexual intent", yes, you'll find that's mostly men.
Men and women are different especially when it comes to the way they think about sex; thus we should expect the ways they intend and perpetrate sexual abuse would be different.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
21d ago
the most egregious motte-and-bailey that is currently widely accepted
No, the most egregious motte-and-bailey is "consent".
Note that this statement:
Call someone a 'pedophile' because they express attraction towards someone just barely under the age of majority, and uninformed onlookers might very well imagine that they're a predator who stalks 10 year olds with designs on kidnapping and molesting them.
is a specific version of the more general form, which is:
Call someone a
'pedophile'rapist because they express attraction towardssomeone just barely under the age of majoritya woman who isn't interested, and uninformed onlookers might very well imagine that they're a predator who stalks 10 year olds with designs on kidnapping and molesting them.
and the popular definition of "pedophile" is fundamentally just the most defensible/best Think Of The Children extension of that core idea. (Because no, that definition only includes man on girl; we pretend it includes man on boy when it's politically convenient to do so, but we don't treat the two equally.)
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
22d ago
From the looks of Wilson Combat's products (in particular) it looks like they're banking on people buying their product to change something about the grip angle of the gun (there are a couple of them that mimic the 1911/DWX) or to have a convenient way to make it heavier.
(Why you'd want to make a plastic gun heavier like that instead of just buying something like a Q5SF Match is another question entirely, but it's not like it costs WC anything to market it as "you could do it".)
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
22d ago
or holding a gun to the stomachs of your own pregnant women to threaten your enemy into compliance
Ironically, the set of people that's less likely to work on are also the set more likely to believe pulling the trigger in that case would be ending two lives.
I feel like this series of events has culture war implications.
SIG has absolutely been trying to leverage the fact there is a culture war to shout down people who now believe their guns are unsafe.
SIG lost two of those cases because they shipped a trigger shoe that did not have a Glock-style trigger safety, which would have hypothetically prevented an uncommanded discharge that occurred due to an undescribed mechanism.
The ultimate problem with the P320 is that it's a case study in extreme cost cutting.
Once upon a time, there was the P250. It was a very modern handgun, with a very mechanically simple firing mechanism. This mechanism is inherently extremely safe for the same reason it's safe on revolvers: the trigger pull is heavy, long, and even if the hammer let go and hit the firing pin somehow it couldn't hit the bullet hard enough to fire it. You don't need any other safeties[1] on a gun like this.
But the same things that made the gun safe and simple to manufacture also made it basically dead on arrival- the trigger pull is long and heavy. Not great for accuracy, or shooting all that quickly, or particularly usable by people who don't have a strong trigger finger. Understandably, sales weren't great.
Now, because modern guns cost far more in tooling to make than non-modern guns, SIG might have been in a bit of a hole financially. The plastic grips and triggers[2] for the P250 may be dirt-cheap to make on a per-unit basis, but the moulds for that plastic are incredibly expensive. To a lesser degree, this is also true of the barrels and slides (when you consider the CAD work for the outside and everything forward of the magazine would need no changes).
So SIG's engineers set to work designing a new firing control mechanism to fit in the same footprint as the old one[3]. By doing that, they could sell it as an upgrade for P250 owners, and recover the costs of that tooling- so they reused the maximum number of parts they could get away with and off it went to consumers.
It's at this point the problems start showing up:
[1] The new firing control mechanism is fundamentally less safe than the old one- they went from a gun that's completely incapable of firing a bullet at rest to one that is intentionally designed to do so (which in a vacuum is a perfectly valid thing to do: it makes the trigger pull much better than it is on competing pistols). So, design decisions that were fine on the old gun are all of a sudden not fine on the new gun- now they need a bunch of additional safeties to make sure the firing pin absolutely can't let go when the gun is dropped or when you pull the slide back a little.
This is what the second recall did- they milled out a bit of the slide and added another safety to it so the striker couldn't drop unless the trigger was pulled.
[2] The new firing control mechanism only needs a fraction of the trigger pull force, and a fraction of the total travel distance, to release the striker. Because inertia means things in motion stay in motion, a heavy enough trigger may have sufficient inertia that when the gun stops (by hitting the floor at a particular angle after being dropped) it still has enough potential energy to release the striker on its own. Now, in a vacuum, having a heavy trigger is a perfectly valid thing- if your gun can't fire until the trigger travels a great distance back under 10 pounds of force, there's no problem- but it stops being fine when the trigger no longer has to come that far back and must have much less force applied to it to activate.
This is what the first recall did- they replaced the heavy P250 plastic trigger with a much lighter one.
[3] The new firing control mechanism makes engineering compromises to stay within the footprint of the old gun. Those compromises include things like the effectiveness of mechanical safeties, as well as requiring certain parts be held to much more exact tolerances (because the size they'd normally be isn't possible on a retrofit like this). Now, if SIG kept making those parts to the initial standard, that's fine- but more exact tolerances cost more money. So, if you tell your subcontractors they can take shortcuts, and they do, a design that was just barely safe if made to those initial tolerances is now no longer safe, so the guns fire on their own.
This is why they're fucked now. They've sold so many, at so low a price (enabled both by being able to reuse tooling and aggressive subcontracting), that doing a recall is likely financially infeasible. SIG doesn't know which guns had parts made by which contractor or when they were made, so they can't guarantee that any gun is safe, and taking them all back to put parts made that are actually to standard in the first place is conceivably going to cost them more money than they ever made from the guns in the first place.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
24d ago
Meritocracy is, in some very real sense, "discrimination against dumb people"
And in that same sense, countries that grant their citizens broad liberties and freedoms discriminate against the stupid and virtueless.
"Ruining it for everyone" is the excuse to socialize your private virtue for those people.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
24d ago
“it is impossible to visualize the conduct of hostilities in which one side would be bound by rules of warfare without benefitting from them, and the other side would benefit from rules of warfare without being bound by them"
However, Israel factually is bound by rules of warfare without benefitting from them; while Hamas factually does benefit from rules of warfare without being bound by them ('there is a class of citizen that laws bind but do not protect, and then there is one that is protected by laws that do not bind').
Note that in the West, citizens in the latter class know it, and thus are far more likely to support Palestine- because not doing so is a refutation of their rights to that special protection in their own societies. Queers for Palestine is perfectly coherent through this lens.
The actual solution is to simply withdraw the protection that society has- if they don't want to follow the laws of war, they must lose the protection of those laws. Laws against genocide are there to protect a society that goes to war and loses from being slaughtered to the last; if a society wants to go to war and not fight that way, the law against genocide must then no longer apply. There is no right to the self-determination of a people without first respecting their right to self-destruction.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
26d ago
It's an unsinkable aircraft carrier whose location checks 3 regional powers that outnumber them at least 9:1- Iran (obvious), Russia (not quite as obvious), and Egypt (if a blockade/freedom of movement on the Suez needed to be enforced).
I don't condemn enemy conscripts. "The enemy" is not necessarily synonymous with "evil", and that's something lots of people have forgotten (the Nazis are a foundation of how the American Empire justifies its right to rule to itself, so it's kind of unavoidable)- if my enemy forces all of its constituent parts to, for example, wear a blue shirt or die, I don't blame anyone for putting the blue shirt on [whether or not they share all of my enemy's goals is irrelevant].
Yet, I don't think friendly forces are evil for killing them either- even in an environment where the enemy has intentionally frustrated identification of those who cause the enemy's cause (those who would rather die before ceasing to be the enemy), and those who would abandon those principles to not be dead (this includes those who only joined for the meals).
It is not, and cannot be, the enemy's fault that circumstances forced your uniform upon you; your only hope is that your own side advances its interests in such a way that your enemies do not decide to violently destroy you if and when they obtain the power to do so.
He does not necessarily deserve the consequences of being an enemy (contra traditionalist thought, where he does), but at the same time it is not immoral to destroy enemies (contra progressive thought, where it is), so I guess it depends on what you actually mean by "condemn".
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