mdurak
2mo ago
Huh. Would you argue that to be the case for all authoritarian governments then?
mdurak
2mo ago
Every man understands this in his dealings with other men.
Sorry, what exactly is the "this" here? Every man understands that they're signing up to compete and potentially get fucked up?
mdurak
2mo ago
These systems weren’t regularly allowed to fail or succeed on their own merits but were always being fucked with by outside actors.
At some point you gotta stop blaming outside actors for internal failures, right? The Soviets were large enough to stand their own and engaged in international trade. Still ended up collapsing.
Even China had to adapt to capitalism in the end. Worker control of the means of production simply doesn't work if you get rid of the market signals that influence the means of production -- and if you're adopting a market economy then you're not doing classical socialism anymore anyways.
mdurak
2mo ago
That's a lot of resources to check out, thank you!
Do you actually believe in your religion's unproven claims about metaphysical reality and the afterlife? Or are you partaking only for the sake of the rituals?
And even if you can come up with some hypothetical where it is possible
I already provided an obvious one that myself (and I'm sure millions of other teenage boys) went through: horny 14 year old me jerking it off to a whole lot of different adult women.
Suppose it were somehow made known to me that I could have sex with one of those women, I just have to say the word and she would allow me to have my way with her. The consensual qualifier is already satisfied, so that leaves the manipulation one. Would she be manipulating me by simply allowing the act to happen?
I don't see how this is a weird hypothetical at all. I may not have been exposed to any such situations myself, but given the amount of news articles where an adult woman was caught doing something like this, there are likely to have been far more unrecorded instances of this happening where an adult woman was not being manipulative, unless your definition of "manipulation" is far more expansive than mine.
mdurak
2mo ago
Except for "developmental vulnerability", by which I assume you mean damage to underdeveloped internal organs, doesn't everything else (pregnancy, reputation, etc.) also apply to really old geezers dating really young adult women?
Also, I wouldn't be so sure about legal risks, given that even a 15 year old boy was ordered to pay child support to a 34 year old adult woman. But that seems almost tautological: it is immoral to fuck a child because society might hurt the child if you do.
mdurak
2mo ago
Ok, I agree with most things you say, but just to clearly separate out the practical rules that must be put in place to protect the median case, versus the purely ethical side of things:
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?
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.
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?
mdurak
2mo ago
You can't "Marshall plan Gaza" when the aid money is just going to get funneled into Hamas.
As for "actually genocide it fr",
I think the state of Israel, while in a very shitty neighborhood, is going absolutely ham to a degree that is impossible to support ethically.
You would start ethically supporting Israel if they went even further than doing things that you find impossible to ethically support?
mdurak
2mo ago
you're also forgetting that (and I can't believe I actually have to say this) most men don't want to fuck little girls
I'm not forgetting that. But there's a huge amount of societal attention placed on the few men that do want to fuck little girls, which is the whole reason that this is even a topic of discussion in the first place, right? Otherwise it'd be a fringe nothingburger concern.
It's actually harmful for women to acknowledge it because their self-interest dictates they pretend sex is a chore, for the same reason your self-interest dictates you seek a high wage even for a job compatible with your interests; men take this at face value sometimes.
Good observation.
so you get the 13-23 set acting super weird because their biology demands adult treatment that society pretends is illegitimate (because they simply don't have room for them in the economy, and segregation breeds contempt).
We pay for it in events where one of them runs amok and kills a bunch of their peers and consider this acceptable for some reason.
Well, we've only started truly paying for it in recent decades, whereas the phenomenon of segregated teenagehood has been going on for quite a while, right? But what solution is there? There is even less room for them in the economy now, and even if there were, the general public would be aghast at the idea of reintroducing child labor.
mdurak
2mo ago
Tomboys are partially exempt from this in male spaces just as gay men are partially exempt from judgment on those attributes in female spaces
Now that's interesting, I never made the connection. What's the flip side of tolerated failure modes for men? Performative toughness, stubborn self-reliance, unrestrained competitiveness?
It doesn't seem like there's a single slur to capture that.
mdurak
2mo ago
Ah, that's exactly what ThisIsSin said as well -- and the connection to Woke being that woke allows for the expression of these.
mdurak
2mo ago
the reverse is categorically harmful
So this relates to the sibling thread I have, but what is the categorical harm being done when it's a male teacher having (consensual, non-manipulative, insert qualifiers, etc.) sex with female students, and what makes for the gendered difference?
But men who engaged in sexual activity with adult women as adolescents describe it more positively and report less trauma.
That study you linked only describes public perception of such acts, not the actual trauma from the act.
mdurak
2mo ago
If you have the wherewithal to ask that question the answer is no... The steelman of their opinion is that it's difficult to know which kind of person you are at that age
Well, I most certainly was not thinking about potential psychological harm when I was rubbing one off to adult women. But regardless of what kind of person you are at that age, how exactly does a horny teenage boy get harmed by having his fantasies met in a non-manipulative and consensual manner?
Again, I'm not saying there's no harm. But if there is, can somebody please show it to me, because I'm having trouble seeing it myself.
The predator angle is usually invented; human instinct says men can't be raped, you need to be educated to believe otherwise
It's certainly possible (English version here).
But what is interesting is the idea of statutory rape. It comes across as this thing that is simply axiomatically wrong, even under ideal circumstances where the adult is not intending to manipulate, groom, or otherwise inflict harm on the child. You can account for everything unwholesome, and yet somehow the act itself is still seen by society at large as so obviously morally wrong as to not need any further justification.
What you said about this being merely the self-interested motivations of different demographics makes sense to me. But this would seem to morally justify sexual relationships with willing girls of any age; the only limiting factor is societal opprobrium, not ethics, which somehow feels like the entirely wrong conclusion to draw (unless this is just my internalized misandry expressing itself).
mdurak
2mo ago
Aren't "barely legal" and "jailbait" referring exactly to the teenagers I'm talking about?
But suppose we lowered the age further. Again, assuming consent -- as in, the child wants to do something with an adult and the adult allows them the opportunity to do so, which I think already implies a minimum threshold for age -- what exactly is immoral about that, and how wouldn't that transfer across different age gaps? Doesn't the hypothetical still hold?
(I say assuming consent because non-consensual acts of sex are obviously unethical regardless of age.)
mdurak
2mo ago
There are definitely people who are sketch and seem like they'd go a lot lower if only it was allowed and those people are pedos
legal vs moral are different questions
I have several questions of my own:
-
Assuming consent and good intentions, what actually makes pedophilia immoral? I remember my days as a horny 14 year old; there were definitely some hot women in their thirties I would have consented to banging. Would even a consensual, non-manipulative act of sex with a much older woman showing me the ropes have caused me irreparable psychological harm?
- I mean, maybe. I'm not an expert in human psychology, so it's possible that giving me exactly what I wanted would've been the worst possible thing to happen to teenage me. But I have a hard time seeing it.
-
And the thing that makes pedophilia immoral -- why wouldn't it make a larger age gap relationship immoral? Imagine a rich 70 year old white man being with a hot 22 year old -- not unheard of here in the third world. I would think he's got at least as much power to manipulate her as a 30 year old with a 14 year old.
-
And of course I understand there is a gendered difference between the scenarios, as much as the left may not want to admit it. A 30 year old man fucking a 14 year old girl produces a much stronger ick than the reverse. Why is that?
mdurak
2mo ago
What would you say are the "psychological impulses" behind Wokism that "gay" and "retarded" are such effective counters to?
mdurak
2mo ago
To what extent are American Jews in support of Israel? Seems like a very sizable contingent of them think there is a genocide in Gaza, which sounds like they belong right in the D camp. Why should GOP (or Dem) treatment of Israel be influenced by Jewish American voters any more than, say, their treatment of China is influenced by Chinese American voters?
mdurak
2mo ago
If you have power, real power, you don't care about the public narrative.
Would you argue that Xi Jinping, and by extension the CCP, does not hold "real" power? Why would they care so much about controlling the public narrative in China if it were completely irrelevant to those in power?
And that's in a dictatorship. Isn't the need to manufacture consent even more dire in a democracy?
mdurak
2mo ago
I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious. There may be good reasons for the shift.
I just got here from a linked comment, so I'm quite late -- but could you explain why and what these good reasons are?
mdurak
2mo ago
I think we are at a point where Jews/Israel are going to have to decide which party they back and won’t be able to play both sides anymore.
Why would you frame it as "playing both sides" when whites, hispanics, and Asians also voted for both parties last election?
mdurak
2mo ago
There are many examples of the various attrocities they have recently inflicted on Palestinians (rape, violence, blah blah blah).
Apart and beyond the usual level of such atrocities in any military?
Or how gaza is levelled and the ~2mil ppl there are now pressed into less than 50% of the pre 2023 land area.
What would be a more effective way to clear out Hamas bases and tunnels that are deeply embedded within civilian infrastructure, without putting your own soldiers at risk? I'm genuinely curious -- I have not been able to get a single good answer to this that isn't simply "Well, don't."
mdurak
2mo ago
What are the steelman arguments for/against using the word "retarded" to describe idiocy?
The main argument I've heard is that actually mentally retarded people are well aware of their condition being used as a punching bag to put down other humans, and this naturally produces feelings of Feels Bad Man. Why would you knowingly inflict such collateral damage on innocents when there are perfectly valid alternative insults to be used?
And yet I can't help but feel that this is what the left would call "tone policing." I wanna express myself how I feel like expressing myself, damn it, and that shit right there is some fucking retarded shit.
What are the defining features of the Chinese economy that get you to call it "socialist"? Given the state of the Chinese labor market and the bargaining power that Chinese workers have, it does not strike me at all as "worker control over the means of production."
Likewise, I don't see any actual real-life implementations of that that don't seem like they'd be better described by the term "capitalism."
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