mdurak
12hr ago
Well, my fellow human, I too have observed plenty of humans. Care to elaborate on which specific observations lead you to which specific conclusion?
I'll start. I've met plenty of guys who act honorably and without bad motives towards women. I've met plenty of women who act the same way towards guys. Therefore I am inclined to believe that it is very possible for a woman to act that way towards an underage boy.
mdurak
12hr ago
How do you want to define “best” in this discussion?
Good question. I suppose that would be, what gives me the most accurate mental model to work with? Modeling NK as "democratic," for example, would not be very accurate at all for any reasonable common understanding of the word "democratic." You'd have to construct so many epicycles to make that model work that it's much easier to model NK as simply being a very undemocratic dictatorship.
Capitalism is a system where the means of production are privately owned. Socialism is a system where the means of production are controlled by the workers. Now how both of these different systems go about trying to enact and carry out their aims is multifaceted.
Right, and when "private ownership" and "worker control" start blending into each other, what use do the labels have anymore? To go back to the beginning of this thread,
If you’re a lefty though, why object to socialism?
Well that depends on what is meant by "socialism", no? If by "socialism" you mean a Chinese-style economy where you can have more billionaires than the US, but the billionaires are explicitly subordinate to the state, then yeah I'm sure that's more palatable to a lot of people. It sounds pretty similar to a fascist Nazi Germany or modern Russia where the state has overwhelming power to direct industrial titans to work towards the state's goals, and neither of those were/are communist states.
mdurak
12hr ago
That's surprising to me and good to know. I guess the external facade of a strongly unified country is just that, a propagandist facade.
mdurak
12hr ago
Surely medieval and ancient rulers must have run into this problem too? I have a hard time imagining that they were much more self-aware about their own limited access to information than today's elites.
mdurak
12hr ago
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.
That's only one way to look at it, no? By demanding such "protection" we cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.
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.
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.
mdurak
17hr ago
To begin with, China defines themselves along the way I described.
Right, but is a country's self-definition the best way to understand it? North Korea defines itself as a democratic people's republic, when it's obviously neither democratic nor for the people.
They see examples like Russia as a God that failed and China as an example of one that works.
Interesting. The internet socialists I've been in contact with in the past were the type to bemoan that China had lost its socialist way.
Call it what you want. Just as there are different flavors and varieties of capitalism, there are different flavors and varieties of socialism.
Fair enough. How is one to differentiate between a capitalist versus socialist economy then, when there can apparently be many shared characteristics across both? As I've mentioned, I'd like something more objective than "They claim to uphold the ideals of their ruling ideology."
mdurak
1d ago
Ok, so then what realistic and fair option do you actually support for ending this conflict?
mdurak
1d ago
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.
Okay, the latter is something I hadn't considered. 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.
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
I don't see why this is a useful protection to grant.
because we generally value human life.
But we're not talking about the general case. 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.
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.
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.
mdurak
1d ago
it will have bad motives and dynamics
Ok, but why do you assume that? Or what do you mean by "bad motives"?
mdurak
1d ago
China is a socialist market economy with strong Leninist leanings
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."
WSDE's don't "get rid of" market signals and expressing a preference.
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."
mdurak
1d ago
Huh. Would you argue that to be the case for all authoritarian governments then?
mdurak
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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).
The first one I've addressed as unviable.
The second one you don't support.
Unless there is a viable alternative option that you support, how is it at all fair to say
Either provide a workable alternative you'd actually support, or do not complain when the only reasonable course of action is taken.
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