LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
No bio...
User ID: 657
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
27d ago
Because the American Indian Act of 1924 might have been unconstitutional if not for the 14A.
If you want to argue that what the authors meant by jurisdiction is in fact the duty to pay capital income tax in the US, and that the former slaves had this duty but foreign residents do not, or find some other bizarre interpretation of jurisdiction.
Or, you know, the pretty basic argument thar "jurisdiction" means just citizens, and a very particular carve out for ex-slaves and native Americans.
My perspective as an non-American third party is that it's pretty clear why the language "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was used instead of just explicitly writing the 14A to restrict citizenship to children of existing citizens (jus sanguinis). It was to include the weird cases of ex-slaves (and later, native Americans, though that's messy about their jurisiction status and for any future similar unusual circumstances) and was never intended to allow for blanket jus soli citizenship.
Ex-slaves and native Americans, even though they weren't citizens, were clearly subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in a way that an anchor baby of a citizen of another country is not.
On the contrary, from what I can gather the 250k figure seems like a perfectly reasonable estimate, and is probably actually lower than the real number as the Rape Gang Inquiry Report suggests.
Firstly, the report clearly says this figure is an estimate only and the countersignallers only trying to "debunk" this figure are by disingenuously portaying as a hard statistic with bad methodology.
Secondly, while the estimate is extrapolating from data from the Rotherham inquiry (and a couple of other smaller inquiries) and you can criticise how accurate such and extrapolation can be:
- there is no reason to doubt the original Rotherham estimate which itself was conservative.
- using Rotherham to extrapolate from is actually a reasonably conservative example as the percentage of Rotherham who are Muslims is actually lower than the UK as a whole.
- the percentage and certainly the absolute number of Muslims in the UK has gone up, not down. The problem would have gotten worse since the Rotherham, not better.
- as noted below, the number covers all kinds of child sexual exploitation, not just rape though the scale of that shouldn't be downplayed either (while the Rape Gang Inquiry emphasise rape, it's clear from other parts they are referring to a broader category of sexual exploitation).
- if you do a very basic, extremely unsophisticated extrapolation of Rotherham to the whole of the UK population you end up with a figure more like 500k not 250k, by my back of the envelope calculations.
You can quibble about how specifically representative Rotherham is, but basically the argument comes down to whether you this Rotherham (and some of the other local inquiries) are broadly, if imprecisely, representative of Muslims in the UK, or you think Rotherham was just some weird fluke or exception.
I have no reason to believe it isn't or wouldn't be representative, and on balance the evidence that does exist seems to suggest the opposite.
It seems grossly unjust for the entire British state apparatus to cover up, refuse to record or report statistics on this matter, and then at the same time supportors of this apparatus turn around and reject any estimate based on the infomation that is available. We all know why there isn't more information and stats being reported. The criticism is all being made in bad faith. I am yet to see a single person make a reasonable counter-estimate. I have not seen someone say, "actually 250k is maybe too high, actually 200k/100k is more reasonable for these reasons."
The approach is basically to assume that 250k is an absurd number to begin with, and then work backwards to "prove" it's false with no real counter-estimate or one that's ironically absurdly low. It's apparently not absurd to believe the official British Government estimate that 3.1 million people in the UK have experienced some kind of child sexual abuse, but it is absurd to believe that 250k is a generally reasonable estimate of those raped and abused by Muslims specifically.
The Rape Gang Inquiry Report is sloppy in some respects, I don't deny but its general thesis and reporting is correct.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1mo ago
I've posted here previously I how I strongly suspect that childcare subsidies, maternal leave and similar economic policies actually counter-intuitively maybe be actually lowering, or to be precise limiting fertility.
The economic approach bakes in assumption that mothers should be working, actually quite insidiously. Maternal leave has a defined period, even if generous. It says to mothers 'great, you've had your generous months with your newborn, now get back to work and put your child in childcare'. Childcare subsidies obviously only make sense in a scenario when a mother is working and not caring for her kids herself. That you should have maybe one or two children then go back to work, and not make childrearing a central part of your life and identity. So economic incenitives end up implicity actually push mothers towards working and reinforce the two-income trap.
In otherwords, I think economic incentives encourage mothers to start or continue working, limiting their fertility, rather than encouraging working women to be mothers.
It is completely a status thing. Modernity is actively hostile to children and childrearing. The worst period of the Great Depression had a higher fertility rate than today.
Putting aside Stop Killing Games (which I support), there is a bigger question about how dependent we are on these tech companies and how it gives them basically unlimited leverage over... well, everything.
In the West, virtually every government agency, every small and big business, every school, college and university, half-assed book club, is dependent on infomation services provided by one of Google/Alphabet, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft (or in some cases, all three. My understanding is Apple is a distant fourth).
Any one of these companies could basically crash the global economy single-handedly just by revoking their services to even a small segment of the population or economy.
I can't imagine how a government plans to regulate these tech companies while they're using the very services provided by those companies to plan said regulation. It seems like there's always a loaded gun on the table, even if these companies superduper pinkie swear never to abuse their power, even putting aside the natural price gouging that occurs.
It might have always been the case that other companies, such as major banks (looking at you GFC) have at similar, if not the same leverage in the past, but I think the difference is that even the banks are now dependent on these tech companies!
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
2mo ago
You're correct but I think this is overcomplicating it.
- Women want a man who is 'nice' but only to her.
- Men want a women who is a 'slut' but only to him.
Women's fantasy is to have a strong-willed, dominant, somewhat abrasive/disagreeable man who gets what he wants, but softens around her and only her, that she can wrap around her finger, not a pushover but 'I would do anything for her'. She is the exception to the other women.
Men's fantasy is to have a youthful, viriginal, agreeable, respectable women, but so enamoured and devoted (unconditionally) that she is willing to throw herself at him and only him, and become his 'slut'. He is the exception to other men.
Everyone wants to feel special.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
7mo ago
Was pre-Communist Russia particularly low trust? It was certainly highy authoritarian and absolutist, but I don't think that's the same thing as low-trust. Even the relative destitution of the Russian people isn't really indicative of low trust and I would say more to do with Russia's lack of industralisation and entrenched serfdom. But previously other European countries had entrenched serfdom and were high trust (e.g. medieval France)
My only cultural touchstone is Crime and Punishment, which does imply a certain level of high trust in Russian society at the time. Indeed, one of Dostoevsky's main points with his writing is that these new modernist (and ultimately proto-Communist) ideas becoming popular at the time destroys morality and society.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
Yeah, they're called Islam and Mormons the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
I'm only half joking. And Mormon theology is really wack. Interestingly when Islam first emerged, the original view of Christendom was it was a heresy, not a distinct religion.
Some Unitarians in eastern Europe (Hungary) might be more conservative, I don't know.
Other major contemporary (socially) conservative non-Trinitarians (if not specifically Unitarians) include Oneness Pentecostals, and Jehovah's Witnesses. There's a whole range of smaller denominations that are anti-Trinitarian in various ways that you may have heard of, generally they're pretty crazy and their theology is a joke.
As a general comment, I understand why people have problems with the Trinity, but at the same time it is the orthodox Christian position for a reason and does have intellectual weight behind it.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
You quite literally went to the worst denomination possible. Unitarians aren't even Christians under most traditional definitions, as they reject the Trinity.
The whole Unitarian movement has always been very liberal. They basically were created to be a liberal denomination of "Christianity".
As a Catholic, if you're interested in engaging intellectually with Christianity, look into a welcoming, conserative Catholic parish. Parishes associated with cathedrals are your best bet. No shade to our Protestant brothers, but Catholics have the longest and most robust intellectual tradition.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
Long-term it’s probably true that this kind of immigration is good for the economy and makes the pie larger for everybody, but it’s just too much too fast.
It doesn't. Countries with mass immigration like the UK, Canada, and Australia (most of Europe is not far behind) have had negative real GDP per capita growth in recent years (despite massive and increasing government spending as a major contributor to GDP I might add). US still has positive real GDP per capita growth, but that's probably due to US having a larger population able to absorb more immigration and the fact the US is still the centre of technology and innovation.
The pie technically does get bigger, but the number of people who eat the pie outpaces it. Liberal politicians love it, because it does technically grow GDP even if it makes their countrymen individually poorer. I'm reminded of the fact that Boris Johnson increased immigration ("Boriswave") because he wanted positive press coverage from the Financial Times. Any GDP growth is probably captured by the rich anyway, due to the wage suppression caused by immigration among other things.
Maybe once upon a time immigration does increase GDP (per capita) when immigrants were of a higher quality, able to integrate well, and came over to work and had no expectation of being supported by the state. Those days are long gone.
Far cry from the millions that people seem to get the impression about. No, a lot of these races are more small-dollar than you'd expect.
If American politics are anything like Australian politics in this regard (which it certainly is), of course this is not how bribes work. No, it takes the form of "not bribes" where while in office, corporations and donors will invite them to galas and events with fine dining, ridiculously high "speaking fees" and so on.
But the important part is when they leave office. You can expect a nice cushy job on a corporate board paying 7 figures, or a lucrative "consulting" role. The revolving door, as they say.
That's only if you're unwilling to abuse your position outright though, unlike a particular former US Democratic Speaker of the House.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
How many "left-wing violence incidents" go unprosecuted or otherwise unrecorded and therefore never end up in any dataset. Quite a lot I'd wager.
The problem with trying to take this "scientific", "quantifiable" approach to measuring and comparing left-wing and right-wing violence is that the right believe that institutions at virtually every level are structure in favour of the left and against the right. At every step right-wing violence is further monitored, scruntised, highlighted, pathologised etc etc while the inverse is true for the left. There is no clean, unbiased dataset. Your own scrubbing of the dataset only proves the bias exists, not that you've managed to produce a useful or accurate dataset after cleaning out all the garbage.
People need to understand that the institutions making these claims have lost all credibility and authority with the right, and that appeals to them are meaningless.
This is in addition to basic issues like trying to quantify "level of violence" by counting the mere number of incidents, when it's really a qualitative phenomenon (do 3 mild cases outweight 1 major one?), and in isolation a narrow definition of violence incidences would exclude other forms of political repression or harm.
So the leftist middle class needed a new victim for whom they could claim to fight. Women. Ethnic and sexual minorities (except pedos, because everyone hates pedos). Victims of colonization. Of course, unlike Marx, they have much less of a master plan, a grand strategy, a theory of victory.
Exactly right, but I have to emphasise that was not merely an organic development, but quite literally what the Frankfurt School/Cultural Marxists/Critical Theorists (and later, the woke), advocate for as a deliberate and concious development of Marxism.
Herbet Marcuse's 1969 Essay on Liberation:
No matter how rational this strategy may be, no matter how sensible the desperate effort to preserve strength in the face of the sustained power of corporate capitalism, the strategy testifies to the “passivity” of the industrial working classes, to the degree of their integration it testifies to the facts which the official theory so vehemently denies. Under the conditions of integration, the new political consciousness of the vital need for radical change emerges among social groups which, on objective grounds, are (relatively) free from the integrating, conservative interests and aspirations, free for the radical transvaluation of values. Without losing its historical role as the basic force of transformation, the working class, in the period of stabilization, assumes a stabilizing, conservative function; and the catalysts of transformation operate “from without.”
This tendency is strengthened by the changing composition of the working class. The declining proportion of blue collar labor, the increasing number and importance of white collar employees, technicians, engineers, and specialists, divides the class. This means that precisely those strata of the working class which bore, and still bear, the brunt of brute exploitation will perform a gradually diminishing function in the process of production. The intelligentsia obtains an increasingly decisive role in this process – an instrumentalist intelligentsia, but intelligentsia nevertheless. This “new working class,” by virtue of its position, could disrupt, reorganize, and redirect the mode and relationships of production...
The ghetto population of the United States constitutes such a force. Confined to small areas of living and dying, it can be more easily organized and directed. Moreover, located in the core cities of the country, the ghettos form natural geographical centers from which the struggle can be mounted against targets of vital economic and political importance; in this respect, the ghettos can be compared with the faubourgs of Paris in the eighteenth century, and their location makes for spreading and “contagious” upheavals. Cruel and indifferent privation is now met with increasing resistance, but its still largely unpolitical character facilitates suppression and diversion. The racial conflict still separates the ghettos from the allies outside. While it is true that the white man is guilty, it is equally true that white men are rebels and radicals. However, the fact is that monopolistic imperialism validates the racist thesis: it subjects ever more nonwhite populations to the brutal power of its bombs, poisons, and moneys; thus making even the exploited white population in the metropoles partners and beneficiaries of the global crime. Class conflicts are being superseded or blotted out by race conflicts: color lines become economic and political realities – a development rooted in the dynamic of late imperialism and its struggle for new methods of internal and external colonization.
As for the lack of master plan - that's also true. Horkheimer said the point of Critical Theory was not to construct or develop a blueprint for a new society, but merely to tear down the existing society so whatever 'good' existed in the society would be liberated and form the basis for the new society. Their whole plant is basically deconstruct everything and the perfect communist society will somehow rise from the ashes.
A big problem with discussion Cultural/Neo-Marxism is that even when you describe or paraphrase their ideas accurately, people think you're being uncharitable, or making it up, or being conspiratorial, because they can't believe someone would actually support those ideas.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
You could at least pretend to display some performative scepticism towards a Guardian article on immigration before uncritically accepting the narrative wholesale. Obvious baitpost.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Israel would have almost exactly the same national security interests and likely strategic patterns of behavior even if it had no element of racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths, though.
Israel would never had existed if they didn't have that though.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Actually, you can't for most subjects.
I spent the last 20 minutes looking for it and I can't find it but a number of years ago I remember seeing data about the political afflication of professors by party, either Democrat or Republican (I think it was out of Jonathan Haidt's work but not 100% sure).
Anyway, the end result was that the balance (and this was back in the 2016-2018 era) was abysmal. Like really really bad. Most subjects had maybe 10 out of every 100 professors were Republican or Republican leaning. Some even lower. There was one or two subjects (I think was English literature and one other thing maybe) where they could not find a single Republican leaning professor at all, from their survey. The only subjects that had a "reasonable" balance of Democrat and Republicans were I think engineering and economics (unsurprisingly), but even that was like 60-40 D-R.
It means in most colleges, outside of engineering and economics, you might have 1 or 2 Republican professors in the whole college, and the vast majority of disciplines in any given university would not have a single Republican leaning professor.
I know Republican != conservative (honestly it's probably worse), and I might be misremembering the data slightly.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Obligatory John Adams quote.
Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Yes, this is what progressive actually believe (what did you think "all sex is rape" meant?). They don't want sex to exist and act accordingly; that's why all of their "pedo literature" is oppression porn and why all of their efforts to educate children about sex center around portraying sex as ugly and terrible.
I notice you ignored the second part of what I said from quoting me. Leftist are sexual utopians at their core, they just believe they have to radically deconstruct and destroy all existing sexual relationships (because they're oppressive) before the sexual utopia will somehow appear. This is the core concept of critical theory, as applied to sex.
To an overwhelming degree, it's a possession/preservation fetish...
...Progressive thought fetishizes innocence, so what we would expect from that is a bunch of so-called "pedo literature" that fails to actually contain any pedophilia [in the "straight man on little girl" sense], and what you actually should be looking for is, again, the fetishization of what they consider innocence.
They fetishizes insofar as they want to get rid of the concept of innocence. It's not preservation fetish, they want to destroy it. That's not my assertion, it's quite literally what they say, as has been already cited by me and others. Your shota reference example in your linked comment is a terrible example, both by the fact it's not a central example of leftism (if it's related to leftism at all), and by the fact that corruption is a central theme. It's about the loss of innocence - so I don't see how it supports your point.
I actually don't think we're really disagreeing her. The reason the leftist hates innocence is because they think it's a concept created by the oppressor class (cis-hetero-capitalist patriarchy or whatever variation you want to use) to control everyone and prevent them from enjoying the fruits of 'sexual liberation' (in both the physical and metaphysical sense).
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
I don't use social media that much and don't intend to go dumpster diving just to fulfil your demand. That being said, I know there's at least a handful of "Breadtube" type 'influencers' who have made various comments about age of consent and the like. Any 'serious' leftist intellectual is not going to put their thoughts on social media, where they will and can be eviscerated by normies, they're going to put it in academic text hidden behind jargon which I have already shown.
20 years ago, open public support for gay 'marriage' was unthinkable. 10 years ago, transgenderism was a tiny, tiny fringe and mostly a joke.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
I oversimplified for the sake of brevity. I could say something like feminism's goal was to deconstruct the cis-hetero-patriarchy or whatever, the patriarchy still exists (by feminism's own admission), therefore feminism hasn't affected anything. Obviously this is sarcastic.
Did you not read my post? I explicitly reference and quote influential leftist intellectuals and academics who are pro-pedophilia, or as I said, are at least comfortable destroying any distinction that would allow pedophilia to exist. Do you think the quotes I have included are fake?
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
The point of that original comment was to provide a historical throughline throughout history in leftist thought, which I think it does pretty conclusive for a relatively short post. Later in that original thread I provide an example of a contemporary article.
Futurity and Childhood Innocence: Beyond the Injury of Development by Hannah Dyer (2016)
Other people in this current threat have provided other examples. It's not hard to find articles/academic publications on this stuff if you go looking.
My point was to look at leftist academic thought, which is always upstream of what (leftist) normies think. It may or may not make its way downstream in the future. Probably not as the tide is turning against leftism, and that pedophilia is so intrinsically evil and disordered that normies can't abstract it way like other things.
I actually think the argument anout adulthood 'shifiting to mid-twenties' is actually in favour of the deconstruction of child and adult, not against it, as it makes the boundaries between child and adults, fuzzier, not clearer. Young adults are being infantalized, extended adolescence. The concept of 'adulting' is classic deconstructionism - adult is now something your perform, rather than something you are.
Marxism intends to overthrow capitalism. America is still capitalist. Therefore, Marxism has had no impact on American society.
Feminism intended to make women happy. Women are less happy. Therefore, feminism did not achieve anything or cause any changes on society.
How is your comment not anything other than a post hoc fallacy?
You're not actually refuting the central claim that there is a strong current in contemporary leftist thought (critical theory, post-modernism, queer theory) that is okay with exposing children to sexual material or activities, or at the very least actively want to demolish barriers that prevent that from happening - the distinction between child and adult, the concept of childhood innocence.
The New Atheists thought that by demolishing religion, they would usher in an age of rational utopia. Instead they got new pseudo-religions. The sex/gender abolitionists thought they would usher in a sex (in both means of the term) utopia. Instead we have sexual chaos. The claim of the leftists is quite literally 'free love', to put it in a simple term, not sexlessness you claim the only way you get sexlessness is if you go so deep down the rabbithole where you deconstruct every the very concept of sex doesn't exist - but then sexlessness also doesn't exist.
I would suggest the reason pedophilia hasn't taken off despite it's presence in leftwing thought is that it is so intrinsically and self-evidently evil and disordered that most people can't and won't accept it even when they might accept other elements of the ideology in the abstract.
That being said, it's progressive - literally. Twenty years ago open political support for gay 'marriage' was unthinkable. Ten years ago, transgenderism was still a fringe concept. As disgusting as it is, and as much as people try to discredit the "slippery slope", it's not out of the realm of possibility to assume what the next step might be (if the leftists manage to retain unchecked power indefinitely)
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
Copying an old comment of mine from the old place.
I think a very strong case can be made that the New Left, and its subsequent and related movements in the academic left particularly queer theory, is pro-pedophilia (eventually filtering down to the 'woke' public in watered down form). To be more charitable, it's not that they are pro-pedophile per se, but rather that they have adopted a world view that doesn't make a distinction between pedophilia and non-pedophilia. The aim to is "deconstruct" sex, gender, sexuality, race and so on. Why would one expect them to stop there and not deconstruct adult and child? In many cases, this is what they explicitly want to do. Some might say this is a 'slippery slope' fallacy, but I think Newton's First Law is an appropriate analogy. One might argue it is the logical conclusion of left academic theory (that is, the critical theories prominent in academia).
It's probably best to use some examples.
John Money, a psychologist and sexologist, with a background in pediatrics, active in the 50s and 60s. John Money is notable for being one of, if not the first person to theorize a distinction between sex and gender, and was the academic who introduced the term 'gender identity' and has been highly influential in the development of sex and gender theory. What is less well know about Money is some of his extremely unethical practices, including the infamous case of David Reimer. When Reimer was born, he was subjected to a botched circumcision that destroyed his penis. On the advice of Money, Reimer's parents subjected Reimer to sex change (as a baby) and raised him as a girl. As part of the therapy, he would make Reimer and his twin brother engage in mock sexual activity, including making them strip for 'inspections' and taking photos. Money claimed that these activities were essential for the development of a healthy adult gender and sexual identity. The case of Reimer was long held up as evidence in support of Money's and later ideas of gender identity and the distinction of sex and gender. David Reimer would "de-transition" later in his teens. Both David and his twin brother Brian would commit suicide in their thirties.
In the 1960s to 1990s, influential German psychologist, sexologist and sex educator Hemlut Kentler ran an experiment with government support where he would put young children as foster children with known pedophiles and encourage sexual activity. Kentler had strong tied to left-wing intellectual circles and believed that 'sexual repression' was the key driver of fascist ideology.
Shulamith Firestone, radical feminist and author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. In the book, she makes four demands for an authentic feminist revolution. Number three is for 'the total integration of women and children into all aspects of larger society' (by this she means the removal of any cultural distinction between men/women and adult/child). Number four is for 'the freedom of all women and children to do whatever they wish to do sexually'.
In 1977, a group of French left or left associated intellectuals signed a petition to the French government asking them abolish the age of consent in France. The signatories include some extremely significant and influential names, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-François Lyotard. I should point out that there is strong evidence is that Michel Foucault was a pedophile, and regularly made trips to Tunisia to abuse young boys there. One has to wonder how this relates to his work in postmodernism.
There's Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay Thinking Sex, considered a foundational text for gay and lesbian studies, gender studies and queer theory. In Thinking Sex, Rubin defends pedophilia (and incest as it happens). It's hard to get a direct quote (you can read the essay yourself) as the language is expectedly obtuse, but it is the logical conclusion of what she is arguing. For example:
It is harder for most people to sympathize with actual boy-lovers. Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt.
Rubin, and many academic leftists like and since her, want to deconstruct the concept of childhood innocence, seeing it yet another part of the oppressive system we find ourself in. I should point out, the Motte and Bailey is particularly strong here.
There's of course, Judith Butler, the queer theorist who needs no introduction. What Judith Butler means can be hard to actually decern, but here's a choice quote from her 2004 book 'Undoing Gender':
It is not necessary to figure parent-child incest as a unilateral impingement on the child by the parent, since whatever impingement takes place will also be registered within the sphere of fantasy. In fact, to understand the violation that incest can be—and also to distinguish between those occasions of incest that are violation and those that are not—it is unnecessary to figure the body of the child exclusively as a surface imposed upon from the outside. The fear, of course, is that if it emerges that the child’s desire has been exploited or incited by incest, this will somehow detract from our understanding of parent-child incest as a violation. The reification of the child’s body as passive surface would thus constitute, at a theoretical level, a further deprivation of the child: the deprivation of psychic life.
Which fits into my initial description - it's not that the 'academic left' (or critical left or whatever term you want to use) are pro-pedophile per se, but rather they believe in deconstructing sexual norms in such a way that pedophile becomes a meaningless concept (and one might say, intentionally or unintentionally giving pedophiles free license to operate). These are just examples, but you can find many other academics arguing the same or similar. A large part of it goes back to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, which basically argues through a Freudian-Marxist synthesis that our natural desires and impulses are suppressed by the capitalist system in order to funnel them into productive work (which no one actually wants to do), and therefore liberation from capitalism but necessarily include the liberation and expression of these desires, with of course, an emphasis on sexual desire.
But surely these are just kooky academics with insane theories that would never actually have any real-world consequences (regardless of how crazy influential they are), right? That normal people (that is, leftists) would never actually implement these kinds of things in a practical manner, right? Well these theories do seem to have effect, least of all in (critical) pedagogy. In particular, sex education does seem to have been affected by these theories, at least in the US. One example is the book 'Gender Queer: A Memoir', the subject of recent controversy, becoming standard in curriculum and libraries for many schools, and is aimed at pre-teens. The book contains extremely graphic (drawn) images, including a blowjob and sex scenes. You can search for the images yourself.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
1yr ago
The question is what do those names actually mean to consumers. At least here in Australia, names like 'feta' are fully genericised - they don't have to come from a particular region in Greece. This is true for a lot of names, though the EU has taken great pains to reverse this.
When a consumer goes to buy feta, what exactly are they looking for? If two products are virtually identicial, taste the same, same texture, but one happens to be made in Australia and one in Greece, do most consumers actually care? Do they just want a lower price (I'm sure some foodies will claim there are subtle but irreducible differences).
At what point does a name become genericised to the point of referring to a type of product, rather that than referring to the geographical origin of a product? Danish pastries certainly aren't just made in Denmark.
It is a legitimate criticism to say that a consumer might be looking for feta and not care if it's from either Australia or Greece, but EU geographical indicators hide Australia 'feta' from consumers as a potential option, and this constitutes protectionism.
Yeah, it's annoyed me even when contemporary conservatives and traditionalists defend the concept (I have seen them criticising foreign countries for not criminalising it) - the concept implicity undermines the traditional understanding of marriage.
Marital rape wasn't a crime because in the past it was assumed (required) that marriage came with an obligation to engage in sexual intercourse with your spouse. There's a reason the euphemism "fulfilling the marital obligations" was used in the past. Catholic teaching, still, teaches that spouses shouldn't refuse one another unless there's a genuine reason and the requests themselves are reasonable.
What defendants of the concept of criminalising marital rape will argue that it's basically to stop violent rape with marriage - i.e. a husband physically and violently forcing himself on his wife. That there were a huge epidemic of women who actually being violently raped by their husbands but no one could do anything about it because it was "legal". But the reality was it was and is already a crime in the form of various spouse battery statutes. In practice, marital rape is used to describe any "coercion" a husband uses on his wife to sleep with her. But this creates huge ambiguity - it's expected, traditionally, that the husband and wife would be having sex so any sexual act itself couldn't be considered evidence of coercion. It demonises normal sexual marital expectations.
The concept of marital rape itself is a good example of how liberal presuppositions have become omnipresent in even our closest relationships. Marital rape as a distinct concept from domestic violence only makes sense where marriage is merely a sexless economic contract between cohabitors that can be broken at any time, and not a union of two bodies and souls.
There are striking parallels to the introduction of no-fault divorce.
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