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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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So, the Guardian has decided to be offended by a volleyball player, gleefully (and from what I can see, technically correctly (the best kind of correct!)) calling him a child rapist in the headlines.

Apparently he had sex with a twelve-year-old when he was 19 (with no additional elements of coercion) and served a year for it in 2016.

That is one icky age difference, and I think that the prison sentence he served might be an appropriate general deterrent. (Personally, I would prefer having (legally void) consensual sex with an adult (to whom I am attracted, see consent) at age 12 to spending a year in the prison at 19, but ymmv.)

However, I also believe in rehabilitation. I see no reason to report on this any more than if he had served a year for insurance fraud in 2016.

Both of the Guardian articles feel less of a hit piece than some other stuff I have read in the past, apart from the headline. (I wish we had some better phrase to refer to the offense than 'child rape', which includes this but also abducting and violently raping kindergardeners.) Of course, that the elected to report on it at all is the most problematic part of it apart from the headlines -- it was eight years ago, which is longer than most doping bans last, and he did a substantial amount of time for it.

I’m rooting for him due to the seethe he triggers in Reddit-types. Of course, if he were instead a black, brown, or Muslim migrant, many of those seething would be turning a blind eye or even defending him.

As a 6’6” white man (and now semi-famous thanks to the Streisand Effect), he’s likely drowning in puss despite his conviction. While the typical playing-life-by-the-rules 75th percentile guy struggles to get a single Tinder match (much less a response after a match), a hypothetical Chaddie Nazi or child rapist receives no shortage of matches and enthusiastic replies (and even chicks messaging first). The well-known female intuition and personality detection at work.

Black-pillers 1, red-pillers 0. Your text game doesn’t suck; your looks/height do. Just as it’s tough to out-run a bad diet, it’s tough to out-text your looks/height. If you’re insufficiently attractive, there’s no combination of printed words that can make a girl attracted to you. And, as the experiments above show, if you’re sufficiently attractive, there can be a wide latitude of printed words that you can get away with.

In the absence of “finance, trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes,” “volleyball, statutory rapist, 6’6”, blue eyes” will do (there’s even a bonus inch!)—unlike if his height starts with a 5. At 6’6”, he’s just at the lower cusp of optimal male height.

A perpetual source of seethe for women is the male preference for younger women, even teenage girls, and a tall handsome athlete going after a 12-year-old reminds them of that. While 12 is almost certainly too extreme, online dating studies show that men view women as monotypically less desirable with increasing age after 18 and that men of most ages prefer 20-year-old women, where 18 and 20 were the respective lower limits. If not for the lower limits, 17 and perhaps 16 could be in play.

Of course, upon seeing such results, women generally cope with this by thinking, “Am I less beautiful than a fresh-faced and tight-bodied 18-year-old? No, it’s men who are wrong and pedophilic.”

Another aspect of this is the modern Western inability to thot-patrol daughters, lest you get accused of being abusive and controlling. At 12 she was already chatting with a least one random boy or man on Facebook and lying to sneak out of the house to meet up with him.

Why do you care so much about what your adolescent daughter does? You don’t own her or her body.

This discussion and the “hyper online right wing guys are weird” being a few post from each other is great comedy.

If this guy didn’t want to be called a rapist for the rest of his life he shouldn’t have had sex with a 12 year old. This isn’t hard folks

Just because he committed a crime doesn't give us carte blanche to commit the worst argument in the world.

I'm certainly glad to see that a case of a guy actually fucking a 12 year old has brought out such principled precision in the forum that is generally absent when discussing sex ed in schools.

  • -13

I don't think I've ever commented on here about sex ed in schools.

'The forum' isn't a person. You can't act as if it is and then claim hypocrisy when the comments of one user don't apply the same inferred values of a completely different user.

Don't take my comment as criticizing you personally, then.

  • -15

Definitely not weird behavior to give a full throated defense of the terms used to describe a 19 year preying on a 12 year old.

  • -16

You seem to think we care about malicious sneering consensus enforcement fresh from from the latest progGPT firmware update.
If anything that's going to make people here double down on saying things that piss you off and filter the normies, because they are weird and proud of it.

Okay, the queue is just full of your comments. You are consistently picking fights with other users, other mods, and the general concept of things you don’t like. In this particular example, you’re doing so while also speaking for a number of people who may or may be on board.

Take another week off to cool down. Quit trying to rally the troops.

This is just pointless. Why is someone getting banned for doing the exact same thing that a poster did above them but the above poster doesn't even get a warning?

The mod queue being how we decide if someone gets banned is just dumb. I check the user/janitor thing every time I'm here and it's like half of the reported comments (which I assume is how they get there) is because someone disagreed with them and they're using the report as an extra downvote. And it's obvious that is skews in one political direction as well, maybe because they're a smaller portion of the people here or maybe it's just their way because it certainly is on places like reddit. But using that as an excuse is surely just going to end up with people deciding the only way to decide what is acceptable on the site is just mass reporting everything they disagree with.

I still don't understand why the mods here can't ever ban people for the things they do that are bad but instead keep a secret tally of bad things that they don't disclose and then ban them for all those things when they do something less egregious. And almost always in a baited argument where the person doing the baiting does not even get a warning.

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I’m frankly amazed that me calling someone who preyed on a 12 year old a rapist has generated this reaction. He legit is a convicted rapist.

  • -14

The pushback that you’re receiving is likely coming from people who are skeptical and scared regarding a general broadening of the definition of rape. Speaking personally, I’ve been pretty spooked by high-profile reports of women regretting sex the next morning and calling it rape, of drunk men being charged with rape for having sex with equally-drunk women (cf. that one infamous subway poster PSA that goes something like “Joe was drunk. Jane was drunk. Joe and Jane slept together. Joe committed rape.”), et cetera.

I, who respond viscerally and emotionally to these instances of the expansion of the definition of rape (these horror stories teamed up with my natural cowardice to ensure that I did not enjoy my youth while I had the chance), am thus inclined to instantly oppose the usage of the same word “rape” to describe non-central examples of the crime. Your argument that “he legit is a convicted rapist” doesn’t quite resonate with me when Joe from the PSA above is equally a convicted rapist. Others with similar viewpoints as mine would likely feel the same.

I hope that this explains why you might be facing opposition from people who nevertheless think that a nineteen-year-old guy having sex with a twelve-year-old girl is still a very bad thing.

that is generally absent when discussing sex ed in schools.

On the contrary, calling what I believe you are referring to "sex ed in schools" is ALSO the non-central fallacy.