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And plenty of teachers and activists have that intent, in rates at least comparable to other organizations that have faced reputational and financial ruin over their association. And as you say, we have bright-line rules to make it easier to detect bad people. Actively generating shrouds of chaff in which bad people can operate is a bad thing. It deserves criticism. "I'm not molesting children, I'm just deliberately cultivating an environment conducive to child molestation" is not the defense you think it is.
Imagine a Scoutmaster or priest actively arguing that they should be allowed to engage kids in sexually charged conversations, make sure they had access to porn, and set an official policy of keeping secrets from parents. Oh, but don't call us groomers, only an increasing-by-obvious-incentive portion of us are literally raping kids! In the real world, Scout leaders are not allowed to talk to kids at all without another adult present, or CCed in any written communications.
Frankly, this seems like a wildly isolated demand for charity.
Yes, that was definitely erring too far on the side of protecting kids, which rather undermines your point.
So, you are agreeing with me: Those with the requisite intent are groomers, and those without it are not. I have not made any claims about how many people have that intent.
I do not agree, for the exact reason it's fair to call Ghislaine Maxwell a groomer. Same as it would be fair to say it about a wife who lured children to her husband, but deluded herself about what was going on. Intent may be necessary for a criminal charge, but willful idiocy is not a defense against social criticism.
I’m of two minds on this one. On the one hand, the behavior that public school employees are fighting tooth and nail to defend is textbook grooming by behavior if not intent. Abandoning child protection best practices for political reasons in an organizing that overwhelming works with children and youth as much as the public school system has obvious and foreseeable consequences for child protection. Yes, these best practices are a pain in the ass, as any volunteer for the RCC or BSA could tell you. But public school employees are by and large not fighting about the pain in the ass bureaucracy parts, they’re fighting back against the obvious common sense parts.
On the other hand, intent seems like an important part of the definition. It’s pretty clear that at least most of these teachers are not wanting to have sex with kids, or to have them have sex with other adults(I’ll side step the question of ultra progressive sex Ed which takes for granted that adolescents should be having sex with each other). Their actual goals are not good for the child either, but that’s because they hold false beliefs, not because they’re perverts.
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Groomer -> Pedophile
Groomer -> Ghislaine Maxwell
Groomer -> Guzman (whoever that Virginian legislator was)
Groomer -> Educators showing their charges books like lawn boy
Groomer -> Educators showing their charges media that has trans/nonbinary/gay characters not doing sexually explicit things
Groomer -> PM me classic memes
Groomer -> pro-trans people (always unclear how wide a net this is casting, sometimes allowing for plausible deniability)
All of these claims have been made in this thread, by numerous different people. At one end, groomers are pedophiles who want to fuck your children (serious and immediate threat!). At the other end, for someone doing something categorically different, you're casting a wide enough net that tens of millions of Americans are now Maxwell-Groomer-Pedophiles (yeschad.jpeg the trolls will say).
I stopped using the words racist, sexist and misogynist for the same reasons that the definitions have gotten so amorphous that some people would call tens of millions of Americans racist (yeschad.jpeg, their response is). Y'all are just playing the same game as the normie Blue tribers you love to hate, to a remarkable degree.
This is definitely a valid concern. "Groomer" is certainly a potential superweapon, and partisans are well familiar with the Evil Overlord advice to use those at every opportunity, and it will eventually be abused. But I think this one is more at the phase "racist" was in the 70's/80's, where there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to call out where the phrase fits well enough. To your examples above, I think it's fair for 1, 2, and 4. And I honestly don't think it's hard to thread this needle, to apply the beneficial things progressives want, without doing groomy shit. But I think we could do with a phase where professional standards and best practices are enforced, and people figure out how to do what they need to do within those constraints.
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And where did I say that trans activists, or anyone else, should be immune to social criticism? What they should be immune from is being given a pejorative label that does not apply to them.
So just to be clear, do you think that term would apply to Ghislaine Maxwell?
And to clarify, the criticism is "you are acting like people who groom and manipulate and rape children, and some of you literally do the rape, and you're willfully obscuring the ability of outsiders to distinguish which of you will cross that line." Does that bother you less? If there a pithy term for that?
It is not exactly a particularly honest claim, since the number of them who "literally do the rape" is small, and I doubt that any of them advocate for policy X in order to "willfully obscure the ability of outsiders to distinguish which of you will cross that line." Moreover, it is awfully similar to the claim made years ago about gay men -- that they were child molesters, etc, etc. However, since it does not include a claim that they are acting with the intent to facilitate sex with children, it is indeed an improvement.
As for Ghislaine Maxwell, she did indeed act with the intent to have the minors be molested, so, to paraphrase my father, if she is not a groomer then she will more than suffice until an actual groomer comes along.
As I've said, it's comparable in rate to other organizations who have been dragged through the mud over it. Every teacher is a mandatory reporter; I believe (hope!) that they're all trained to recognize those behaviors are red flags for grooming/child abuse. They have no excuse for not being fully cognizant.
"Them" refers trans activists, etc, doesn’t it? Not teachers?
I was thinking of teachers and other school employees. "Trans activists" are a whole other, extremely unusual mess, but the pertinent point is that I have no idea what their rates of offense are.
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