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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30410 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Haven't seen a thread yet on the gay bar shooting last weekend so I figured I would start it.

Sticking to facts in this post, opinion will go in reply.

  • The shooter killed 5 and injured 25

  • The shooter is a 22 year old, Anderson Lee Aldrich

  • The shooter previously was charged after he threatened his mother with homemade explosives and kidnapped her, but the charges were dropped

  • The shooter is the grandson of a prominent local Republican

  • The shooter was stopped by a drag queen combat veteran, who used his high heels to stomp him

The shooter was stopped by a drag queen combat veteran, who used his high heels to stomp him

This is genuinely badass. I applaud that man, well fucking done sir.

No, he wasn't. He was grabbed by some retired major. A drag queen stomped on him, however, the bigger factors was the 300 shooter was dragged to the ground by another 300 lbs American. A very modern situation.

badass

I believe the term you're looking for is "fabulous".

What the linked article actually says:

The attack ended when a patron grabbed a handgun from the suspect and hit him with it, Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers told The Associated Press. The person who hit the gunman had him pinned down when police arrived, Suthers said.

I think it's more complicated, at least I'd say that there's a clear fourth category: That the social/cultural/institutional power given to modern activism based around postmodern Critical concepts of power creates situations that are rife for abuse. I think there's a second side of it...in that I do think that internalizing/actualizing said postmodern Critical concepts of power is unhealthy on a personal level. In reality, when people talk about "Grooming" in this context, I think that's largely what they mean. It's just a very....ugly shorthand?

But someone down below said something I agree with. I don't think this language comes out of nowhere. I think people either try, or they see the reaction given to less ugly ways of saying/presenting the same idea. And it's not like those less ugly ways of presenting it, or even more moderate ways of presenting the same thing get a better response. You're just as much of a bigot either way. So there's really no incentive to NOT go full culture war TBH.

I'm not saying this in approval, to make it clear. And I'm not saying it as any sort of traditionalist. I'm a modernist liberal who does value diversity, but I also think that the above postmodern Critical concepts of power are stupid dangerous and unsustainable, speaking as someone who actually grew up internalizing them.

I'd even go a step further, and honestly...I don't see this as "hate". I see this as fear. And yeah, they can look alike and one can bleed into the other. But I do think there's too much discussion that has the effect of declaring that marginalized identities should be given essentially blank checks. It won't be abused, of course, because they're the good guys, not like those non-marginalized identities who are the bad guys. And this isn't a strawman...this rhetoric is too common, even if I don't think people usually actually mean it. But...not everybody gets that message. And certainly we're not talking about what that actually means....if it's not meant why do people say it? (Covering up for uncomfortable facets of power, privilege and bias that discussion of such would negatively impact people with social/network power)

But yeah. As someone who thinks that "whataboutism" is like just one of the most illiberal memes out there....we can't look at stuff like this in a partisan fashion. Again, as someone else mentioned below, you're not going to get your Yellow Card/15-Yard Penalty aimed at just Conservatives. It's not going to do any good, I don't think. Hell, even if you could take enough control to get all "Groomer" language excised from the internet...I do not believe that's going to help. Frankly, I think down that road, you gotta keep on going until you get to straight up mass violence. Not an option. Which is why I think it has to be holistic. I think you have to understand WHY this meme exists, and actually work to defuse it. People SEE the power. And they react to it. The best thing you can do, IMO, is negate that power. Don't give the activists a blank check. Again, this isn't meaning to be any sort of reactionary thing. It doesn't have to be. What's important for a liberal, modernist order is the perception that we're moving towards everybody playing by the same rules. Not throwing that out the window.

Edit: Just want to add one thing. I really do think a lot of this is caused by people who have an unrealistic notion of what "normal" is. This is something that sets expectations at a degree that just doesn't work. I see a lot of language out there that's like......"majority X would get away with this", when that's obviously not true at all. Or the idea that like, any white guy could walk into a bank, give the manager a handshake and walk out with a loan. Things like that.

So you have activists who are demanding this notion of "normal", who legitimately believe that this is what it means.

In particular I think that when we think about the term grooming in the non-culture-war sense, we are generally discussing a close relationship between a particular adult and a particular minor, where that adult intends to form a sexual relationship or otherwise initiate sexual contact with that minor.

As I recall, that usage is itself somewhat recent. Kind of like how a bunch of people switched from "CP" to "CSAM" around the time of the discourse about Apple's cloud photo backup scanning.

20 years ago, the most salient meanings of "grooming" would've been, first apes picking bugs and leaves out of each other's hair, and second preparing an employee for a promotion, typically to an executive position or to replace someone soon to retire. I for one, applaud the anti-trans set for managing to make that incredibly goofy word verboten among Respectable People. (If only there were some way to sic them on "colorway" next...)

They way they use it is denotationally the succession thing, but teases at the pedo thing.

The motte is that there is a funnel that begins with a tumblr or tick-talk subculture, or a danger-haired middle school teacher fresh out of women's college (I know one), and ends with endocrine-disrupting drugs ordered from an internet pharmacy or supplied by an NGO such as planned parenthood, and the people along that funnel view transition as a desirable outcome. The bailey is that the people along it want a sexual relationship with the people sliding down it. (Probably not true in general, but if you run away to join a trans-girl group house, I refuse to believe it's a nunnery.)

When that is not present, we need to look more at what the nature of the information and motives behind it are. If you ask activists about their motives, you'll hear about reducing suicidality, encouraging people to express themselves and form healthy relationships, and so on. Often you'll hear something to the effect of "what I wish I'd heard / seen when I was growing up."

It's a stand-alone complex. The core beliefs motivating it are

  1. LGBT identities are common and an inherent character trait.

  2. LGBT identities can be discovered by introspection.

  3. Un-discovered LGBT identities are harmful.

You can imagine a similar stand-alone complex for pedophilic groomers. "I wish I knew how to make myself cum earlier growing up."

Overly empowering young people to make decisions about gender and sexuality that could have long term repercussions is a bad idea and minors need more supervision, guidance, and control than what is the current trend.

The way I would phrase it is more like...

It is terrifyingly easy to fall off the wagon, permanently. Just as the path to greatness in industry or academia begins in adolescence and is easily derailed, so does the path to spending many healthy years surrounded by loving family. The time a person has with their family begins with the birth of their first child, and ends with death. Therefore, you really want to avoid children getting taken in by subcultures that encourage self-sterilization or inceldom.

You're assuming that family is typically a loving, healthy experience. You're also assuming that a healthy family is more important than a healthy individual. I also kind of feel like you're making kids responsible for how their families treat them rather than a split responsibility.

Let's flip the script here. It's 2200 and pink haired feminists have completed their takeover. While some groups tolerate straightness, the majority of people think that being straight is wrong and possible even harmful to society as a whole.

Would you tell a straight kid to stop meeting with the straights rights group at school to avoid conflict with their family? Would you tell the kid that even though they might actually be straight, living that lifestyle might result in their family rejecting them and to just put up with it? Would you tell their school to stop teaching less-popular sexual identities?

Of course not! You'd call their family and tell them to stop letting their child's sexuality determine how well they treat their kid. You'd tell them to stop acting as though their kid is gay when they're clearly not. Put some responsibility on them - they're the adults, they need to figure out how to love the child they created and are responsible for regardless of their sexuality.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I was talking about the individual becoming a parent with a healthy family of their own. This isn't possible if the individual's life course is derailed into HRT, inceldom, drug-addled homelessness, some kind of celibate religious order, etc. Furthermore, I believe healthy individuals and healthy families are, in almost all cases, synergistic, not things that trade off against one another.

Your hypothetical contradicts mammalian biology and results in total population collapse within single-digit generations, and hopefully re-establishment of civilization by the survivors or by whatever pockets of resistance managed to escape detection.

In the context of the present culture war, and in particular as regards young people who don't conform to gender norms, I see an expansion of the term, in particular eliminating the context of a close relationship and intent to form a sexual relationship with a particular minor. Then, grooming just becomes introducing sexually related content or concepts to minors, especially when those relate to non-conventional concepts.

As part of the reputationally and financially ruinous lawsuits against the Boy Scouts, many examples of flagged behavior from their private archives were made public. One example in my area was a scout leader in the mid-80s who was banned from the organization after giving a half dozen teenaged boys access to beer and porn on a camping trip. There is no indication that he singled one out to try to rape. If we want to be charitable, it sounds like something The Onion's VP Joe Biden would do, "Hey boys, here's some Bud and a Playboy, then I'll show you how to do donuts in the 'Vette!" That guy was still banned from the organization, decades before anyone got serious about youth protection, because that behavior is such an obvious red flag that you don't need to wait around for a kid to get raped.

Actively trying to prevent and shut down that sort of behavior is so thoroughly not enough that the organization responsible was dealt reputational and financial ruin by the courts. So, by that standard, how should we think of, e.g. librarians who fight tooth and nail to ensure child pornography is kept in elementary schools? "Oh, it's not grooming, it's just being wildly sketchier and more cavalier with children than the organization that just had the shit kicked out of it for insufficient zealousness in protecting kids." It should not be a tall ask to have the "what I wish I'd had growing up" to be restricted to normal standards for age appropriateness.

I am a high school teacher in Canada, and I see this type of thing all the time. We have a token gay teacher at my school who runs the GSA (formerly the gay-straight alliance, but now the gender and sexuality alliance) but the flag is really waved by straight, childless women who crave the trappings of emotional intimacy that come with long, private discussions about sexuality, gender, coming out and whatever else. So they co-op the GSA (which has itself been co-opted by homely “trans” girls, and contains very few gay kids) and get to emotionally masturbate and play confidante every lunch hour with the neediest kids, and feel just like cool moms! They really are using these kids for their own purposes, those purposes just aren’t sexual, and they cheerlead (“affirm”) the girls who come to them relentlessly, so it’s not weird to see the explosion of trans-identifying girls as a partial result of this. It’s maybe a tortured definition of grooming, but it is damaging kids for personal gain, and it’s definitely a bad thing.

You're making a lot of assumptions about the behavior that you're seeing. Why do you assume that women in the GSA are craving emotional intimacy and/or using the GSA explicitly for their solely for their own benefit? Do you not think there could be any other alternative explanations for their interest in the GSA? Have you ever asked them about their involvement? I doubt they told you that they were there to emotionally masturbate with their kids, so why would you assume that?

One, two and three, found by glancing through the last week of Libs of Tik Tok posts. I don't want relevant terms in my search history, so I'll just try to remember to link you one of the compilations of images next time I see one posted on PCM or someplace.

To be clear, I don't think that sort of thing ought to be in an elementary or middle school library, and I don't think it's obviously wrong for parents to not want it in a high school library either (same for straight stuff like IT). I also don't think the books should be criminalized. But actively trying to get kids to read that sort of thing is suspicious. If a teacher brought one in on their own volition and gave it to a student, that should flag mandatory reporter laws.

Wait, that somehow passes for porn? I've seen beginner DeviantArt and Wattpad pages have more... stimulating... writing and artwork than that- even AI can do better these days. And if that's the absolute spiciest thing LibsOfTikTok can come up with (does it get spicier, or is that just to stay within Twitter rules?)...

But actively trying to get kids to read that sort of thing is suspicious.

The reason they want to get kids to read it is because, first and foremost, it's "oppression pornography". You know, the kind of porn straight educated women really like; and it's fig-leaf deniable in the "actually, it's about ethics in gaming journalism the loli vampire is really 7000 years old" way. And since it's porn women like (and women really like heteronormative gay porn; they self-insert as the tortured bottom that the dashing top comes to 'save'), and female sexuality isn't inherently threatening, they get far more leeway (remember the headlines when 50 shades of grey came out?). However, when it comes to the question of 'is it sexual', though, it might be intended to be but in practice it's not going to "groom" anyone because it's garbage lol.

So while sure, you can point out the object-level, society's cover to women is going to be too strong for anyone to really do anything about it. (Humorously, it's also why their examples of "pornography" never depict any straight women or girls in similar circumstances- you'd expect that it'd be far more prevalent if the model the stereotypical "male pedo trying to seduce young girl" example that people who say "groomer" are intentionally trying to provoke was correct, but it's pretty blatantly not- and "male pedo x young boy" doesn't wash either because even gay men don't actually respond to oppression porn.)

And sure, it might still be "female pedo x young boy"... but you're not going to find anyone's in any hurry to deal with that, either. Double standards gonna double standard, and complaining about that only really works for women anyway.

Wait, that somehow passes for porn? I've seen beginner DeviantArt and Wattpad pages have more... stimulating... writing and artwork than that- even AI can do better these days.

And I strongly encourage parents to keep their tweens off Wattpad for exactly that reason.

Humorously, it's also why their examples of "pornography" never depict any straight women or girls in similar circumstances- you'd expect that it'd be far more prevalent if the model the stereotypical "male pedo trying to seduce young girl" example that people who say "groomer" are intentionally trying to provoke was correct, but it's pretty blatantly not- and "male pedo x young boy" doesn't wash either because even gay men don't actually respond to oppression porn.

Did you listen to the readings? One is about a girl crying and saying "no", and being ignored and shut up with a cock in her mouth.

And sure, it might still be "female pedo x young boy"... but you're not going to find anyone's in any hurry to deal with that, either. Double standards gonna double standard, and complaining about that only really works for women anyway.

In the real world, women do consistently go to jail for raping their male students, even if they get lesser sentences than their male peers.

One is about a girl crying and saying "no", and being ignored and shut up with a cock in her mouth.

So the absolute spiciest part of the book they could find was... pretty lame, minimal, and not particularly played in a dramatized, titillating, or positive way. As such, I'm not concerned. (Maximum charity says "book left over from a time the school had way more of a grade range".) I find it interesting that it's about as spicy as another book I was forced to read in school (in pre-woke times, no less), and while it was pretty clearly intended to establish the morality-pet and villain status of 2 of the characters it was also similarly not played up (it took... 3? sentences to describe, I believe). Even 1984 was spicier than that.

Of course, my contrast is that one other book I got shown by a classmate around that time which took about 5 pages to describe in precise detail... a teenage boy masturbating in a pool and dying gruesomely (I cannot find the name of the book that was in, something something pearl diving). Granted, I'm pretty sure that one wasn't in the school library.

But then again, I believe there is a qualitative difference between "matter-of-fact description [in text]", "a full page of describing organs coming out his ass [in text]", and "basically Emergence/'177013' [graphic in the novel sense])"... and I suspect you do, too.

it's also why their examples of "pornography" never depict any straight women or girls in similar circumstances

Specifically, there's no distaff heterosexual counterpart for "Flamer" (and any of the picture books like it). If there was, it would be the (maximally inflammatory) example instead; absence of evidence is evidence of absence in this case.

a teenage boy masturbating in a pool and dying gruesomely

Sure it wasn't "Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk?

More comments

Trying to tease out this distinction feels a lot more like it's trying to muddy things than clarify them.

If the behaviour you are engaging in makes children more susceptible to paedophilic sexual attention from nefarious parties, I don't think it really matters whether that was your explicit intent or not, you are grooming them. Unwittingly or no, it's still not a good thing to be doing. If you teaching these concepts to children enables and empowers people to prey on them, facilitates those people making arguments like "children can consent, they've all been taught sex ed now!", then you are assisting paedophiles, whether that is your intent or not. If you teach children that sexual stuff is no big deal and normal, and that causes them to not flag predatory behaviour from paedophiles to the relevant adults because they've been taught it's normal and they should know about and do sexual things, then you have groomed those children for the paedophiles. Wittingly or no. And if, when this is pointed out to you, you insist on continuing your behaviour, then you've knowingly crossed the line from unwitting to willing participant.

The attempts to be super strict with the definition of grooming so that you can say "well, actually, we're not technically grooming anyone" remind me a lot of attempts to draw distinction between "paedophilia" and "ephebophilia" as if the distinction makes any kind of actual real difference to the act of fucking someone who's underage. It's a very "well yes, but actually no" sort of objection. It's patently obvious that the motivation in that case is to disassociate the acts the person is committing from the word "paedophilia", which everyone knows is bad and a very serious crime, and onto some other lesser-known word that people don't know as much about or have as much of an instinctive negative reaction to that makes it easier to defend. And nobody gains anything from that but the paedophile in question. I suspect the "well, actually" objection in the case of grooming serves the same purpose. You know it's wrong and you know it's bad, but you want people to think it's less bad than it is, so you attempt to euphemise what you're doing by preventing people from calling it out using the most straightforwardly applicable and widely understandable terms, instead trying to force everyone into using wordy circumlocutions that require laborious explanation and lose the strength of the meaning in doing so.

If the behaviour you are engaging in makes children more susceptible to paedophilic sexual attention from nefarious parties, I don't think it really matters whether that was your explicit intent or not, you are grooming them. Unwittingly or no, it's still not a good thing to be doing. If you teaching these concepts to children enables and empowers people to prey on them, facilitates those people making arguments like "children can consent, they've all been taught sex ed now!",

More susceptible than what is the question here though. Remember abusers also take advantage of cultures where sex education is not open and sex is seen to be shameful by using that shame to get their victims to hide what is going on. Is every parent and teacher and religious figure who taught kids that sex outside of marriage is sinful a groomer because they made it easier for someone to manipulate them in that framework?

I would say not. Predators will adapt to the cultural situation they are in. Some kinds of abuse are made easier with more openness, some are made easier with less, that's the ugly truth I think. Every step you take creates an attack surface. Including not taking any.

As an example, the white victims in Rotherham and the primarily Pakistani Muslim victims were both victimized by the same groups but with different attack vectors. For the white victims they were primarily working class, often from broken homes or in care. They were targeted at taxi ranks, kebab shops, bars, where underage girls were not supposed to be at night and were therefore vulnerable. They were (largely) targeted using age old prostitution gang tactics, wooed with booze and drugs and older men who pretended to be their boyfriends before pimping them out. The muslim girls were primarily targeted in the home, were friends, neighbors and family members. More of the "traditional" family abuser situation. And we had real trouble getting them to come forward, in many cases their families refused because of the shame it would bring. Both cultures enabled the abuse in different ways. If you are Muslim you can point to the decadent West as letting their girls out unprotected and if you are Western you can point to the patriarchal backwards shaming of women for being the victims of abuse, meaning they would rather die than admit it.

If your bar is "made it easier for pedophiles" then traditional Christianity is groomer to the core as is Islam, the Amish, hippies, Mormon's and Rationalist shared living houses. But at that point the term is so wide as to be meaningless.

As a PSA if you are a parent, whatever your beliefs on when or what kids should learn about sex, please make sure to teach them young about inappropriate and bad touching whether it is from family members, strangers, other kids or adults. Kids pick up on the shame around sexuality and many abusers are adept at using this to exploit and manipulate. The staggering numbers of case files I read where this was the attack vector was eye opening. For the generally (I think) middle class American Motteizens this is more likely to be a vulnerability than your 12 year old daughter being at a kebab shop drinking vodka at 2am I would guess.

more susceptible compared to what?

As I’ve pointed out before, child protection best practices are, on an institutional level, a solved problem. I’ve given to understand that they’re more or less the law of the land for non-LGBT stuff at schools, enforcement issues notwithstanding.

Making exceptions to them(like, for example, hiding things from the child’s parents) for the sake of ‘but gay’ is very, very bad and should be criticized, just like Mormonism’s refusal to implement child protection best practices should be.

More susceptible than what is the question here though.

Than not... doing... that? It's pretty much a binary choice here.

Predators will adapt to the cultural situation they are in.

You don't think the culture of secret at-school transitions and shhh-don't-tell-mom encouraging keeping BIG secrets from parents could possibly contribute to an offender getting away with something they otherwise wouldn't?

But not doing that, means keeping the current system which in the US heavily leans towards the shame/secrecy version. There is no neutral option is my point. And yes it will give a vector space, and so does the version where we don't talk about it at all.

That is the entire point of my post. They both have failure modes.

When people apply the ephebophilia sneer to situations less like "30 and 15" and more like "19 and 17", it devalues the sneer. Would you claim there is no difference to those two acts of fucking someone who's underage?

Destroying distinction between acts that might be disgusting and acts that are disgusting is how you make people wonder "wait, is it really that bad this time?"

attempts to draw distinction between "paedophilia" and "ephebophilia" as if the distinction makes any kind of actual real difference to the act of fucking someone who's underage

To be fair, I do think there is a distinct difference between "30 year old wants to fuck 17 year old" and "30 year old wants to fuck 8/10/12 year old". Both are sketchy, but wanting to fuck someone young enough to be your own kid is a lot creepier and more abusive. If 30 year old guy can keep it in his pants for three years until 17 year old is 20, the age difference is not as bad. It's still pretty fucking awful if 30 year old waits three years until the kid is 12-15 years old.

But agreed, the people trying to draw such distinctions are well aware that they're too damn old to be trying to have relationships with someone of that age, and they want to avoid the stigma of being kiddie-diddlers. So in practice, it's a distinction that makes no difference. And if you're 30-40 years old and want to make the distinction that "well, 14-16 is pubescent so it's ephebophilia/hebephilia, not paedophilia which means prepubescent children", then you should be strung up by your thumbs alongside the 40 year old guy who wants to diddle 10 year olds.

As far as I'm aware, the distinction is almost only ever trotted out in the former case, usually by the defendant, to argue that what they aren't doing isn't "actually" paedophilia. I've never seen it used in the latter way personally; and aren't there in any case carve-outs for that kind of scenario in many places? I certainly don't think that definition-arguing would be the cornerstone of any defense case.

Personally, I thought the adoption of the "groomer" label was a mixture of the "okay, boomer" meme and getting a term to use that was equivalent to the way the LBGT+ crowd call everyone "TERFs" and "homophobes/transphobes" meaning "irrational fear and disgust about gay and trans people". 'Oh, you say you're not a transphobe just because you want to ban people from using bathrooms in line with their gender identity, you bigot? Okay, TERF!' was and is very annoying. The assumption that there was no difference between "I think maybe having someone who still has a working dick in a shelter with vulnerable women who are triggered by male-bodied individuals is not the best idea" and "these are the kind of people who murder trans women, see the Transgender Day of Remembrance", any objection is transphobia and prejudice, is frustrating when trying to have a conversation about these topics. The denial of "you can't have a reason for this stance, it's all just because you think gay and trans people are icky".

So to be annoying back, 'Oh you want to teach three year olds about being trans? Okay, groomer!' was the way to have that side spluttering in indignation and trying to have recognition about the difference between their position and paedophiles. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Not edifying, but satisfying.

The reason I think the distinction matters is that when someone is trying to get in a minor's pants, we can kind of ignore if their tactics are effective. Trying is bad enough.

And if these instances aren't reported because children now think that sexual activity at their age is normal and they've been told they're old enough to make their own decisions about such things, what then? Then we never know about the trying. The whole culture encourages children to keep secrets from their guardians anyway, by way of secret school transitions that are never reported home to parents.

If it is in fact the case that "teaching these concepts to children enables and empowers people to prey on them" then that's very bad. But I don't think that claim is at all proven.

I don't think that's how this should work at all. We don't unilaterally approve new drugs for use on children until such time as side effects can be conclusively demonstrated; we disallow their use until they're deemed safe (except with coof vaccines and puberty blockers, apparently). So too should we be doing with this sort of nonsense.

Are adult men using a gay party drug with a 12 year old boy grooming him? You've written a long post very carefully not saying anything specific and insinuating that any opposition to these specific things is just enforcing victorian morality.

Why is this? If there is nothing wrong with the specific behavior of these activists, why avoid mentioning it?

OP explicitly referenced "introducing sexually related content or concepts to minors, especially when those relate to non-conventional concepts" which is clearly a reference to the ongoing controversies in education about precisely that The issue has nothing to do with giving kids party drugs.

that there are some bad apples taking their stuff to wrong directions is not their fault

I don’t see them making this argument, I see them calling people who notice transphobic and shrieking about how parents don’t have the right to know what goes on with their children.

If they disavowed these people, it’d be one thing. They don’t, they shriek about how doing anything but pretend it isn’t happening is bigoted.

I think the problem is when the pink haired lady gets a job as high school counsellor and assures students that if they want, the school will adopt their new pronouns and new name and keep it all secret from their parents, and when communicating with their parents will use their deadname, but don't worry, we know who you really are.

The argument is that this is necessary to protect vulnerable young people from abusive parents who would harm them if they found out their kid was trans. The trouble is, that "this is a special secret just between us and your parents will never know" is also the kind of behaviour that, yes, groomers engage in. 'I am the sympathetic adult who really understands you, and this topic of sexuality is a secret between us, and sure your parents would be very angry with you if they found out, so it will be a secret between you and me'.

It's definitely a valid concern. But opponents of such programs/behavior also refuse to offer any other solutions for the child who expresses concerns of abuse from their parents. This has to go both ways. Any reasonable adult would want to protect a child from abuse and would take reasonable steps to do so. "Pink haired ladies" came up with one solution and it's not perfect. But I have yet to hear any reasonable alternative solution for other side of this coin either.

the pink haired lady, giving seminars on how you should be decent to that kid too even if he's weird and stands out

I mean, that's not what people are objecting to at all and I think you know it, so this is incredibly disingenuous.

The LGBT activist community can easily wiggle out of the responsibility just following the template put forward by many here: that some bad apples taking their stuff to wrong directions is not their fault.

They could, and some do, have you heard about "Gays Against Groomers"? But most progressives seem to prefer to attack people pointing out the bad apples, which in my opinion implicates them to an extent.

Oh, sure. I'm not saying every LGBT person should start an equivalent of Gays Against Groomers, I'm just saying they shouldn't try to get GAG banned like they did.

I don't think Gays Against Groomers should be banned, but I suspect they're roughly equivalent to the Log Cabin Republicans or many other "we're tribe X, but we hold unconventional views for members of tribe X" groups. Usually, you can model them as being run by leaders who are secretly tribe Y, and who wish to undermine the efforts of tribe X.

Gays Against Groomers should get a fair hearing in society if they're arguing in good faith, and individuals should punish them with inattention and apathy if they're not arguing in good faith.

but I suspect they're roughly equivalent to the Log Cabin Republicans or many other "we're tribe X, but we hold unconventional views for members of tribe X" groups

Hold on, how is that supposed to work?

The Log Cabin Republicans were not representative of the gay community, because they were on board with the Republican Party platform. It's completely reasonable for gay people to say "we have nothing in common with those guys, except for our sexuality".

Gays Against Groomers, are a single-issue group devoted to pointing out the bad apples. You can't say "we have nothing in common with them except for our sexuality" while still distancing yourself from the bad apples.

I don't think Gays Against Groomers should be banned

Well, the problem is that they were. So not only there seem to be bad apples in the education system, the moderation of Big Tech platforms seems to be heavily influenced by some sort of pro-bad-apple club, making it even more important to point them out, in my opinion.

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The shooter was stopped by a drag queen combat veteran, who used his high heels to stomp him

Obviously I'm on the opposite ideological side of him, but you can't deny that this is classic masculine excellence, even in a dress. It takes balls to bring high heels to a gunfight. Bravo. (This is unironic praise.)

Edit: From what I'm reading, it seems to me that the drag queen and combat veteran may have been separate people, with the drag queen only jumping in after the combat veteran already took shooter down. If this is the case, I rescind my praise.

Correct. For sticking to just the facts, it's disappointing to mess it up like that.

I didn't even know about this until you shared it. If this were 2 decades ago it would probably be non-stop coverage. Or if it happened at a school. It shows being gay no longer conveys cultural currency like it did in the past. Now it's trans.

I think the media usually downplays the value of self-defense in mitigating mass murder.

It's been all over the news in Colorado.

deleted

One of the people shot to death was trans.

Now for the opinion:

I believe that speech is powerful. Words are a means we use to convince other minds of beliefs about the world. Minds act upon those beliefs.

At present, there is a powerful right wing-meme that many people, some LGBT and some not, mostly democrats, are attempting to sexually confuse children for nefarious purposes. This is often described as "grooming" in order to equivocate with sexual abuse children.

Insofar as the reasonable man's reaction to a co-ordinated effort to sexually abuse children is not "I should vote about this and if I get outvoted, I should allow my children to be sexually abused", the actions of the shooter are completely predictable.

You should take care to think about the consequences of the speech you use. If someone were to be persuaded by your argument, what would that cause them to do?

You aren't reponsible for every nutcase or moron on your team. But you are responsible for the logical consequence of your ideas. I know of no society that believes they should be having free and open debates and votes about whether teachers should be permitted to sexually abuse children. If you really believe this, you should act the same as if they proposed legalizing Cannabalism. There is no debate with barbarians, only the sword.

Insofar as the reasonable man's reaction to a co-ordinated effort to sexually abuse children is not "I should vote about this and if I get outvoted, I should allow my children to be sexually abused", the actions of the shooter are completely predictable

Andrew Anglin (AA) at the Dailystormer agrees with you.

You aren't reponsible for every nutcase or moron on your team. But you are responsible for the logical consequence of your ideas.

Why is the onus on the people upset about child sex abuse to watch their speech and not those who condone the CSA?

AA makes the point that the club where that shooting happened:

  • can reasonably be inferred to host sex parties because that is what MSM do in their clubs

-was advertising a drag story hour for children in the same premises

Obviously that kind of coincidence is upsetting for a certain segment of the population.

The logical consequence of the widespread conflation of 1 the 'gay lifestyle' ie orgies with strangers in semi-public locations (see pride) and 2

outreach with children leads to a natural association :

'these perverts are really keen to 'educate' [my] children into their so-called lifestyle, and I don't see this as an optimal situation as I do not want [my] children to grow up with trauma, sexual infections, unnatural behaviors etc'

Aside from ramping up the police state, what is the MSM community's solution to marginal non-MSM anger?

You should take care to think about the consequences of the speech you use. If someone were to be persuaded by your argument, what would that cause them to do?

Well, it would help me to moderate if the meme wasn't so true.

You think it's true that there is a coordinated effort by millions of gay adults and teachers and community-leaders to manipulate children into acting trans and gay and then have sex with them? Obviously "the meme" could refer to a broad range of stuff - but I think that's the gist of it. That seems very outlandish to me. Do you have any evidence?

Yes. My evidence is that they freak out whenever people notice them doing said things and have tried to prevent the passage of transparency legislation. Have covered up actual rapes in their schools, and also that teacher have one of, if not the highest, child sex rates of any profession.

How else can I respond to this besides yes_chad.jpg? You want to make it far-fetched, to make it absurd, but there's nothing so absurd you could suggest that I wouldn't entertain as true, based on my experience and what I've seen in my life. I could fudge a bit on the edges, but they are coordinated, they want to make as many children gay and trans as possible, and they do it through suggestion, social pressure, and grooming.

I used to believe that live and let live was the right way to be. That what two adults do in the privacy of their bedroom is nobody's business. And then I watched those ideas slide down the slippery slope, replaced by trans women are women (they aren't), trans rights are human rights (they aren't) and that children should be allowed and encouraged to explore transsexuality (they shouldn't). I spent my charity already, and I'm not allotting any more to this group. They are evil, wrongheaded, and causing harm to individuals and to society.

@anti_dan's low effort comment was, indeed, low effort--to the point where it might have drawn moderation if it were more directly antagonistic or uncharitable or somesuch. I don't think it quite rises to the level of calling for a wrist slap, but on a different day, maybe it would.

But you uncharitably characterizing a position on which someone else was insufficiently specific does not improve matters at all. Especially when you acknowledge that there is a broad range of interpretations, here. Picking the most outrageous, least plausible version of that and then asking for evidence has some very "have you stopped beating your wife" kind of energy. Please don't do this.

My comment was not low effort, it was accurate. If you think I am incorrect, I suggest a cheese wakeup, After that sleeep.

My comment was not low effort

Yes, it was. You left entirely too much to the imagination of your readers.

If you think I am incorrect

It's not about whether I think you're incorrect. It's about whether you put sufficient effort into being understood. I gave you the benefit of the doubt (and moderated someone who did not) and so did not moderate you. But given your low-key antagonism here: consider yourself officially warned.

I find the moderation hat here putting me in a difficult position since you incorrectly claim I uncharitably characterized it with my question, but 4 other people are replying to my question, "Yes, absolutely that is what influential gay people are doing" albeit sometimes in smaller numbers. It seems I'm not allowed to discuss the non-conspiracy side of this issue earnestly.

you incorrectly claim I uncharitably characterized it with my question

No, on review I was definitely correct.

4 other people are replying to my question, "Yes, absolutely that is what influential gay people are doing"

Yep, you can definitely reply to them about what they have said. That would not be uncharitable. This was.

Sure, but an important hinge of this discussion is what 'people' in 'society' are broadly doing. I think all of the posters here practice as minimal sexual engagement/discussion/fondling of children as possible - but when I'm replying to someone who says something broad like 'The memes are turning out to be correct' without being specific as to which ones, I'm required to take a bit of a leap if my comment is to be something other than "Please post some clear sources so that I may engage with what you said." I even flagged this in my first comment here: https://i.imgur.com/AlT6s4m.png

but when I'm replying to someone who says something broad like 'The memes are turning out to be correct' without being specific as to which ones, I'm required to take a bit of a leap if my comment is to be something other than "Please post some clear sources so that I may engage with what you said."

If you're "required to take a bit of a leap" you'll often be better off just not. If you decide to take that leap anyway, then you need to come with the most charitable and steelmanned take you can muster. If someone else in the thread is giving a worse take, then take it up with them.

Really this a good illustration of why we have the rules that we have, and why in general the best approach to rule-breakers is to not respond to them. The comment you responded to really needed more, but taking "a bit of a leap" instead of just asking for more was actually a worse violation of the rules than the low effort comment itself. These things have a way of spiraling rather quickly out of control--one person keeps to the letter of the law, but violates the spirit, the next person crosses the bright line, but only slightly, this makes someone else feel like they are being good community police by slapping them down... and pretty soon we're 15 comments deep into a snarky back-and-forth.

Remember that the goal here is to engage with the best ideas of people with whom you disagree. If someone says something genuinely bad, there's a certain extent to which the mod team will interpret that as offering their own shady thinking up for examination and critique! But when you take it on yourself to impute a certain view to others, you need to do better than you managed this time.

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I barely have an opinion on this, particularly about millions or coordinated efforts. However, I'm a big believer in object permanence, which reasonable polite debate eschews and instead demands evidence of the object being visible right now. A group is not even on par with a two-year old individual.

We know that NAMBLA still exists, albeit a shadow of its prime; it was bigger in the past, when the afterglow of sexual revolution still inspired unreasonable hopes for the slipperiness of the slope in all sorts of people.

We know that a number of French intellectuals who have played an enormous part in shaping Western culture, and particularly its academics, «teachers and community leaders» part, have been defenders of legality of sex with what we consider to be minors, and particularly with boys.

An open letter signed by 69 people, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, and Louis Aragon[11] was published in Le Monde in 1977, on the eve of the trial of three Frenchmen (Bernard Dejager, Jean-Claude Gallien, and Jean Burckardt) all accused of having sex with 12- and 13-year-old girls and boys.

The greatest among them, in fact the most cited academic in history, probably sexually abused prepubescent Tunisian boys. His arguments for drawing the line on 13 years can be read here.

(To be clear: in principle, I agree with Foucault there that, regardless of orientation, the obsession with fixed age as a Schelling point, to the complete dismissal of particulars of the case, is indefensible idiocy and the prime example of High Modernist approach to disciplining the society. Conservatives are beyond hope if they believe that high age of consent is «trad» or pride themselves on upholding muh rules and red lines. It's the same issue as their preoccupation with counting and recounting votes and «illegal immigrants»; coping strategy of simpletons cheated out of their inheritance and myopically tracing lines of the fundamentally hostile contract, hoping to find some gotcha, a technical defect in wording. But that's beside the point).

NAMBLA counted among its members the lauded poet and activist Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl was so fruitfully used as a starting point by our dear Scott in his iconic Meditations on Moloch:

"Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance ... I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too -- everybody does, who has a little humanity."

NAMBLA quotes proudly:

"An Icon of American Letters" "Despite his status as an icon of American letters, Ginsberg remains controversial. The recent sale of his collection of memorabilia to Stanford University became an explosive topic when the executive board of that august bastion of conservatism discovered his relationship with NAMBLA." Nevertheless, Stanford reportedly paid Ginsberg over $2 million for his manuscripts and memorabilia..

Another poem by Ginsberg, Sweet Boy, Gimme Yer Ass, you can read yourself.

There are many cases of actual, no-equivocation grooming perpetrated by politically salient «allies», and I remember at least two cases where people got off to the idea of persuading boys to take the pink pill. (Some Catboy Ranch on Discord? I don't collect this stuff). Long ago I was also acquainted, hilariously enough, with a very left-wing, very active,«community leader» type gay psychiatrist, obsessed with assholes and dominating femboys, who tried to groom me and a number of my friends and younger people I looked after on the internet. (The main result of his actions was an uptick in pervasive Russian antisemitism). This suggests to me that it is not so rare.

My point is that those movements were/are a tip of the iceberg, made of the most vocal and irrationally daring proponents of the view that fundamentally arises out of rather widespread sexual preferences. Generally people who have those preferences can figure out good positions to preach and help legitimize them without explicit coordination, evil cackling and so on.

On top of that, teenagers are horny. Gay teenagers too, desperately so; you can see people with really wild bios popping left and... left in political debates, and most aren't trolls or LARPers. For one who has been repressed as a teenager, it would not be unthinkable to empathize with that and perceive further relaxation of sexual mores as helping those kids find happiness; don't you think?

Alternative sexualities are trivial distortions of the default reproductive drive, and combinations thereof; deformations of self-identifying and target patterns. Young, prepubescent boys are attractive to a subset of adult men precisely because they are men with a relatively feminine appearance and psyche (this has been acknowledged throughout history, codified in temporary names and dresses and attitudes – from the most benign and non-sexual, like Japanese boys wearing female-styled kimono, to the most explicit practices like bacha bazi). It is an inevitable inference, available to Thai peasants and American doctors alike, that blocking puberty and initiating HRT will preserve and augment those desirable traits.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If there are incentives for a thing to exist and to stay hidden, means to stay hidden, and past hints of its existence, then it may well exist to this day, and indeed may well have grown.

Certainly not. There's a coordinated effort by a very small number to do this. Think of them as the inner party.

There's an outer party - larger in number - who are happy to get positions of petty power where they push ideologically compliant stories and occasionally hide truthful information that might harm the party. Think: all the journalists/content moderators happy to hide what Kiwifarms/libsoftiktok/NY Post want to reveal, regardless of it's truth. As another example, consider the case of Loudon County covering up a rape because it was done by a transwoman, or the police covering up hundreds of rapes in the UK.

Most of these folks would certainly never rape children. But even if a few leftist drag queens do want to rape children, it's an isolated incident and it's best to cover it up to avoid getting conservatives elected.

And there's a much larger group of folks who believe whatever MSNBC and the NYT tells them, and also believe that if it isn't on MSNBC it didn't happen. These folks can be forgiven for not noticing the small correction the NYT made that Trump supporters never killed anyone on Jan 6, or the line casually buried in the 8'th paragraph that hate crimes the police solve in NYC almost never fit the stereotype of a right wing white guy. If it were important, it'd be on the front page, right?

As another example, consider the case of Loudon County covering up a rape because it was done by a transwoman

This one isn't really a good example for the anti-trans side, is it?

The two students involved were fuck buddies and had met for liaisons several times in the school bathroom. At the time of the incident, they were meeting up, but the girl was intending to cut things off. This doesn't seem like the typical example people think of, when they think of the dangers of transwomen in women's bathrooms. Like, are women seriously scared that they'll arrange a meeting with a long-time, trans sexual partner in the bathroom, and that partner will react badly to them ending things and assault them in the bathroom? No, the fear is always that a stranger will assault them, and there's still very little evidence that this happens often enough to warrant the fear people have of it.

I thought there was also confusion as to whether the attacker was actually trans, or merely a GNC boy. Regardless of that, at the time didn't the school not have policies in place allowing trans students to use their preferred bathrooms? So, if lack of such policies is supposed to protect women, this case would tend to be a bad argument in favor of it.

Obviously, the school shouldn't have tried to cover the incident up. But that is sort of separate to whether it actually supports the anti-trans side.

Recall that I'm responding to this:

a coordinated effort by millions of gay adults and teachers and community-leaders to manipulate children into acting trans and gay and then have sex with them?

The point here is that the millions don't want to have sex with children but will participate in the cover up of child rapes anyway, at various levels.

At most thousands, probably less: people who actually want gay sex with trans children and will act on this.

Hundreds of thousands: Administrators/teachers/community-leaders/"journalists" who will cover up the rapes, or if they are publicized minimize them and make it socially and economically perilous to advocate for stopping them. These are the Loudon county school board folks who use violence against the father of a rape victim and directly cover things up. They are also the reddit/twitter mods who suppress the story, and the journalists who dowplay it when they grudgingly cover it.

Millions: regular folks who pay not very close attention to NYT/MSNBC and are happy to attribute politically inconvenient facts to Russian misinformation or whatever.

This doesn't seem like the typical example people think of, when they think of the dangers of transwomen in women's bathrooms.

Perhaps Loudon county schools should have made that case instead of using violence (perpetrated by police) against the father of a crime victim.

I think the cover ups are a more general phenomenon. There's a reason why LGBT-friendly school districts and the Catholic church react in similar ways to a sex scandal - and a lot of it comes down to power and prestige, and the desire to maintain it. I agree this is a bad thing - all crimes should be aired and given sunlight, but there will always be incentives for institutions, especially highly respected ones in our society, to cover something up.

Our media environment is hardly ideal, but I do appreciate that thanks to tribalism, something like Fox News can occasionally report true negative things about one side of the political aisle. They did report on the story of Loudon, and I think that is a good thing, especially with the father being covered up and spoken over. The only issue is that because of that same tribalism, many people will never read a Fox News article about a bathroom scare and think about the implications of it, and those that do will come to entirely the wrong conclusions.

Perhaps Loudon county schools should have made that case instead of using violence (perpetrated by police) against the father of a crime victim.

I agree. I in no way condone Loudon county schools for their actions. I wish they hadn't done the cover up, and I wish they had policies that would have prevented the boy from going on to assault a second victim.

I also don't think the story, as covered up, is actually a good match for the fears people have of transwomen in bathrooms. If people want to use the Loudon case to speak against censorship, then they go with my blessing. If they want to use it as a case for why tranwomen shouldn't use their preferred bathrooms, then it is a huge reach, in my opinion.

I think the cover ups are a more general phenomenon. There's a reason why LGBT-friendly school districts and the Catholic church react in similar ways to a sex scandal

I do not disagree with this. Though I will suggest there is one big difference - the Catholic church hadn't developed the memeplex to get ordinary churchgoers to ignore it as "Protestant misinformation" or whatever. Unlike modern leftists, they were pretty horrified.

If people want to use the Loudon case to speak against censorship, then they go with my blessing.

I used it as an example of how you can have a very small number of gay tranny pedos but a much larger number of people involved in the conspiracy to cover up their actions. I believe the old time feminists characterized this as "rape culture".

And what about the second girl in a different school this gender-fluid kid assaulted? Were they fuck buddies too?

The amount of justification going on to protect the fuckwits on the school board is amazing. Victim-blaming the girl, blaming everyone except the activist group that exerted pressure on the school board to introduce such policies.

Hey, it was Trans Day of Remembrance recently when the list of "look at all the trans people who got murdered!" is regularly produced. By your logic, it was all their own fault for being murdered, yes? I mean, if a lot of them were sex workers or had fuck buddies, yeah? "Arranging meetings with long-term sexual partners" is their own fault!

The amount of justification going on to protect the fuckwits on the school board is amazing. Victim-blaming the girl, blaming everyone except the activist group that exerted pressure on the school board to introduce such policies.

Don't project opinions onto me. I already said that the school acted in an irresponsible way. I agree that schools with better policies would not have had a second or third victim after this.

I don't really blame the girl for what happened. Obviously, the moment she ended their relationship, the assailant should have accepted it with grace and left her alone. However, I also don't think it is advisable for teenage girls to have sex with guys in school bathrooms, and while "he might take it badly when you end things" isn't the first item on my list of reasons why, it could certainly serve as one pragmatic reason why.

Hey, it was Trans Day of Remembrance recently when the list of "look at all the trans people who got murdered!" is regularly produced. By your logic, it was all their own fault for being murdered, yes? I mean, if a lot of them were sex workers or had fuck buddies, yeah? "Arranging meetings with long-term sexual partners" is their own fault!

Again, you assume too much of me. I don't victim blame, but I do accept pragmatically (not morally) that trans sex workers being at higher risk of being murdered is not the same thing as trans people in general being at higher risk of being murdered. I would prefer no one get murdered, period. But if people in risky professions get murdered, it is probably a sign that we should arrange society in such a way that either people don't feel compelled to go into those risky professions, or we limit the harm as far as possible of people entering those risky professions.

Kids also aren't supposed to be fucking in the school bathroom in the first place. An example of a boy lying about being trans to gain sexual access to women-only areas is not exactly a glowing endorsement.

Kids also aren't supposed to be fucking in the school bathroom in the first place. An example of a boy lying about being trans to gain sexual access to women-only areas is not exactly a glowing endorsement.

It has been a while since I've looked at the case in depth, but I don't believe that the boy was lying about anything of the sort, and certainly not just to get into the bathroom for consensual sexual encounters. He was just gender non-conforming and wearing a skirt. The skirt did not grant him access to the bathroom, since the school did not have policies allowing children to use their preferred toilet at the time. It was just two stupid kids engaging in risky behavior, until one of them took a rejection particularly badly.

I agree that ideally, schools should not be turning a blind eye to students having sex in the school bathroom, but I think this probably happens more often then most people expect, and in the vast majority it involves a boy and a girl with no pretense on either one's part of being GNC or trans. They're just blatantly breaking the rules.

The skirt did not grant him access to the bathroom, since the school did not have policies allowing children to use their preferred toilet at the time.

This is... a little more complicated than it sounds at first glance: see the second half of this post

You think it's true that there is a coordinated effort by millions of gay adults and teachers and community-leaders to manipulate children into acting trans and gay and then have sex with them?

Why does it have to be millions, when our institutions seem to be shaped by determined minorities, and why do they have to be gay, if a lot this ideology is peddled by straight/cis people? The second point is my immediate issue with the "groomer is an anti-LGBT slur" - it doesn't actually target LGBT people.

Look up "Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher tik tok teens breast removal 'yeet the teat'"

Then look up "Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher malpractice rotted tissue"

I won't post images.

That name is actually Sadhbh, not Sidhbh.

Very nice old Irish name, pronounced "sive".

This bitch seems to be mangling the name, as well as all the teenagers and young women she's surgically mangling. It should be "Sadbh", pronounced "Sive", but this is how she spells it.

Seemingly she's from Louth, so she should know how to spell it, but maybe this is on her parents. Nominative determinism? "I have a fucked-up version of my name, now I can give you a fucked-up version of your body!"

Oh right, I didn't realise that was the spelling she's using herself. That's totally, totally stupid if it's actually legally spelt that way; Sadhbh is already a name you need to know how to pronounce, so why bother chsnging the vowel and not the cluster of consonants at the end? Maybe to avoid having the letters S - A - D in her name?

But if I were anglicising that name I'd just spell it "Sive".

"sive"

Does that rhyme with "dive" or "give"?

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I have no doubt that a for-profit plastic surgeon has an attempted viral marketing campaign called yeet the teat, but I googled that (in a private tab) and the first result is her saying that gender surgery isn't the same for everybody and some people won't ever need or want it: https://tiktok.com/@gendersurgeon/video/7168239778415103278?is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7168239778415103278

Is this an example of a coordinated effort by millions of gay adults and teachers and community-leaders to manipulate children into acting trans and gay and then have sex with them or just a questionable surgeon profiteering off a trend?

The rotted tissue hysteria is similarly underwhelming: https://lolcow.farm/snow/res/1703905.html (first google result again)

What a monumentally cynical take by you. First off, do you have any solid evidence of the specific motives of the shooter? Please recall the coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting, which received massive and nonstop worldwide news coverage as the sine qua nom of anti-gay hate crimes. Well, it turns out that, as @Iconochasm notes below, the Pulse shooting had absolutely nothing to do with gay people, and the shooter literally picked it at random after he arrived at his planned target, the Disney entertainment complex in Orlando, realized that the security was too strong and that he stood no chance, and then searched “Orlando night clubs” in Google Maps and went to the closest one. We know this for a fact because it all came out in the trial of his widow. Still, to this day, Pulse is such a load-bearing part of the narrative that LGBT+ advocates continue to wield it totemically, either genuinely unaware of the truth or calculating in their dishonesty.

So, I think I’ll wait to render any judgment of the shooting (other than, of course, to unequivocally condemn it and its perpetrator) and hold off on assigning any blame to anybody.

That’s not even touching the obvious double standard which countless other commenters are noting, wherein catastrophizing about the perpetual threat posed by the very public existence of right-wing speech - let alone right-wing policies or actions - is routine, constant, and amplified daily and hourly by the most powerful people in the world. I don’t need or expect you to apologize for any of that - you have, as far as I’m aware, no power nor any significant public platform beyond this forum - but I find it profoundly cringeworthy that you would stoop to something like this.

The conflation of pedos and gays is deeply evil.

It is! I wish paedophiles and their defenders would stop hiding behind me and mine to defend their horrendous ways. Trying to pretend that attacking groomers is attacking me is what is conflating us, not anything else.

It's like the meme of the archetypal progressive pointing at a picture of a Tokien orc and saying to a black person "Look! Aren't you offended by this depiction of you?!" and the black person responding "You think that looks like me...?" It reveals a lot more about the speaker than anything else.

Having a [possibly exaggerated or wrong] model of what a racist/queerphobe thinks in one's mind is not the same as being one.

The conflation of pedos and gays is deeply evil.

Its done primarily by pedos and gays and trans advocates themselves. It would be simple to tone back the gay pederasty and "hatching eggs" (and of course the pedos themselves have always tried, largely successfully) to incorporate themselves into the gay community. One of the sales pitches of gay marriage was this would normalize gays and create a schism between these communities, instead the opposite happened.

I can just as well say that the conflation of whites and racists is done primarily by whites, racists and white racists themselves. I suspect I would even find a few people here who would eagerly act as a case in point.

There is a massive gulf between the treatment of white supremacists by the white community and the treatment of pedos and pedas by the homosexual community. In the latter they are widely accepted and even celebrated (see, e.g. George Takei and Milo Yiabopolis descriptions of their first sexual acts).

There's definitely a discussion to be had about how the gay community seems to often accept things that we would not tolerate if they were homosexual, but it seems like the median gay wants no interaction with children(before puberty) in any way, whether sexual or not.

People do in fact conflate whites with racism because a prominent subset of whites openly and vociferously pushed racism for quite some time, and a smaller subset continue to do so to this day. If someone were to claim that white racism against blacks and other people of color was still an issue that needed to be addressed, would you disagree?

I can just as well say that the conflation of whites and racists is done primarily by whites, racists and white racists themselves.

That would be true, because the conflation is pushed primarily by self-hating white leftists. The self-hating racist is often the boldest of racists, because they feel that, as part of the target group, they have more authority to speak ill of the target and they feel the urge to do it in order to set themselves apart from the hated group.

Is it? To consider whites inherently racist codes more anti-racist to me. White anti-racist, but anti-racist nonetheless.

No, I mean in the sense of "those whites are acting racist and racists are acting in favor of whites, therefore conflating the labels" like the parent comment said about gay/trans people and pedos.

The accurate parallel would be if someone condemned "These Nazis marching in Skokie", and every Republican threw a fit about "this bigoted attack on all white people". At that point, it is more than fair to say "My dude, you are the one conflating Nazis and white people."

I'm curious, do you think that the whole "Desmond is amazing" ketamine thing has anything to do with sex? Like do you see it as kids playing around? Because as a gay dude it seems obvious to me that he's non-figuratively being groomed by adult men, and iirc the CPS investigation backed that impression up. Yet corporations sponsor this stuff, and YouTube just deletes the incriminating videos and everyone pretends it didn't happen.

Telling people they can't point this out just seems wrong when doing this to kids is literally the thing they have issues with.

My impression is that people are clapping and cheering because they actually read him as a boy and hence such things are seen as fairly harmless pretend play in case of an 11 year old boy.

That is incredibly naive, and if it is truly your interpretation, there's very little common ground in which to have this kind of conversation.

He's 11, being showered with praise and money for pretending to be an adult, dancing sexually. It's fucked up, it's obviously fucked up, and the most fucked up part is not that it's happening, but that it's being celebrated. I can understand how people would do this to a child. I can't understand other people celebrating it. Or in your case, downplaying.

fairly harmless pretend play in case of an 11 year old boy

TIL that it's normal for young boys to pretend to be female rock stars and dance in front of adults in a gay club. Well how Science Marches On since I was that age!

To clarify, you are saying that if the right-wing accusation of LGBT+ grooming children is truthful, then you personally support the shooter?

What does this mean specifically?

It means the LGBT+ community is trying to influence children to join their sexual culture. Do you think this is happening?

just set them on course to join in the future as adults?

So this is not "grooming" in your mind???? Conservatives would consider cultural influence "setting them on the course" to join that community as grooming their children. If you've set a child on the course of sexual development, the grooming is done.

However leftist normies usually don't even believe that one can be influenced in their sexual orientation like that

They need to believe this because the justification for tolerance and rights is based on the born-this-way defense. That defense isn't true, of course, but it was damn useful and it has not yet been fully discarded.

Watch, though, as it gets discarded because if you're born that way, then there are biological markers saying so, which contradicts the self-identification campagin.

That's not pedophilia or child sexual abuse though.

It is grooming, though, isn't it?

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That's not pedophilia or child sexual abuse though.

It is abusive to set children on the course of heavily self-destructive and dysgenic behavior.

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However leftist normies usually don't even believe that one can be influenced in their sexual orientation like that,

This is not how most LGBT activists (particularly T) act. They behave as a population that knows it will go extinct without the ability to hard indoctrinate children out of the view of parents.

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Also how do you imagine this? They groom the kids specifically for themselves in the future or just "altruistically" to the whote gay community?

To the extent that this is a real phenomenon, I think It's more about missionary work. Teaching kids grammar is boring. Inspiring a heart-felt coming out story is dramatic. From what I see of conservatives, they are much more concerned with "totally not straight" white women with danger hair than any actual gay men.

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If you really believe this, you should act the same as if they proposed legalizing Cannabalism. There is no debate with barbarians, only the sword.

I don't get why you would go on rampage against cannibals with your AR-15 when you could beat them at the ballot box and have the police do it for you. If you're saying that we should immediately resort to violence against any sufficiently outrageous political movement, without even trying to resolve it peacefully, that's coming from you. Nobody else is saying that.

The call to violence makes it strongly resemble a tactic I have seen often before: "I dare you to bite this bullet. If you don't, you're a hypocrite who should be ignored, and if you do, you're a monster who should be destroyed."

I don't approve of that tactic for two reasons: for one, I have seen it backfire in a "be careful what you wish for" way. For two, it does not seem conducive to "arguing to understand." I recommend against using it, particular if one isn't actually in a position to destroy the provoked monster.

I believe that speech is powerful. Words are a means we use to convince other minds of beliefs about the world. Minds act upon those beliefs.

Especially nowadays, words are in massive superabundance. Unless you are someone with a public following - and even then - the idea that any one statement, out of millions, is dispositive of an individual's actions, strains credulity.

At present, there is a powerful right wing-meme that many people, some LGBT and some not, mostly democrats, are attempting to sexually confuse children for nefarious purposes. This is often described as "grooming" in order to equivocate with sexual abuse children.

It is also described as "grooming" because it is seen, in its own terms, as a dangerous hijacking and corruption of children's development towards au courant notions and sexed identities. There is evidence for this claim.

Insofar as the reasonable man's reaction to a co-ordinated effort to sexually abuse children is not "I should vote about this and if I get outvoted, I should allow my children to be sexually abused", the actions of the shooter are completely predictable.

No, you have not drawn a nexus between this particular bar and efforts aimed at children; or between the shooter and the "groomer" meme.

All you have on that point is that the shooter is the grandson of a Republican politician. This, in itself, tells us very little, because it is not uncommon for the descendants of major GOP figures to vocally repudiate, or distance themselves from their politically-active kin. In fact, it's a meme that every brooklyn hipster has to deal with "conservative family" on Thanksgiving.

Nor does there appear any evidence (at this time) that the shooter himself was politically radicalized (though that could change). What information we do have suggests the shooter was, in fact, generally violent (e.g. the threats against parents with home-made bombs and guns, with sufficient severity that the parents had the dude arrested). Of course this could change, and if and when new information comes out I will update my assessment accordingly. But right now, there is no link other than supposition and weak inference-drawing.

You should take care to think about the consequences of the speech you use. If someone were to be persuaded by your argument, what would that cause them to do?

This proves too much. No speech could survive a standard requiring that not even a mentally-deranged individual threatening their own parents with bombings could interpret any particular statement so as to encourage violence.

Even if this standard were workable, which it is not, I would reject it because it is only ever applied unidirectionally. Only traditionalist or conservative speech is ever to be muzzled; the entire industries built on the left about pathologizing and demonizing conservatives, whites, and men are to be left alone. For example: no-one suppresses the speech of Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nahesi Coates, or thinks about reining in the legion of diversocrats who make a profession out of demonizing "whiteness," when radicalized black racialists kill white people, or torture white people, or assault random white people because they are white.

I would gladly stand with you if you said "we should all condemn these unprovoked murders." I would even be on your side if you had referenced the Idaho pastor cited in OP's link who apparently called for drag queens to be put to death. I would still be with you if you were proselytizing this sub's decorum rules, which would foreclose most use of the 3-edgy-5-me "day of the rope," "free helicopter ride," and other memes which do play around with and cheapen actual lethal political violence. But that's not where you're standing, which seems a bit telling to me.

You aren't reponsible for every nutcase or moron on your team. But you are responsible for the logical consequence of your ideas. I know of no society that believes they should be having free and open debates and votes about whether teachers should be permitted to sexually abuse children.

The French did, and within living memory. And it may not be specifically teachers doing it, but, well, uh, the sexual use of children does happen in some cultures today. The question of when "childhood" ends, and what special privileges are to be accorded children is not inviolate throughout time and space, and has been answered many different ways, changing over time in response to material circumstances and cultural shifts. It evokes especially high emotions for many contemporary Americans, but that's not a cross-cultural universal.

Does this apply to singing "we're coming for your kids"? Or "Republicans are trying to destroy democracy and impose fascism"? You'd shoot Baby Hitler, right, so why not the supporters of Cheeto Hitler?

It always seems like the only people who need to be "held responsible for their words" are those saying things that you don't like (or make you feel guilty).

Naturally you're going to talk about this one for as long as you can get away with.

You should take care to think about the consequences of the speech you use. If someone were to be persuaded by your argument, what would that cause them to do?

This is an interesting argument that was notably and conspicuously completely absent (along with claims or any awareness of "stochastic terrorism") during the "punch a nazi" fervor.

I disagree with the stance PMCM is taking here, and I agree that this stance was conspicuously absent during many excesses of the left. However, in fairness to PMCM, it must be pointed out that he himself may argue the exact same thing against those cases as well. Just because the left in general seems to have been hypocritical in the way you indicate doesn't mean that PMCM specifically was.

I'm gonna deny this.

I mean, I also object to its premises: I don't think you've got sufficient evidence for his motivations (yet! maybe you're guessing right, but you're guessing), and I don't think you cared about examples with opposing valence like the Dayton Shooter (which turned out to not be motivated by his left-wing politics or the demographics of the bar he targeted), or the planned attack on Kavanaugh. I don't think you'd accept the same games with any of the 'inevitable' consequences of police deescalation. I don't think you'd suddenly stop blaming people if they merely said that people advocating the availability of Gender Neutral in school libraries were merely violating the boundaries of parents. And I can demonstrate that you're not going to limit this object to the specific matter of sexuality, but also to immigration.

But more deeply, same as last time: no. The theory that someone is responsible for the bad actions of a crazed actor taking the funhouse mirror of a bad game of telephone of their actual argument is not good as political, moral, or normative philosophy. Not just in the obvious stupid ways where you're incentivizing future mass murderers by making clear that they could get outsized publicity and undermine the political opponents by selecting their targets carefully.

The more blunt way where turning all arguments into debates over the "reasonable man's reaction" rather than their actual truth value is insipid. Do you realize the natural consequences of this position? Do you realize why neither I nor you should spell them out?

What do you think would happen if you were to go to LibsOfTikTok's audience and tell them than any reasonable man, seeing what they've seen, should commit horrific acts, instead of commenting against the representativeness and accuracy of what they've seen? Of course, that's not the point, here. You want the referee to step in, and give a timeout and a five-yard penalty, and maybe a yellow card. What possible consequence could come from trying to do that for a tenth of the American population?

I honestly think the increase in the use of "groomer" is because people no longer care to be reasonable. Which isn't to say there there's no good reason to use the word, since I do believe that this modern phenomenon of "grooming" is a real thing that warrants the label in some form. But it is impossible to ignore its more salacious connotations.

Reasonsble concerns were registered, reasonable arguments were made, and the response was to accuse one of wanting trans/gay kids to die. There's clearly no oasis of high-minded discourse down that road. So if the battle requires responding in kind - tainting one's enemies as kid-fuckers - and there's more mileage to get from that, so be it.

This will, of course, result in innocent casualties. And apparently I'm supposed to be angry at the Right when they occur, but all I can summon is disdain for a Left that chose this ball, picked it up, and ran the whole field before the other team knew there was a game on. Shouldn't their steadfast refusal to entertain any sensible debate be held in judgment when these totally predictable consequences occur, even just a little bit?

Here and elsewhere I read commentary about how the "groomer" meme has gone too far, and the Right needs to talk more in a way that invites better understanding and doesn't cast heat at potential innocent bystanders. And I want to yawn so hard that my jaw falls into my coffee mug, because boy if we were all supposed to really care about this, we should have been less idiotic and cavalier about 'trans issues' as we have been the last few years. Best I can do is flail my arms and say "You were forewarned about playing with fire".

Throw the shithead in prison and give him the chair. I'll donate 20 bucks to the execution fund. But there will be no marches of solidarity or moments of introspection, because the CW still marches on around us.

If the left is grooming children I'm not "on the hook" for pointing it out and calling it bad just because someone else decides its bad enough to kill someone. If the left is grooming children they don't get a pass on that just because not giving them a pass might cause someone else to act out violently against them.

Edit: Maybe the people accusing the left of grooming children aren't doing it as a rhetorical tool, maybe they really believe the left is grooming children.

Can you define what you consider the defining characteristics of modern leftist grooming?

How malleable do you think sexual orientation and feelings of social and bodily dysphoria around sex roles are in children? If we lived in a society where the concepts of gay people were generally unknown, and the idea of being trans wasn't common knowledge - about what percent of grown adults do you think would naturally and spontaneously be gay or trans?

Do you think the Left doesn't honestly believe their "closeted" model of the situation? (That is, that some percentage of the population will irreparably be gay or trans no matter what shape society takes, and any rise in numbers results from closeted members feeling more comfortable coming out, and not an increase in number due to malleable youth mistakenly identifying as one of these things?) Or do you just believe that it doesn't matter if they honestly belief in the "closeted" model, because they are wrong as a matter of fact, and their belief is just a useful myth that keeps them recruiting for their in-group?

Can you define what you consider the defining characteristics of modern leftist [recruiting]?

Forming an individual, emotional relationship with children, while in a position of authority over them, that is kept secret from their parents.

You're asking questions of the wrong person. I don't know if I believe the left is grooming. I do believe that the right believes it.

How malleable do you think sexual orientation and feelings of social and bodily dysphoria around sex roles are in children?

Enough to cause about a 3600% increase in referrals to gender clinics, and completely flip age and gender ratios.

If we lived in a society where the concepts of gay people were generally unknown, and the idea of being trans wasn't common knowledge - about what percent of grown adults do you think would naturally and spontaneously be gay or trans?

About what we saw until the 2010's?

About what we saw until the 2010's?

That's fascinating to me.

On one hand, I definitely think that things like prison sexuality, bacha bazi and ancient Greece prove the idea that sexual behavior is partially a product of societal conditioning and material conditions. But I don't know how much that implies actual differences in people's underlying dispositions towards sex. If the story society tells is one where homosexuality is a moral failing, does this make a bunch of closeted gay guys, does it cause would-be bisexuals to bury their feeling so deep that they never act on them? Or can it actually affect a person's sexuality at the margins?

If there's been an increase of self-identified LGB people over the last 40 years, I think it's probably best explained by increasing societal acceptance, and perhaps some malingering from people claiming to be "bi" for social credit. However, I admit I don't know what to think of the T side of things. I suspect that the existence of HRT and other medical interventions does make the options look more attractive, but it's hard to say what that means in practice. More people in the modern world also get boob jobs, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people wouldn't have been getting boob jobs through out all of human history if they had been available. They just happened to not be medically possible, so people used different methods like corsets and weird dresses to artificially create more feminine figures.

However, I admit I don't know what to think of the T side of things

The T side of things is what I have issues with. Who you sleep with is none of my business. Even if you come to regret it, you can move on with your life mostly without consequences. On the other hand medical transitioning, including puberty blockers, wrecks your body even if you don't regret it. The justification for it is that it's better than living with dysphoria, but if people are transitioning mostly because it's being promoted, we're doing them great harm by waving them through the pipeline, and not questioning them.

I suspect that the existence of HRT and other medical interventions does make the options look more attractive, but it's hard to say what that means in practice.

My understanding is that HRT was available for decades before the massive post 2010 spike, so I don't think we can use that to explain what we're seeing.

but that doesn't necessarily mean that people wouldn't have been getting boob jobs through out all of human history if they had been available.

One thing to keep in mind is that we're not living in times where medical transition is merely possible, it's also heavily promoted, and skepticism of it is demonized.

They just happened to not be medically possible, so people used different methods like corsets and weird dresses to artificially create more feminine figures.

You can't compare this to what's going on with trans issues nowadays. If a dude wants to wear a corset, or a woman wants to wear shoulder pads, more power to them. If you're going to sell them a medical procedure that will make them a patient for the rest of their lives, in the hopes of solving their psychological issues, that's a completely different thing. Not to mention all the slogans like "trans women are women" that everyone else is also supposed get on board of.

My understanding is that HRT was available for decades before the massive post 2010 spike, so I don't think we can use that to explain what we're seeing.

HRT was available, but not readily available: the standards of care were a little... stupid.

I think the pendulum's swung too far the other direction, but until 2011, the WPATH SoC required three months "life experience" before physicians were supposed to allow HRT. There was probably an underlying steelman that was making sure people were able and remained interested after doing anything outside of a closed room, but Common Knowledge -- and the legal name change requirement especially -- held to the mid-00s that this meant either cocooning yourself in a very LGBT-specific community or doing a very bad drag impersonation while at your work and normal social life for three to six months, minimum.

I think we'd still have seen a pretty significant boost just by getting rid of that, though I'd expect still less than today. In run, I'd caution a lot of what we're seeing in reporting is probably a conflation of many different categories that you may not be expecting. There are still some medical concerns for butch lesbian / femme nonbinary trans * (low and irregular T doses are probably less likely to lead to ovarian cancer, and still be reason enough for concern), but they're not that far from the corset ones (eg, high heel and chest-binding can actually be dangerous... in rare cases).

held to the mid-00s that this meant either cocooning yourself in a very LGBT-specific community or doing a very bad drag impersonation while at your work and normal social life for three to six months, minimum.

I might be missing something, but this doesn't strike me as particularly restrictive? HRT doesn't magically make you pass, so one way or the other you might end up in this situation. Isn't it better to find out if you're cut out for it before you start messing around with your body?

If we can revert that 3600% increase by telling kids to try on a dress for 6 months, maybe we should do that?

In run, I'd caution a lot of what we're seeing in reporting is probably a conflation of many different categories that you may not be expecting.

No, this is based on referrals to the Tavistock GIDS, not a survey of zoomer tumblrinas.

EDIT: Which, now that I think about it also addresses your previous point. The loosening of the guidelines for HRT has no impact here, since this is just the first step of your family doctor sending you to the gender clinic. You only get HRT after that,

There are still some medical concerns for butch lesbian / femme nonbinary trans * (low and irregular T doses are probably less likely to lead to ovarian cancer, and still be reason enough for concern), but they're not that far from the corset ones (eg, high heel and chest-binding can actually be dangerous... in rare cases).

My impression is that medical concerns abound. Increased risk of cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, inability to orgasm if you block puberty too early... Even adult detransitioners say they feel they were mislead about the medical consequences of it all, and we're talking about pushing kids through the pipeline...

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While I agree with you that blurring the lines to conflate all LGBT+ education efforts and the direct sexual abuse of minors is irresponsible, and likely to lead to violence if taken seriously by the wrong person, do we actually know that his motivation had anything to do with this?

As far as I know, the police haven't made public any information about his motive, so all we can do is speculate over the exact origin of his hate. Remember that the claimed motivation for the Pulse nightclub shooting was supposedly in retaliation for US airstrikes against Iraq and Syria, but the shooter, Omar Mateen, had supposedly contracted AIDs from a Latino man and frequented gay bars himself. It's not clear to me that the Pulse night club shooting can be read as a straightforward act of hate against LGBT people, versus a very messy personal drama spilling out into the rest of society. How likely is it that Aldrich's motives in the recent Colorado shooting won't be a straightforward hate crime either?

The police also haven’t made public that the “suspect,” arrested at the scene of the crime with rifle, armor, and ammo, committed the crimes at all. Or that he’s the same guy who was arrested last year for explosives, despite their matching names and ages. They have a duty not to speculate.

I think the prior for “gay club shooters hate gays” should be pretty high. I’m going to register my prediction that yes, he did in fact have an anti-gay agenda.

The gay claims about Mateen seem thoroughly disproven. Further, Pulse wasn't even his preferred target, and he seems to have not even known it was a gay nightclub.

The gay claims about Mateen seem thoroughly disproven.

Thank you for this. I'm happy to be corrected.

My overall point that OP didn't have any reason to believe that this more recent shooting in Colorado was motivated by any particular anti-gay animus still stands, though.

Violent nutjobs have gone after whoever they hated most - not infrequently, gays among others - since long before groomer discourse was a thing. You trying to hang this on anyone who ever complained about Drag Queen Story Hour is honestly kind of repulsive. As is trying to spin something out of "His grandfather is a Republican."

Let's assume Aldrich was persuaded by LibsOfTikTok that we must stop the gays from grooming our children by any means necessary. It's still very unlikely that this otherwise stable and non-violent individual was just going to live a peaceful life until Twitter and grandpa told him about the "groomers."

You aren't reponsible for every nutcase or moron on your team. But you are responsible for the logical consequence of your ideas. I know of no society that believes they should be having free and open debates and votes about whether teachers should be permitted to sexually abuse children. If you really believe this, you should act the same as if they proposed legalizing Cannabalism. There is no debate with barbarians, only the sword.

I expect to see "If you say (fairly mainstream thing) you are Literally Killing People" on Twitter, but you offering it unironically here is crap argumentation.

Violent nutjobs have gone after whoever they hated most - not infrequently, gays among others - since long before groomer discourse was a thing. You trying to hang this on anyone who ever complained about Drag Queen Story Hour is honestly kind of repulsive. As is trying to spin something out of "His grandfather is a Republican."

And you're not engaging with anything near a steelman of the argument he made. Painting relatively benign opponents as fascist white supremacists is not particularly productive, nor is it particularly controversial in these spaces that this kind of speech is dangerous. People don't like Arthur Chu talking about putting bullets in tumorous nazi Republican flesh or whatever that quote was. Seems fair to me that PM doesn't appreciate being called a groomer pedophile out to rape your kids, no?

Let's assume Aldrich was persuaded by LibsOfTikTok that we must stop the gays from grooming our children by any means necessary. It's still very unlikely that this otherwise stable and non-violent individual was just going to live a peaceful life until Twitter and grandpa told him about the "groomers."

Bad things happen. Bad people do bad things. We will always have bad people doing bad things. Therefore, why bother?

I hear this logic hasn't worked so well with defunding the police, and that actually, there are people who respond to incentives and the environment they live in. Seems pretty reasonable to me that there people out there who may not have been stable, peaceful individuals that nevertheless wouldn't have become mass shooters if it weren't for the toxic political waters we swim in.

I expect to see "If you say (fairly mainstream thing) you are Literally Killing People" on Twitter, but you offering it unironically here is crap argumentation.

It probably wasn't framed in an ideal way, nor does putting it in the context of his previous posts paint a very flattering picture, but...I think his point about not calling your fellow citizens pedophile groomers is valid? If you don't want to engage with it, you don't need to try and reduce it to puerile twitter one-liners.

"Don't call your fellow citizens pedophile groomers" is valid. "This crazy person shot a bunch of people because of what you said" is not. We don't even know what his motivations were yet (we can probably assume it had something to do with not liking gay people) but if you accept crazy people can be driven to violence by toxic narratives in political discourse, those toxic narratives come from many places.

PM is doing that thing we usually criticize the media for doing, getting up on a hobby horse to point fingers and assign blame while the bodies are still cooling and the causal links, such as they are, are far from established.

Seems fair to me that PM doesn't appreciate being called a groomer pedophile out to rape your kids, no?

With all love and respect to PmMeClassicMemes, they really need to grow a thicker skin on this topic; it's obvious that this gets their goat so badly that they dispense with all the usual decorum and rules-following they normally have. I swear, the nastiness from PMCM only ever comes out when this topic comes up, and it's not good for them or for us.

It also comes out from the mods. This might be the only topic where I’ve seen nara get heated.

Turns out child rape, or accusations thereof, are pretty emotionally charged topics.

You're not wrong, but there's still a valid argument there to consider.

nor is it particularly controversial in these spaces that this kind of speech is dangerous

No. I don't want to enforce consensus, so I'll just say that I think what's not controversial in these spaces is that this kind of speech is treated completely differently by the "trust and safety enforcement" blob. People are upset about the blatantly who/whom censorship, not that Arthur Chu and Tim Wise are allowed to speak.

You could see what PmMeClassicMemes has to say about "harmful speech" targeting people he doesn't like, but after he flamed out of the motte calling everyone Nazis, his Reddit account finally got suspended for saying the quiet part a bit too loud too many times.

So regardless of what you think people here believe, it doesn't appear obvious that he does.

You could see what PmMeClassicMemes has to say about "harmful speech" targeting people he doesn't like, but after he flamed out of the motte calling everyone Nazis, his Reddit account finally got suspended for saying the quiet part a bit too loud too many times.

We still have a rule about leaving the rest of the Internet at the door, and we've talked before about your habit of digging up links to every past grievance while arguing with people. ( @gattsuru is doing it too, above, but at least he's kind of addressing past statements relevant to current ones. You're just going "Neener neener, you got suspended on reddit.")

Do not do this.

This is silly. Not bringing unrelated drama from other places is not the same thing as pretending people don't have a track record on an argument they brought up.

This is silly. Not bringing unrelated drama from other places is not the same thing as pretending people don't have a track record on an argument they brought up.

You don't have to pretend you don't remember what people have said in the past, when it's relevant to the discussion. If you can link to someone previously contradicting something they are saying now, "Hey, how do you reconcile these statements?" is valid.

Dragging old grudges into every exchange is not.

Gattsuru did a much better job, as always. My point was a simpler one: that the guy who got banned from reddit for calling people subhuman is probably not treating his argument about suppressing "harmful speech" as a universal principle, just a club to hit (subhuman) speakers he doesn't like.

I'll delete it if you'd like. This entire thread is just the same people relitigating and redeploying the same tactics as the last ten, and I shouldn't have even engaged.

No, my reddit account was suspended because I called someone sub-human in an argument on a finance subreddit.

This view seems to me to be lacking in nuance. Sure, someone may hate Olmecs, thinking that the nature of their existence is an affront to Vedist principles, but who's to say that they won't only be explicitly driven towards violence against Olmecs after they become firmly convinced that Olmecs are going after Vedist children?

(Or who is to say that they couldn't only decide that they really hate Olmecs at all after they come to think that the Olmecs are going after Vedist children? Modern people are very sensitive about (their) children in these days of advanced medical technology and lowered child mortality. Modern people are also pretty tolerant and "Live and let live, just leave me alone about it."-adhering otherwise.)

I feel like there were/are a lot of people who were/would have been supporters of lesser homosexual creeds such as "Let them do what they want in their own bedrooms.", "Let them do what they want between consenting adults.", "Sure, pride is great, and if people don't want to see grown bears twerking on a Bank of America float they can go somewhere else for the day.", etc. who nevertheless drew the line somewhere around Drag Queen Story Hour, and, as the old poem goes, began to hate. I don't know how many, but surely it's at least one.

It's still very unlikely that this otherwise stable and non-violent individual was just going to live a peaceful life until Twitter and grandpa told him about the "groomers."

I would say this needs a heavy dose of justification. To me it seems like the radicalization that leads to mass murder attacks is highly context-dependent, but I guess I could be wrong about that.

Insofar as the reasonable man's reaction to a co-ordinated effort to sexually abuse children is not "I should vote about this and if I get outvoted, I should allow my children to be sexually abused", the actions of the shooter are completely predictable.

Which is why if you consider left-wing "tolerance" expanding to pedophilia inevitable and think that it will negatively impact your children, you might perhaps consider instead supporting a right-wing pedophilic ideology that allows a man to claim his own offspring as his own sexual property!

(Use this to enhance your sexual gratification and life satisfaction or not. Your choice. If you wish for your daughters to stay virginal/chaste, even in regards to yourself, to enhance their market/social value as young adults or for other reasons, then that is allowed. Unlike in the current system, you may even keep your daughters wholly abstinent for their entire lives if that is your preference.)

I am of course speaking of my preferred pedofascism.

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unless you really bend beyond the breaking point what "right-wing" should mean

? There is little that is more right-wing/traditional than men having sex with/possessing/being betrothed to young girls, including in the pedophilic range. The age of consent in colonial Delaware was explicitly set at 7. (Was the founding generation of the United States leftist now?) Most modern ages of consent are far newer than the 19th Amendment, much less the 13th and 14th. (I guess those are based now, the tradition and heritage that right-wingers are trying to defend?) For example, Georgia's age of consent wasn't raised from 14 to 16 until 1995 (and wasn't raised from 10 to 14 until 1918, almost the exact same time as the 19th Amendment).

It was in fact specifically the same feminism behind the 19th Amendment which made campaigning to raise the age of consent one of its first orders of business, even before allowing women to vote or prohibition. Basically any age of consent beyond around 10-12 (at least in the modern West as far as I know) or so originates from and is originally an invention of modern, progressive, and explicitly feminist (again in origination) leftism (and even the earlier ones are evidence of those tendencies in a more primordial form).

So I'm afraid that I feel like it is you who is "bending beyond the breaking point" what "right-wing" should mean by apparently suggesting/implying that 99% of right-wingers throughout history somehow weren't actually right-wing. To the vast, overwhelmingly majority of the most trad, masculine, and right-wing men in history (so right-wing they didn't even call themselves "right-wing" in most cases because it was simply the accepted default norms of behavior), the age of consent was either "absurdly" low (by modern standards), non-existent, or likely, in many if not most cases, nonsensical as a concept: If a man is in possession of a female, if she is his property, and if he wishes to make sexual use of his property according to his own preferences and natural rights to unrestricted use of what belongs to him, then what matter is her age? Why would he bother waiting? Because older women don't like that unrestricted access by men to younger ones readily crowds them out of the sexual market? This is the concern of the properly right-wing male?

(We must also consider, as a semi-famous /pol/ post wrote, that nowadays many of the most hardcore right-wingers believe/understand that waiting also usually just amounts to simply a policy of "Give Tyrone and Muhammad [names copied verbatim, not intended derisively] a turn first.", as we all know that many if not most of the "precious" underage girls who supposedly need our "protection" from the "traumatizing" matter of sex certainly aren't waiting/"protecting" themselves from it until they turn 18... Is it very trad, right-wing, and based to ensure that the first penis inside the mother of your children is not likely to be your own and quite likely to be non-White (or of another tribe in general)?)

Would another man tell him that he must leave his meat for some particular period of time before eating it or let his spear "mature" before he takes it into battle? Of course not. Who cares? It's his. So why shouldn't that apply equally to his feminine property (as I assure you almost all men throughout history who were far more right-wing than you or 99% of modern so-called "right-wingers" (and who would likely think of you and them as an "effeminate abominations of modernity" or some equivalent (not saying that as a direct insult/sneer, just emphasizing their vast differences and analogizing to how many modern right-wingers often tend to see modern left-wingers), just as much as you likely think that of some modern left-wingers or kindergarten-attending drag queens) almost certainly considered their females to be some variation of (by modern standards especially))?

Explain that to me in right-wing terms. And explain it to this guy while you're at it too, how he's some sort of naturally left-wing degenerate who someone needs to ride in on a high horse of right-wing propriety to correct. Explain it to the notoriously feminist left-wing progressive (by modern standards) Romans (sarcasm) too.

(Protip: You won't be able to use, for the example, The Bible, as much as that is in my view a Jewish invention/instrument of subversion against the Roman hierarchy and thus actually not really properly/ideally right-wing itself (at least in its non-Aryanized form), because it doesn't mandate/suggest any age of consent and often quite blatantly condones violations against our society's current Holy Number of 18. (That is, even the guys against the Romans for not being egalitarian/left-wing enough saw no problems with their sexual predilections in regards to age.) But I suppose medieval Crusaders weren't as right-wing as the modern median oh-so-hardcore "trad" online right-winger because they... post about how they don't like drag queens online? Or about how restoring natural masculine sexual age freedom that most men throughout history wouldn't have even thought twice about is just "edgy musing"? I can't say they've exactly been upstaged here.)

Consider the following:

Guys who fancy themselves to the right of Genghis Khan and talk about gassing jews all day instantly turning into first wave feminists at the prospect of rolling marriage laws back less than 100 years. Just own being a modernist, bro.

Do not confuse certain irregularities of the modern political realm with the absolute truth of political ontology for all time. That would be a severe error that would potentially make you look quite foolish.

I mean, there’s probably at least one person with a 10,000 word manifesto on how fucking kids is lindy, and he probably has at least a few followers. Bacha bazi is also both pedophilic and very much not on the left.

In general though, when people say ‘right wing pedophilic ideology’, they’re referring to a very small number of fundamentalists who think men should marry teenaged girls. That’s not pedophilia, technically, but whatever. And these people are a distinct minority even in their own communities, but they do exist as an ideology.

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