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Notes -
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
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.
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?
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.
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:
NAMBLA quotes proudly:
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.
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