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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30443 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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One worrying trend I've been seeing in the modern world is the social outlawing of any form of permissible contact between older people and children. It seems that with the obsession modern western society has on children's sexuality, all of the sudden the default position when an adult interacts with a child that isn't related to them by blood, is that the adult is a sexual predator.

Especially on the motte there have been a lot of recent concerns about 'grooming,' which as a thread below mentions is an extremely muddy and useless term. In my opinion it should be tabooed from these discussions.

This issue becomes especially salient when you look at the rise of internet addiction issues, and the mental health/suicide problems that come along with it. Many kids go to internet forums like this because they don't have role models or guides they respect in life. They end up forming parasocial relationships with internet celebrities that are probably more likely to be predatory and harmful to the child, as if the habit of going on the internet all day isn't bad enough.

We as a society are losing vast amounts of illegible knowledge every day as older people die, exit the workforce, or suffer cognitive decline. There are many areas where 'book smarts' can't teach you everything, especially when it comes to emotional issues or social issues. The rise of inceldom, trans, and other social movements primarily focused on social issues of young people are a prime example.

My question is: How are adults supposed to offer guidance to children in the modern world, especially adult men? There are numerous stories of a child's father having the police called on them because people think the father might be a sexual predator, in this environment why would any man risk the reputational and legal risk of mentoring a kid?

Is it worth losing any realistic relationship between the young and old because of vague fears of sexual predation? Does the current hysteria even help sexual predation, or does preventing children from having good role models make them more insecure and vulnerable to bad actors?

It's also getting harder for women to find mentors because it's riskier for men to enter that kind of relationship. I don't have any ideas, I suppose mentors can do their best to vet their mentee candidates for the risky behaviour, and mentees can find ways to signal low-risk.

The traditional way to signal low risk was bending over tolerating the plausibly-deniable harassment. This has some obvious flaws.

What flaws?

The way Camille Paglia explained it, if you tolerated it, it meant you were game, if you slapped his hand or face or just it meant you weren't.

Seems fairly straightforward to me!

It's also getting harder for women to find mentors because it's riskier for men to enter that kind of relationship.

Every damn time, it's always the first type that takes it on the chin for the benefit of the second type.

In this case, it's more difficult for the actually productive people to meet each other simply because the parasites insist on the ability to call rape when a man offends them. All policies have costs.

I don't have any ideas

We're not getting out of this without a massive technological and productivity boom that puts the reality-focused closer to sociopolitical power again.

Maybe a war, maybe AI, I don't know, but it depresses me. It's not an Iron Law for no reason; it always was "powers and principalities".

A productivity boom? Seems like the more productivity has increased the more people who don’t seem to produce anything in particular nor have any real attachment to reality exclude others from sociopolitical power, because they’re less reliant on the group of people who are by necessity part of the real world.

Precisely. The less time society needs them do to productive work ( e.g. farming), the more these types can invest in politicking.

Hence I predict, absent AI overlords, a fully automated society is going to be absolutely hellish because of a zillion manager types politciking and getting into everyone's business to justify their pointless existence.

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