There comes a time in every discussion forum user's life that they espouse an unpopular opinion. Not something unpopular in a way that they have broken any rules. But unpopular in a way that many other users want to chime in with their disagreement.
Ratioed
On twitter it is called getting "ratioed" where the unpopular tweets have a higher than normal number of comments relative to likes and retweets. It is viewed as a negative thing to happen when you are on twitter, because saying unpopular things on twitter is seen as bad.
Here on themotte saying unpopular things is not bad. We are here to have discussions with people who have different points of view. If you say something unpopular but not against the rules then you are serving the purpose of themotte. Not only have you not done something bad, you have done something good. You have provided everyone else here with content. There might be some tribal instincts in the back of your head screaming warnings at you "oh no! you have said something unpopular. quick! defend yourself, moderate your position, attack your most aggressive detractors!" These instincts are wrong. Instead, by saying something unpopular you have become the bell of the ball. The star athlete that all the recruiters want. Etc etc. We all want to talk to you!
Death by a thousand cuts
Being the center of attention and wanted by everyone can be stressful, especially when it feels like a form of infamy. There is a common failure mode that we as the mods have to witness happen again and again. The person that is at the center of attention is getting minor attacks that don't rise to the level of moderation. Multiple people might say the equivalent of "I think you are wrong because you aren't smart", or other forms of implied insults. The person at the center of attention will eventually get worn down by all these small cuts and jabs, and they will lash out at someone making the jabs. The lash out often does rise to the level of moderation.
You are the solution
The mods have talked about this phenomenon and we have realized that there isn't a good way to solve this problem through moderation. But! That doesn't mean there is no good solution at all.
These are the strategies I have used when getting ratioed, they've kept me sane, kept me calm, and helped me enjoy my time far more:
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Attitude - You are the popular one. Everyone wants to talk with you. Keep these in mind to avoid the tribal anxiety of 'everyone hates me I have to defend myself!'
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Match Effort - There are lots of responses flying at you and these responses have varying levels of effort. If someone has a low effort comment I do not respond with a well researched and cited response, I will often try and avoid responding to low effort comments altogether. Remember, you are the bell of the ball, they need to come to you.
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Prioritize the Best - Try and respond to your best disagreers first. The ones that bring up the best points, address all the things you said, or are just very polite about how they say it. You should be rewarding their effort, and hopefully signalling to other potential commentors that this is the type of comment you will respond to. This also helps with the next piece of advice:
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Refer back to yourself - Don't get frustrated saying the same thing a bunch of times. If you find yourself having the same argument in two different places, then only have it in the place with the better disagreer, and then point the other people to those posts, or just extensively quote yourself. "I addressed your point while talking with [other user], see my comment here(link)".
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Limit the back and forth - I will usually only give one response to most users. I will try and match their effort and address their points. I will try and have an extended discussion only with the best disagreers. So many instances of me moderating people happen ten or fifteen comments deep into a conversation, when almost everyone else has stopped reading. Both sides have already said the same thing multiple times, and they just become frustrated at each other "How can you resist the amazing logic and beauty of my arguments! Only a cretin and scum could fail to be convinced!" My suggestion is to just say your point and get out. You should expect to not have the last word when you are getting ratioed, so just embrace that reality up front.
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Leave when you are done - Sometimes even with all these strategies you might reach the end of your patience. You just don't want to talk about it anymore. Try and be introspective and recognize when you have reached this point. Once it happens, thank your best disagreer for the good discussion, say you are done with this topic and leave the discussion. Do not feel obligated to respond to additional comments. Your further participation is only likely to get you in trouble. You will likely get more and more frustrated until you lash out.
I also have advice for when you see someone getting ratioed and you want to join in on the dogpile. But that advice is more of a charitable nature, like it would be helpful to the community as a whole, but probably not as much to you personally. If people are interested I'll add it.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I openly identify as a "pedofascist" here. I don't think I can relate at all to caring enough about this issue to write this long of a post about it.
Here's my short advice that I think is both more succinct and superior to yours (which again in my view is unnecessarily lengthy for such a minor issue): It's just text on a screen. It means nothing. It can't hurt you. (Somebody implied that they were going to throw me in a woodchipper on here like a day ago, to which I responded with German loli visual novel song lyrics. What's he gonna do about it? Nothing.)
Engage as much as is entertaining and/or intellectually stimulating for you. Then leave. (I guess that's similar to a suggestion you made too, but mine's quicker.)
PS: It's "belle of the ball", not "bell".
Just curious -- what's your objective in engaging with people on TheMotte? Are you mainly here to raise awareness about and defend your own beliefs?
I have no "objective" really. I just like to spar and express myself, ideally with a board culture that doesn't end up resulting in the discussion degrading into the worst, not-actually-debate Reddit cliches ("Touch grass", "Get help", etc.). I decided to go full hog with my preferred, no-compromises political fantasy because I actually do think its basic tenets are quite readily defensible and I'm smart enough to handle it (admittedly some of this is because a decent amount of people don't want to engage with such an ideology at all), and so far I don't feel like it's taken a serious intellectual blow so I suppose I'm right.
To actually criticize pedofascism - at least one that doesn't contest any "values", and is both unexpected and only morally objectionable in that it doesn't scream 'pedo nazi' - is physical - given the natural end of sex is childbirth, I can't see a fascist seeing value in sex outside childbirth in a large-scale sense - wouldn't even ephebophilia (by-definition pedophilia can't cause childbirth at all, although nobody really uses that definition exclusively) not maximize long-term fertility rates because small bodies would be injured by childbirth & not nourish the child well enough?
I'm not aware of anything in the fundamental nature of fascism which proscribes pleasure and enjoyment. Hitler obviously didn't think so. Certainly fascism often demands a significant measure of gravitas and ardent resolve from its citizens/adherents, but who said it was all no fun all the time?
Of course sexuality (which is often not even actual sex nowadays, just sexual hypnosis in the form of voyeurism/pornography (addictions)) must not be allowed to run wild, that is the state of libido dominandi that we are currently imprisoned by must be prevented, but what ideology based in the exaltation of bold and natural masculinity (among other things, but that's a big one) would ban men from sex for the pure pleasure and thrill of dominating (that is communing with, in the proper, just, and natural fashion by dominating) the feminine? If anything, within reason, this shall be encouraged. Perhaps there is a tendency in historical fascism that heavily contradicts this (in which case, as fascism is fundamentally a progressive (though right-wing progressive) ideology, I am still free to either accept this restriction or alter/abolish it), but I am not aware of it.
Well luckily we have the technology to separate sex and fertility to quite a reasonable degree. So I don't really see any great necessity behind so specifically making sexual policy contingent on fertility aims, as it seems to me that you can readily achieve those regardless with various breeding programs. (Of course the infrastructure to support this separation may take some time to construct/acquire. So perhaps the people may be required to deprive themselves of behaving as they could if the ideal resolution had already been achieved for a time, but as they will be a hardy, fascist people, this will not cause any great difficulties.)
Can you define "bold and natural masculinity" clearly? I imagine there are plenty of reason men in this proposed society might be friends in a great fraternal way or bash each other's heads in at slight provocation and they hinge critically on the whole "raping each other's mates, mothers and daughters" thing. There would presumably be about one man per woman, who is sharing?
Unfortunately I cannot entirely, as it is a matter to which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous "I know it when I see it." quote readily applies. I can clearly answer your specific question though:
My conception of "natural masculinity" includes the recognition of the concept of property, as even dogs recognize that taking a bone in the possession of another dog is grounds for conflict (so surely we can hold even the most primitive men to a same if not higher standard).
So no, men would not be allowed to fuck each other's feminine property without explicit permission. (And even with permission this would need to be controlled to avoid the reemergence of the eroticization of cuckoldry.)
Women would be property, generally personal property and generally owned each by one individual man. (Perhaps more complex ownership arrangements could be considered in some cases but this is tangential.)
So men own their daughters, how do men without daughters find mates? Is there a prostitution angle as well? I don't see how such a society could move from one generation to the next.
I wouldn't call it prostitution per se as that's a rental (though you can call it that if you want), but some men will inevitably prefer to sell/betroth (at least some of perhaps) their daughters to other men (according to economic incentive or more ideally personal affection) rather than keep all of them as their personal mates. (To be clear, no man is required to have sex with any female he doesn't want to, including his own daughters. It's just a nice available perk.)
Other than that, options include state or privately produced waifus without explicit parentage (obviously they would have one genetically but it wouldn't necessarily be recognized - all the better for them to be bonded only to their masculine owner), waifus "ex nihilo" that is (not really but kind of), state or privately provided breeding resources such as surrogates or artificial wombs (though I think it wouldn't be advised for men to have children without a mate to perform the naturally feminine aspects of child-rearing).
The key is that due to the fact that polygny would be allowed if not encouraged (within reason and the capacity of each man to properly support/justify his harem - to each according to his contribution), birth ratios would need to be tilted heavily in favor of females (with the exact ratio depending on how much allowance for masculine polygny is fulfilled by corresponding demand), which would be managed with embryonic selection, etc.
On the subject of monogamy, pedofascism recognizes that favoring monogamy over polyamory/polygny especially was a crucial social adaptation in the past to prevent females from being lopsidedly hoarded by particular men, leaving some others with none, causing general masculine discontent. But I believe that with modern technology we can now do better and grant each man the harem he deserves as his masculine birthright (again according to merit), allowing all men to live more as past kings and emperors did (which we basically already do, or often rather better, in the realm of the material/technological, so why not the romantic/sexual?).
Pedofascism also doesn't discount the possibly beneficial effects of future technologies like sexbots, VR/AI waifus, etc. in this area. If artificial feminine technologies surpass their natural equivalent (which they very well could) in utility (including breeding), then the natural variety of female could become as rare as masculine apathy permits. (I for one would welcome this, though it would never be entirely any one man's decision. Those who prefer the natural variety could keep them.)
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Not at all, but it's understood that the forms of pleasure are the same as with purpose and strength - this is why well formed breasts and hips are innately attractive - and why the pleasurable act involves putting sperm into the fallopian tube - and that having sex without a purpose of childbirth is generally degenerate. So I don't see why you'd want to have sex with a prepubescent child! As to the link - 'bread and circuses for the people' aside, which is vaguely progressive, art, music, athletics, theatre, aren't merely 'entertainment' for nothing but itself, but directly communicate values, aesthetics, desires etc to people!
It's really funny how just making that argument is incredibly taboo and icky, because i'm not saying "what the fuck you pedophile GET OUT". It's the main correct factual basis for disliking pedophilia, though. If fertilizing 9yos was, historically, the most large-scale efficient method of reproduction for humans, we'd [probably] have no taboos on it whatsoever, and other animals have reproduction mechanisms as strange as that. All morality is like that though, contingent yet useful, cheating is contingently disliked not because it disrupts the fundamental spiritual union of awesome eternal souls but because it reduces an individual's number of offspring (which is important, because the peoples' genes determine much of most important things about them!)
The pleasure is the desire to reproduce, though, and getting off in the same way with someone who can't reproduce (in the case of literal pedophilia) is just confused. Fascism, iirc, didn't have rape as a general practice, instead having people marry and reproduce (although pushing that earlier). But that's besides the principle of it. And 'separating sex from fertility' is similarly mistaken - any time you have sex without reproducing, you've just wasted a correct desire to reproduce!
Club Tropical Rape, except the RWBB groyper's sperm genomes are swapped for short and ugly 150iq scientists? You could even keep most of the scientist genomes while swapping the attractiveness-related alleles, i guess. iirc GWASes generally found little negative correlations between traits like that, although idk how true that is at the tails.
This is directly contradictory to basic reality unfortunately. I can provably orgasm, and experience pleasure (which is not to say satisfaction, which is a wholly different matter), from putting my semen in a banana, my hand, a silicone doll, and so on (which is not to say that any of this is preferable). (And though masturbation is an ugly habit to be the slave of, if we are to recognize nature, we must recognize why nature has allowed us to arouse ourselves when we can't, for example, tickle ourselves.) No fallopian tubes are required. (Perhaps it is a fascist tendency (or a tendency of all politics) or not, but I am not in favor of the rhetorical denial of basic reality to emphasize a moral/spiritual point.)
I don't see how that's true. If anything, having sex with the purpose of childbirth can be degenerate if you are not appropriately managing your breeding impulses with a long-term outlook. (Otherwise Africans having 8 children they can't feed each and vastly overpopulating their continent would be the least degenerate people alive, which I don't think you mean to imply.)
For the same non-reproductive reasons you'd want to have sex with anyone else? Because they are sexually attractive and it will bring you pleasure? Unless you see humans as purely baby-making machines (which to me is the most limited kind of primitive, reactionary thinking that is hardly fascist at all (as fascism explicitly opposed mindless reaction (see: Nazi anthem "Die Fahne hoch" for example)), evident in the fact that as stated above it most closely praises African breeding patterns), these are perfectly valid reasons in appropriate contexts.
Well, you are ignoring a few things I believe:
A. For the vast majority of human history, there wasn't much of a taboo against fertilizing 9 year olds (which can happen in some cases as the youngest mother in human history was actually only 5, and she delivered successfully without dying) or attempting it. (For example, the explicit age of consent in colonial Delaware, inhabited by a reasonably reproductively-oriented people I think you'd agree, was set at 7.) It is very modern and thus cannot be reasonably claimed to be a moral intuition based in inherent human reproductive instinct (as in your cheating example).
(Actually this is not entirely true because I do think there is some reproductive instinct that explains it... the feminine reproductive instinct to establish taboos that allow them to avoid being outcompeted and quickly made reproductively obsolete in their life spans by more attractive and fertile younger females. (See now how so many of them are trying to stigmatize age gaps featuring an older man of almost any size larger than 2-3 years, how many of them shriek about a 27 year old dating a 19 year old for example. The underlying psychological instinct was always barely child "protection" at all and thus naturally never stopped at them.) This of course has likely only begun to influence men at all due to their modern feminization.)
B. We humans are of course a K-selected and not r-selected species (another reason why "sex for breeding only" is a flawed ideology as the human appetite for sex vastly outweighs its capacity for proper investment in offspring). Let me ask you, which is more K-selected behavior:
a. Becoming sexually attracted to other members of your species only at their exact, immediate moment of peak fertility?
b. Or becoming sexually attracted to other members of your species in anticipation of their peak fertility in order to facilitate the establishment of a stronger pair bond (which can take years) prior to that peak fertility which might benefit your offspring?
You now know the evolutionary argument for why men tend to begin to be attracted to females prior to their peak fertility (which is usually not the same as the onset of fertility at all), with escalating degrees of hebephilia/pedophilia simply being different, more highly tuned calibrations of this which naturally establish different reproductive niches. (It is worth noting that this implies that the more pedophilic an individual is, the more naturally K-selected their reproductive strategy is (which is not automatic praise, as basic economic analysis of the concept of "investment" of course reveals that it is possible to be too K-selected).)
I'm no fan of cheating but I think the claim that it "reduces an individual's number of offspring" is highly contextual and requires a greater degree of universal justification.
I've ejaculated in multiple women while using various means of birth control. It felt perfectly pleasurable to me. The satisfaction of reproduction is again provably, empirically perhaps related but easily separable. (You may claim that recognizing this separation is inherently immoral, improper, or inadvisable for various reasons but that's a different argument than claiming that they're equivalent.)
Dominating your own property is not rape (which originally meant theft for obvious reasons, that rape as a sex act was primarily and properly characterized as an aggression not against a woman's consent but a man's property). My quote was not a reference to rape in this fashion.
The Africans appreciate you. Perhaps we men shall simply travel to Mars on a mountain of babies, produced by a race fucking like they're on Ford's factory line to make more and more endless, indistinguishable offspring commensurate with a vigorous human appetite for sexuality because... I forgot why this was supposedly a good thing.
I can assure you that I have had a consummated desire for sex many times without an equivalent comprehensive desire for reproduction (because I non-degenerately recognized that reproduction at that moment was not behaviorally optimal long-term for either myself or my offspring).
Well yes, though the primary initial goal of the breeding programs will be to perfect women as subservient creatures (as I imagine this will be more readily achievable for a time than producing a perfect artificial equivalent) in order to save society from their subversive influences. It worked for dogs even without much in the way of modern science, so I don't take it as impossible.
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this is not convincing to me because in my opinion the purpose of sex is pleasure, reproduction is a secondary effect which is not necessarily desirable. People who have sex while denying its reproductive potential do not feel like they are wasting their desire, instead they feel like they are fulfilling it. I think you are the one who is confused here.
Are you approaching this from the 'pedofascist' angle or a more common one? Assuming latter -
So, sex is a process of physical acts, right? A variety of physical relations that have evolved over millenia to coordinate reproduction. Now, it evolved because of reproduction - so the pleasure comes, in a sense, from reproduction. We can take this elsewhere - is eating primarily for pleasure? Is curiosity? What about duty - is a sense of duty to one's family or group 'primarily for the feeling of duty', or is it for those people?
Also, what about the profound cause of creating more people, who can have the same experiences and trials you had, but varied, with a chance at better? Isn't that valuable? Isn't that captured by the "pleasure" of sex? What is sex, or pleasure, without that? Why does satisfying 'desire to have sex' mean anything without sex?
Why not just jerk off? Or do heroin for that matter.
yeah, if sexual pleasure was not related to reproduction it would not have evolved to be a thing, so reproduction is its purpose in that sense. but i was referring to purpose as something that is determined by the user, so in that case sex would not have the same purpose for everyone.
in the case of eating, i would not say it is primarily for pleasure, but for an obese person it is, because they would not have to eat nearly as much if their primary purpose was sustenance.
in my opinion creating more people is not obviously valuable, so it may be a negative, idk.
satisfying the desire to have sex creates pleasure which is intrinsically valuable imo, just as you believe creating more people is valuable, i think pleasure is a good thing that is meaningful of itself.
jerking off is usually not as pleasurable. and heroin has side effects that can spiral out of control.
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We literally live in a society that has taboos on 20 year olds having children and is currently selecting its members out of the planetary gene pool. And let's not even get started on all the other ways that only non-reproductive sex is celebrated, from homosexuality to infanticide to ritual castration.
I don't think you can use the Efficient Taboo Hypothesis for this one.
Just making the point that all these moral claims are, or are attempts to be, about the practical results of the prescribed or proscribed actions. There are historical, correct reasons to dislike pedophilia in the literal sense! Evolutionary contingency could put us in places that, by 'local' moral standards, would be incredibly disgusting to us but natural to 'them' (as too happens between societies).
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