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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language?

Assume Prisoner's Dilemma rules where you saw the other player pushed the "defect" button right in front of you?

But really, they only have two options, and one of them is praising murderism (i.e. it's blatantly sexual, but that's fine). And sure, you can punish them for being part of the tribe that poisoned the well with safetyism for everything that isn't their pet project, but they have the power and incentive to deflect and deflect they shall.

That said, the mistake-theory approach to drag kids, and its ultimate steelman, is "safetyism isn't all it's cracked up to be, take risks once in a while", which is why I (and I suspect this is probably close to the political center) actually have a difficult time outright condemning it under those rules. Put another way, I have legitimately no idea how "It's not going to lick itself" is supposed to seduce anyone capable of understanding what that phrase means.

If grooming is the intent, it's clearly not particularly effective, and isn't going to work on a straight viewer regardless. In fact, the Junior Anti-Sex League is incapable of grooming straight kids, and even gay kids should be beyond their reach for the same reasons; that would require attractive teenage same-sex participants, and as far as I'm aware, Pride has a shortage of them. (Nudists are basically never the people anyone actually wants to see nude.)

often by putting inappropriate pressure on them to participate

Every Boomer that I know talks about their parents sending them to music lessons where the teacher would whack your hands if you did it wrong. Now their children are doing the same thing to their grandchildren, except this time they leer at you and grab your ass instead. And while I would prefer this not happen to anyone, I can accept it not being anything more than surface-level harmful, and it's better for kids that suffer this to recognize that their authority figures put them into an uncomfortable situation for political reasons and update how much they trust authority accordingly.