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I don't think I noticed that, somehow. What sort of "pedo stuff" are we talking about, on the spectrum from toddler rape to the American "that bikini pic? She was 17 years and 364 days old, you monster"?
Well, in addition to what's been mentioned, some of the notable ones include this, this and this.
/images/17497538068451805.webp
Nicholas Decker is a piece of work.
Who is this person? I've never heard of them before.
This is where I first heard about them (?).
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Decker is the one who said it was good to murder the Tsar's small children because their genetics and education might have made them better than average, right?
Really drives home how no one ever considers themselves the villain.
I don't know if he/they/whatever said that.
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No, that was a twitter commie. Decker is an ancap who throws out spicy takes.
Huh. Now I need to track that other guy down and see if they had a similar pattern of flags or something.
Probably because he directly argued against the claim here.
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Let me preface that I haven't opened twitter in nearly 2 years and have no clue who Aella is. My moot just shares drama updates on discord and he thinks this was due to the fact that she appeals to the low value males, which pisses off radfems. But I don't understand the thought process behind openly tweeting sus pedo bait like this just weeks after the FBI came down on several members of the 764 group, some of whom were on twitter.
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I would put these in the "edgy sacred values trolling" (see below) and/or "America" category, which for me makes sense given that I'm currently (back) in a country where the age of consent is 14.
Yes, individually these and the below examples are edgy sacred values trolling, but the thing is the pattern.
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The one I saw mentioned (and I have no idea if this is true) was "An elderly woman will be tortured to death unless you have sex with a six year old. So, what are you going to do? Explain your reasoning and moral valences for your answer" (that's not the exact wording but the essence was 'would you/would you not rape a six year old to save an old woman from a horrible death?')
The only way that works is if the six year old consents to the sex, and how the hell is a six year old child going to consent to sex with an adult in any meaningful way? But if she thinks "yes a six year old can consent" due to "I was six when an adult had sex with me, and it makes me feel less like a victim to pretend I consented" then that makes some kind of sense.
This doesn't sound like "pedo stuff" so much as the usual exercise of pissing off normies by asking them to trade off sacred values (the concept has been floating around the LWsphere for a long time, I thought there was a canonical SSC citation but couldn't find it). I think parsing "so is A or B more sacred, in a contrived scenario where you have to choose between them" as "I want you to profane against both A and B" is just part of what sacredness feels like from the inside.
(Probably in fact here B is just considered more sacred, so it just loses in the same way "kidneys for money" invites the "you are an evil cannibal turbocapitalist" attack)
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Can I say that for all human-constructed trolley problems, I categorically place the moral blame for all outcomes on the constructor, not the one holding the switch? I get it they're unavoidable in some cases from natural causes, but this case is really just negotiating with terrorists.
I understand the catharsis in cheating to win the Kobayashi Maru challenge but it really is the cop out answer. Oh, so you're guarded and cynical and don't want to discuss sacred values? That's fine, you can use this maneuver to get out of it when it's an inappropriate time to have the discussion but are you genuinely just committed to never exploring which of your values plays master to the others? Too afraid of judgement for making a call?
Fighting the hypothetical is small talk, it's a dodge. It exchanges a kind of low grade cleverness to avoid substance.
I know which of my values are the masters. I have no interest in performing a puppet show for some stranger's amusement. I'm perfectly fine with blitzing through the online survey trolley problems to be told at the end "well you are consistent at least, you horrible monster" because I know the purpose of such surveys is to persuade me around to their way of holding sacred values, and I don't care if I'm thought of as a horrible monster by a bunch that I consider evil idiots.
Maybe you do but I consistently find that the sorts of people who resist thought experiments tend to have deeply conflicted world views that they never examine. As I said, if you're being accosted by some rude stranger feel free to dodge out and stick to small talk. But With people you know well who are curious about how you think? On a discussion forum where the whole purpose is battling out ideas? What's the point? You could just go do something else with your time.
Do you not understand that this is just like fourth wall breaking and pointless? The person asking you is just going to come back with some added contrivance to make this "actually I start a rebellion" dodge impossible because whether you're clever or heroic enough to overcome the scenario isn't what anyone cares about in this sort of conversation.
They're trying to see how other people think about certain value trade offs, would you do something horrible and disgusting to save a life? Does it matter if it's an elderly life you're saving? If your answer is no then that's a fine answer and you can justify it. Whether you'd then go and try to overthrow the society that put you in that situation is just not very interesting. Yes, very good, everyone agrees it'd be horrible to be put in that situation. Because we all agree with that you elaborating on just how angry you are at this imaginary entity forcing the least bad option is just kind of boring, especially if you're doing it to dodge that actual question.
What is your understanding and assessment of the loaded phrase "just asking questions"?
I think what you are seeing here is a more general application of the ideas behind the phrase.
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Where it's genuinely battling out ideas? That's fine. But too often it's "tell me your stupidly wrong notions so I can lead you by the hand to the Only True Correct Beliefs which I happen to hold" instead, so those kind of questions can go hang.
If you and someone else believe different things then this is the process of finding out where the underlying disagreement is. Seems pretty reasonable, if you're confident in your beliefs you should be able to object to the part of the hypothetical that is wrong. This is a perfectly fair way to investigate someone's beliefs.
Investigating, or trying to change? One of the rules of this joint is "no building consensus" and I think that's fair enough. If A wants to know why B thinks/doesn't think X is right or wrong, fine. If A is trying to persuade B that of course X is right (or wrong) and that B should change their mind, now we're getting into a grey area.
Because I've seen my share recently of "well of course all right-thinking people believe X is normal, moral, and good" with no room for "some people think X is wrong in good faith and with solid reasons".
There are some things I am not going to change someone's mind on and they're not going to change mine. I've had those arguments and those rows, more or less civil depending on how heated both parties got. So when "just askin' why" query number 999 comes along, I'm not interested in fighting over that old fight again.
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yeah, my position on the fat man problem is "shove the guy who created this problem in the first place onto the track".
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Possibly relevant link: AI Child Porn Will Probably Save Real Children
This is your brain on utilitarianism.
Sometimes it just doesn't matter what the cost/benefit tradeoff is, it's still wrong.
This is your brain on deontology. Sometimes it is better if fewer people suffer with less intensity.
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Well, with that one, I concur with the argument. Fight me?
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She's probably right but damn if that isn't the most autistic thing ever. It is not new that people will treat anything short of maximal condemnation of child porn as being pro-child abuse. I don't think that it should be that way, because it's better for said abused children if we can rationally discuss ways to better disincentivize what's happening to them. But for better or for worse that's how people are, they can handle zero rational discussion on this topic and I would say she should've known that.
The problem is that if you normalise certain activities through porn, they will eventually bleed through into the mainstream (e.g. for a recent example, heterosexual anal sex now being part of the expected sexual repertoire after formerly being something only or mostly found in porn; see here for 2014 'pressured into having anal sex' followed by 2018 'nah it's normal and fine' from the same magazine).
So normalising child porn may not lead to "nobody will ever have real life sex with kids", the same way that we still have rape and sexual assault even though there is access to porn. There's arguments tat availability of porn leads to less rape, but not no rape.
Okay, but guys who have no other sexual outlets than watching porn still want real life sexual encounters and even relationships. A paedophile (or should I use the preferred euphemism of 'Minor Attracted Person'?) may still desire a real sexual relationship with a child, even if 'as realistic as real' AI-generated child porn is available. And if the acceptance of using that AI porn means that over time, it wears down any resistance about "I can't have this in reality, that's wrong or society disapproves"? What then?
Yes, I realise I'm going for worst-case scenarios, but I am pessimist enough to think we should plan for worst-case scenarios. Making AI child porn legal, then finding out that "holy crap, this only inflames the desires of those using it, conditions them to think of it as normal, and then they try it in real life*, how were we to know?" would be the worst of all possible worlds.
*Presumably the AI-generated porn would have happy, laughing, fully-consenting six year olds engaging in these acts with adults, which my ignorant self can't help but think would condition the user to imagine that real six year olds would consent and be happy doing it. Unless you're producing stuff for the people who want and need 'no, I want crying and screaming and begging to stop' fantasy material, which may be a step too far for society until some brave pioneer breaks the taboo of producing 'you won't believe it's not real three year old rape!' stuff.
EDIT: Before anyone gets on to me, yes I agree that fake three year old rape porn is much better than the real thing. Best of all is to put out the eyes of watchers of said porn with sporks, but if we have to have it, then fake three year olds instead.
I don't think you have to normalize it if you make it legal. There's no need to put "literal toddlers" next to "teens", "mature" and "shemales" up on PornHub.
Just like in some countries addicts can get injected with heroin at government-run clinics, the same approach can be used there: pedophiles can visit government-run clinics, where a soundproof room with a PC securely connected to a government-run AI CSAM server is theirs for X minutes a week.
If it's legal, it will become normalised. If it's legal to have AI-generated porn, and it's legal to make, distribute, and consume AI generated child porn, then by what rules or laws do you tell AI Pornhub "sure, fake me up some incest porn with barely-legal sixteen year old hot blonde twins but never oh never six year olds"?
Gay marriage is the ur-example here: we went pretty damn quick from "gay marriage will not affect you in the slightest, if you don't like gay marriage then don't get gay married" to "well now everyone surely agrees that gay marriage is moral and normal and only horrible monster bigots could ever have objected to it".
Porn is about selling what society considers taboo/shameful to those willing to pay for it. Blue clubs and stag movies were early versions, as were the jokes about barbers and "something for the weekend" as they would sell condoms on the side. Oral sex is shocking and depraved? Even prostitutes won't do it (as in the case of the Marquis de Sade where an early trial had a prostitute testify that he wanted her to perform certain unnatural acts)? Well we'll show it in porn because it's the shocking spicy act people want to see and then over time that leaks into the mainstream so that now blowjobs are now just another normal act people do.
AI kiddie porn is the most taboo? Even the AI-generated stuff? You don't want to go to the government centre to access it? Never fear, for the right money we'll sell it to you so you can consume it at home. And then it goes onto the mainstream porn sites. Because after all, it's legal and even the government is providing it for the MAPs at their centres!
Unless you really do sign up to the deontological "the bad thing is people getting off to CP", I don't see how this even sketches a slippery slope that actually ends up somewhere bad. How do we get from "CP is decriminalised, but actual sexual acts with children are as illegal as they always were" to any greater prevalence of the latter? You have to contend with at least one great counterexample, which is that simultaneously with depictions of graphic violence (and even compelling simulations of engaging in it) becoming ever better and more widely available, actual violence is on the decline.
Gay marriage fell so fast because the underlying moral taboo (on gay sex) had collapsed many decades prior, following the collapse of either moral framework it could be derived from (Christianity, dominant masculinity). The condemnation of sex with children rests on a different framework (rejection of children's moral and contractual autonomy), which I don't see as declining at all - in fact, if anything, with rampant safetyism, trigger warnings and coddled college students, the principle that some are too young and innocent to manage their own affairs is ascendant.
Because in the lovely world we currently live in, bad things happen, and I'm fed-up of "this will never have bad consequences/how were we possibly to know this would happen?" two-step dance (currently happening with vaping, I am led to believe, for a very minor example of same).
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By making it illegal to make or distribute or possess, of course. Unless you're the government.
Yeah, because making ordinary porn illegal to make, distribute, or possess worked so well. And it's not like there are people taking the line that attempts to make ordinary porn hard to get is a threat to your liberty.
I hate to be that wet blanket, but if you make having AI generated child porn legal, then somebody has to make that AI porn. And it has to be distributed somehow. How will you square the circle of "it's illegal to make, distribute or possess this" with "we want paedophiles to have this to stop them consuming real child rape"? 'The government will do it' is not the answer, because the government is not providing legal heroin, for example (methadone maybe, but not the drugs the current crop of addicts want better than they want life).
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PornHub got with the program, the category is called "trans" now.
Though I don't think transwomen are particularly happy about it either way.
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