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Back in 2021, Reuters published the following about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial:
"not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers. Instead, the Online Right has gone in a very different direction, being convinced that it would severely disrupt the status quo if they could prove the Epstein murder/pedo ring conspiracy is true. ActuallyATleilaxuGhola asserts that the only reason people would doubt that Epstein was murdered is a desire to avoid a backlash against the status quo or Jews:
I think it's the "Epstein was murdered" people who are engaging in motivated reasoning, since the evidence for the conspiracy is very weak. Instead of another perhaps pointless argument about the evidence, let's look at the underlying assumption that "exposure" of the supposed conspiracy would "disrupt the status quo." Would that actually happen?
Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.
Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.
You may say that, over the long term, voters will be more open to anti-establishment voices. I wouldn't be so sure. Won't take long for the establishment to come up with its equivalent of "the Soviet Union failed because it wasn't communist enough." They'll point out that the vast majority of the accused/convicted individuals are men, so we need more control of male sexuality. Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up. But if you want there to be a "reckoning" over this, it's unavoidable. If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power? After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition. Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?
Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.
You are again purposely ignoring and denying what people mean when they talk about the situation. It's a ring of geriatric men trafficking and abusing a bunch of underage girls. Most people would agree that such a thing can be described as a pedo ring.
Nobody cares that technically, abusing 16 year old girls does not meet the criteria for a DSM-5 diagnosis for the mental disorder. People are still going to call them pedos.
Then people are wrong. I discussed this before.
Let me put it more plainly and provocatively. The problem with calling a 50yo who fucks a 16yo teen in a clearly coercive setting "pedophile" is that you are equating something which is deeply morally objectionable with something which is fine.
In case there is any doubt about which is which, yes, I am claiming that there is nothing morally wrong with being a pedophile, in the technically sense of the word.
Now obviously, it is a sexual orientation which sucks greatly for anyone with a remotely working moral compass (and will lead to behavior which is very wrong for those without one), and I thank my maker that I am into women with tits instead so I have access to ethically produced porn and ethical opportunities to have sex (even if being bi would be strictly preferable in that regard).
Sure, there is a large overlap between child-fuckers and pedophiles, but my problem is with child-fuckers as child-fuckers. If some asshole decides to sexually abuse a kid, I don't give a rats ass if they were into kids or watching MILF porn at the same time to keep aroused, they should go to prison either way.
Using pedos as a synonym for child abusers is bad. Expanding it to include creepy sex pest-ry targeting underage victims is even worse. I also do not think that the general vibe of "your sexual orientation makes you the likeliest group to be deported to death camps without anyone else saying a word in your defense" is actually very effective at keeping ethical pedos (who are not complicit in sexual abuse) ethical, probably a society which was meh about ethical pedos but very much against child abusers (which mostly describes western legal systems) would offer a better gradient.
I am not much of a linguistic prescriptionist, normally. I use to beg the question correctly, but it is not a hill I am willing to die on. Still, words matter, and I think that on this forum we should strive to use accurate terminology even if 85% of the general population is using it in a more diffuse manner, especially if it involves emotionally charged words which are intentionally repurposed for clear political goals.
As another example (without a strict 1:1 correspondence), consider a (perhaps hypothetical) attempt to redefine "rape" as "any sex act perpetrated by a man which involved a woman who either did not consent or regretted consenting subsequently". (It is not entirely divorced from common usage, people have sex under the influence of voluntarily consumed drugs which would inhibit their legal ability to consent all the time, and end up in situations where they can decide on the next day that they were raped (and then decide to report it or not) or retroactively grant consent. (Perhaps not legally, but practically. Legally, "last night when I was dead drunk, I urged my hot husband to fuck my brains out and he did" might still be rape, but unless she bring that up in divorce proceedings eventually, nobody cares.)) Still, I would definitely argue against anyone here who would try to push such a new definition, because it hopelessly muddies the water by using the same term for different things which are not remotely morally equivalent.
There's nothing morally wrong with being a psychopath either but the stigma around that term isn't going away anytime soon either. Having a mental disorder may be morally neutral but the results are not for the vast majority of those afflicted, so I can't blame the public for having prejudice.
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