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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29295 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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NY Mag published a piece defending Yoel Roth from Musk's "smears", declaring that Musk "falsely implied" that Roth had advocated for normalising child sexualisation in his old tweets.

Turns out, he's apparently a Zionist too! Wonder how this will sit with sections of the left rigorously defending Roth knowing that he probably lobbies for an apartheid state, or the rigorously pro-Israel right exposing his bizarre tweets. And I doubt Musk is in any way interested in exposing the Israeli lobby.

It's not like Musk, specifically, has a history of insulting people by calling them pedophiles, right? It has been fascinating watching certain parts of right wing politics re-invent a Satanic Panic about Pedophilia over the last couple years.

Just that there has been a satanic panic once doesn't mean there can't be a pedophile-using organisation that uses allegations of a satanic panic, or directly whips up a satanic panic as cover for its operations.

The more low-IQ conspiracy theorists are around some topic, the worse is the signal to noise ratio.

A frequent ways spies recruit people to do things is ask them to do something relatively innocuous for them. Once you have done that, you're forced to cooperate, because they can threaten you with revealing the cooperation.

Pedophiles are ideal; once they find out someone is a pedophile, they can get them to cooperate just by asking.

No need to get them to do them a favor, thus implicating them.

They don't even have to spell it out.

"Why are you asking me to risk so much for you?"

"You damn well know why. Now be a good boy and get to it. We'll pay you, don't worry."

It's interesting how this particular manner of writing is common among people who are vaguely "conspiracy theorists", or who are vaguely but ominously musing about dark, shadowy conspiracies.

Very frequent line breaks, jumping from topic to topic, a narrative/story-like flow, vague hints.

[not saying this as evidence your points are wrong, good points are sometimes made with weird modes of speaking, but association is strong]

Where am I being "vague" ? The existence of pedophiles wasn't invalidated by there having been a panic about them.

Neither does panic about a non-existent nonsensical conspiracy make actual conspiracies less likely.

There's been at least two elite pedophile conspiracies that have come to light that are rather .. solid- the Dutroux affair, and the Pedophile Information Exchange / MI6 thing.

The former is well known, and seeing as secret service leadership is 'elite'. In the 1970s, the deputy head of MI6 being a pedophile is significant.. During the same time frame, the head of MI6 was Oldfield, who in late 1980s admitted to having had sex with 'houseboys' in the 40s and 50s.

In retrospect, the leadership of MI6 during the 1970s included a pedophile deputy director, and at least a homosexual director.

As pedophilia and homosexuality are both rather rare, it seems very unlikely that they did not know about each other, and got into these position by complete accident.

There's nothing 'vague' about saying people on whom blackmail material exists are more easily influenced either.

There's been at least two elite pedophile conspiracies that have come to light that are rather .. solid- the Dutroux affair, and the Pedophile Information Exchange / MI6 thing.

sure. but 'some elites are pedophiles' isn't surprising. there are a lot of elites. hundreds of thousands at least, certainly if we can look to the past and any area of significance in any significant country. There's gonna be some pedophile rings in any randomly selected group of 200k people. I mean, there have been "12,421 individuals" in the US Congress since the US's founding! that's just one specific very important institution!

As pedophilia and homosexuality are both rather rare, it seems very unlikely that they did not know about each other, and got into these position by complete accident.

this is vague. "unlikely got into position by accident". it's not actually saying anything. it's vaguely implied pedophilia somehow makes one elite.

There's nothing 'vague' about saying people on whom blackmail material exists are more easily influenced either.

yes, that is very vague and ambiguous! "people on whom [what] blackmail material exists are [how much] more easily influenced [by whom, to what, for what purpose]"

As pedophilia and homosexuality are both rather rare, it seems very unlikely that they did not know about each other, and got into these position by complete accident.

pedophilia and homosexuality aren't independent here, for actual pedophiles (in the sense of 'wanting to molest 12yos) 95% aren't "straight". Also, yoyoel's thesis is discussing "16yos using grindr", which is very different than "i want to molest 12yos".

sure. but 'some elites are pedophiles' isn't surprising.

The people in question were director (certainly homosexual, possibly a pedophile) and deputy director of MI6 (almost certainly).

Positions to which people are not appointed without having undergone serious vetting.

Positions that have perhaps seen, during the entire 20th century been held by only 20-30 different people.

So these people have either kept their homosexuality completely secret, despite being in a position, where they were supposedly vetted, or they were part of some homosexual conspiracy in the secret service. The former seems rather less likely than the latter.

yes, that is very vague and ambiguous! "people on whom [what] blackmail material exists are [how much] more easily influenced [by whom, to what, for what purpose]"

Nonsensical objection. Having covert influence over a person in an influential position is of interest to every conspiracy out there, from simple criminal organisation, to foreign spies, etc.

Head of secret service is one maybe top 10 most important posts in a nation.

Also, yoyoel's thesis is discussing "16yos using grindr", which is very different than "i want to molest 12yos".

One of the people in question, Hayman, was investigated because he lost a large amount of pornographic pedophilic material and it was traced back to him.

Positions that have perhaps seen, during the entire 20th century been held by only 20-30 different people.

the idea is that there's lots of different positions, and if instead of MI5 director as pedo the DCCC chair or army general were pedos that'd be your evidence instead

So these people have either kept their homosexuality completely secret, despite being in a position, where they were supposedly vetted, or they were part of some homosexual conspiracy in the secret service. The former seems rather less likely than the latter.

you swapped 'homosexual' for 'pedophile'? homosexuality isn't illegal in current_year, and in the '50s you could keep it secret by just not telling anyone. How is 'not telling anyone you're gay' less plausible than 'secret service homo conspiracy'

Nonsensical objection. Having covert influence over a person in an influential position is of interest to every conspiracy out there, from simple criminal organisation, to foreign spies, etc.

your claim is a "pedophile secret service conspiracy". there's a profound difference between 'one secret agency head was a pedo' and 'there is a world-spanning pedo conspiracy enforced by blackmail'. If head of "secret service" is '10 most important positions in a nation' ... and there are 10 nations ... 10x10 is 100, 1 in 100 people are pedos, nothing to explain!

you swapped 'homosexual' for 'pedophile'? homosexuality isn't illegal in current_year, and in the '50s you could keep it secret by just not telling anyone. How is 'not telling anyone you're gay' less plausible than 'secret service homo conspiracy'

The secrets "weren't really kept", if you were to read the links, at least one of these people had nasty rumors swirling all around him. And iirc, the British counter-intelligence service filed on Hayman all but concluded he was a pedophile.

If head of "secret service" is '10 most important positions in a nation' ... and there are 10 nations ... 10x10 is 100, 1 in 100 people are pedos, nothing to explain!

You're making the unwarranted assumption we know about all of these conspiracies. It's far more likely most of such networks are never exposed, so we only ever know about few of them..

With Dutroux, we don't even know who was in on it, though given the cover-up it must have been someone important.

Positions to which people are not appointed without having undergone serious vetting.

This was the UK though; that vetting consisted of asking his Oxford/Cambridge schoolmates if he was a good chap. Which backfired on them quite often when all the guy's buddies and professors were fellow members of the communist-homopaedo/theatre club who were all working for the Soviets too.

That guy doesn't have a corpus of work about adult-child sex relations.

Here is Roth's dissertation, available for free for download.

Here's the abstract of the paper:

Since its launch in 2009, the geosocial networking service Grindr has become an increasingly mainstream and prominent part of gay culture, both in the United States and globally. Mobile applications like Grindr give users the ability to quickly and easily share information about themselves (in the form of text, numbers, and pictures), and connect with each other in real time on the basis of geographic proximity. I argue that these services constitute an important site for examining how bodies, identities, and communities are translated into data, as well as how data becomes a tool for forming, understanding, and managing personal relationships. Throughout this work, I articulate a model of networked interactivity that conceptualizes self-expression as an act determined by three sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting sets of affordances and constraints: (1) technocommercial structures of software and business; (2) cultural and subcultural norms, mores, histories, and standards of acceptable and expected conduct; and (3) sociopolitical tendencies that appear to be (but in fact are not) fixed technocommercial structures. In these discussions, Grindr serves both as a model of processes that apply to social networking more generally, as well as a particular study into how networked interactivity is complicated by the histories and particularities of Western gay culture. Over the course of this dissertation, I suggest ways in which users, policymakers, and developers can productively recognize the liveness, vitality, and durability of personal information in the design, implementation, and use of gay-targeted social networking services. Specifically, I argue that through a focus on (1) open-ended structures of interface design, (2) clear and transparent articulations of service policies, and the rationales behind them, and (3) approaches to user information that promote data sovereignty, designers, developers, and advocates can work to make social networking services, including Grindr, safer and more representative of their users throughout their data’s lifecycle.

Can you tell me, in what sense is the paper "about adult-child sex relations?"

I read the section you're describing (it starts with the last paragraph on page 246 of the thesis, PDF page 259) and I don't think it's accurate to characterize Roth's statements as dismissing the concern as "impossible/problem on privacy grounds." Rather, while acknowledging the possibility Grindr may be "too lewd or too hook-up oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers" he's worried that underage users may still use the platform to network with other peers in ways that don't involve having sex and removing this platform for them to have those discussions. To which point he recommends Grindr take steps to separate the lewd/hookup purpose of the app from the more general discussion platform it enables. One illustrative page:

These accounts echo many of the classic tropes of online child safety narratives: the essentially dangerous nature of new media; the need to impose strict, top-down controls on how minors use the internet; a digital reincarnation of “stranger danger” in the figure of the older male sexual predator; and the importance of raising children to be safety-savvy and highly private. Yet, absent from these discussions is even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth. While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.

I'm also curious how this makes him a hypocrite.

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The idea of using a hook-up/dating app for finding friends is... bizarre to me, to say the least, but well maybe it happens. I can see how maybe it's a thing in the gay community, but I still find it bizarre.

I am told by straight friends that they do this too. Many women seek social interactions on tinder with the lure of possible sex to rope guys in.

I also know of one very hot but socially awkward straight guy who does this. Step 1: display abs and do hookup. Step 2: friends with benefits. Step 3: some of the friends with benefits become genuine friendships. Or maybe he's just buff nerd bodybuilder with a harem, I can't tell.

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More comments

There's a lot more space in gay communities for the concept of a friend that you like, have fucked or could fuck, but aren't especially sexually compatible with, sometimes to extremes. And Grindr's long pretended it wasn't just a hookup app, but also a local community social media app; I don't know whether this was to avoid getting booted by Apple or a genuine marketing approach, but cfe here for someone complaining that they found more Facebook friends on the platform than fuckbuddies.

There's also an issue that's broader than just finding friends, but broader communication. There's a lot of things that... while not easy for straight people, have broader social transmission of knowledge, in ways that a lot of gay people don't. As bad of romantic advice or that any romantic comedy or agony aunt might be, having Dan Savage's weekly notes is worse. Some are only weakly romantic, and even some of the non-platonic ones aren't very sexual, but there's a lot of awkwardness in any puberty. Worse, a lot of norms for gay stuff are highly regional: the extent it might be appropriate to discuss someone's orientation or gender identity without them having explicitly said they were out in a given context is drastically different from Massachusetts to California to Florida to Kentucky. Many of these are difficult to communicate in mixed-orientation communities or even mixed LGB communities (trivial example: "how do I let down a girl that's hitting on me, possibly without having to come out?").

I agree that Grindr's especially poorly-suited for such purposes, but I think (while poorly written) in that paper "including", here, is meant to modify "services providers like" rather than Grindr, specifically. And while Roth overlooked a few SFW gay-focused online phpBB-style groups that do exist, the high difficulty of maintaining such services in a Discord/Twitter/so on world is pretty hard to overstate.

That said, I'd go further to suggest that Roth is incredibly blithe about the issues such networks face, both obvious and not-obvious. Even non-sexuality-focused social networks face serious challenges (eg: this was the explicit purpose behind the recent report-to-Mojang function for Minecraft). I think Bernd overstates some of the problems the furry fandom has, but they definitely exist, and perhaps worse they exist as much or more in SFW-specific spaces because predators can tell that such a larger percentage of common users are younger. Fighting to keep division of NSFW content from a FFXIV free company's discord is a constant battle. And I'm starting to see signs of a similar-enough pattern happening or having happened in and around VR spheres.

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Not a hypocrite, necessarily, but the three cases of sexual assault he discusses, which were facilitated by Grindr, are:

(1) Threesome arranged by two adult guys with under-18 (doesn't say how much under 18 so could be 17 year old)

(2) HIV-positive guy had sex with 15 year old

(3) Guy sexually assaulted 14 year old, met on Grindr

Roth makes the point (that every sex ed promoter makes) that even if Grindr does try to keep it over-18s there are probably younger gay guys using it, and that they'll be having sex with strangers anyway, so all Grindr can do is try and be aware that there are under 18 users and make it easier and safer for them (and also, yeah, it's up to the parents etc. to keep their kids out of trouble).

That's not necessarily advocating for "sure, adults should be able to hook up with 14 year olds" but like I said, it's the same pro-sex ed message: the kids are gonna be doing it anyway, so all you can do is make sure they know to use condoms and birth control, even if legally 12 year olds should not be having sex.

I'm more surprised you can get a doctorate in philosophy just for writing a paper on a hook-up app. We're not exactly talking Plato's Academy, are we? (or maybe we are, if the attendees of the Academy were also hooking up with younger guys for sex).

I quoted Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance last week and had to look up the exact wording. It was, in fact, Plato arguing for (and against) the special relationship between boy and lover. The broader context is...still incredibly gay.

So, yes.

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