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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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I'm not, strictly speaking, a paedophile

I don't believe people who look at (or even write) porn of anime schoolgirls are generally child-molesters-to-be, future-thailand-visitors, or groomers-in-training. That said, this is not a sentence anyone should find themselves saying. Consider not doing things you'd rather die than have people know about you?

Thank you for the frank and interesting post though.

...At which point I learned a rather-vital piece of information: the courts uphold these crazy laws when cases are actually prosecuted, but the police consider them a crock of shit and don't actually arrest people for them except in highly-unusual circumstances. So I got in no legal trouble whatsoever, and the motivation to kill myself evaporated.

This is a common intuition gap between the general public and the legal system. Most people walk around in blissful ignorance about how common things like sex crimes, domestic violence, or driving with substance abuse are. If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.

Necessarily, the police exercise discretion in who to throw the book at. This state-of-affairs doesn't mix well with moral panics about racism, but that's another topic.

This is a common intuition gap between the general public and the legal system. Most people walk around in blissful ignorance about how common things like sex crimes, domestic violence, or driving with substance abuse are. If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.

Necessarily, the police exercise discretion in who to throw the book at. This state-of-affairs doesn't mix well with moral panics about racism, but that's another topic.

It doesn't mix well with a lot of things; when prosecutions are massively underdetermined by the law, they're being determined by something else, which leaves a gaping hole for corruption and political repression.

If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.

That or we'd get Singapore.

I mean, maybe we'd need to cane them on national TV rather than incarcerate them, but you get the point.