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A top level post about an extremely... divisive topic by an account with only 3 prior posts all made 3 years ago?
On the off chance you're not here to stir up shit, I recommend that you please try to be a more active and positively-contributing member of this community before posting top level comments about topics like this.
Contra @Jiro's usual supercilious sneering, when we see a post like this, no one is naive to the likelihood that it's a troll. Some of the people who argue with obvious trolls are just the sort of people who cannot resist responding even to troll-posts. OTOH, if an obvious controversial post is "long and grammatically correct" (in other words, it's actually making a coherent argument), the difference between "troll" and "someone making a sincere if inflammatory argument" is only in what their motivation is, which we generally cannot know.
Yeah, I looked at @DeepNeuralNetwork's history to see if he might be an alt of our old nazi-pedo friend or the other guy who insisted that not granting full adult rights and responsibilities to children is slavery. Is he? shrug Don't think so, doesn't have the same style. Is he a troll writing an effort-post to giggle and see how the Motte will react to "It should be legal to fuck 15-year-olds?" He could be. On the other hand, he might also really believe what he is saying. While I don't agree with his argument, I don't actually think it's insane on the face of it- there are lots of reasons for why the age of consent is the way it is today and not what it was in the 18th century, and overall, his post didn't read like your typical troll who just wants to fuck 15-year-old girls.
One of @ZorbaTHut's explicit goals for the Motte is to enable it to be a place where people can come here with blazing hot takes (sincerely held!) that couldn't find a fair audience anywhere else. Let people post them and argue them and take the brickbats and rotten tomatoes. Yes, sometimes that means enabling trolls who are just here to shit-stir. Of course sometimes those blazing hot takes are things like "Certain people should have bad things done to them," which crosses some other lines. And often those blazing hot takes descend into an exchange of insults and personal attacks, which crosses others.
Moderation has never been flawless here. We have a set of dials we can adjust up or down, and every adjustment has consequences. The OP got reported by several people basically saying "This didn't break the rules but I don't like it." I've seen this a lot lately. I mean... what are we supposed to do about that?
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It's a perfectly legitimate topic framed in a perfectly legitimate manner. I think one of the moderators of this website said a while ago something like "If we can get trolls to participate in a productive manner as part of their trolling, then we have won".
@Jiro
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You are right, of course. But people here seem to have bad troll detectors. As long as a post is long and grammatical (and nowaways, doesn't have too many signs of ChatGPT), someone falls for it every time.
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I don't have time to use this forum a lot, but I wanted insight from a more intelligent crowd than X on this topic. You don't have to engage.
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