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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19650 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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IMO you do need an AoC, although the argument that sways me is contingent on the AIDS pandemic. Specifically, consent without knowing about HIV isn't fully informed, which means you need sex ed, which means you can't have 5-year-olds consenting to sex because lol good luck getting them to comprehend sex ed.

16-18 is way too high, though. If teens are lying about their ages to get sex, your AoC is too high. Sex ed for preteens and AoC at 13-14 is what I support. And if you get rid of AIDS I'd be willing to abolish it - it's the only one left that is a big deal (the rest are either curable, vaccinable, or so minor nobody really cares).

Even with no STDs, I support a common law age of consent. For example, if I were on a jury and a prosecutor was trying to convict a child molester of rape or sexual assault, I would vote guilty if the child is under an age of reasonable intelligence. All I would need as evidence is a psychological examination that shows the child does not understand sex or its consequences. I would never buy this for an intelligent adolescent.

The weird thing about reading things in isolation from the mod queue is my first thought was "What the hell did Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez do now?"

reading things in isolation from the mod queue

(or from the firehose page)

You can't just "get rid of AIDS" while tolerating the #1 enabler of it: homosexuality.

Making a vaccine or a cure would work. That's what removed syphilis, gonorrhea, and hepatitis as problem STDs.

(Technically, there already is a cure for HIV - bone marrow transplant from someone with CCR5-Δ32 - but that cure is useless because either you take such doses of immunosuppressants that you effectively have AIDS anyway, or you get graft vs. host disease and die even quicker. I mean a useful cure.)

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