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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   27135 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I think you shouldn't downvote user Celestial-body-NOS for telling his anti-HBD position. He answers questions, does not engage in obscurantism and does not claim his position was proven beyond doubt by some decades ago. I think that it's where anti-HBD actually comes from: that all humans have soul that is indivisible, preexisting, made by God, has one bodily experience and returns to God after.

I sympathize with your complaint, but it's just the way things are here - if you are standing your ground on an unpopular opinion, you will get downvoted.

That said, @YoungAchamian is correct- starting a top-level thread to complain about another thread is generally bad form. Address it in the thread, or if you really think it deserves its own thread, maybe take the effort to frame it as a general discussion about how and why Motte users upvote and downvote things so it's not just "I'm mad about this one thread."

Wrong location?

no, i intended that

A number of stories I vaguely follow have largely been ignored by this space. To start discussion:

Ukraine

Back in November, there was discussion about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk, encirclement of Ukrainian troops and collapse of the frontline:

Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore

It seems like the capeshit arc rages on, and yet another prediction of Ukrainian (or Russian, for that matter) collapse goes in the dustbin. Deepstatemap shows the UA holding onto a corner of Pokrovsk, the ISW map doesn't seem to have moved significantly, there haven't been any MSM news articles on Pokrovsk since December (?!), Russian economic collapse seems yet to materialize. Does anyone have more insight?

Measles makes a comeback in the US - who wants some lockdowns?

2025 recorded ~2500 measles cases in the US, and 733 recorded so far in 2026. This is the highest number of cases since about 1990, and for the 90s/2000s we saw low double-digit numbers of cases. A handful of children have died. Solely based on the numbers, I think you'd expect a case or two of encephalitis but I'm unsure. The biggest outbreaks are in Spartanburg county, South Carolina (Trump - 66% of the vote), Gaines county, Texas (Trump won 91% of the vote) and Mohave county, Arizona (Trump won 77% of the vote). As far as I can tell, there are no real cities in any of these counties. We're seeing a remarkable inversion where historically infectious disease outbreaks would start in the cities and people would flee to the suburbs/countryside. Maybe my next startup idea should be a chain of sanatoriums (sanatoria?) in NYC or SF.

Trans identification decreasing?

Several months late to the party, but in October a study came out suggesting the number of trans students applying to Brown had roughly halved, yoy. I suppose it's early to be declaring victory given that the data/methodology don't seem particularly rock-solid, but I'm definitely chalking it as evidence supporting my claim that there is a hardcore group of genuinely trans people, while the significant increases were rebellious teens and some better way to rebel will crop up to replace it. At the least, it's evidence that the doomers and blackpillers claiming lines go up are wrong.

Anecdotally, I've heard gen Z college students get off on being offensive. In 15-20 years Millenials will be even more deeply uncool and taking the place of boomers, while the alphas and betas rebel and move leftwards to areas we can't even imagine (but get ready for AI girlfriends. They'll be called AI-Attracted Individuals, and I'm planting a flag in the AIAI acronym right now).

Poopgate

In the most momentous news since Biden fell off a bike, leftist social media has been circulating a Forbes video claiming to show Trump soiling himself at the 0:34 mark (you'll have to find it on youtube yourself, sorry - and turn up your audio). We've now been blessed with Yahoo News' headline 'No credible evidence Trump pooped himself during executive order signing', which is interesting given the video that millions of people have watched.

It will be interesting watching Trump's mental faculties evolve over the next three years. Biden was notably sharper in 2020 than in his disastrous 2024 debate performance. Presumably Trump won't tolerate handlers the same way Biden did, so it seems like a situation that could rapidly dissolve into a ahem shitshow.

I wish you'd include a link to the old Ukraine discussions, as it would be nice to go through and downgrade my opinion of certain forum posters' forecasting ability relative to the confidence they projected in Ukraine's impending doom.

This forum has a lot of pro-Russian (or anti-Western is probably a better term for them) posters who are smart enough not to go full "just 2 more weeks!!!" but who still fall for a lot of the pro-Russian propaganda overall. I vaguely recall a post involving a new Russian missile that would be a wunderwaffe.

As always, Ukraine could experience upsets at any time, but the likelihood of that at any given point is relatively low compared to just muddling along as usual.

Sorry, I was actively looking at the thread I had in mind and just forgot to link it. It's this one.

Thank you for the link. That's a pretty juicy one. That sneering, spiteful attitude. Claiming America started the war. Getting pushback in the comments and responding that other people offsite had unrealistic expectations without linking anything. Even seeing "majestic capeshit arc" in context is worth a chuckle.

As one of the sort of pro-Russian regulars who otherwise never happened to make such predictions I can only make the following observation for now: during every single winter the USSR was engaged in WW2 they completed at least one successful offensive. Compared to this the Russian performance in this war is indeed found wanting. However, it's also true that as of now the Ukrainians had three whole summers to complete the victorious final counteroffensive they and their Western propagandists have been predicting since Spring 2023 which was supposed to be some sort of re-run of North Vietnam's Spring Offensive of 1975 or the Croatian Army's Operation Storm in 1995.

I'm staunchly pro-Western and have been following Ukraine relatively closely for its entire duration. I recall the hype for the summer 2023 offensive, but I don't recall much widespread hype for summer 2024, and I really don't recall anything for summer 2025 nor upcoming 2026.

Fair enough. I guess this depends on one's willingness to subject oneself to trashy FAFOist Twitter feeds and comment sections of various sorts (Youtube, Reddit etc). I've seen some people confidently predict a counteroffensive that will definitely succeed the coming summer. Either way, my point is that the Atlanticist promotion of the Ukrainian nationalist cause only makes any conceivable sense if such a swift counteroffensive happens and succeeds. The other options are a war of attrition or a peace deal, and even you're the biggest cynic on the planet whose only priority in any of this is weakening Russia, I think it's probably still a bad idea to compel the Ukrainian state to eventually grind itself down to dust and thus leave the Southwestern borders of Russia without that bulwark.

You fell head over heels for the obvious fake Selzer poll despite being tell you otherwise. Have you downgraded your forecasting ability?

Excuse you, "obvious" fake? Not at all, it was just muddled in what it was picking up! I have that from the horse's mouth 😁

The Des Moines Register released a poll saying we were up, 47 to 44. Sheila, for one, didn’t believe it. “We’re not winning in Iowa,” she said. But since the polling firm, Selzer & Company, was one of the most reputable, she suspected it was picking up something positive for us: perhaps a shift in the votes of suburban women, or perhaps Republican women moving to our corner."

Harris, Kamala. 107 Days (p. 268). Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.

I'm blocking Zeke since he mostly just posted ad hominems instead of actual arguments when responding to me. I can't see his comment. What does this have to do with Ukraine?

  • -18

I don’t mostly pet ad hominems. I just find it beyond rich that you are gloating about people’s forecasting opinion when you were taken in by the most obviously bad forecast. Glass house and all.

In fact you blocked me for pointing out your failure of forecasting due to your worldview.

Blocking is petty, and announcing you have blocked someone is extremely petty. If you want to know what someone you have blocked is saying about/to you, you need to unblock him or view the board without being logged in.

Blocking people certainly isn't petty if they consistently resort to ad hominems. Attacking the speaker rather than their arguments ought to result in a mod action unless there are exceptional circumstances IMO since it almost always degenerates to heat > light, but that's not really enforced here. I wish there was something like Twitter's mute functionality as that's what I'd prefer over full blocking, but if blocking is the only thing I have then that's what I'll use.

But you're right, I should probably have just ignored this. Fruit from a rotten tree.

but that's not really enforced here

Yes it is. We just don't always agree with you what constitutes an attack. Many people are maximally sensitive to anything said to them, and want maximum charity when interpreting anything said by them.

If you consider your behavior in posts like these to be fine, then I would not consider you to have a very good definition of what constitutes an ad hominem

Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.

you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll

you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.

You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit

Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.

More comments

Deepstate are as reliable as the numbers that Ukraine MOD produced about their AA effectiveness. ISW are marginally better. How many hours per day there is electricity in Kiev is better indicator how the war is going. Not saying this sarcastically - Russia right now is doing their best to keep Ukraine in the dark. So by how dark is - you can think of how the war is going. Also this hurts their GDP quite a lot - it makes the funding gap even bigger.

It seems like the capeshit arc rages on, and yet another prediction of Ukrainian (or Russian, for that matter) collapse goes in the dustbin. Deepstatemap shows the UA holding onto a corner of Pokrovsk, the ISW map doesn't seem to have moved significantly, there haven't been any MSM news articles on Pokrovsk since December (?!), Russian economic collapse seems yet to materialize. Does anyone have more insight?

Pokrovsk and Mirnograd have effectively fallen, but there's simply no way Russia can convert this or any other conquest into a massive rout to the Dnieper. It can push and probe along the whole frontline and exploit any local weaknesses until Ukraine scrambles enough reserves to plug the hole. It can slowly move the frontline in the Donbass so it can, in the worst case, neutralize the contradiction between Russian and Ukrainian demands.

But both countries are basically looking at the economies more than they are looking at the front. Ukraine's is on European life support, Russia's is circling round the drain. The real "not-loser" will be the one that can recover better, that's why Trump with his "let's just all make more money together" approach to diplomacy is so vital for Russia, Europe has whipped itself into a frenzy and keeps sabotaging peace talks by insisting on terms that ensure Russia will have a harder time recovering from the war, knowing full well that this only prolongs the fighting.

The real "not-loser" will be the one that can recover better,

I disagree. It is perfectly possible for two belligerents to both lose as opposed to the counterfactual of not fighting a war. Ukraine will most certainly be worse off than if they had just written of the Crimea and the two 'rebel' oblasts. Russia will most certainly be worse off than if Putin had never invaded.

that's why Trump with his "let's just all make more money together" approach to diplomacy is so vital for Russia, Europe has whipped itself into a frenzy and keeps sabotaging peace talks by insisting on terms that ensure Russia will have a harder time recovering from the war, knowing full well that this only prolongs the fighting.

If the West had simply wanted to stop the fighting, we could just not have supported Ukraine, thus allowing Putin to win decisively. We supported them both for moral and pragmatic reasons: punishing defectors to the international rule-based order when we can is good, and weakening a big NATO opponent by making the wars they are waging disastrously expensive in people and materiel is sound strategy.

Last time I checked (which is a while ago), the main obstacles to a peace deal were that Russia wanted territory it does not currently hold and Ukraine wants some security guarantee so that it does not find Russia coming for the next slice in a decade.

At the end of the day, the people who need to be convinced of a peace deal are Zelenskyy and Putin. If they want to make peace, there is little the US or Europe could do to stop them. Europe being more willing to support Ukraine than Trump is hardly feels like 'evil EU thwarting Peacebringer Trump's visionary plan for peace'.

I disagree. It is perfectly possible for two belligerents to both lose as opposed to the counterfactual of not fighting a war.

You and I mean the same thing, there will be no winners in this war. But someone will be able to say they haven't been shafted as much as the other.

Russia is waging a territory-centric war to secure the Donbas, probably so they can declare victory and wind down operations as much as possible. Ukraine is more attrition-aligned but territory is still necessary because it's good PR when Pokrovsk/Kupyansk/??? Holds. Syrsky is known as General 200 and loves his 'meat' counterattacks, but the Russians are performing similarly brutal operations. The Europeans have tried to pick up the slack from Trump but Belgium refused to liquidate frozen Russian assets. So, who really knows what's happening?

it's good PR when Pokrovsk/Kupyansk/??? Holds.

It’s not just that. Once Ukraine gets pushed off its major fortification line around the Donbas and into fields and open steppe, preventing a major collapse of front line gets much harder and more costly. Notice how fast the front is moving along the southern sector. That offensive spent three years jammed up on the Avdiivka-Donetsk-Vuhledar fortifications but once it got passed that it accelerated rapidly.

@Chrisprattalpharaptr

It’s not going great for Ukraine. Losing Pokrovsk is bad because it was a major logistical hub for the whole front. The last major fortification line at Sloviansk-Kramantorsk-Konstantivka is rapidly being surrounded. Once that goes the eastern front is basically cooked. There are also minor incursions into Kharkiv oblast that are gradually being developed into a more major offensive. The Zaprozhia axis is collapsing.

And like @Lizzardspawn was saying, their air defense is basically gone and their logistics are rapidly being diced up with airstrikes. I don’t know what the casulties/manpower situation is but my guess is “not great”.

Overall I would say July-August is when the oh-shit moment comes and it becomes obvious they could lose the eastern half of the country.

Overall I would say July-August is when the oh-shit moment comes and it becomes obvious they could lose the eastern half of the country.

Alright, we'll see if I remember to check back in this summer.

I have heard variations of this every few months for four years now, it’s always the same. Some random town I’ve never heard of with a population of 300 is about to fall which will cause the entire Ukrainian defense to collapse in a matter of days. Nobody is more consistently wrong than pro-Russian “realist” posters on The Motte. I know nothing about the situation but I know you’re wrong

Nobody is more consistently wrong than pro-Russian “realist” posters on The Motte. I know nothing about the situation but I know you’re wrong

Hey, if this is what you actually believe I have a proposal for you - I'm willing to bet a few hundred USD that Russia ultimately wins the war, the same wager that I offered back in the days when this forum was on reddit. If us pro-Russian "realist" posters are so consistently wrong, this is just going to be free money for you.

The entire incident has convinced me that "cold hearted realism" is as much a fantasy of the speaker as any idealism.

You won’t be talking so tough once Stinky (population 265) has fallen.

Repent, westoid. The spare room in Kovalenko's dacha has been captured with only 300 casualties.

Gaines county, Texas

A short while ago, someone made a comment which mentioned that technology and wealth seem to be utterly failing at making us happier, and (IIRC rhetorically) asked who could have foreseen that. I was starting to write up my non-rhetorical response, about how the Mennonite wariness of technology is in part specifically due to their having foreseen the risks of being trapped into dependence on some technologies (and the wealth they bring) which end up decreasing our interdependence on our fellow human beings, which weakens the bonds of community we form, which are far more important to human happiness than material wealth.

And then while doing a few searches to get quotes, I ran across the deaths of Kayley Fehr (a 6 year old Mennonite girl) and Daisy Hildebrand (an 8 year old Mennonite girl).

There's still a lot to be said about the distinction between religious laws (Mennonite communities do not prohibit vaccine use!) and religious culture (Mennonites in West Texas only have something like an 80% measles vaccination rate, well under what's believed to be needed for "herd immunity"), or about the pain of balancing Type I vs Type II errors, but I can't bring myself to write it.

As someone who never heard of Gaines county I looked up the Wikipedia article on it out of curiosity after I read your comment. This part stood out:

A large population addition to Gaines County came in 1977 when a group of conservative German speaking "Russian" Mennonites from Mexico arrived to start farming and ranching.

I'd say whatever their overall attitude is towards measles vaccination it probably has more to do with the 'German speaking "Russian" Mennonites from Mexico' part than with anything else.

I mean Trump did campaign to anabaptist groups by claiming democrats would take away their customarily high levels of religious liberty. Vaccines falling under that doesn't seem implausible.

Back in November, there was discussion about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk

This sort of nonsense is why I do not follow the war news. It's disgusting seeing people, especially foreigners, cheer on two Slavic teams slowly grinding each other into nothingness, hype up a minor breach (in reality "a group of Russians maybe spotted slightly ahead of their usual positions") or interpret troop movements in the rear as a sign of impending collapse.

My dad used to repeat that the strongest bet in WWII on a day-to-day base was «nothing changes». But WWII was quite dynamic compared to this. It's actually hard to take territory in this kind of a war. Most gains are ephemeral digital map-painting, but losses are very real, and yet very gradual and insufficient to undermine either side's long-term warfighting capacity. Of course there's no decisive defensive line or «logistics hub» the loss of which will doom Ukraine – they can retreat just a little, to a more thoroughly prepared set of fucking trenches, and continue eroding Russian troops with the usual drone-centric tactics. There won't be gallant armor brigades thundering over the steppe, armor burns easily these days. With steady Chinese support of Russian military industry (bought and paid for) and steady European life support for the entire Ukrainian state (presumably Russians will end up paying for that too), it can go on like this for many years more.

Any plausible upset can only come from those external forces – either China ramping up its engagement, actually selling military assets rather than just dual-use goods and some sneakily rebranded «civilian» lasers and such (at the cost of losing European markets and goodwill, won largely through Trump's buffoonery), or the EU/NATO committing forces, or providing Ukraine with F-35s or something to that effect, or maybe the US getting serious. Nobody seems interested, however.

Measles makes a comeback in the US - who wants some lockdowns?

In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns. Lockdowns are just a bad idea.

As far as I can tell, the outbreak is mostly among religious communities who have low vaccination rates (though apparently not actually for religious reasons). There has been a small general drop in vaccination, but it's not clear if it has had a significant effect. The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.

In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns.

How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.

There has been a small general drop in vaccination, but it's not clear if it has had a significant effect.

It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?

The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.

No, I think I'll blame the people who choose to not get vaccinated instead. Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?

In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns.

How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.

"Ancestors" is rather an odd term since 1964 is well within living memory (not mine, but that of many actual Boomers). They just realized the world couldn't come to a stop because of a disease.

It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?

Already answered. It is spreading among particular religious communities who, while they are not religiously scrupulous of vaccination, intentionally don't have a lot of contact with the public health system. This includes having their own schools. Since those communities have contact with each other, it has also been spreading between them, both within the US and internationally. This has been going on for a few years now.

The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.

No, I think I'll blame the people who choose to not get vaccinated instead.

You can do that if you want to be hardheaded, but burning the credibility of the CDC had a cost nevertheless. But as far as I know it has nothing to do with the current outbreak.

In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns.

How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.

Isn't it, compared to influenza, 10x as infectious, with 10x the hospitalization rate and 5-10x as deadly?

If we had a vaccine that reliably stopped influenza (instead of the bullshit yearly one people try taking which misses 75% of the time) I can't imagine why we wouldn't all be on it? But the measles vaccine is a lot more reliable than the influenza vaccine? And you don't have to take it annually?

It seems like a tragedy that our society is rejecting the measles vaccine. What am I missing?

If we had a vaccine that reliably stopped influenza (instead of the bullshit yearly one people try taking which misses 75% of the time)

Supposedly it reduces symptoms more than prevents you from getting sick in the first place, but I haven't dug into the clinical literature.

As for the rest - I was joking. I am pro MMR.

It seems like a tragedy that our society is rejecting the measles vaccine. What am I missing?'

There has been a marginal change, likely due to the reasons @ABigGuy4U gives -- backlash from all that pushing of the COVID vaccine, which seemed to work about as well as the flu vaccine. Especially the pushing of it on children, who were at very low risk from COVID.

Can you maybe offer some information regarding regulations of measles vaccination in the three federal states OP has mentioned? I guess it'd be relevant here.

South Carolina requires measles vaccination for kindergarten students; they allow both medical and religious exemptions. Texas requires it for pre-K students, and allows medical, religious, and personal belief exemptions. Arizona requires it for daycare and kindergarten and allows medical, religious, and personal belief exemptions. As I understand it, these particular Mennonite communities have their own schools which are simply not covered by any of this.

What am I missing?

When you flood your country with a firehose of malignant propaganda the people eventually stop trusting you, even about basic stuff.

Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?

I wouldn't go quite so far but it's just open-and-shut correct that many people can't properly evaluate the things that we use to establish the safety of vaccines, like randomized trials. Add in the possibility of fraud/bias (which is a legitimate concern in academia and science) and that almost certainly rises from "many" to "most." Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?

Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.

Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?

Not if they just make up or fudge the numbers. In my field I can catch most of the bullshit that isn't outright lying. If it's far enough outside my wheelhouse, almost certainly not.

Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.

When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population? If Fauci had noped out day one and been replaced by a COVID mega-dove, you still would have burned credibility with half the country. We'd just be having this conversation with inverse valence.

I maintain that:

  1. The lockdowns were popular in the beginning.
  2. Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.
  3. It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.

When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

I am sympathetic to the problem here, because I do think it is a real one, but "not lying" (or perhaps with unnecessary charity, "not giving confusing, contradictory, or wrong advice") is a good place to start.

Of course, given that there were geographic cleavages in a lot of the response, having a state-by-state approach to these questions is also an underrated solution. We actually got to see that in action during COVID, as a lot of COVID rules were made on a state-by-state basis, and it seems to me that was mostly ignored on both sides in favor of arguing about whatever the CDC had said most recently. Which is unfortunate!

Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.

What counts as "corrupt" is open to a lot of discussion, but I don't think the institutions have always been this incompetent. Just look at NASA.

It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.

I think this really depends on the institution and circumstance. Sometimes the institutions actually are hostile to you.

What counts as "corrupt" is open to a lot of discussion, but I don't think the institutions have always been this incompetent. Just look at NASA.

HIV was discovered in the early 1980s, a few years after AIDS was recognized as a disease. The first drug was AZT 4 years later (6-7 years after the pandemic started), and that was a stroke of luck in that they repurposed an oncology drug that just happened to have activity against HIV. The first protease inhibitor (something designed specifically to target an HIV protein) was mid 90s, or ~15 years later.

Contrast that to COVID-19, where we had a bajillion genome sequences within months of the virus spreading, RNA-Seq datasets from infected patient lungs which led to a number of therapeutic trials (unfortunately didn't pan out, but still good shots on goal). We had paxlovid (a COVID-19 specific protease inhibitor) within a year. We had mRNA vaccines in a similar timeframe, which were more effective than anything we'd seen prior and outperformed anything the Chinese could do - how many other American institutions can say the same? That's about a 10x compression in timelines for identifying, characterizing and developing drugs to an emerging virus.

All of this, pearls before swine. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? of man hours by people like me all so some retard on twitter can go viral (no pun intended) for writing some hysterical slop about how the mRNA vaccines are going to cause mass infertility/blood clots/insta-death (how did all those predictions pan out?). The public has no idea how much effort is expended on things you would never think of - pharmacology, every manufacturing/storage/distribution step, toxicology and safety, in vitro and preclinical models. The public is ignorant of how far we've come, and the oceans of sweat and tears and grinding in the lab that have built this edifice to improve their lives.

Half the country saying the FDA moved too quickly, mRNA vaccines are dangerous, blah blah blah. Other half saying they have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands. Half the country saying lockdowns are ineffective (as if China didn't exist), the other half that the government doesn't care about their safety and people are dying. Maybe in addition to the internet, the other thing that's changed is everyone with a twitter account feels entitled to weigh in on every issue.

Just look at NASA.

I don't think NASA is a good example; their mandate means they were always going to have much less friction surface with the general population than most of what we call "institutions".

Perhaps you're right. On the other hand, though, we should expect this to increase their competency, though, since they are going to be less distorted by that friction; instead it seems their competency has declined.

NASAs competency has been consistently lousy since the end of the Apollo program, no?

More comments

[H]ow exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

They could start by admitting that they are capable of being wrong, and when they update their advice, not pretending that We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken!

The effects of slightly more COVID deaths would have been way less visible in people's lives than the effects of long-term lockdowns turned out to be, and scared people could have just stayed home; work from home could have continued for email people without lockdowns.

They could have just ended the lockdowns after two weeks like they said they would. Or after doctors declared COVID was less dangerous than racism. Or after the vaccines became available. Instead they waited til May 2023, and by that point maskies had become subculture; I still see maskies every day. I tried going to fucking speed dating last year, and they handed out masks and required proof of vaccination.

In the mirror universe, is there a subculture of people in perpetual mourning for those who died from COVID? They'd be indistinguishable from goths.

I tried going to fucking speed dating last year, and they handed out masks and required proof of vaccination.

Last year?!? If you don’t mind saying, where do you live? Or was this hosted by some oddball organization? Genuinely curious. I live in a deep-blue city, I do still see “maskies” out and about, but I haven’t seen an event hand out masks in a very long time. And asking for proof of vaccination in 2025 is basically incomprehensible to me, that was already dying out here (again, deep-blue area) by 2023 at the very latest, and realistically I don’t recall actually being asked to show it later than 2022.

West side Chicago.

Wild. Is that relatively normal, asking for vaccine proof at an event? Or was this one just run by committed weirdos? Either way that really is crazy to me, I had no idea people like that were still out there at a scale where they could end up running a speed-dating event, especially if it wasn’t explicitly branded as a “special” zero-covid event.

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When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

The same two things every technical expert wanting to preserve their credibility should do:

  1. Say only things you are confident about
  2. Stay out of the political side of debates

They violated the first by making a lot of confident claims that later turned out to be incorrect. They violated the second by advocating for the implementation of a bunch of specific solutions which had non-medical trade-offs.

If they'd done neither and kept to relatively generic advice and a little bit of carefully-phrased speculation they might get criticism for being useless but would have avoided much of the trust loss from saying wrong things. I think you would have also seen much less aggressive fights over lockdowns and masking without The Science pushing specific solutions.

Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.

A lot of the credibility current institutions are burning came from past institutions getting things right. When they said that vaccinating everyone against measles would get rid of measles it actually did do so. The same was not so for the coronavirus.

Past institutions could just have been lucky, but I think a more sensible default assumption is that they got better results because they were better.

Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob. People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.

Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob.

And this was something deliberately cultivated by the scientific community itself. During Covid there were credentialed experts coming out against lockdowns or MRNA vaccines, etc., and the response was that it's the scientific consensus that counts, not individual opinions.

I think Arjin responded to the first part more eloquently than I can. I'll just add that to the degree that this was pushed by scientists as a group then scientists should share blame for it as a group.

People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.

I've seen this argument before and the aim is usually to imply that because some of the lower-level scientists were correct you should not lose trust in science from failures of science-driven policy. Sorry if that's not what you're getting at here.

That idea is bullshit because nothing has changed in the pipeline of science to policy. When the public next gets some more fancy science-based policy it won't be from the random scientist who has sane opinions but from the same kind of people who got things wrong last time. If scientists want credit for being correct they need to actually speak up when the public is being told incorrect science. Otherwise what the scientists are saying among themselves is irrelevant to whether or not the public should trust the science that gets to them.

Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob.

During COVID, the scientific and medical communities enforced conformity, by ostracizing those like Bhattacharya and calling his ideas "unethical", and pulling the licenses of dissident doctors. They intended to be seen as a solid front.

When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?

My suggestion would be to not inflame the population over it with a massive fear-mongering media campaign combined with insane unconstitutional regulations -- the lockdowns might have been popular-ish for the first few weeks or so, but without all the media and 'nudging' I think this would have faded pretty fast. Indeed it probably could have been nipped in the bud by China coverage along the lines of "look what the crazy totalitarians are doing now" and some pictures of Tank Man rather than "what a good idea!"

Public opinion is super malleable at the moment, is what I'm saying.

It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.

That's taking it a tad far.

I caught my garage in a lie the other day.

They tried to claim my windshield wipers were worn out even though I had replaced them just a few weeks before. They were embarrassed when I said so and at least did not try to push it further. But they did try to cheat me, and they tried to cheat me for about 50 bucks to boot. They have recently been bought out by a different owner, who I'm sure told them to try this, as before they didn't try such tricks.

My brake pads were also worn out. Or so they said. I chose to believe them about the brake pads despite their lie about the windshield wipers, as the brake pads had been on there for about 100k miles and the previous set didn't make it that far. Despite that, I had to restrain myself from telling them to go fuck themselves.

I'm sure that someone who is a bit more hot-headed, and/or with a bit less of an idea of how long brake pads last, would've given them the middle finger they did surely deserve for that stunt right then and there, and gone on to drive another 100k miles with worn-out brake pads. "Oh, sure, the brake pads are worn out. That's what the last guy said, and I know for damn sure he was a cheater and a liar." That would be the wrong thing to do, but I would completely get it if someone did react in that way.

I'm going to go find a different garage. But I can't just go find a different medical establishment.

And while I may have some idea of how long brake pads last, because that's the kind of knowledge you gain just by living your life and paying a little attention, I did not study medicine. I only know about my own field. You can't expect people to have in-depth knowledge about fields other than their own. But you can certainly expect people who've been lied to, to react badly.

It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?

You're an actual expert on this stuff. I am very much not. But the common rebuttal I've seen from right-wingers is that Canada is seeing a proportionally worse increase with no RFK. The "other" factor they point to that both nations have in common over the relevant time frame is mass immigration from nations with much lower overall vaccination rates.

At a quick glance, that doesn't look like it holds much explanatory power for Spartansburg, but Gains County does seem have a high immigrant rate.. Mojave looks like it might be lower levels of immigrants than the surrounding area.

You're an actual expert on this stuff.

The bitter lessons of COVID were that my colleagues and I aren't epidemiologists, our actual specialty is worthless for making predictions in the real world and internet autists with sufficient time and motivation are at least as knowledgeable about the literature. At this point, a literate caveman with GPT terminal debating me about the literature would be like watching stockfish demolish a grade school chess class.

But the common rebuttal I've seen from right-wingers is that Canada is seeing a proportionally worse increase with no RFK. The "other" factor they point to that both nations have in common over the relevant time frame is mass immigration from nations with much lower overall vaccination rates.

I was actually unaware of the outbreak in Canada. Seems like I was wrong and @The_Nybbler was right, it's the mennonite communities in Canada/Texas and apparently 'Slavic' (Ukrainian? Russian? Apparently services are held in both) immigrants in South Carolina. Not really your garden variety Trump supporters. Mea culpa.

I was actually unaware of the outbreak in Canada. Seems like I was wrong and @The_Nybbler was right, it's the mennonite communities in Canada/Texas and apparently 'Slavic' (Ukrainian? Russian? Apparently services are held in both) immigrants in South Carolina. Not really your garden variety Trump supporters. Mea culpa.

FWIW, I'm not giving a lot of credit to the right-wingers on this one either. "Mennonites who came from Mexico in the 70's" is maybe the finest split possible between technically correct, but also really not what I took away from what those guys meant by "immigrants". Just so with "Russo-Ukranian Evangelicals".

When I was looking for links for that last post, I found this ranking of nations by MMR vaccination rate, and it does have some hotly topical immigrant source nations near the bottom, like Somalia, Haiti, and Venezuela. But that doesn't seem to have actually translated into outbreaks.

Gaines County

Mennonites

Mohave County

Fundamentalist Mormons

Spartanburg County

Slavic-language church

centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor

Come on, man. You should know better than this. At least do the 30-second google research instead of jumping to the convenient correlation. I recall you being not so far away from this field professionally, and I've spent some time at the coalface on this, and when it comes to outbreaks of easily-avoidable communicable disease it's pretty much always oddball religious sects or low-trust immigrant communities or, in the latter case, apparently both. I'm totally happy to make the argument that "a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor", because it's right.

Feel free to cite this post smugly in a couple years if the possible trend continues and normie republicans do get memed into antivaxxing below herd immunity, or just down to the level of granola moms that have caused minor outbreaks in the past. Until then,

Edit: CPAR has mea culpa'd elsewhere in the thread - good on him.

Minnesota has low vaccination rates, due to - uh, the Somali community and fears about vaccination there? Gosh, who knew there was a secret nest of Trump voters in that community!

In 2006, 92% of Somali 2-year-olds were up-to-date on the measles vaccine, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Today's rate is closer to 24%, according to state data. A 95% rate is needed to prevent outbreaks of measles, an extremely contagious disease.

...Estimated autism rates in Somali 4-year-olds are 3.5 times higher than those of white 4-year-olds in Minnesota, according to University of Minnesota data. Researchers say they don’t know why. And in this vacuum of scientific certainty, inaccurate beliefs thrive.

Many blame the measles, mumps and rubella shot — a single injection proven to safely protect against the three viruses, with the first dose recommended when children are 12 to 15 months old.

In November, at one of Maalimisaq’s last Motherhood Circle gatherings, Somali mothers and grandmothers volleyed questions at facilitators. Won’t a shot for three viruses overwhelm a baby? Why does autism seem more prevalent here than back home?

...Most parents here vaccinate their children eventually. Many Somali families prefer to wait until a child is 5, despite a lack of evidence that doing so cuts autism rates. Measles is endemic in Somalia, where war and international aid cuts have crippled the medical system, and elsewhere in East Africa where residents here often travel.

“Measles is just a plane ride away, and measles is going to find the unvaccinated,” said Carly Edson, the state health department’s immunization outreach coordinator. “We are always at risk.”

Oh, look. The reason is not correlated with voting for Trump. Impeccably Blue and vaccinated California has outbreaks, one traced to someone who visited Texas and picked up a case from the outbreak there, plus exposure traced to international travellers (one of whom visited Disneyland).

In 2006, 92% of Somali 2-year-olds were up-to-date on the measles vaccine, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Today's rate is closer to 24%, according to state data.

Such a huge drop in 20 years is baffling.

It seems to be a combination of (1) higher autism rates (there's a bit in the article I didn't quote about a gathering for Somali mothers who asked the nurse leading it "Why does autism seem more prevalent here than back home?") being diagnosed in the USA amongst the kids and (2) from that, picking up the anti-vax attitudes around "vaccines cause autism" and (3) cultural habits of vaccinating the kids when they're older plus (4) the article can't resist blaming (a) the pandemic when everything was locked down, people couldn't go out, and thus visits to get the kids vaccinated also fell off and of course (b) it's all the fault of ICE scaring everyone so they stay home and don't go out in case they get picked up by them.

Plus the funding for vaccination initiatives such as outreach to the community got cut and such efforts were start-and-stop anyway, and on top of that back in Somalia measles is endemic, so if people travel home and back to the USA then there's a greater risk that they'll bring infection with them.

Thanks for the summary. I'm somewhat skeptical regarding 2) though, as I imagine these Somalis have long been acculturated in a Blue Tribe milieu which is rather antagonistic towards anti-waxxer activism. And 3) and 4) do sound a bit like Blue Tribe copium. Either way, a drop from 92% to 24% these factors do not really explain.

Somalis may not be running with rednecks very often, but they aren't running with the normal blue tribe locals either- they're probably exposed to antivaxxers because that's in the water, and it's kind of unpredictable what they choose to go with, because this is a fairly inward-looking community.

They aren't the same Somalis.

My apologies but I don't get it.

The Somali parents in Minnesota in 2006 were a different group than the Somali parents in 2025. Once a foothold had been obtained and a Somalia-to-Minnesota pipeline had been set up, it was much easier for the less functional to migrate.

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Poopgate is just the natural result of the claims that Trump wears suit jackets with large tails so he can hide evidence of soiling himself. The story was, and is, that he's not just Evil, he's also dementia-riddled and hence losing control of his bowels.

If you really want a selection of Youtube videos of the clickbait form where "medical experts" diagnose all the ailments Trump suffers from "look at the colour of this skin patch on his hand", the algorithm will happily serve them up even if you don't go looking for them. I'm not interested in Poopgate or any of these.

Though I do note how you wove in that last sentence about Trump's mental faculties: are you claiming the Poopgate et al. videos are true, or is it simply a case of "who cares if they're true, so long as the stick beats the dog?"

Regarding what future generations will be doing, it's as likely that they will move hard rightwards as hard leftwards. Millennials are the tolerant generation, so yeah a reaction against all the Coexist and QUILTBAG stuff is likely in the kids/grandkids, but that could be severely socially conservative as much as 'seize the means of production cottagecore Communism'.

Your point about measles outbreaks is interesting, I would ask what those areas have in common besides being rural. Looking at your linked map, for instance, there's an odd clustering on the Connecticut/New York state border. And the areas with low immunisation include New York state, whereas West Virginia has high immunisation coverage. Minnesota, that impeccably Blue state, also has low coverage. So "voted for Trump" does not seem to be correlation, much less cause.

You might indeed do well with a chain of sanatoria in NY, given the low immunisation coverage!

Yet this BBC report tells me "The measles vaccination rate for school-aged children is about 90% in Spartanburg County, the epicentre of the outbreak." So if kids are being vaccinated, what is behind the outbreak? This story tells me:

The majority of cases remain centered in Spartanburg County, mostly among people who were either unvaccinated or didn't know their status, the South Carolina Department of Public Health reported Tuesday. There have been 89 new cases confirmed since Friday, a clear sign that the outbreak isn't under control.

Okay, but are these any people in particular, or from all demographics in the population? It's sounding like adult cases, not children, though again, there's an outbreak at a school:

More than 170 people under quarantine in Union County, North Carolina, are connected to a case at Shining Light Baptist Academy, a private Christian school that has children as young as 6 weeks old.

The quarantine orders stem from an unvaccinated child who attends the school, according to a Union County Public Health alert, “and contracted measles connected to an outbreak in South Carolina. The child attended school while contagious.”

According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, just 60.1% of students at Shining Light Baptist Academy are vaccinated against measles. A vaccination rate of at least 95% is the accepted level of herd immunity needed to protect against a measles outbreak.

“If you have schools that have very low vaccination rates, you essentially create a tinder box for measles, because it is so incredibly contagious,” said Dr. Deborah Greenhouse, a past president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “That’s what happened in the upstate of South Carolina, and that’s exactly what can happen over and over again if the disease spreads to other areas with low vaccination rates.”

Okay, so again I ask: who are these people?

It’s close, tight-knit communities with the lowest vaccination rates that have been hit hardest, according to an NBC News data investigation.

South Carolina’s outbreak, health officials said, was first reported among families who immigrated from Ukraine to Spartanburg County in recent decades. The county has one of the highest percentages of nonmedical vaccine exemptions at 8.2%, meaning schoolchildren are opting out of vaccination for personal or religious reasons.

In West Texas, cases occurred mostly in a Mennonite community in Gaines County where nonmedical vaccine exemptions are at 19.5%.

The outbreak concentrated along the border of Arizona and Utah is mostly linked to residents with ties to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mohave County, Arizona’s nonmedical vaccine exemptions are at 15.9%, and neighboring Washington County, Utah, is at 19.6%.

So, uh, let's blame those Ukrainian Mennonite Mormon Trump voters?

Poopgate is just the natural result of the claims that Trump wears suit jackets with large tails so he can hide evidence of soiling himself. The story was, and is, that he's not just Evil, he's also dementia-riddled and hence losing control of his bowels.

Did you watch the video? Someone was having a bad time. I don't have Trump's soiled diapers to rub in your face, but even if I did, you wouldn't believe me then. /shrug

Though I do note how you wove in that last sentence about Trump's mental faculties: are you claiming the Poopgate et al. videos are true, or is it simply a case of "who cares if they're true, so long as the stick beats the dog?"

Again, the video itself is 'true' insofar as it exists and isn't doctored by AI to my knowledge. The point of the last line is that Trump could deteriorate fairly quickly in the next few years similarly to Biden. I'm not sure why you'd leap to insinuating that the point is to undermine the public's confidence in Trump, why my point is that the ground truth could be mental decline.

Looking at your linked map, for instance, there's an odd clustering on the Connecticut/New York state border. And the areas with low immunisation include New York state, whereas West Virginia has high immunisation coverage. Minnesota, that impeccably Blue state, also has low coverage. So "voted for Trump" does not seem to be correlation, much less cause.

Looking at the state level is misguided. Every red state has blue urban centers, and every blue state has red rural counties. More granularly:

The Northeast, Midwest, Northwest, and Pacific coast had high MMR vaccine uptake, and clusters of high coverage were concentrated in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Low coverage was seen in West Texas, southern New Mexico, northern Arizona, parts of Mississippi, and the rural Southeast.

At the state level, county-aggregated estimates ranged from 61.6% in New Mexico to 79.1% in Massachusetts (median, 71.3%). County-level estimates showed even wider variation, with a median uptake of 71.4% (range, 35.8% to 86.8%). Counties with the lowest uptake were mainly in Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas, with the highest coverage in parts of Indiana, New York, and Oregon.

So, uh, let's blame those Ukrainian Mennonite Mormon Trump voters?

I grant that they aren't garden-variety Trump voters, but do you think Mennonites vote for Harris?

Friend, there are things called adult diapers for elderly people with incontinence problems. I don't need to watch a doctored video about "Trump poopy!" to know when I'm being offered partisan clickbait. If Trump really had such problems, he would be using those garments and not "ooh ooh I soiled myself ooh ooh".

You can try to serve me up shit as chocolate mousse, but I'm not buying it.

I grant that they aren't garden-variety Trump voters, but do you think Mennonites vote for Harris?

Mennonites are notoriously non-federalized, but AFAIK the conservative ones don't vote at all. (with possible exceptions made in the event of the Second Coming, but even then you'd want to watch out for the Antichrist!)

IIRC Trump ran a specific outreach to the anabaptists on the basis that democrats would take away their customarily higher-than-usual levels of religious freedom, and this was successful in increasing his voter rolls.

And the areas with low immunisation include New York state, whereas West Virginia has high immunisation coverage. Minnesota, that impeccably Blue state, also has low coverage. So "voted for Trump" does not seem to be correlation, much less cause.

Makes sense to me. Anti-vaccination tendencies, as far as I can tell, are prevalent among middle-class suburban wine moms, especially the ones that are natural medicine nerds, and that demographic is largely Blue-coded. I imagine they are also prevalent among all minority groups, religious or otherwise, that are characterized by a general distrust of state authority. Average, run-of-the-mill working class people, on the other hand, such as a big segment of the West Virginian population, only rarely adopt such views, because their attitudes towards healthcare, and pretty much everything else, are inherently practical.

given that the data/methodology don't seem particularly rock-solid,

For a discussion on the study and it's issues, you can check this article by SEGM

At the least, it's evidence that the doomers and blackpillers claiming lines go up are wrong.

Chris has me blocked, so can someone ask him who is he talking about? "Social contagion" and "trans trend" have been the dominant narrative on the anti-trans side for years.

A number of stories I vaguely follow have largely been ignored by this space

I stopped doing regular dispatches from the Trans Wars because even relatively major developments don't feel like fertile ground for discussion, but since we're already here: the first detransitioner has won $2 miilion in a malpractice lawsuit. A few days later, in a move completely unrelated to the recent news, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a statement recommending against gender surgeries for youth below 19. There's about two dozen more such lawsuits in the pipeline, and they all started prior to the resolution of this case hitting the news.

I'll echo Chris' "too early to declare victory", but I'd say it's safe to assume this will put a major damper on the process of transing kids. Even sympathetic providers will likely find themselves putting some effort into exploring alternatives, to cover their own ass, if nothing else. They'll hopefully also think twice before pommelling parents with "would you rather have a happy son or a dead daughter?".

I stopped doing regular dispatches from the Trans Wars because even relatively major developments don't feel like fertile ground for discussion

Remember, it won't affect you in your normal life! So I was thoroughly informed in response to my own little dispatch from the Wars, Irish front. Naturally everyone is ignoring these nothingburger stories which have nothing at all to do with ordinary, non-trans people in their ordinary, non-trans lives. When they said "you must" they didn't mean "you must"!

Who do you want fifteen-year-olds to have sex with? Their classmates? High school seniors? College students? Their dads' friends?

If you are who I suspect you are you are, you're what? Around 30 years-old now give or take? If a 7 - 10 year age-gap is what you really want, why not date a 22 year-old?

Likewise if the goal is to improve TFR, why not advise boys to take few years after high-school to build up some experience and equity before going to college so they'll be more attractive mates?

Mate attractiveness is mostly a relative good. Giving everyone a relative good doesn't have absolute effects.

Note that in most of the USA, the age of consent actually is 16 or 17. The meme that it's 18 is from a combination of 1) California has 18, and makes most US media, 2) a bunch of other crimes do kick in at 18, just not statutory rape itself.

My problem with this idea is that legality, while originally designed to reflect morality, inevitably influences it. Both in the "illegal, thus immoral" direction, and, what's more important in this case, "legal, thus moral".

This might be literally a first-world problem, since countries with less pervasive state influence do not conflate legality and morality equally easily, but in a place like the US I'd rather have more fine-grained AoC laws, so that fathers don't have to resort to moral, but illegal acts to keep scumbags away.

The law mainly functions to prevent loving, family-condoned relationships between 20-something men and teenage girls.

How many of those do you think would happen in this day and age?

The law mainly functions to prevent loving, family-condoned relationships between 20-something men and teenage girls.

Mate, please stop explaining. You just sound more and more creepy the more you go on about older men and younger girls. Seven year age gaps can be a huge gulf, or not so much, depending on the age of both parties. 15 and 21 are two different phases of life. 22 and 29 are getting nearer in experiences. 30 and 37 are fine.

10 and 17 is not fine. 12 and 19 is not fine. And I've found that arguments around "why not 15?" tend to drift downwards rather than upwards in the "if 15, why not..." later development of the argument. If 15, why not 14? If 14, why not 13? If 13, why not 12 - after all in the Classical world 12 year olds were married! (as you have used as an example yourself).

As to "family condoned", that depends on the family. Were I the parent of a young daughter, I'd be highly suspicious of any 20-25 year old guy sniffing around my 13-15 year old daughter.

Why are all the guys so eager to fuck teenage girls also so insistent that these girls be virgins?

Serious question, bub: You keep talking about your "lived experience." So I assume you are not a virgin. I'm not going to ask if you've ever banged an underage girl, but I am going to ask: assuming you have had sex with a virgin, why didn't you marry her?

Why are all the guys so eager to fuck teenage girls also so insistent that these girls be virgins?

Half the point of dating a teenager is that she is much more likely to be a virgin.

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Eventually, you get children who don't desire sex, can't get pregnant, and don't understand it.

Paedophiles out there claiming six year olds experience sexual desire and are competent to have loving, consensual, sexual relationships with adults. Your arguments that "I'm not one of those guys" do not convince me on the grounds you are putting them. And it's becoming more and more evident your concern is "men can't get young pussy" and not "girls are being artificially debarred from forming permanent attachments leading to marriage and family".

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The big issue is the Fascist-Feminist synthesis means both the Left and the Right actually agree on this issue, but for wildly different reasons:

  • Older women viscerally hate it when older men date younger women, which has led to the Left broadly being hostile towards age gap relationships.
  • The Right has two elements: First, there was a lot of (wildly incorrect) hysteria that Leftists were going to try to make pedophilia legal as the next step on the slippery slope after gays and trans were done. Second, there's long been a bunch of conspiracies about pedophiles controlling the government in QAnon or Pizzagate form, so there's been a ridiculous trend to try and link practically anything towards sinister cabals of pedophiles.

As such, there's almost no political appetite for decreasing the age of consent.

As for what it ought to be, 15 does indeed seem like a more reasonable age than 18. It wasn't even that uncommon all that long ago, heck a lot of countries in Europe have their ages at 14. In terms of mentality, a lot of it depends on the individual's IQ. A 130 IQ kid could be emancipated at 13 and would probably make better decisions than the average adult, and there's an argument to be made that an 85 IQ person should always be treated as a child to some extent. But polite society has an allergy to explicit references to IQ so we just randomly draw a line at 16-18 and call it good enough I guess.

makes me think this topic is for some reason stratified mainly by intelligence.

How convenient it's only we knuckle-dragging mouth breathers who object to your reasonable proposal!

Every time I see this argument in the wild. Every. God. Damn. Time. It's maybe not a troll, but it is a guy who genuinely wants to stick his dick into underage pussy and feels unfairly victimised by society who think 30-40 year old men should not be eyeing up 13 year olds for their big racks. Of course society is made up of the stupid and the really intelligent deep thinkers like Underage Pussy For Me guys are the victims of their unreasonable distaste.

Male feelings when it's a 20 year old guy wanting to fuck a girl who was still playing with dolls when he was her age are about "me horny" and nothing more elevated.

And why not 13 and 40? If we're going to argue that "such an age is only arbitrary, this age is plenty old enough to make up their mind, in Classical times women were married by then", then why put upper limits on the loving MAP man? Why not 15 and 60, if it comes to that?

If guy is 20 now and girl is 15, when guy was 15 girl was 10. Can you not do simple arithmetic?

Every. God. Damn. Time.

Either you've got a lousy memory, or you're calling me a liar.

I do have a terrible memory, so I didn't remember you were one of the "it's perfectly normal for older men to want to fuck pubescent girls" types.

You claim it's not because of such attraction on your part, but pure devotion to scientific fact? Well, you have your claims as to motives, I have my beliefs as to motives, and since nobody is a mind-reader, all such will remain in the privacy of our skulls.

Unfalsifiable beliefs are pretty weak sauce. There are very few things more antithetical to the purpose of this place than do this kind of bulverism in the pursuit of defending taboos.

You claim it's not because of such attraction on your part, but pure devotion to scientific fact?

Devotion to liberty.

I don't believe I've ever said that there aren't 12-year-old girls that I find sexually attractive. I haven't said that because it'd be untrue; while I'm not a paedophile in the proper sense, there are some very-early bloomers out there and, indeed, postpubescence is all that's really needed for the normal male gaze to approve. However, I have no intention of pursuing them in that fashion, and this is not related to my opposition to the current Anglospheric ages of consent.

Do you realise that you've set up epistemic closure, here? If someone says that he wants to lower the AoC because he wants to fuck kids, you count him as part of your "every time". If someone says the opposite, you count him as a liar and still as part of "every time". That's not an algorithm that depends on what the truth actually is; regardless of the evidence, you'll simply become more sure of yourself.

I actually suggest you take a look through my post history. See if I'm really the sort to lie about myself.

and that smart people on this forum independently arive at the same opinions as myself

Do they, now?

Olde[r] women viscerally hate it when older men date younger women, which has led to the Left broadly being hostile towards age gap relationships.

I'm also quite cynical about this phenomenon, but for what it's worth, I felt a pretty visceral hatred for those relationships myself when I was a younger man.

I keep thinking about a tweet which went something like this:

Being a boy sucks because when you're 13, you're competing for the attention of 13-year-old girls against 19-year-old men. And when you're 19, you're competing for the attention of 19-year-old girls against Saudi princes.

As such, there's almost no political appetite for increasing the age of consent.

I think you mean "decreasing".

Correct, I've changed it, thank you for pointing it out.

Its a simple balancing act. 15 is probably too young, because there remains a significant number of girls who are still beginning puberty at that age and pregnancy, while possible, is more dangerous than it would be in just a year or two. By the time a girl is 17, the chance that a pregnancy is better off delayed for a year based on physical development is minuscule.

Seems like a weird rule that you can have sex with a girl, and its legal so long as your swimmers don't hit the lottery.

Because the point of the sex is pregnancy. If its morally good to have sex with a woman, it is definitionally also good to impregnate her.

Plus in the modern age girls are idiots at 15. And the window of years around that. Particularly when an older man can flash cash at them and not be immediately hung by his heels by her brothers or dad. Some of the Epstein accusers aren't, in my view, the heroines they are made out to be, but I don't doubt they feel traumatized. Even the girl who served as his wrangler and got all her friends to turn up for all the great times. Of course she regrets it now. We all regret a lot of things.

Centuries ago yeah, maybe females and males could get the sexual congress going earlier. They could also feed themselves and survive in the wild, and had to answer to the tribe. In the current year I'm not at all convinced. I partially agree with @Corvos in his comment, but like almost everything, case-by-case.

I strongly suspect girls(and boys) were always idiots at 15 and that historical low marriage ages worked out mostly because the girl wasn't the final say in who she married. For some reason I don't think this guy is trying to bring that system back.

Germany

WP on AoC:

The age of consent in Germany is 14, as long as a person over the age of 21 does not exploit a 14- to 15-year-old person's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination

So it would be more accurate to say that the ages 14 and 15 are a grey area. (Arguably, that grey area extends further (probably all the way to infinity) if alcohol is involved, which likely covers the majority of new sex partners. A judge might view the ability of a 16yo to consent after two beers lot differently than that of a 26yo. And of course sex work is 18+ only.)

To be honest, I was not even aware of the AoC being 14 in Germany. When I was 25, the thought to try to find an underage girlfriend genuinely did not even cross my mind. I strongly suspect that a man who decides to groom 15yo's does not have their best interests at heart. However, I also acknowledge that things do not always go according to plan, and sometimes people just fall in love over age gaps most would consider inappropriate.

I think just handing the power to the younger partner to decide if they want to press charges rather than investigating ex officio is probably a good compromise.

For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that I do not see a good reason to apply different AoC's for different combinations of sexes, so your proposal would also legalize gay men grooming 15yo boys, which I intuitively find as unacceptable as straight men grooming girls of a similar age.

The age of consent in reality is whatever age a person has to be for their "yes" to mean consent legally.

So there is no age of consent for women, and probably never will be.

The arguments for an age of consent of 15 are multitude. First there's evospych; studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls.

Being nubile at 15 is nowhere near being mentally or emotionally mature enough, and you're sailing right into Epstein Island waters by proposing "but why not 15 year old masseuses providing escort services, Science Shows guys think if they're hot enough, they're old enough!"

To be clear, I'm not imputing such views to you personally, but right at this particular moment it may not wise to start that hare.

Then there's ancient demography; the median age of marriage ranged from 16 to 18 for girls until 1600 AD and the minimum legal age of marriage ranged from 12-14 in most societies. ...Finally, the data don't seem to indicate that teenage girls are too young for pregnancy; the negative causal effects on their pregnancy are extremely mild and don't justify banning a 20 year old from dating a 15 year old.

Married off at 12 does not necessarily mean "and the older husband immediately deflowered his pre-teen bride"; often the extremely young ages were more to do with locking down alliances and getting prime inheritances into your hands e.g. Charles Brandon, aged 29, became betrothed to his 8 year old ward Elizabeth Grey which enabled him to be raised to the peerage as she was heiress to a title and a fortune. This contract was annulled when he married Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth was married off aged 10 to the 17 year old Henry Courtenay. She died aged 14 so it is unlikely the marriage was ever consummated.

Early pregnancy, even in the Middle Ages, was considered harmful to health; Margaret Beaufort was married at 12 to the 24 year old Edmund Tudor, who did consummate the marriage; he left her pregnant and a widow by the age of 13, and the birth of her only son was so difficult it was believed that it was the explanation why she never had any more children, despite being married twice more after that.

It makes sense once you figure out it's never been about protecting children. (Death threat = topic is governed by conflict theory.)

It's about protecting old women from the competition [for men and their resources] young women inherently provide, in co-operation with a subset of old men [fathers] being able to credibly threaten to lock up whoever their daughters are dating. Whether this is a good or bad thing is out of scope.

All of the other stuff it's claimed the blanket approach protects against is already covered by existing laws (rape/kidnapping, extortion, and anti-incest for the rest of it), so by POSIWID that's not what the AoC is for.

It's about protecting old women from the competition [for men and their resources] young women inherently provide

You are not convincing me of the rightness of your views here: "yeah, given my druthers, I'd much rather a hot little 15 year old than that 30 year old hag, I'm only 46, I'm in my prime!"

yeah, given my druthers, I'd much rather a hot little 15 year old than that 30 year old hag, I'm only 46, I'm in my prime!

Which is a situation that "30 year old hag" (in your words) would naturally like to avoid. By cutting the top competitors out of the market, the rest of the competitors stabilize their positions.

Yes, the best men (from the most mercenary "sex for resources" perspective) are still going to select right at the limit. But since that market is artificially limited, the total supply of women is constrained, thus the definition of any given quality of man "settling for" becomes a correspondingly older woman (as that's what they can afford; age is usually a proxy for this, which you acknowledge). If no AoC, "settling" would be 20 (or a 8/10), but with the limit in place "settling" may be 25-30 (or a 5/10).

In this way, the AoC protects the sociofinancial interests of all women over it, at the expense of men (in the "not allowed to fully utilize resources for sex" sense, typically rationalized in some form of "men are objectively better than women and so have a duty to them") and women under it (typically rationalized as "too immature", but importantly the AoC doesn't actually prohibit these women from having sex, it just makes it so that the only men they can sell sex to can't afford to buy it).

Is this an overly simplistic model of how men and women form relationships? Sure- most people aren't quite that mercenary- but there's always some element of this present in every relationship (and is the fear keeping the relevant actors up at night).

You are not convincing me of the rightness of your views here

On the contrary, I think you are already convinced. It's not a crime to be on the high side of political power.

Let me assure you, 30 year old women are not thinking of 15 year old girls as sexual rivals and competitors, they are thinking guys who want to fuck girls that age when the men are the same age as the 30 year old woman are disgusting creepy predators.

Are you, at whatever age you are now, really scared that a 15 year old boy is going to out-compete you in the employment marketplace? The men on here who argue about "all women have of value are their tits and cunt, and that's all they have to sell, and as soon as they're over 20 they're undesirable, so they want to ban nice ordinary normal men who have perfectly natural preferences for 15 year olds from getting access to 15 year olds" are not coming across as rational giant brains, they're coming across as "welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Mensa branch of PIE".

they are thinking guys who want to fuck girls that age when the men are the same age as the 30 year old woman are disgusting creepy predators.

And if it wasn't obviously in their interest to publicly believe this, I might believe this as well. Half the problem with the "debate" is that this claim isn't being made in good faith; you acknowledge this yourself through your last sentence despite you already having established in previous comments that you know drawing that equivalence is wrong.

So, when everything anyone will tell you is going to be biased in their favor in some way, what else can you do but return to monke initial conditions and reason about what people will say about this topic now assuming those initial conditions remain valid (ignoring stuff like technologies [contraceptives, all known STDs of consequence cured except for one] with which human instinct is not natively compatible)?

The men on here who argue about "all women have of value are their tits and cunt, and that's all they have to sell"

And the women on here argue that "all men have of value is their ability to physically produce, and that's all they have with which to buy" (or "what price they can fetch on the employment marketplace"). Given gender equality, both should be valid.

The reason for the emphasis on this is that it's the only part of the dynamic we can actually control and measure, much like 6/6/6 is for women (but somehow that's acceptable, which again is why I believe women who do this while believing it's evil when men do it are mistaken at best and actively lying at worst). And every relationship is affected by these dynamics to some degree; there's no getting away from it, we're all human, we like good things, and may God have mercy on our souls.

Is it the full picture? Of course not; people marry their friends all the time to the point it's a meme, women actually seek out casual sex (contrary to an asymmetric biological imperative that they shouldn't), men actually seek out commitment, etc.- but to say that an age beginning with 1 or 2, or a total income that has 5 zeroes in it, isn't a measurable starting point at least some of the time (or at least an attractor, if not the primary one), and isn't the dominating portion of it from people who are working in a way compatible with their instincts? I think that's likely to be destructive.

really scared that a 15 year old boy is going to out-compete you in the employment marketplace?

They'll outcompete me in the dating marketplace for cougars and tomboys (if male sexuality in a woman, then they're probably looking for someone young in that unrealized-potential-is-attractive way); why even live?

if you honestly think forty year old women want fifteen year old boys, I don't know how to continue this conversation. Yeah, there are female predators out there as there are male ones, and they're both sick and depraved, not "this is simply evopsych in action".

I do have to wonder, how many of the gentlemen on here with wives/partners, are willing to go into real life and not just argue on The Motte with "Let's face it, honey, if I got the chance and I wouldn't end up charged with statutory rape, I'd dump you in the morning for a fifteen year old to have my babies and cook my meals. That's just evolutionary psychology, science has proved it! And then when she ages out at nineteen or so, I'd dump her for a newer model in her turn. After all, over twenty in a female is going from 8/10 to 5/10 for guys, sad but true, nothing I can do about it".

A long time ago I used to follow the Youtube channel of The Young Turks. (Bear with me please.) The host Cenk Uygur was commenting on the clearly accelerating social trend of relatively hot female high school teachers in their 30s and 40s seducing their male students. He offered an explanation that seemed to be right on point. There is only one thing in this world that a teenage boy can offer a grown woman but a grown man will never do so: undivided attention. It's a temptation many of them can't resist, as their lives are deeply frustrated in that area.

There does seem to be a worrying increase in this, and I don't think it's "because my male students can give me undivided attention" (have you ever tried to teach a class of teenage boys?)

It's a combination of stupid idiot mentally ill women taking advantage of boys who are (due to modern standards of living) tall enough and physically developed enough but not emotionally or mentally mature enough for sexual relationships, to be fooled into "I really love you" and where societal standards do tend to laugh about it happening to boys and make salacious jokes about "I wish my hot teacher had hit on me when I was that age".

It's not funny and it can be every bit as traumatic as if it was older man/younger girl or older man/younger boy. Again, I see a lot of complaining on here about the attitude that Women Are Wonderful, and this is one area where it does damage: it is not taken seriously because even adult women are probably not capable of physically over-powering a teenage boy, so the view is "if he really didn't want it, he could fight her off". That's not how manipulation works!

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I think it's less "undivided attention" and more "absence of the open hostility/irony-poisoning typical between grown men and grown women[1]", where undivided attention is a [beneficial?] side-effect of that.

On the female side, I can't think of any larger refutation of "sex for resources" than intentionally going after men who don't even have those resources, and so are selecting for earnestness/potential more than anything else. It also throws out the protection that AoC is supposed to provide [to them as a class], since this is basically the only case where the risk is higher to the woman than it is to the man. (Not that they won't be arrested for sending nudes of themselves, but still.)

It's easier on the men, perhaps, since they won't even get selected if they aren't like that and they're already being frustrated by their cohort of young women only attracted to older men anyway. Perhaps it disadvantages young women once they hit 30 and this is basically allowing the good men to be taken out of the pool they'll be depending on later, but it's not acceptable for women to expect this and for the decent men to be forced to wait and have zero options until then.

It's a temptation many of them can't resist, as their lives are deeply frustrated in that area.

Yeah, can't imagine why that would be.

[1] The definition of "grown", of course, being "has become aware of, and internalized, that relationships are sex-for-resources because [reasons]". This is perhaps the main change puberty makes to your brain.

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In this way, the AoC protects the sociofinancial interests of all women over it, at the expense of ... women under it (typically rationalized as "too immature", but importantly the AoC doesn't actually prohibit these women from having sex, it just makes it so that the only men they can sell sex to can't afford to buy it).

It actually also protects the interests of women under it: selective enforcement empowers women to "sell sex" at its peak and then exploit the illegality of the men's action as leverage over the those they "sell" it to.

Blackmail material is frequently of negative utility to the one with it, insofar as it gives a murder motive to the subject of the material.

Yes, it has high tail risks (and rewards). I think the average expected value of blackmail is usually still positive though, particularly when supported by the legal system rather than opposed by it.

True; that's why the AoC is currently infinite (and the women still honoring this compromise are generally seen as suckers). I think I could be more precise in saying that they can't sell sex in the context of a relationship that isn't purely exploitative on the woman's part, though since that was the entire point of establishing the AoC in the first place...

All sex is rape [as women obviously can't be trusted not to call sex they regretted rape] + woman forced to marry her rapist [provided this didn't occur where anyone could have reasonably heard her cry rape] is a stable compromise, which is probably why traditionalist societies did that.

Raising the age of consent(it used to be, basically, the beginning of puberty) is a remnant of older laws intended to protect unmarried young women from older guys lying to them to get laid. There were a lot of these laws in the past, a high age of consent isn't an adequate replacement.

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).

AoC at 13-14

Don't make me quote The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon at you!

Yes, it was sensationalist yellow journalism of its day, but it was also true that rich guys were having young girls pimped out by their poor parents to them, then at rape trials claiming "no, it was totes consensual" and getting away with it as the age of consent was that low. Hence, the raising of the age of consent from 13 to 16 by Parliament:

Under the Offences against the Person Act 1861, the age of consent was 12 (reflecting the common law), it was a felony to have unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under the age of 10, and it was a misdemeanour to have unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl between the ages of 10 and 12. In addition, the 1861 Act had made the penalty for indecent assault or attempted rape of a girl below the consensual age two years' imprisonment. Although the age of consent was subsequently raised to 13 upon amendments made to the 1861 act with the Offences Against the Person Act 1875, these pieces of legislation were enacted to protect mainly the very young and the very wealthy.

Take it away, Mr. Stead!

London's lust annually uses up many thousands of women, who are literally killed and made away with—living sacrifices slain in the service of vice. That may be inevitable, and with that I have nothing to do. But I do ask that those doomed to the house of evil fame shall not be trapped into it unwillingly, and that none shall be beguiled into the chamber of death before they are of an age to read the inscription above the portal—"All hope abandon ye who enter here." If the daughters of the people must be served up as dainty morsels to minister to the passions of the rich, let them at least attain an age when they can understand the nature of the sacrifice which they are asked to make. And if we must cast maidens—not seven, but seven times seven— nightly into the jaws of vice, let us at least see to it that they assent to their own immolation, and are not unwilling sacrifices procured by force and fraud.

That is surely not too much to ask from the dissolute rich. Even considerations of self-interest might lead our rulers to assent to so modest a demand. For the hour of Democracy has struck, and there is no wrong which a man resents like this. If it has not been resented hitherto, it is not because it was not felt. The Roman Republic was founded by the rape of Lucrece, but Lucrece was a member of one of the governing families. A similar offence placed Spain under the domination of the Moors, but there again the victim of Royal licence was the daughter of a Count. But the fathers and brothers whose daughters and sisters are purchased like slaves, not for labour, but for lust, are now at last enrolled among the governing classes—a circumstance full of hope for the nation, but by no means without menace for a class. Many of the French Revolutionists were dissolute enough, but nothing gave such an edge to the guillotine as the memory of the Parc aux Cerfs; and even in our time the horrors that attended the suppression of the Commune were largely due to the despair of the femme vengeresse. Hence, unless the levying of the maiden-tribute in London is shorn of its worst abuses—at present, as I shall show, flourishing unchecked—resentment, which might be appeased by reform, may hereafter be the virus of a social revolution. It is the one explosive which is strong enough to wreck the Throne.

To avoid all misapprehension as to the object with which I propose to set forth the ghastly and criminal features of this infernal traffic, I wish to say emphatically at the outset that, however strongly I may feel as to the imperative importance of morality and chastity, I do not ask for any police interference with the liberty of vice. I ask only for the repression of crime. Sexual immorality, however evil it may be in itself or in its consequences, must be dealt with not by the policeman but by the teacher, so long as the persons contracting are of full age, are perfectly free agents, and in their sin are guilty of no outrage on public morals. Let us by all means apply the sacred principles of free trade to trade in vice, and regulate the relations of the sexes by the higgling of the market and the liberty of private contract. Whatever may be my belief as to the reality and the importance of a transcendental theory of purity in the relations between man and woman, that is an affair for the moralist, not for the legislator.

So far from demanding any increased power for the police, I would rather incline to say to the police, "Hands off," when they interfere arbitrarily with the ordinary operations of the market of vice. But the more freely we permit to adults absolute liberty to dispose of their persons in accordance with the principles of private contract and free trade, the more stringent must be our precautions against the innumerable crimes which spring from vice, as vice itself springs from the impure imaginings of the heart of man. These crimes flourish on every side, unnoticed and unchecked—if, indeed, they are not absolutely encouraged by the law, as they are certainly practised by some legislators and winked at by many administrators of the law. To extirpate vice by Act of Parliament is impossible; but because we must leave vice free that is no reason why we should acquiesce helplessly in the perpetration of crime.

You can cover that with child labour laws.

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.)

EDIT: I've seen some reports that getting a bone marrow transplant from someone without the mutation, and getting graft vs. host disease, might also work. Still not a useful cure.

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)

studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls

Which studies would those be?

My takeaway is that age of consent laws over 14 or 15 primarily act to felonize normal young men under 25, with very thin justification

Yes, this is troubling. The predictable consequence of taking a genuine concern and putting it in the hands of bureaucrats and law enforcement operating under perverted incentive structures.

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.

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.

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?

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,

What you are talking about is single issue posters. Many of them are sincere, and really aren't trolls in the sense of shit-stirrers. I would agree that DNN is not an alt of one of those--a single issue poster and a troll are very different, even if they can both be disruptive in their own way.

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?

If he's here to shit-stir (especially if he's doing it to get juicy quotes to make rationalists look bad, he is in fact breaking the rules. He certainly isn't speaking plainly, and if his intention is to get quotes from rationalists, he's not leaving the rest of the Internet at the door either. Don't confuse "it takes human judgment to decide that he's breaking the rules" with "he isn't breaking the rules". Yeah, Zorba wants people to come with hot takes that are sincerely held. This kind of troll's opinions are not sincerely held.

And single issue posters and drive-by trolls both violate "post on multiple subjects". I would also argue that someone who makes a post and never responds to criticisms is violating at least the spirit of the rule about low effort participation, even if the original post did require some effort.

And in response to @ToaKraka:

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".

This kind of trolling may have individual subjects that are discussed "productively", but trolls can cause damage just by changing the emphasis on what is discussed even if each individual instance of a topic is one that we might have discussed anyway. You don't really get productive trolls, you get trolls who are better at causing subtle damage. (And if they're quoting us offsite, that adds a bunch of extra harm that isn't always immediately obvious.)

Your entire argument is predicated on your ability to read a poster's intent better than we can.

There are few people whose judgment would cause me to second-guess my own, and you aren't one of them.

If he's here to shit-stir (especially if he's doing it to get juicy quotes to make rationalists look bad

Is this even still a thing? Where do they post their content? I checked sneer club but they seem to be basically exclusive anti-yud posters at this point.

Oh I agree it's a legitimate topic for debate with plenty of room for changes in the law outside of "I really want to fuck 15 year olds and you should just let me", and the OP isn't being a blatant troll, but my default assumption when I see a top level post like this is that it's to get responses to share elsewhere about how we're a bunch of evil creeps etc.

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

Finally, the data don't seem to indicate that teenage girls are too young for pregnancy; the negative causal effects on their pregnancy are extremely mild and don't justify banning a 20 year old from dating a 15 year old.

It's important to disentangle physical readiness from mental/financial/social readiness. Teenagers are not ready to raise children. They're still in high school, if they drop out of school they'll have to get a low paying job and will have worse financial prospects for the rest of their life. If they try to stay in school the baby is likely to get a poor upbringing (or the burden falls on their parents, IF they have good parents). They're probably never going to college. It's not automatically guaranteed to ruin their life, but it's likely.

Unless, of course, the father takes on a proper father role and earns money and helps raise his child because he's a proper and responsible adult.

This almost never happens (and probably still wouldn't even if it were legal to admit to being the father). What's more likely is she just aborts and and then we have more dead babies and more psychological trauma. I wouldn't object in principle to a teenager marrying an adult ahead of time and then having marital sex, because this handles the pregnancy issue, and also prevents a lot of the potential for predatory relationships where a high status man convinces a gullible teen girl that he loves her and her bullshit detectors haven't finished developing. I would also have a lot less objections if birth control were free, widely accessible, and perfectly reliable, though I still think the emotional and sexual dynamics are unlikely to turn out well.

15 year old girls demonstrate adult intelligence

is just flatly false. You can score high on an IQ test, but it takes a lot longer for people to develop some emotional maturity and shed off their childhood naivety. I don't think it's impossible for an adult and a teenager to fall in love, but there's such a huge variety of predatory and charismatic people who tell all sorts of lies to get into someone's pants. I don't think this is good.

If we lived in a more monogamous, more honorable, more high-trust society where a girl's father and brother could beat the crap out of and/or ostracize creeps who make false promises and break her heart, I think a lower age of consent would be fine. If we had a magical mind reading or future forecasting machine that could pick out people acting in good faith I think a lower age of consent would be fine if restricted to people who passed this screening. But in the world we live in, where we have to make a law and apply it fairly to everyone, something like "15-17 years old if the other person is within a certain age range, 18 otherwise" is fine, which is what a lot of U.S. states have. Statistically, this reduces bad outcomes while still enabling normal behavior in most cases. What Epstein did is horrible and wrong. It's much easier to convinct if we have clear lines that were broken instead of having to pick and choose "well, this girl was maybe kind of taken advantage of but I guess he didn't break any laws... oh well, guess you can go free."

And keep in mind that an adult who genuinely falls in love with a teenager with good intentions can just date them without having sex until they're old enough, so it's not like these laws are causing tons of harm to people. The laws only get people too impulsive, impatient, or predatory to wait, which is exactly who we want off the streets.

I tentatively agree with your more moderate points.

But by preventing loving relationships from forming in the first place, the laws cause significant harm. The 21 year old dating pool is essentially cut in half by high age of consent laws and the irrational taboos they enable. This causes large harm to normal 21 year old men, akin to a regulation that seriously disrupts the market for some good which most people need to be happy.

Sure. I think the age of consent laws Should have generous exceptions for young adults crossing the boundary. There's a difference between a 21 year old dating a 17 year old in his dating pool, vs a 40 year old teacher dating their 17 year old student. Yes, it is technically possible for them to actually fall in love and get married and form a stable family, but 90% of the time that's not what's going on there.

Getting someone to drop out of school shouldn't be a felony.

...maybe. If it was actual literal rape then yes, it should be a felony. If it's consensual but she only consented due to lies and deception (man tells girl he loves her and will divorce his wife for her but has no intention of doing so) then I'd say it's right on the border: minor felony or major misdemeanor. If they actually just like each other and there's no shenanigans going on then it's probably fine.

But... how do you tell the difference? In a legal sense, how does the law get set up in a way that you can prove one or the other beyond a reasonable doubt?

Now, in a lot of cases you don't make things illegal just because they might be bad, but in a lot of cases you do, when the probabilities are sufficiently strong. We make it illegal to drive while drunk, even if some people might be really good at driving and not crash even while drunk. Some people might be really good at holding their liquor and barely deteriorate in skill even if they blow a 0.08% BAC. Is it fair to jail simply for driving drunk if they haven't crashed or caused any harm or damage? Yes. Because they might. It's an irresponsible and negligent thing to do, and making it illegal causes more good on average than harm. Are innocent people inconvenienced by the inability to drive themselves while legally intoxicated but practically competent due to their unique situation? Sure. But a lot more people are saved in comparison to the minor harms that people can easily account for and compensate for.

I am tentatively in favor of decreasing the penalties for sex with teenagers. I don't think it should count as "rape" or use the term "rape" unless it's clear that there was actual force involved. But it should be punished, because it's not something adults should be doing. It's significantly more likely to cause long lasting harm than it is to make anyone's lives better.

If a 15 year old and a 20 year old fall in love, she will probably be about 18 by the time they are married and done with high school by the time they consider kids. People don't normally meet and reproduce in the span of a few months.

Cool. I re-iterate that I agree age of consent laws should have exceptions for people close in age together. For people with larger age gaps, as far as I'm aware it is 100% legal for a 15 year old and a 40 year old to date while not having sex. Maybe it's super out of fashion to date while not having sex. Maybe this diminishes their likelihood of staying together when either of them could have sex with their peers. But if they actually fall in love they can be patient and keep it in their pants for a few years. If they're actually in love with each other specifically then they have their entire lives ahead of them, there's no need to be impatient. That's the thing here. It's not saying "you can never be together" it just says "wait, take things slow, and make sure before leaping into something you might regret". Teenagers are impulsive. I remember classmates in highschool getting in a new relationship every 3 months on repeat (this is also bad). If these chain relationships had been with 40 year old, wealthy, sexually mature/greedy/desperate men this would have likely been a lot worse. Saying "hey, slow down" seems like a good thing to me. Again, anyone acting in good faith can just date them without having sex for a couple years and everything is fine.

First there's evospych; studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls.

Studies also show that men are more aggressive than women. That doesn't mean we should legalise assault.

Assault is legal in some cases, such as self defense

The law makes a very clear distinction between the two such that self-defense is not assault.

it's not a felony to get in a fight

In many jurisdictions, it absolutely is.

if I punch someone, they're more of a victim than a 15 year old girl who loves her 20 year old boyfriend

A "15-year-old girl who loves her 20-year-old boyfriend" is not the same as "a 15-year-old victim of statutory rape".

It would be even better if the law made a distinction where a loving relationship involving a 15 year old between could never be statutory rape.

Does the law ever pass judgement on which relationships are "loving" and which aren't? How would it even go about doing this? I know that in custody disputes between divorcing parents the judge may well take the respective parents' apparent affection for their children (and concern for their welfare) into account, but my understanding is that this is only one factor of many taken into consideration: if forced to choose between granting custody to one parent who really loves his children but is a heroin addict, and another parent who doesn't seem that invested in them but isn't addicted to heroin and always feeds and clothes them, I imagine most judges would choose the latter parent. Offhand I can't think of any instance in which the legal system adjudicates on which relationships are "loving" and which are not. Still less can I think of any crime which is not considered a crime provided the perpetrator and victim love each other. We used to recognise such categories (domestic abuse, marital rape), and it was considered a major feminist victory when we no longer did so. I, for one, would not like to go back to the world in which it is legally impossible for a man to rape his wife.

I guess in mine it's not

Which jurisdiction would that be?

It is if they have sex, even if she wanted it and is not victimized by it.

No, it's not. If a fifteen-year-old girl loves her twenty-year-old boyfriend, but they have a celibate relationship, no crime has been committed. If a fifteen-year-old girl has sex with her twenty-year-old boyfriend, in some jurisdictions he will be considered a statutory rapist. The extent to which she loves him simply doesn't enter into it. We're not criminalising loving relationships, we're criminalising the sexual exploitation of minors, and as with literally every law in the history of the human race there are bound to be weird edge cases where it could plausibly be argued no real harm has been done.

If a man is convicted of statutory rape, then he had consensual sex with a teenage girl.

Okay, now tell me why you can't (or wouldn't) make all these same arguments about a 10-year-old who has hit puberty?

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You are aware that it is possible to have a loving relationship without having sex?

I'm not willing to put the mere feelings of teenage girls over the mating interests of young men

Ah. Are we getting to the real nub of the argument now? And how many 20 year old men want to have babies with their 15 year old girlfriends, as opposed to getting to stick their dick into a hot, wet hole?

If we're going to argue old-timey laws and customs, seduction was also a crime, my friend, and that includes making a girl think she's in love with you and you're in love with her.

You've discounted feelings there, and that's the rationale of the laws around statutory rape: it used to be argued "it wasn't rape, she consented!" even in cases where it was clear the girl wasn't able to consent or was not mature enough to consent, and secondly the law is dealing in reason not feelings. It's bad for society when minors are exploited, even if minors consent to the exploitation and feel they are not being exploited and that they really do love the guy.

You don't believe the testimony of those who said they were not, in fact, old enough at the time:

Interlocuters swear up and down that they weren't mature enough to date at 15. Well, that's not my experience and the experience of a ton of other people, including entire countries with nuclear weapons.

But why don't you? These are people who are now older and mature and more experienced, saying "yeah gosh back then I thought I knew it all but I had no idea" and I think most of us find that out as we get older. The things we thought we understood and were equipped to deal with with, we had no real idea of what was involved.

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A "15-year-old girl who loves her 20-year-old boyfriend" is not the same as "a 15-year-old victim of statutory rape".

A 15-year-old who has sex with her 20-year-old boyfriend is, however, in most US jurisdictions ("Romeo and Juliet" laws tend to allow 4 years or less)

Yes, but the operative fact in that distinction is sexual contact. It's not a crime in and of itself for a fifteen-year-old girl to love a twenty-year-old boy, or vice versa. (Indeed, how could the law ever criminalise emotional states? That's right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

While I agree that you can't criminalise emotional states, I'm also dubious about "but she loooves him!" arguments, because 15 year olds of either gender are damn idiots, and we've all seen grown adults ruin their lives over "but loooove!" Women who stay with men who beat the crap out of them, or who beat the crap out of their last girlfriend (but it'll be different with me). Men who get taken advantage of by gold-diggers and emotional leeches.

You won't die of a broken heart if mom and dad refuse to let you run off with your 20 year old paramour, and when you hit 20 yourself, you may be very glad they didn't let it happen.

Agreed. This is the entire reason we recognise the age of majority.

Indeed, how could the law ever criminalise emotional states?

And yet this actually is the law of the land; "woman regrets it afterwards" is the mechanism by which any sex may retroactively become rape. If and when this fails in a court of law, laws get changed to make sure future instances of this succeed.

That's right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Most (all?) modern gender politics are.

There's contemporary cross cultural evidence, specifically from Europe, which shows that wealthy modern countries can do just fine with age of consent set at 14 or 15.

I do wonder whether scientists in these countries have done any rigorous studies regarding whether early sex has harmful psychological effects.

I don’t know, but I would guess this is very much ‘if you have sex at 16 and your culture regards this as abuse then you’ll probably be traumatised, but if society regards this as the natural outcome then you’ll be fine’.

I was trying to find the citation for my anecdotal example I wanted to use, to, kinda sorta, back you on this, but alas it's one of these things I saw on one of the zillions of 3 hour podcasts I listen to daily, and cant locate easily anymore, so ultimately the source is: trust me, bro.

So there was this interview I was listening to with some sweet old lady recounting her life as some sort of activist. Unrelated to the main topic of the conversation, she mentioned how her husband started courting her when she was 16 or so, and he was 20-something*, exactly the sort of relationship that you seem to argue for here. My first reaction was "yikes", but through the interview she seemed to have nothing but love and respect for her husband, and she also mentioned they had something like 5 kids together, and each of them had a lot of kids in turn, so she's now surrounded by approximately 7 zillion grandchildren and great-grandchildren. At the end of it, I found it hard to say this was all somehow wrong.

*) Or he might have actually waited until she turned 18, but he was definitely orbiting her since she was in her mid-teens.

That said, for something like this to work, I think the conversation has to be a lot bigger than "age of consent", and basically you'd have to RETVRN to traditional sexual mores: no sex before marriage, no divorce, the parents have to co-sign the relationship. I think a lot of the "ick factor" comes from people assuming the 20-something is just looking for sex - which is a reasonable assumption - and the the 15 year old girl is naive, and easily taken advantage of - which is another reasonable assumption. If, on the other hand, we assume the guy is looking for love and for a way to start a family... well I'm sure lots of people would still complain, but I think it's more defensible than lowering the age of consent, and normalizing big age-gap relationships with the current sexual mores in effect.

young men get a felony if they resist losing half of their dating pool to high age of consent

Really? Half of the dating pool is aged fifteen and under? The only way 20 year old Deep can get a girlfriend is to hang around 13 year olds?

Do you hear what you are saying?


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