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Notes -
Many things are habbening at once, here are for some more random culture war (and culture war by other means) news for the second part of the week.
Middle Eastern habbenings are already sufficiently covered elsewhere, things are going interesting even outside this part of the world.
1/Cancel culture files
Canceling machine is still running in overdrive mode, and it is coming for Cesar Chavez.
It turned out that "Moses of his people" routinely raped underage girls including another famous activist Dolores Huerta.
This is bad. Imagine if it came out that MLK raped Rosa Parks. That bad.
Many streets, schools, libraries, parks etc. are to be renamed soon.
It is already beginning.
2/Dukes, princes and kings of hazard files
Gambling is getting normalized and spreads all over the world.
Not only betting on sports for plebes, but betting on world habbenings for sophisticated situation monitorers.
In Washington DC, Polymarket just opened the world's first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation.
This sort of gambling, in addition to ruining people's finances and lives, adds another element of chaos to already spicy world's situations. With few clicks, anyone in even middling military/govt positions can personally greatly profit from insider info.
And if you are in high, decision making position ... another source of income opens, faster and more lucrative than old timey corruption and theft.
No suprise that tensions are running high.
3/US gun politics files
Illinois wants track all ammo and mandate microstamping of serial numbers to all ammunition.
Even if they could make it work, there is so much ammo already manufactured, you could say. This is no way to protect Black lives from gun violence!
This is the point. You cannot get the evil white gun hoarders for their guns (yet), but you can send them to prison for unserialized ammo.
4/Democracy files
In suprising news, Kim Jong-un wins North Korea’s parliamentary elections with 99.93% of the vote.
This was not something anyone could predict.
In 2023, Kim oversaw his party's WORST election results in 60 years, winning just 99.63% of votes.
But "to give up" is not in Kim Jong-un's dictionary.
He persisted.
He fought and regained trust of the people. May this tale of true grit and determination inspire all of us.
5/Woke culture files
You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America
TL;DR: Wokeness is not dead yet. It might be wobbling at the top, but it is marching triumphantly across America.
Dinergoth is the aesthetic of ruined suburbia and dying small towns.
They are the mainstream now, they are not weird anymore. You are the weirdo.
6/Space invader files
Third recorded interstellar object at 16th March crossed the orbit of Jupiter and is now on the way out of Solar system.
So far, three interstellar objects were detected.
Number Two looked and behaved like ordinary snowy mudball, numbers One and Three were, in comparison to Solar system objects, very strange.
Either we live on rather busy interstellar highway, or interstellar objects are not at all like Solar system ones.
Alien starship monitoring community breathed in relief (and disappointment).
Close encounter with Jupiter was the opportunity for space battleship to rev up her engines and use Jupiter's gravity for course correction straight to Earth.
Previously, we had doubt about object origin. Now, we are certain that crew of 3I/Atlas is made of highly intelligent beings who saw nothing worth conquering on this monkey planet.
7/Cryptid files
The famous Patterson–Gimlin film was, for 59 years, known as the best evidence for existence of Bigfoot/Sasquatch.
Now, new documentary shows it all as "incredible hoax". Not only straight confession of Patterson's son Clint, but another 16mm film reel showing Bigfoot costume.
More links and sources here.
But, at the end, it doesn't matter.
Real or not, Bigfoot lives in our hearts. For forever.
I'm going to say something I can't truly back up but I'm noticing the belief forming so I'll throw it out there
It says something about the psychology of this particular ideology that so many prominent lefty leaders turn out to be rapists and/or pedophiles. It genuinely now seems like there are fewer such leaders, political or otherwise, in the last 100 years that DON'T have such credible allegations than those that do, now.
Likewise, look at the most credibly implicated parties on the alleged Epstein list, and note their overall political bent (Looking dead straight at you, CHOMSKY.)
Like, here's the most absurd way I can characterize it:
Even the Boogeyman of their entire political movement, Adolf Hitler himself, did not rape anybody.
I don't think Vladimir Putin has been credibly accused of rape either.
Trump has of course been accused of rape and other forms of sex assault (and yes, "grab 'em by the pussy" counts in its own way) but I am genuinely pretty sure he has never forcibly penetrated anyone in his life, I read him as his ego requiring him to believe he successfully seduced someone.
And how many male feminist types have been outed as sex pests in the last 10 years alone?
And no, I'm absolutely, positively not saying "right wingers are less likely to commit rape or practice pedophilia."
I think I'm gesturing off in the direction of "right wingers tend not to elevate rapists and pedos as leaders, and are certainly NOT prone to censoring or rewriting history to cover up such traits in their leaders." And perhaps a side of "Right wing leaders tend not to use their power to indulge that particular cruelty, despite the various other atrocities they will impose."
Happy to accept some correction on this point, but Googling (in an incognito window) terms like "Did Pinochet/Franco/Napoleon/Bolsonaro rape anyone" usually turns up results related to torture tactics used by their regime and not acts they themselves were known for.
Well, there are allegations against a dude named Franco but he's yet another of those male feminists.
And I DID turn up some credible claims about Mussolini. We could probably argue for a few hours about whether he's truly right wing, but I will not push that button.
You should use the feedback you are getting to appreciate the Motte for its true purpose, which is to test (and sometimes discard) your shady ideas. Because as a number of people have pointed out, the right is not lacking in sexual predators, or the tendency to close ranks to protect their own.
What you are noticing is that leftist sexual predators are of a particular type, which is somewhat different than rightist sexual predators. Right-wingers who like to do a little groomin', rapin', and molestin' generally don't make excuses for it (unless it's part of some religious cult thing); they just do it (if they can get away with it) and hide it (if their followers would not approve). Whereas leftists will try to wrap it in their ideology, hence all the "male feminist" sex pests, hence all the grooming by professors and creatives and academics and the like of adoring female acolytes (though this is not a lot different than "grooming" of groupies by rock stars back in the day), hence the current wave of "polyamory"-related implosions.
So you aren't wrong to notice that there is a... kind of thing that is particular to the left. You're just wrong to think that this kind of thing is part of the fundamental psychology of leftists, and not just the same thing fundamental to the psychology of basically all amoral people with means, motive, and opportunity, but styled in a particularly leftist way.
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I feel like there is a very broad strokes claim that "the Right thinks that systems exist to work around the failings of individual humans, while the Left thinks that humans have to to work around the failings of systems" here. The deviance in individuals would seem likely manifest differently. But I suppose "power corrupts" is as true as it always has been on all sides here.
This isn't really a fully coherent hypothesis, I'll admit.
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I think it's more that left-of-center people are significantly more likely to care if a prominent member of their organization turns out to be a sexual predator. A remarkable number of right-wingers seem to think that banging dubiously consenting 16 year olds and sexually harassing your subordinates is just the Big Man's due (and are generally significantly more prone to dismissing/denying claims of sexual abuse).
The fact that these interrogations are being carried out even against dead icons suggests there's an actual principle at play - pushes against living figures could be argued to be power plays, and going after the other team's heroes is just playing politics, but there's really no reason to go digging up these kinds of skeletons unless this is something you actually care about.
Umm... ah... what?
Let's leave aside the allegations against Mr. Trump or people like Matt Gaetz for a moment. Remember Mark Foley or Dennis Hastert? The fact that a long-serving GOP Speaker was a pedophile has been largely consigned to the memoryhole. How about Roy Moore? The Catholic Church has had a parade of scandals (though they're woke now, so idk if that counts anymore). Southern Baptist churches have been subject to a slew of sexual abuse scandals. I know I could do some actual research and come up with more examples, but the point is less to establish who has more pedos and more to illustrate the existence of a history of right-wing leaders getting caught up in sex abuse scandals and the conservative movement downplaying or forgetting about it.
The actual pattern I can discern is that if you put men in a position of power, influence, or prestige, a significant subset of them will try to exploit it for sex (whatever prior commitments they may have re: celibacy or marriage). Of those, many will get outright coercive or direct their attentions towards inappropriate subjects (e.g. minors, subordinates).
I think that there's significant nonpartisan crossover between the types of personalities that gravitate toward positions of power over others in terms of political/business/civic roles and the types that seek power over others in terms of vices. There's a degree of sociopathy at play in any "maverick" who bucks the system rather than follows the rules that is totally unsurprisingly aligned with the sociopathy that is into taboo sexuality, bucking the system of common morality. Power also allows one to engage more freely in otherwise difficult vices, which is why a lot of pedos gravitate toward roles as teachers, pastors, priests, cub scout leaders, etc.
In our zeal to attack "the other side's" examples of this, we often fail to really grapple with whether or not these failings mean anything substantial, or are just easy targets for oppositional demoralization.
Pick your #1 issue, whatever it is, and ask yourself if your mind would be changed .000001% on that subject if it turned out that the leading voice for that issue was also a pedophile. Most likely not, I suspect.
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Yes, for a bunch of supposed noticers, The Motte is kind of doing gymnastics to avoid noticing the most obvious pattern and conclusion. Irrespective of ideology or movement, an enormous percentage of men simply want to have as much sex as possible and are willing to abuse power to do it.
That just the baseline reality that everyone already baked into their model of the world. The question is, why do some ideologies appear to have more of this kind of abuser in leadership roles than others? Of course, that's either a trivial question (answer: because what things appear to you is primarily determined by your biases, rather than underlying reality) or a loaded question (i.e. the question is implying that this "appearance" correlates with reality), and so the "clean" version of that question would be: "Do some ideologies actually have more of this kind of abuser in leadership roles than others, and if so, is there something about the psychology of these ideologies that leads a difference in prevalence of this?"
Which is an interesting question to at least speculate about, though any actual conclusions would be completely unwarranted.
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How many statues to Dennis Hastert are out there? I genuinely don't know. I assume zero.
How many streets are named after disgraced Catholic priests?
How many streets are named after Catholic priests at all?
If society mostly celebrates characters that we interpret as left-wing, it stands to reason that most rapists society celebrates are also left-wing. You have not made a case that P(rapist|celebrated left-wing hero)>P(rapist|celebrated hero).
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I'm not really sure how that's relevant to the question of whether or not left-wingers are uniquely prone to elevating sexual predators to positions of authority.
(Also, Hastert did have stuff named in his honor. Not so much any more).
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Technically a ton, since MLK was named after Martin Luther.
CLEVER. I laughed.
Of course, MLK is one of those lefty heroes who might have been okay with rape I was thinking of. The proof is not dispositive there.
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Actually care? Left wing spaces also let you leverage claims like this a lot harder for your own future publicity and credentials.
I do agree that there's a general Hallmark of power that guys will push the envelope. On the other hand, women will also tend to be attracted to power and prestige. Consent can be retroactively withdrawn if the encounter doesn't live up to expectations.
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Eventually. Maybe. Decades later. And only if they're heterosexual.
As you gesture at, it's resolving the tension between the principle and the endless thirst for power- once everyone's dead and the consequences have happened, you can look back and say "well wasn't that unfortunate? Too bad we were all fucking cowards at the time and decided The Cause was worth a bit of rape!"
Pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
I'm confused - are they not canceling people for sexual misconduct? If all the consequences are low probability and delayed by decades, why were so many people worked up about this?
The entire backlash against #MeToo only makes sense in the context of it actively going after currently prominent individuals.
I think the argument is that #MeToo accusations are strategically delayed to minimize harm to the left and maximize harm to the left's enemies.
If someone's in a position of power and supporting the left, the #MeToo accusations will be delayed until they're no longer in power or it can be guaranteed that they will be replaced by someone just as supportive to the left.
If someone's not supporting the left, the #MeToo accusations will come out immediately and be leveraged to their maximum extent to attempt to replace that person with someone more supportive to the left.
I'm not sure how much I agree with it, but this should be at least somewhat disprovable: there's gotta be some easy counterexamples.
Al Franken was a sitting senator when he resigned, but the accusations were from 2006 and didn't come out until 2017. And he did get replaced with another Democrat who won 76% of the vote, so it's plausible that it was timed to where they were sure the left wouldn't lose any power by it. But the accusations were from Leeann Tweeden, who has a few right-wing things in her bio: I don't know enough about her to know if that's accurate. "Left-wingers strategically get right-winger to accuse left-winger of sexual misconduct at a time where they're confident another left-winger can win the election" seems a little too complex for me to see as plausible.
As one prominent politician put it: "And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
Notably, the Left still seems to hold Bill Clinton in high regard, despite a physical relationship with a much younger subordinate --- contra the TA and student elsewhere in this thread: intern and Most Powerful Man in the World. But somehow still allowed to be considered "consensual". And one direct accusation of rape. Also his wife who has long defended him against these accusations remains in good standing, as opposed to people who merely emailed Epstein a couple times.
Although the Chavez case could also be seen as an example of being willing to hold their own leaders to account: I generally have more respect for organizations that clearly abide by their stated principles. Uncharitably, I might not be surprised if we start hearing about how Chavez (famous union leader) was always a dirty right-winger because agriculture or quotes about immigration or that choice of flag.
Apparently, true progressives photosynthesise....
I'd like to see a story where one side has the politics of a certain Austrian painter wrapped in a soft pastel uwu aesthetic, while the other side has the aesthetics of the III. Reich and 1990's/2000's liberal politics. (In TVTropes terms, A Nazi by Any Other Name vs. Putting on the Reich.) Too many people, while they learned that the Nazis were bad, lack understanding of why, and treat it as an axiom; this is a house built on sand. Knowing that 'totalitarianism and racial narcissism are bad; the Nazis did those things; therefore the Nazis were bad' is the house built on rock.
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Well, he has been dead for 30 years, so it might be a little late to provide feedback and steer his behavior.
And it seems like this was not an unknown thing before now, so I don't know how much credit I want to give: "abiding by your stated principles" is mostly impressive when it's chosen over maximizing your capability to attain your goals. Is denouncing Cesar Chavez now costing them much?
But, to be perfectly mirrored, we'd have to look at people that died in the 90s, were credibly accused of sexual misconduct, and were right-wing, to see if right-wingers are currently denouncing or at least not supporting them. Maybe they don't clear this bar.
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Accusations that become culturally important scissor statements tend to be the ones that are delayed past the expiration of any possible proof or disproof. Like Brett Kavanaugh, how is he supposed to prove he didn't do something in high school?
That leaves everyone to fall back on their priors.
Less vague accusations, like those against Roger Ailes, don't make big waves.
Well, he could have kept a detailed journal of his activities showing what he did and where he went every day, that covers the entire period during which the event where he was accused of doing the thing could have occurred. But who does that?
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The better view is that the right wing equivalent is religious leaders. I don't typically indulge in the priest jokes (except the funny ones), but it's a pretty universal problem:
The Witnesses the Southern Baptists:
The pattern isn't: Left Wing political leaders engage in sex abuse because leftist libertinism. The pattern is: Religious Leaders engage in sex abuse, Left Wing political leaders are religious leaders. Leftists like Chavez are preaching a religion, an ultimate truth about Life the Universe and Everything, and once you get in that deep the sex abuse starts.
If pastors preaching chastity can get handsy, it's not the values being taught, it's the power and the hierarchy.
If we want to make that comparison, then do public school teachers, too.
This "comeback" whataboutism sucks. Priests and political activists don't have limitless access to children for 8 hours a day, 300 days a year. Of course teachers fuck kids, but on a per-hour-around-kids basis, religious leaders are in their own special class.
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It doesn't even have to be a religious (including leftist-"religious" or other ideological) leader; whenever you have some group with motivations and ability to deny or cover up allegations, that group ends up attracting the sort of people who want to do things they'll need to deny or cover up.
Being part of any sacrosanct Noble Cause can do it, if the cause's actually-noble followers are afraid that making ignoble leaders' transgressions public would unfairly reflect badly on the Cause - this works if the Cause includes an "ultimate truth", but it also shows up in non-profits, charitable organizations, environmentalist organizations, police organizations... Even a mundane worry like "we don't want to scare kids away from the Boy Scouts just because of this one bad apple" can do it, for a while.
The inverse of power can be a form of power, if it attracts internal or especially external sympathy. Any group that feels marginalized has bad incentives, when members feel like other members' transgressions might unfairly reflect badly on them - there are cases among racial minorities, political factions, some religious groups where the abusers aren't among the leadership, some sexual orientations and kinks.
This is probably one reason why religious cults are such dangers; even if they're not showing any of they typical cult warning signs, any small religious group gets "feels marginalized" from being outnumbered by non-believers and gets "Noble Cause" from its religion, and so is doubly attractive for abusers.
I pseudo-apologize pre-emptively for bringing up my favorite hobby horse/pet peeve, which is that these so-called "actually-noble followers" are actually not noble, due to their actions, i.e. prioritizing their Cause's optics over justice for the victims of their leaders. As you say, if you believe that the Cause has some "ultimate truth" that supersedes all else (which, IME, applies exactly as well and often to non-profits, charitable organizations, etc. as any other religious organization), you can justify this line of thinking.
However, the issue there is that no truly noble follower of any Cause would be ignorant of the pattern of people who have followed some Cause in the past; to follow a Cause without skeptically analyzing the forces that would lead you to being convinced by the Cause is something I'd consider unambiguously ignoble. And one pattern that any follower of any Cause must notice is that most people (likely almost everyone) in the past who was convinced by a different Cause was wrong. Therefore, anyone who believes strongly in their Cause can't actually conclude anything about the correctness of their Cause; their strong belief in it doesn't provide any meaningful information for determining its correctness.
If God came down and proved His existence and then declared that This Cause is the Correct one, then perhaps noble followers of This Cause would be just in allowing [bad behavior] as a necessary cost for accomplishing This Cause. Perhaps. But, AFAICT, God never did that (and never existed, but that's a different conversation), and so we live in a world where the
stupidignoble are cocksure about their Cause while theintelligentnoble are full of doubt about their Cause.Unfortunately, being unjustly cocksure about something tends to be more attractive than being justly doubtful about something, and so it seems to me that basically any Cause is guaranteed to attract ignoble people near the top.
I definitely worded that poorly, and you haven't written anything here I strongly disagree with.
But I think there's a steelman here that's at least worth some sympathy (albeit not agreement) in the bigger scandals. At least the little people caught up in these scandals really do seem to think the problem is just "one bad apple" who made "one mistake". Even victims often believe that they're alone! Until word leaks up to more central authorities, nobody is thinking about trading off The Noble Cause versus Justice; they're thinking about trading off The Noble Cause Everywhere And Everywhen versus Punishment After The Fact In Just This One Case. It's not like they can do anything that will cause that kid to be unmolested, right? All they can do is to try to avoid compounding the damage, and as long as they keep an eye on that "one bad apple", there won't be any further damage done! This is also one of the reasons why these sorts of stories end up breaking all at once: when each story goes public, then people who know about another story start to worry that maybe it's not just two bad apples and/or two mistakes, start to see the systemic problems that allowed multiple perps to get away with it and/or allowed one perp to get away with it repeatedly, and finally start to reconsider whether they made the right or wrong call. Then you get a chain reaction and everything finally comes out all at once.
I'm pretty sure this criterion makes the median human being ignoble, if not a supermajority of us. I'm still not exactly disagreeing, but I'd suggest that the world is a better-understood (and in the end a better) place when we think of nobility as a continuum rather than a binary.
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I think it’s just normal human sin. I don’t know the base rate, but as I recall pastors are significantly less likely to abuse children than school teachers.
That list was a weapon in the culture war. There are some progressive (by evangelical standards) people and organizations whose M.O. is to ignore base rates, ignore any exculpatory evidence, and accuse denominations or institutions of being shot through with sexual abuse, then demand checks and balances that subvert the denomination’s polity. The people they want to grant new power over doctrine and practice are consistently from the progressive wing of the denomination, and they always think that the right way to address sexual abuse is by moving the denomination closer to the broader culture.
I don't think base rates are super useful for painting values differences. I'm not familiar with the numbers one way or the other, so you're probably correct about them.
But unless we're talking 10:1, or something like that, it's not indicative of "X is a trait of Y, but not of Z" so much "X is a trait of Y and Z."
Point taken.
“Values differences” is an interesting phrase, and I think the way you used it here suggests some differences in deeper underlying ideas, but I can’t quite get at them yet. I’ll think on it.
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Have you heard of this little organisation called the Catholic Church?
How many priests are Right Wing Icons? ( I can only think of Fulton Sheen, who has not been credibly accused of abuse despite being a bishop and a TV Star)
And how many of abusive priests in the Catholic Church were left wing vs right wing? From the demographics we have now, priests ordained between 1960 to 1980 are more likely to be Left/Progressive, younger priests are more likely to be conservatives. (see figure on page 5). Most abuse cases also peaked between 1960 - 1980 (see page 28).
There is an argument that has been made that the abuse crisis was allowed to proliferate because of an increase in progressive thought - primarily the attitude that sexual abuse was a psychological problem instead of a sin, that sexual urges are higher in the order of goods than they were typically considered in prior Catholic thought, and that after a therapist gave someone the all-clear they were good to return to ministry.
There’s Marcial Maciel, but he’s an outlier.
I was going to leave well enough alone, but I want to partly push back on your post and partly on FtttG’s. I am working from memory and partial understanding here, and I welcome corrections.
It’s important to note that a supermajority of Roman Catholic sex-abuse cases were sexually active gay priests canoodling with underage teenage boys. There were other cases and other victims, but those set the tone. So part of the coverup came from networks of sexually active gay priests, and some sexually active straight priests, who were already accustomed to covering for each other, and whom an investigation might implicate in adult but compromising sexual activity.
The other factor I can see is the social mores downstream of Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Rome teaches that, ordinarily, salvation is mediated by the church defined by properly ordained hierarchs in communion with Rome. To their credit, many of the hierarchs seem to take this seriously; it’s not just an excuse to gather power. One of the consequences of this is that anything with the potential to alienate someone from that hierarchy is a threat to his soul; even the R.C. bishops not involved in sexual immorality sought to lesson the scandal, in both colloquial and theological senses, and that often looked like a coverup. When Pope Benedict tried to restrict Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s public activities, McCarrick defied him, because – well, what could Benedict do without exposing his misconduct?
To be clear, this does not contradict R.C. ecclesiology, which would take a biblical or theological argument and not a pragmatic one. But I think the scandal is a strong practical argument against clerical celibacy, which led to such an overrepresentation of gay men in Catholic ministry, and which is a discipline imposed by a decision of the Roman Catholic church and not a dogma it is bound to.
It would be straightforwardly consistent with R.C. doctrine for pope and councils to allow the ordination of married men, as is routinely done in the Eastern Rite Catholic churches and occasionally done for married Lutheran and Anglican pastors who convert. I suspect that Rome could also allow already-ordained priests to marry without any change in doctrine, although I am not certain of this, and it may be unwilling to accept the hit to ecumenical relations with the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches. (To my outsider’s eye, Counter-Reformation statements on marriage played pretty fast and loose with the distinction between illicit and invalid, and I am hesitant to draw too many conclusions.)
Before he was revealed to be an abuser, my response to that name would have been, "Who? Quien?"
Otherwise I largely agree with your post, except I think there is good reason to give primacy to celibate priests. The fact that abuse has gone down dramatically since 1985 while the church has kept celibate priests seems to indicated that changing the practice is not needed to reduce molestation.
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This strikes me as a bit of a weaselly definition. The Catholic Church is institutionally opposed to abortion, homosexuality and divorce. Women cannot be ordained as priests. People have been characterised as "far-right" for much less.
John Paul II, for one.
The institution has both right wing and left wing positions, like the preferential option for the poor. More than that, in the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of incoming priests were pro choice, pro homosexuals, and pro divorce. There were a lot of progressive activists inside the Church joining the priesthood for this purpose.
It doesn't seem weaselly to me to ask, were the people who were doing the abuse actually conservative or where they progressive activists? And if the answer is actually they were progressive activists, then it seems to be more of what @faceh was saying.
Edit: see figure 12 here: https://catholicproject.catholic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/NSCPWave2FINAL.pdf
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Maybe something about soft power vs hard power? These types of leftist leaders tend to attract a lot of poor people as followers. Chavez was leading immigrant farm workers, so he had lots of votes but not a lot of money. That also tends to attract a lot of young student types, and idealistic women. If I can speculate uncharitably here, that would put him in close proximity to a lot of young women who believe in his cause, but aren't really attracted to him personally at all. Same with a lot of the modern male feminist types- they might be politically popular, but they still look like dirty hippies or weaselly student activists.
With the right wing leaders, it's the opposite- they don't get nearly as many female followers. But when they do, they've got all the traditional trappings of power that make them more attractive to women, so they can easily find someone willing to sleep with them.
Did you read the linked NYT article? This does not sound like the case at all. For instance, it quotes a letter written by one of the girls to Chavez:
And the article ends with
To take the Devil's Advocate position, the "paper trail" proves nothing. It's a note 13-year-old Rojas wrote which describes no inappropriate activity on Chavez's part, and reads like a crush on her part. The part about kissing and fondling is not in the paper trail; it's a recent claim.
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I'm still getting up to speed on the details of this. But uh... grooming a 12 yr old is wildly different from winniing the attraction of an adult woman. What he did there was horrible.
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Feels like a failure of imagination. Monarchists are right wing. Haven't there been a bunch of scandals about kings graping people. Do we need to get into various the various pope scandals, or even priest pedo scandals? We have Trump showing up at Epstein island. I'm sure Saddam, or Gaddafi never ever raped people, and neither have various Saudi monarchs.
I think the much safer claim is that power attracts predators, and the revolutionary leftwing movements are no different.
EDIT: How could I forget about our "allies" in Afghanistan and their practice of Bacha Bazi, due to their strong conservative beliefs in Islam. Definitely not right wingers. /s
Saddam might not have personally raped anyone, but his son and subordinate Uday did.
Yeah these I know about, I imagine his son didn't fall far from the tree. I doubt lefties have a monopoly on sexual predation.
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If 'showing up at orgy island' is your benchmark for rape I'm pretty sure Gadaffi would have had some lifetime sexual encounters of that ilk. Didn't he have an all female bodyguard squad?
Keep in mind its pedo-orgy island. Whether or not Trump really engage in it, he's at a similar level of guilt as the quoted Chomsky. Prince Andrew is definitely guilty and since he's royalty, albeit British, does the left or the right claim him?
Yeah Gadaffi likely got up to some extreme levels of sexual deviancy. You definitely don't have a hot female body squad, just because you are *checks notes * "A strong feminist Dictator"
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I don't know how you want to count Dennis Hastert as far as a "movement leader" goes, but he was Speaker of the House.
How many streets are or were named after him?
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The "don't report the rape because it'll damage The Cause" psychology of a certain kind of victim/attendant/etc is surely part of the equation too.
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Not that I’m aware of. In his youth he was probably something of a womanizing cad but in consensual way (hard to believe but as a young man he was something of a pretty-boy). Once he got into the higher rungs of power he quickly ended up married to the job, and he lost a wife and then two mistresses by being a workaholic.
Considering that, as an old man, he's something of a pretty boy, I don't find that hard to believe.
Literally my thought.
I doubt he was having trouble finding consensual partners.
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The equivalent right wing trope is the republican senator having gay sex in the airport bathroom stall.
He just had a wide stance.
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I mean, many things can genuinely seem some way without being true. I don't know that what you claim is in evidence, and certainly this one example of Chavez doesn't move the needle one way or another.
However, I do think there's a core truth here when it comes to the modern leftist movement which is and has been for about 1.5 decades, dominated by the movement that has been established as "woke." Not a unique characteristic, but certainly a defining one of "wokeness" is prioritizing identity over their behavior or speech* when it comes to judging the person in specific contexts where their behavior or speech would be consequential to the outcome. Combined with another defining characteristic of "wokeness" - automatic categorizing of all constructive criticism as bad faith malicious attempts at sabotage - this results in massive opportunities for people of the right identities to become leaders while engaging in horrible behavior, as long as that horrible behavior pays off in harm to people you don't care about.
Now, Chavez didn't exist in such an environment. He likely would have benefited in that environment, but he wouldn't have had enough oppression points to just get to the top without legitimate leadership skills. So I think his situation (and any others from eras past) likely had different causes.
* More accurately: having ready-available justifications for why to selectively prioritize identity or behavior/speech based on personal preferences.
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FWIW I think that modern Leftism is a magnet for various types of bad people (grifters, sadists, sexual abusers, etc.) who want (1) a shield against accusations of misbehavior; and (2) the opportunity to feel good and righteous and just as they inflict harm on others.
If I were a sociopath and I were mainly concerned about self-aggrandizement; sexual opportunities; and/or outlets for sadism, then 100% I would get involved in some Leftist cause.
As far as Nazis go, I would guess that it's the same principle in play. Perhaps not Hitler himself, but I think it's very likely that the ranks of Nazi leadership were full of sexual abusers, it's just that there isn't evidence available in the form of victim testimony, photographs, etc. But if you are a sociopath in 1930s Germany, of course you are going to join the Nazi party if you can.
Yep. "Positions of power will attract power-hungry sociopaths" is for all pursuits and purposes, a truism.
But it is notable that the ideology that claims to be about liberation, smashing of oppression and coercion, removal of hiearchies, etc. etc. has such poor antibodies against abusers achieving power.
To the point where they will actively coordinate to protect the reputation of the abusers in many cases, for the good of their movement.
And of course the libertarian movement, both right AND left, has a bit of a reputation for being pedo-tolerant to a fault, which points to the issue NOT just being about exercise of power.
I would need to think about that one. Of course part of the issue here is that I absolutely despise Leftists so of course I am naturally biased towards any argument that they are more prone to be sexual abusers and such.
That being said, perhaps a factor is that -- in large part -- Leftist ideology is about reforming traditional norms. So perhaps the provides more of an opening for sexual opportunists and such. Certainly if I were looking to get laid, I would prefer to the head of the local PETA chapter, as opposed to being the head of the local chapter of Operation Rescue.
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The libertarians are tolerant by definition in a way that feminism cannot claim to be.
Not that tolerating pedophiles is a good thing, mind. I just find that libertarians aren't the best example to pick here.
I'd make the connection between libertarians being open and tolerant (and leery of strict authoritarian rulemakers) and their susceptibility to letting questionable characters into their midst. They could stand to be about twice as judgmental as they actually are.
And lefties in general having that same tendency. They like to reject rigid rules and prefer more relativistic morals, and thus the are able to get to a position where "restricting children from having sex is oppression!" is a viable stance for many of them.
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I don’t think Nazis had a lot of sexual abuses. Right wing orgs are different than left-wing orgs. Best example I have is there doesn’t seem to be many claims of pedophilia or sexual degeneracy in maga. Right-wing probably does select for profiteers etc but moral degeneracy I don’t think so. Like maybe Peter Thiel? There are some homosexuals in maga. But worst I’ve seen is Thiel having 20 something sugar babies.
The Nazis themselves were a claimed response to Jewish degeneracy.
MAGA seems fine with age-gap relationships and men using power to get sex from of-age girls. But I don’t think that’s the same thing as the child porn stuff popping up on left.
The national leaders seem to have been personally virtuous in this regard, but they were also willing to tolerate and promote men like Oskar Dirlewanger, who was notorious for his many atrocities, including raping, mutilating, and murdering scores of women and children.
That wiki is a horrifying read:
Jesus. CHRIST.
Sort of gets to the point, though, he would have gotten punished more quickly, if he hadn't apparently had a powerful protector.
When even the guy responsible for organizing SS genocidal tactics and supressing the Warsaw uprising thinks the guy is too far gone, that's really saying something:
"Guderian was supported by SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the overall commander of the forces pacifying Warsaw (and Dirlewanger's own former superior officer in Belarus)"
Seems like the difference between the guy for whom its a 9-5 and he's just carrying out his job working at the atrocity factory, vs. the guy who is doing his war crimes during his personal time.
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See the case mentioned below, about the 26 year old professor and the 22 (or 20? I saw that age elsewhere) undergraduate. Oh, the age gap involved! Clearly he abused his power over her! A whopping 4 to 6 years difference!
Worrying about age gaps can get ridiculous. No, an adult man (or woman) should not be trying to get intimate with a child. No, 'X is 6 years older than Y' when they're both in their 20s or 30s is not the same thing.
To be clear that’s the left making that an issue. And specifically blue sky leftists.
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I don't know about that. Of course I despise Nazis, so it's difficult for me to concede that they may have had any redeeming qualities. In any event, they surely had their share of sadists and psychopaths. And it's pretty common for men in positions of power to leverage that power for sexual access to women (or other men). So I would have to guess that there was quite a lot. Especially given that they were in a position to conceal much of the evidence.
I mean, I'm not looking for redeeming qualities. Right wingers have their goddamn share of atrocities to their names, even if those who were impeccably gracious in their personal lives.
Just making some observations about comparative evils.
Was defeating Hitler worth the huge amount of rapes committed by the Red Army? I think the lefties would say so. I wouldn't want to ask for an exchange rate, though. "How many rapes is worth one holocaust victim's life" is a horrendously taboo question.
Rapes by the Red Army are things that would have happened whether anyone in the West chose to fight Hitler or not, so I don't think that question means much. It's not as if someone could say "we don't want your help" and they'd go home.
The trouble with comparing Soviet and Nazi atrocities is that the Soviets did what they were going to do while the Nazis were stopped. There really isn't a serious counterfactual where the Soviets do a whole lot worse than they actually did. By contrast, the Nazis plans for if they won in the East involved tens of millions of deaths on top of everything they actually did, and we have every reason to think they meant it.
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I mean, I'm just asking it to be provocative. "If saving six million Jews meant 12 million women get raped, is it a net good?"
Can your utilitarianism save you now, rationalist?
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Huh? Rape of concentration camp prisoners is pretty well documented, as are the brothels.
Isn’t that normal especially in war? Nothing about that is moral degeneracy - homosexuality back then or pedophilia.
Raping people from your own country is not normal in war.
There are plenty of examples of war between sides arguing over the definition of "your own country" (Ukraine, for a current one), many of which include the unfortunately standard set of war crimes.
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