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There is no "steelman" for pedophilia, unlike for racism (freedom of association), sexism (traditional gender roles), and homophobia (traditional sexual morality). There's no virtuous principle or sympathetic situation that causes people to think "hmm, maybe sex with kids isn't so black and white." So I expect the taboo to hold indefinitely barring a radical shift in the legal and social understanding of what childhood is and what children are.
As for the sequel's main character -- look, I grew up on early chan imageboards and the unfiltered early 2000s internet so I have a pretty high tolerance and probably a quite warped sense of what's within the bounds of good taste -- but even in my opinion, that's a 7 year old's face on a young woman's body. That's bad enough, but all the exploitative and opportunistic camera angels make it uncanny and perverse. I probably wouldn't play it unless they aged her up at least to adolescence.
EDIT: I'm not talking about the SJW version of "pedophilia" meaning attraction to women under 30. And yes I'm aware that people online like to motte and bailey the term in bad faith. I don't have any problem with people playing this or making this game, just saying it's not for me.
There's are a lot more baileys out there than the "women under 30" one, including both ones farmed by the left-leaning and the right-leaning. The motte, as I understand, is "legal adult literally having sex with a prepubescent child". Baileys include e.g. adults fantasising about doing this to a child (imagined or real), but not physically doing it; older legally underage individuals; underage individuals having sex with each other rather than adults; adults fantasising about the latter ("I wish I could have acted on my crush on Stacy in seventh grade"). For each of those, it is in fact not hard to come up with virtuous principles and sympathetic situations.
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The more I read this the more I'm convinced nobody saying this has seen an actual kid in many, many years. (Or they have, but were trying so hard not to crimethink that they didn't actually perceive them.) If I didn't know any better I'd say it's something puberty does to you, but I actually think it's in-built preference. Or maybe you're old enough that even young adults have started to look like kids (something else I've heard people say- never sure if they're serious).
Actually, there's a better and more recent example of this about Diana [from Pragmata], whose character design is actually trying to be a kid (with the associated and predictable discourse about how
transparently obvious it was that whoever was complaining definitely wanted to fuck her, lmaothis was Harmful and Bad). She isn't really "sexualized" in the game outside of maybe that one DLC outfit (critics remain correct that the coat's cheating her age in the downwards direction; she can be as curvy or not curvy as you imagine under there, the mechanic outfit just makes it obvious); this protagonist is pretty obviously fully grown, which you can see clearly at 2:47-2:48 in the trailer.The most kid-like her face gets is the final frame at 2:50 (you'll have to go frame by frame for it), and note that she's slightly looking up in that frame (reducing the apparent length of her face) and taking a "pose" that minimizes the shape of her face more generally. If that shape was the default, the argument would maybe be more valid, but everywhere else you see her face it's adult-length (and comes to a finer point typical for adults), so...
But, I dunno. Maybe I'm completely miscalibrated in terms of what a kid actually looks like- I'm expecting a round/truncated face on top of a body with relatively straight lines up and down. But then again, I've also noticed people are just really bad at guessing ages, even those that should by all rights know better, so...
It happens, although they don't look like literal prepubescent children. It's more that they look under-cooked and could use more time in the cloning tank to fully finish.
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There is an alternative steelman of homophobia based on refusing to memory hole the AIDS crisis.
First, the AIDS crisis made every-one notice that homosexuality includes both Love is love nest builders and bath-house high scorers. That matters because lots of people go along with gay lib on paradigm of Love is love nest builders. Noticing forces a rethink.
That rethink may include a father deciding
The AIDS crisis had libertarians and gay friendly people saying "Unholy shit, that is a lot of sodomy!"Also the amount of gays that did not (and still don't, though anti-retrovirals have changed this somewhat) care about having and/or spreading AIDS gave and still gives a lot of people pause.
The "standard fuck party" clip from this documentary about bugchasing still makes the rounds on /pol/ from time to time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(2003_film)
Worth looking up the clip, it doesn't show any actual sex, it's some middle-aged gay guy giving a tour of the house where he hosts gay orgies. One of the other guys in the video, who is visibly very sickly, talks about how he doesn't care about being sick or potentially spreading it, he just wants to have fun.
I realize that "not all gay people" are like that, but given the massive amount of gays that do engage in such behaviors I think homophobia can be completely justified. But like you said, the "We just want to get married and live like normal people!" gays are carrying water for their hedonistic fellow gays. It also doesn't help when news stories of the "nest builder" gays being pedophile rapists come out, like this disgusting example:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/qld-boys-horror-raised-global-075915383.html
And the (now deleted) article titled "Two Dads are Better Than One" about the same gay couple adopting a kid:
https://static.life.ru/posts/2013/07/115738/Snimok_ekrana_2013-07-01_v_12.40.27.png
Edit: BONUS ROUND, turns out the female journalist that wrote the puff piece about the gay pedophile couple wrote a response to the controversy. Accountability is nowhere to be found, but getting mad at American conservatives is! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-10/gorman-second-thoughts/4809582
I have a "want to get married and live like normal people!" gay brother, and even before he came out to me, the people who reliably made my skin crawl were the moralizers, the ones who can't watch someone live an alternative lifestyle without reaching for the pulpit. That impulse disturbs me more than anything happening behind the bush.
And yes, there are millions of gay men getting their backs blown out and gagging on cock behind that bush, and I seem to know half of them. That's what happens when you spend a questionable amount of time in gay spaces because the conversation is genuinely good (and the drinks are cheap). I'll keep it simple. When two consenting adults do something gross in a way that touches only the two of them, the harm doesn't fuck you in the ass or to the kid down the street. When their lifestyle does turn harmful, the fallout lands almost entirely on the people who opted in. I have zero appetite for assless chaps or golden showers. As long as nobody touches me up, which has never happened because I'd sock them, it stays squarely none of my business.
I'll turn my gaze to the strongest version of the other side, because I'm an even handed and bored person. Bugchasing is "real". The documentary exists. The visibly sick guy saying he doesn't care if he spreads it exists. The tail of the distribution is not empty.
There. Done being even handed. The "standard fuck party" clip recirculates on /pol/ for the same reason 2003 Rolling Stone "Bug Chasers" article went viral. It happened to be lurid, enraging, and claimed bugchasing accounted for up to a quarter of new HIV infections among gay men. That figure was downstream of a single source and fell apart on contact with reality, in part because Freeman had casually reclassified every barebacker as a bugchaser regardless of intent. When researchers actually combed profiles on a bareback-centric site, the share of HIV-positive men actually trying to infect partners came out around 1 percent. Most self-described "bugchasers" were roleplaying a fantasy they never acted on. Your feed is tuned to churn up that 1 percent because it enrages you, which means the sample is poisoned before you ever start counting. Base rates people. Look them up.
The most questionable things get signal-boosted to awareness. That is how the internet works. Nobody forwards clips of a gay accountant making lasagne for his husband, two mildly overweight lesbians arguing over oat milk, or some HIV-positive man taking his ART, remaining undetectable, and living a life so boring it would put /pol/ into a coma. The transgressive, and morally alarming material travels. Normality is busy tying laces. You can build an entire worldview out of the most alarming 0.1% of a group, but at that point you've given up on sociology. You've ended up producing pornography for your prejudices. And whoever enjoys that hobby should take up yoga and go fuck themselves.
My own anec-data, for whatever an n-of-my-social-graph is worth? I have the ethnographic essays, and after snowball sampling through the gay men I actually know, nobody could name a living bugchaser. Only the gray-haired ones remembered a few, and those few were dead. AIDS, obviously.
The calculus of harm has gone to bed, while some of the panic remains like a bad hangover from 2003. A virally suppressed person on antiretrovirals transmits HIV to sexual partners at a measured rate of zero. Howdy, PARTNER: we've logged tens of thousands of condomless acts between serodiscordant couples and recorded not one linked transmission when the positive partner was suppressed. "Undetectable equals untransmittable" is the CDC's official position, and that happens to be backed by the largest prospective evidence we have. Is there any problem better drugs can't cure?
Sigh. I really can't spare more effort for the old "some members of group X do something disgusting, therefore contempt for all of X is warranted." Run it against any large population and watch it generate nonsense. The worst 1 percent of evangelicals, of soldiers, of parents, of whatever demographic you happen to belong to, or dislike. That's where the ruin lies.
So sure, go off, kings (or queens) who disagree. I've made my peace with being one of the rare freaks in this thread who is actually open-minded and willing live, let other people live, or die.
Godammit, dude.
Please see my reply to George.
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I know you'll be annoyed to read this.
Back, say, as little as three years ago, I might have read this short, evocative metaphor placed among longer sentences and thought it was an interesting image. Now--and I am not entirely sure why--it reminds me of LLM output. Which is not to say I'm pointing a finger at you. Rather, this is what flags (to me) writing as LLM these days. Something about it. Like the calibration "write with style and a touch of wry humor." I think that perhaps for some of us, if we are to write in the age of LLMs but distinguish our own writing from output, we are going to have to purposely start not writing like they do. I'd feel happier if you said this actually was an LLM tweak to your own original passage.
To your point: For about a decade due to circumstances somewhat outside my control I hung out socially almost completely with either gay men or lesbians or what we used to call fag hags (as far as I know this is a term coined by gay men.) I saw all types, I was youngish and a pretty boy, and I was often plied with booze and told, as you say you've been told, that I was really a bit gay myself, wasn't I?
I wasn't. Nor was I ever curious enough to test the waters, as it were. But it was a gay gay gay gay world, and mostly not pretty. I'm not even going to go into it. You know what I'm talking about. I would take issue with your comment in another reply actually, that straight men don't engage constantly in illicit sex because they can't. Yes, some would, and I know them. I wouldn't, could have (perhaps even still could) and haven't, and even for those who might say "yes you have" I'd counter not nearly to the same degree as the gay dudes I've known who have had triple or more digit partners. There's something else going on. I could be wrong of course.
I am, in fact, annoyed to read this. But only slightly, and neither of us need to lose sleep over it. That sentence is, unfortunately or fortunately, entirely human written. With the thumbs I've been twiddling. There are only so many ways to rephrase or repurpose "A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”—Mark Twain. That em-dash being part of the Google search snippet I've snipped and pasted.
I suppose you must have been prettier or more twink-passing than me, because I can't say I've been plied with booze on a regular basis. Not that I would accept the booze, really. I can buy my own drinks, and to quote myself:
I do think you're wrong. And most gay men don't have triple digit body counts. Google informs me that depending on who you ask, the median is 19-23. The mean is higher, because some of them really get around.
That is why I chose "[straight] male supermodel" as the reference class. I've done pretty well with the ladies, and I am quite keen on shacking up and settling down. But if I could get away with, I would very much have racked up or stacked up similar numbers by that point. Unfortunately, I'm only decent looking, funny and in possession of a modest amount of social status, not a supermodel. I have to work for it.
In other words, straight male sexuality is bottlenecked by the lack of women willing to really exercise it. That is not true for the gay men. The straight men who are hot enough to have as many women as they desire tend to sleep around a lot. Good for them. I don't deem it pathological in either instance, as long as it doesn't make them bitter and unhappy (which it sometimes can). And I can't pity them, because I would trade places in a heartbeat with the straight ones.
For ze record, I never accepted bought drinks at a bar, usually I was at someone's apartment, either before, during, or after some home party. I'm surprised mildly that you trust self-reported statistics of this sort; it seems to me that there would be a bunch of reasons to over- or under- report one's sexual stickers on the fuselage. But the alternative is believing my opinion based on what others have also self-reported to me, so you're probably fine.
You sort of lost me when you said straight male supermodel. I know of one, I think. But he's old now. Sorry about the LLM thing, but if you give the reply you wrote a while to get cold and go back and read it, you might see what I mean. Maybe you will. Possibly you won't.
The gay male promiscuity thing may indeed have to do with just being male, but being male following an ethos that has to some degree thrown off social mores regarding sex. Very few men who are straight (exclusively straight) have done that, at least in my experience. Once all is permitted, if the whole of the law were Do what thou wilt sexually, and if the gates were open to us to almost any woman, well it's hard (cough) to say. But that's a hypothetical. It does seem to me that gay men get around a lot more than straight men, though it's true in the finger-pointing there is probably some hypocrisy.
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This is meandering.
When I was younger we used to call gay people "faggots," which was the style at the time. Increasing acceptance and exposure (as well as the same stuff that eventually created "woke") rendered that inappropriate and impolite and the world verboten.
For a time in between those two states you would call someone a faggot if they were gay and obnoxious about it. You don't do that anymore but you can have some very important adjacent insights. Plenty of gay people are just like "straight men" who have sex with men. Plenty of are flaming gays and it's those who have a disproportionate mindshare in the minds of straight men and conservatives.
This is for good reason - they are socially aggressive, much more likely to sexually harass, culturally evangelical, beloved by straight women and therefore a distraction and a bunch of other shit.
Psychologically once you establish a culture without shame (and especially if it has widespread support like you see for gay and trans communities right now) things can go off the rails very fast. Drag queen story hour is fundamentally the same stuff as a gay couple who refuse to stop having sex in public (and unlike a straight couple make no effort to hide).
That couple is rare, as bug chasers are - but they have no guilt or shame and a social milieu which fully supports bonkers and inappropriate behavior.
Most gay people may in fact not be like this, but as many of my gay friends complain - they are culturally marginalized by gay men who are assholes or inappropriate (and those get support from the woke victim complex). Bug chasers are also rare but they are real and like any rare but high impact group they can cause problems.
Some of the bad behaviors are by no means rare however. Sexual harassment by gay men is crazy common. Once I stopped being young and athletic women stopped sexual harassing me (yay?) gay men never stopped. It's not a lot of them (but sadly it's more like 10% then 1%), but the ones who do it harass enough that it's a common experience.
Like most modern Americans I don't really have any issue with gay men (or any other demographic) that acts within the bounds of polite and appropriate behavior, but again enough people from these groups exist and they are metaphorically forced down our throats by pride initiatives and the woke (a similar annoying demographic is the militant lesbian who ex complains about manspreading on the subway but sits with her legs as far apart as she can because "men do it" and doesn't understand hip morphology).
Some of the bad behavior does have more direct impact on the rest of the population though. AIDS is a disease of the gay that took a lot of work to get into the straight population and this was caused by gay men who made zero effort to change their behavior.
Another similar problem (in the U.S. at least) is a rise in STIs and drug resistant STIs because gay men have hundreds of partners, refuse to use condoms and then fuck bi and "straight" people. Because they can't get pregnant and HIV is no longer a death sentence they refuse to use safe sex practices. Shut the fuck up and wrap your shit or have a reasonable number of partners, "benign" STIs are significantly more problematic for the female population.
So I do think some of the aggravation in this thread is coming from a reality based place.
I've logged an unfortunate number of hours in "gay" environs. Sadly I can't put that in my actual logbook or portfolio. Perhaps I'm not young (and was never particularly athletic), but I've never been sexually harassed. The closest was some four-eyes weirdo friend-of-an-acquaintance who was coked up, drunk to his man-tits, and convinced by the coca-ethylene to attempt to convince me that I wasn't straight. Very intense. Very retarded. I sat there in increasing discomfort, trying to tell him (politely) that I wasn't interested. Eventually he gave up and went off to go hit on other straight men, or I went off to get a pint and throw darts. I suspect I had a better hit rate. This was just a regular pub, on the seedy side - it had both pensioners and people propping up the Albanian GDP in the toilets.
Nothing else ever happened. I find it very funny when the gay men in actual gay places hit on me. It's good for my ego, or at least it was before I worked out, put on nice clothes, got a nice haircut and enjoyed attention from actual hot women. It's been known to happen. I don't blame them for trying (by which I mean the men). Yeah I'm fucking sitting there in a gay bar, notorious for hosting straight men first and foremost.
I can only say that I've done more time than you have, probably. But the world is a big place, and I don't claim to have performed an exhaustive or representative sampling of homosexual behavior on a global scale. All I can say is that the UK is as or more friendly to the gays than the States is. And it's fine. It's fucking Pride Month and I haven't seen anything ridiculous. I would have, I suppose if my little brother had shown up and I had a reason to expand his horizons. But no, as far as I'm concerned, things are fine.
Do I approve of this? You can guess. But there is no point to getting angry about it. The average straight man or even the above average straight man doesn't fuck hundreds of women raw because the latter have standards. The mid gay man can (but not necessarily does) fuck like a straight male supermodel because he's not restrained by feminine sexuality. You are complaining about men being manly men with other men. The straights would do it if they could. They just can't.
I'm not convinced this is the case, or that this is a full account of what male sexuality is like. You can't simply look at what gay sexual practices look like and assume this is what straight men would be like if women had more casual sex. Gay hookup culture came into existence under certain conditions (particularly ones where you had to grab whatever sex you could get because it was so rare, and could not be connected to intimacy or commitment because homosexuality was clandestine and often criminalized), and persists both because of cultural inertia and because the scripts people are handed limit what they can conceive and expect from others.
Le'ts assume you're a gay man like your brother, or perhaps someone like your brother but without his good and firm insight into what he wants. What does gay culture railroad him into? What will the men he meets on grindr/tinder with gay settings/a gay bar offer him? What will their sexual expectations be like? They're likely to be body-first, push relationships towards casual trysts rather than long-term commitment, emphasize sexual contact over emotional intimacy, and most importantly get bored of him and find someone else if he doesn't put his dick immediately on the table. Because the assumptions of gay culture are body-first, anyone who doesn't play along is presumed to be a liar or simply not that interested. And like straight men learning the Game, people are very good at picking up what is necessary to get them the intimacy they crave and contorting themselves towards it.
Inevitably obligate homosexual men under these conditions, whatever their theoretical desires, will end up having to get on their knees for this system, which they did not create and may not even meet with their aspirations. And especially if you're purely gay, the entire cultural and social system of gay culture will put every pressure on you to believe that hookup culture is liberatory and fun, while monogamy is internalized homophobia.
Like most people under social pressure, it's far psychologically easier to come to believe in the system than to stand aghast at it, especially if your sexual access becomes absolutely dependent on accepting it. The gays don't run "pray away the frigidity" camps, but like every culture this one has its own means of forcing misfits into a tight orifice.
This process has been going on for a long, long time in gay culture, while cultural movements towards restraint, safe sex, dating before fucking, or STD awareness is pattern-matched by many gay men either to dastardly heteronormativity or to Republicans calling AIDS a punishment from God, and therefore resisted.
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The male sex drive is so strong because it has to be to deal with female frigidity. You can clearly see what would happen if both partners had a woman's sex drive in lesbian couples; it's called lesbian bed death.
It is only by combining male horniness and aggression with female selectivity and passiveness that you get a healthy relationship. We're complements, designed by Gnon to bring out the best of each other. Gays demonstrate the worst of mankind; male sexuality unrestrained.
Kind of hard to take such profound arguments seriously when your usual argument is for removing the women's ability to select.
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It's certainly possible my community was particularly aggressive, that it was an American thing, or that that time is now over - but for a good decade or so if you were in a gay space you'd get groped, or get comments that were rather unacceptable or forward. Some of this is the lack of time wasting in the gay community but even gay men will complain about this - someone who wants a more heterosexual romance can often find it hard or impossible to find and just end up barraged with dick picks, promiscuity, and harassment.
The community is degenerate, and to some extent that is okay - but it's a problem when it impedes on people outside the community (it does) and has reached the point where some people in the community are mad about degeneracy (see: growing number of gay Republicans).
With respect to the STIs - yes many straights are just jealous and straights would have similar behaviors if allowed (and celebrities do do that) but celebrities are small in number and the rest can't so gay people are currently causing a public health crisis (and did in the past when parts of the community declined to acknowledge the existence of AIDs).
It's selfish and anti-social behavior that does in fact hurt others and while I don't think it should be banned it does annoy me that we don't have the social technology to make things better. Likewise I don't agree that we should just let them die from venereal disease but it should be doable to understand why some people feel that way.
Most STIs are much, much more of a choice than the average lifestyle disease. Avoiding addiction and overeating is hard. Putting a goddamn condom on is easy.
Social technology is grossly inferior to medical technology. We couldn't shame or blame or diet away the obesity epidemic. Ozempic is doing what no amount of moralizing can.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
How prescient. Lucky that I've made my peace with never being as good as Scott. Well, I'm content with being the fourth best psychiatrist blogger on the internet. I can only name two who are better, but eh, humility is clearly my greatest strength.
I understand these people, on an intellectual level. I understand why schizophrenics are the way they are too, but I don't relate to them from a phenomenological perspective or like their actions.
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Uh, I'd caveat that the summary has 20% of HIV-negative men in the sample not caring about the HIV status of their partners, and the full document has 7.5% as HIV-negative seeking HIV-positive specifically. That's not the strict definition of bugchasing -- they could theoretically just practice very safe sex -- but it's closer than the HIV-positive-seeking-HIV-negative 1% number (actually 0.4% in the full paper).
On the other hand, I'll also point out that the sample was selected from a 2003/2004-era bugchasing-specific website, and that the total N=1228. That's... not representative, and while it's probably not the strict maximum (ie, I think there were probably more than a hundred bugchasers in the United States in 2003), it's closer to that than a good population-level estimate. I'm... not sure there even is a modern equivalent -- in addition to the survival pressures, a lot of the reasons behind bugchasing-as-a-kink just collapsed as it became understood HIV could be avoided or managed.
I'm aware of one bug-chasing-adjacent incident (technically, just an HIV-positive guy being incredibly careless, but close enough for government work) in the furry fandom, and the convention circuit treated the guy more seriously than they did a fellow who brought a loaded gun. Even as a fantasy, there's only two-digits worth of bugchasing images on e621; that doesn't just get dwarfed by (other) snuff or gore as a category, it gets dwarfed by extremely specific forms of gore. A quick google search pointed to a modern descendant of the website Grov-Parsons monitored... with <500 members. I couldn't find many others, and none of them were bigger.
The end result of the mix points heavily to "if you want to stop X from happening, stop X from happening", not fucking around three or five levels distant.
((Conversely, there are serious financial and resource allocation arguments. PReP spending is a nonzero line item, and while the actual breakdown by orientation and location gets complicated because it's nonlinear, but the Ryan White CARE Act started in the hundred-million range and got to the billion range. Not the worst payoff compared to some other public health spending, at least if you buy the metrics at face value, but neither would they be topping the chart at effective altruism metrics, nor do them seem immediately better turn than 'dudes, just go with frottage'.))
Separate from the bugchasing thing, I'd also point out that many of the people who seem extremely transgressive in summary aren't necessarily so in actual sexual practice. There's a thirst trap fursuiter on youtube with a recent output titled things like "How to FLUSTER your BOYFRIEND", "GOOD BOYS sit on your LAP", "I got EXPOSED for this..." and has a body count of six, total. I'm not going to say that all of the extreme and transgressive people aren't, in reality, but a lot of people who seem like a lot are much more boring than it looks.
This really is a "More than I ever wanted to know" post, but thank you, sincerely. I did look at the Ryan White figures at about the same time, and I knew that someone would show up to nitpick the bugchaser stats. Didn't think that someone would be you, but I'm not really complaining.
Because it's hard to fuck in a fursuit without getting heatstroke? Should I even ask? Do I really want to know? Tell me anyway.
Sorry about the nitpick.
Just picky about his hookups (cw: nsfw audio). Dude's pretty built, so I guess he can afford to be, but pretty far from what the stereotype would say.
There's a social conservative complaint that 'demisexual' just describes normal sexual functioning, and from a social conservative perspective that's probably not wrong so much as overloading the definition of 'normal'. But when the uwu maid outfit gay guy is less comfortable with a one-night stand than urquan, it points to something that exists as a meaningful distinguishing marker.
I'm not opening that video, unfortunately. Instagram seems to think I'm a gay Chinese woman, and YouTube shouldn't get any ideas.
I shall not intervene in a lovers tiff. Unless you pay for couples counseling.
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So that's why it seems so much more common in Nordic countries!
Indian furries either never existed, or like the Asiatic cheetah, have gone extinct. They won't even survive the journey to the air-conditioned convention center.
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Who pays for these antiretrovirals and other PLWH costs?
You, me and everyone else who is a net positive tax payer. In theory, I'm not subsidizing the lifestyle of an American with HIV, or even just their life.
But we subsidize a lot of things dawg. Old people. T2DMs hitting the soda fountain while their kidneys spit out sprite. Children with leukemia. Not smokers, since they pay for their sins by saving the taxpayer money by denying themselves old age <3
In the US the tab runs through the public ledger far more than the private one (your healthcare system is deeply in the closet, and claims to be privatized). Medicaid is the single largest payer of HIV care, Medicare second, and the Ryan White program bottoms underneath both as the "payer of last resort," funded at roughly $2.6 billion in FY2024. Domestic federal HIV spending sits around $28 to $33 billion a year, the large majority of it mandatory entitlement money that swells with caseload. Per head, lifetime care runs about $420,000 discounted and north of a million undiscounted, with something like 60 to 68% of it being the antiretrovirals themselves. So yes. It is socialized. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to protect my flank. Or my ass, which is unviolated by anything but NHS negative-ply today.
But you gotta spend money to make money. And in this case, you do make money.
Then the part that should actually interest a cost-conscious person, because it cuts the other way from how you're swinging it through implication. Because U=U holds (UwU) and a virally suppressed person does not transmit, the single most cost-effective prevention tool available is putting positive people on the drugs and keeping them there. Every suppression is an infection that never happens, and every averted infection is another ~$420k to $510k lifetime tab that never opens. The modelling supports this, AFAIK: in the Botswana combination-prevention work each averted infection saved about $9,200 in downstream care and pushed the whole intervention into cost-saving or near-cost-saving territory.
ART buys a lot of QALYs for the treated person, and viral suppression also prevents expensive future infections. At U.S. drug prices, the treatment itself is costly, but interventions that get people diagnosed, treated and suppressed often become cost-saving once avoided transmission is counted.
ART for diagnosed HIV? A fucking bargain at about $21k per QALY.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23318310/
Well below the usual threshold of $100k per QALY.
ART for prevention? Even better, because you're averting transmissions and secondary QALY/financial losses. HIV is highly contagious (surprising nobody here, I hope, there's a reason it's everywhere and has been for decades).
Finally, ART costs money because people live for decades and keep taking drugs. Duh.
Untreated HIV is not free to the pool. You must consider opportunistic infections, ICU admissions, and onward transmission, all of which cost more than the pills. If your genuine concern is my wallet (doing fine) or yours (can't say) the wallet-minimizing policy is more treatment, started earlier, not less. I'm libertarian-adjacent, and I'd prefer that people pay for themselves really, but if we're going to pool risk and expenses, we might as well do it sensibly. Why yes, I work for the NHS.
If you're trying to pray away the gay, or AIDS, it's not going to work. Things were worse in the 80s and 90s, when the disease was a death sentence. I have little interest in considering "solutions" that involve trying to get rid of gay men being gay men (good luck, even immense social stigma and a near lethal disease couldn't do it), and it's not like most countries don't spend on primary prevention or awareness programs. I'd suggest cutting the budget for expeditions in the ME first, not that anyone listens to me about that. The drugs continue to get cheaper, and I continue to get drunker while the Ritalin wears off.
That is all I have time for, because I'm at a straight pub and I intend to enjoy myself.
These are a lot of words to say that "spreading HIV actually costs the taxpayer a ton of money and even the best way that we know how to reduce the costs still costs a ton of money and all things considered it would be better for society if people didn't engage in risky behaviors that spread HIV."
And yes, this is also true for a lot of other things - simple overeating is a much larger drain on the taxpayer than HIV, and you shouldn't pretend like that doesn't have negative externalities either.
And I never have. I'm voting for the party that supports Universal Public Ozempic.
Are you surprised that I am internally coherent and know the facts? Don't be. The nerd who calculates QALY figures isn't. You can also use more words too, really, but I'd presume that if you found an actual logical flaw in my argument you would have pointed it out.
You said "[w]hen their lifestyle does turn harmful, the fallout lands almost entirely on the people who opted in" during your assessment of the damages of HIV in this specific context of gay men. I think that's misleading: the fallout of HIV is very expensive, and society picks up some of that tab. And furthermore (as you doubtless also know) HIV is not randomly distributed across the population (nor is it distributed evenly across the population of gay men). People who get HIV are more likely to be materially disadvantaged, not less, so the taxpayers are more likely to pick up the tab.
I don't consider this a logical or process flaw in your argument so much as a factual or directional mistake.
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While your contributions are undeniably positive, if you work for the NHS, you can't be a net positive tax payer.
I can and I am. In the wrong tax bracket. Mostly being taxed of patience and the will to live.
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yep it's all fun and games until we remember we live in a society with mandated health insurance with no pre-existing condition exclusions that socializes costs.
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She's also a Jewess with roots in present-day Slovakia and described on Wikipedia as a 'Australian social justice journalist'. Jokes are surely still just writing themselves.
Another example was the so-called Patient Zero of the AIDS epidemic in the USA:
"Shilts interviewed epidemiologist Selma Dritz, who reported that in 1982, she informed Dugas that he was infecting other people, but he refused to cease having casual sex in spite of this."
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I mean there's the whole ephebophilia thing that comes up here a bunch and you can argue as long as you want about 18 being a fairly arbitrary line and the whole '17.99999999 years old you sick fuck' situation. Personally I feel like arguing the point always veers off into a ditch so I ignore it but I also feel if I lived in a society where legal consent was at 17 I'd probably barely notice a difference.
The best argument I've heard is along the lines of "Yes, there are probably 17 year olds that are mentally capable/ready of consent and 19 year olds that aren't. But we need to clearly draw the line somewhere (and somewhere close to where we can be reasonably confident that most young people will be capable/ready), because otherwise we'll get all kinds of arguments from creeps about why they should be allowed to fuck a 10 year old that they say is totally capable of consent."
And this is true of laws in general. There are probably people who can drive safely with a blood alcohol level of [two percentage points over whatever the legal limit is in your jurisdiction], and people who can't drive safely after imbibing so much as a thimbleful of sherry. But in order to enforce laws effectively we need to set cutoff points somewhere.
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I think you can argue all day about where the line should be, but in the established metagame that is 2026 Western society there are better uses of your time and generally if you're arguing passionately about this it's not really for productive reasons.
If I moved into another neighboring society and the line was anywhere between like 16 and 20 I can't imagine it having too big an impact on my day-to-day life or being something I consider a grave injustice eitherway.
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Unfortunately, 'drawing the line somewhere' still results in arguments about how a 24 year old shouldn't be allowed to fuck an 18 year old. The line works only one way.
She’s young enough to be your position coach’s daughter, you sick fuck!
The usual Schrodinger’s feminism, where young women are strong and independent badasses one moment and then helpless children the next.
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There absolutely is, and, somewhat ironically, it was something pushed by the pre-"woke" and even pre-"SJW" progressive leftists certainly in the late 00s. I still see some of it now, with the woke-natured push to retire that word and replace it with Minor Attracted Persons.
The steelman is pretty simple: pedophilia is a sexual orientation like any other, a sort of innate characteristic of someone that they're helpless to change, and finding something attractive doesn't imply actually doing anything to fulfill that attraction. As such, pedophiles deserve compassion, not condemnation, along with the structures to help them never make their attraction come to fruition in a healthy, non-shameful way. This wasn't a popular topic of discussion, but it absolutely was one among college leftists when I was a college leftist, involving things like future realistic androids or future VR experiences. I remember listening to a friend who was a psych major talking sympathetically about some therapy recording with a pedophile he heard in class, and how that man was clearly in pain and suffering due to his helpless feelings of attraction, which he knew he had to suppress.
Blood Rain, of course, is a video game that uses computers to generate imagery by modeling a virtual world, so it's pretty akin to the VR experiences mentioned above. Assuming that Evie were actually child-looking (a judgment I disagree with, but that's irrelevant here), it's perfectly defensible to have a game that overtly sexualizes her, and plenty of people have indeed defended such a notion.
Sorry, my comment was sloppy. You're right about the MAP thing. I didn't mean that there was literally no possible steelman, I meant that there was no steelman that would be convincing to the mass of normies since aversion to sex with children runs too deep for the vast majority of people.
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Sexism didn't lose its taboo because of a "steelman". What happened was exhaustion, we saw it liberally stretch from "repeal the 19th" to "why is there no female Bond??" with near equal levels of emotional and ideological fervour. Eventually, it became apparent that it's mostly just bitter and depressed women who just wanted you to be as miserable as they were. Most people would still broadly agree that you shouldn't be a dick to women, even though hair-trigger ideological enforcement is mostly gone.
Nobody is thinking "hmm, maybe sex with kids isn't so black and white." I'm wondering, "uhh do you mean 40yo Steve molested his 8yo niece or did he just go on a date with a 25yo office worker?" This deliberate conflation is not at all minor. And the second and third order effects won't be trivial either, think an ever expanding breach of civil liberties and digital privacy.
Dawg, I live in a mostly Asian suburb and I'd say they were roughly 40% of my classmates in school, I've never seen a 7yo look like that. I've seen adult aged e-girls on douyin look like this. But I will concede that on the sliding scale of neoteny, she is on the higher end.
I feel like in the very initial prerendered part of the trailer she looks chubby cheeked enough to be disconcertingly young but the other angles/actual gameplay model looks perfectly adult
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Sure, but I think that the sort of actual unambiguous sexism that used to be roundly condemned now draws less outrage than it used to. I'm predicting that desoite attempts to abuse the term "pedophilia" to smear men who like women in their 20s, there is a floor on how much the power of the word can erode since the central examples of pedophilia are just too abhorrent for the vast majority of people, unlike racism or sexism.
Dawg, I have also spent a little time around Asian people I disagree. Yes, Asian children look different than the apparent fantasy-Caucasian main character front he video, but the facial age is quite clear to me.
That was my point though, nothing is immune to "crying wolf". You don't have infinite oxygen for anything. In around half the world, the central examples of sexism are still "women are just baby machines", which is still abhorrent to most western people. What they're too exhausted to combat is someone simply tweeting "your body, my choice". Because in your immediate proximity, and near ambient personal experience, "sexism" is mostly "this 2D comic book woman is too busty!" Getting tired of verbal cheapshots need not numb you to the actual act itself.
Okay, we have a floor. But where's the ceiling? Can a normal person just stand upright without hitting their head?
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I'd consider Muhammad and Aisha a pretty central example of pedophilia, and they made a religion out of that which, in the present day, has about 2 billion adherents, nearly a quarter of the world's population. Humanity's moral floors are generally much further away than you'd like them to be.
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Echoing what @RenOS said below – between the ages of 26-27 I was in a relationship with a Chinese woman who was a year younger than me. Whenever she went to buy beer in a shop, she was asked to show her ID, literally every single time. (The fact that she was five feet tall certainly didn't help.) The median East Asian woman legitimately looks significantly more childlike than the median white, Hispanic or black woman.
Responded here. I'm aware of the neoteny but I think the character in the video looks like a child. It's on a different level than stylized anime or looking younger than white people.
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The steelman is that a 30-yo man having a normal, consensual relationship with a legal adult female age 24 is something that currently can fall under "pedophilia" in the national discourse. The issue isn't that "real" pedophilia has some redeeming quality (it doesn't), it's that because of that very evil, we will never be able to define it narrowly enough to stay pure evil. People will always be looking to smear that taint onto stuff that isn't quite, or even close to pedophilia.
And anyone who argues the minutia (e.g. "ephebophilia") just gets bulldozed as "pro-pedo".
I'm getting a lot of replies in this vein, but AFAIK the "she was 29 you sick fuck!" crowd is mostly deranged internet leftists? Is anyone getting cancelled for "pedophilia" for dating a woman over 18? There's a lot of screeching online about it, but it reminds me of "patriarchy" or "shitlords" or whatever. I agree that some people try to make pedophilia mean "age gap," but I don't think the vast majority of people buy it at all.
Deranged internet leftists have never been able to stampede major institutions into implementing their demands? It's all online screeching until the DOJ mandates the screeching.
So yeah, I'm gonna stay in the pocket on this one too.
That's not what I said. If we see Woke 2.0 then sure, I wouldn't be surprised if wokescolds managed to force some institution to pass "anti-pedophilia" codes of conduct or whatever that protect 29 year old women from "predatory" 35 year old me. But I don't think the vast majority of normal people bought into "system racism" when Woke 1.0 was at its peak, and the opinions of normal people are what the original comment was about.
Yes, they did. The opinions of normal people are the opinions the vanguard tells them to have, and they hold them quite sincerely.
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I mean several things get wrapped into pedophilia:
-Age gap relationships.
-Socially approved Ephebophilia (such and such sexualized pop starlet is 18, now we can stare at her).
-Socially not approved Ephebphilia (such and such sexualized pop starlet is 17 and 360 days old).
-Clearly not okay relationships that fall afoul of age of consent laws.
-Clearly okay relationships that fall afoul of age of consent laws.
-Historically accurate but icky relationships between a post-pubescent but young child and a much older person, usually a noble or equivalent figure.
-Actual relationships or physical contact between an adult and a prepubescent child (aka actual pedophilia).
Obviously I've approached this a in a loaded way, but all of these things get labeled pedophilia by some people. Your lines may not match what the woke feel is appropriate for instance, nevertheless they've had a lot of success at labeling the first item pedophilia.
Realistically we need other words for icky behavior but we don't have them, even as an anti-woke person what Leonardo DiCaprio gets up to is weird and deserves some social censure. But we have the one weird and it gets tossed everywhere.
With respect to the matter at hand - I know lots of Asians and Asian enjoyers who are like "yeah this looks normal" even if you don't feel that way, and I have seen some cosplayers already look like the character.
I'd argue that it's romantic relationships between teenagers (normally between a teenage girl and a slightly older boy) that can be categorized as 'socially approved ephebophilia', as socially generally tolerates such sexual acts within certain limits. Society is also generally OK with male college students having relationships with 17/18-yr-old girls. Relationships between older male groomers and underage teen girls, on the other hand, are cases of socially not approved ephebophilia.
While disgruntled women may not like men looking at the 19 year old cheerleader/athlete/celebrity most men are going to find that acceptable (outside of woke circles),*
I tried to capture your example in age of consent laws, which (at least when I was a teenager, I don't know if this has been patched everywhere) could get you in trouble for dating a high school student while you were in high school.
*Notably in porn, most places don't use "jailbait" or "teen" heavily anymore but stepsister porn is high popularity and while the reasons for existence have less to do with the age stuff, it's definitely by implication underage people even if the actors involved are clearly in their late 20s and make sure to loudly explicitly state "I'm over 18."
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That's what I was asking -- have they really? Does anyone actually care what those people think?
There's really nothing I can do here but take your word for it, so okay. FWIW I don't care if other people enjoy the character, more power to them. Just looks like like my elementary school kids' classmates to me, personally.
I think the initial face reveal in the trailer looks disconcertingly young but the game play model just looks generic pretty girl but not illegally young. Mostly since the initial face reveal has chubbier cheeks
That's fair. The action scenes that were in 3rd person looked fine to me. Maybe it was just the face reveal that looked off.
Yeah it's the cheeks for me but the third person view looks pretty generic Squenix final fantasy protag to me
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You may have a heightened degree of sensitivity for this topic (which is by no means wrong, the heat generated by it is kind of the point, see other poster's comments) or an increased ability to perform facial discrimination and be actually correct - but you have seen enough posters quickly post their anecdata, many people aren't really seeing what you are seeing (again doesn't make us more correct, just reflecting the views of others).
With respect to the woke scolds. Yes. Yes people care what those people think. Those people run the culture and decide what is allowed and permitted and what gets you fired. A small but lovely part of watching the World Cup was seeing beautiful people from around the world representing the appearance and character of those countries. That's banned now, so when the camera scans the crowd it's mostly fat old guys in costumes. The world was made dimmer by the woke scolds and they are working on age gap relationships right now.
As to the frequency of these beliefs.... I work in healthcare so I'm around tons of basic bitch women all the time, they've all obtained the download and find everything bad and to be truly "pedophilia," even the ones who fantasize about a rich age gap relationship for them. It's just how they are.
FWIW, they’ve been subtly bringing this back. I’ve watched quite a few of this year’s World Cup matches so far, and pretty much all them have included at least one obvious “check out this hot girl” crowd shot for each country, usually more. Not as blatant as the gratuitous “zoom the camera directly in on her boobs” shots you’d see in the 2000s, but they’re clearly not sticking to the ostentatiously sexless #metoo-era posture either.
Fundamentally though I agree with you. It doesn’t matter much that most people don’t really care about woke-scolds’ pet issues, because woke-scold types are vastly overrepresented in positions of power; they will enthusiastically use that power to advance their positions; and normal people do remain terrified of upsetting them, because they are disproportionately common in positions of power. This is all true.
I will say, when I interact with people younger than myself, the age gap stuff seems to have few true believers. Zoomers seem to be stuck in a collective action problem where no one wants to be the first to break from the perceived consensus, and many (especially girls) feel the need to performatively enforce the perceived consensus lest they be shunned, but the consensus doesn’t really exist.
For example, a friend of mine was working for our college’s IT department after graduation and eventually started dating a sophomore who he basically met through that job. Based on what you see online, you might expect that this was somehow fraught or they’d have to defend their gasp 3-ish year age gap or the fact she was a student and he was staff. In reality common sense prevailed, and there was no such friction. Well, we did rib him a little at first (“you can’t even take her to a bar bro lol”). In fact they’re still together several years later and I suspect they’re going to end up married.
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I'm actually quite sympathetic to the people responding to me. I really dislike all the people who smear anything cute, sexy, or childish as "pedophilia!" and I do strongly agree that the word is intentionally and systematically abused to smear what are basically normal healthy instincts for heterosexual men, namely attraction to post-pubescent women.
I actually wouldn't have posted my opinion outside the Motte since I don't want to aid and abet that crowd. I was hoping to share my view here merely as a data point, not as an implied condemnation of the game or anyone's taste.
I actually wonder about that -- maybe so, or maybe they're trying to prevent a weakman from becoming a superweapon. If it's the latter, I understand.
I'll take your word for it since I'm not around those sorts of people much these days.
Love that!
Probably, but a lot of people here are autistic enough to be like "that 16 year old looks 23 and massive tits why is this in the same category....." (with threat of social censure making most not say that and many of those believe it). While Stellar Blade is a different situation those lessons metastasize elsewhere.
Between my social scene and work I am very fortunate to have access to pretty much the full range of people. It's really important to remember the lessons of "its just those kids on college campuses" we started hearing that in the early 2010s and now our culture is unrecognizable, if you have a lot of woke access you'll see that the stereotypes and worst ideas are all full throttle. I was talking to a former NFL player turned business exec at dinner this weekend. Guy is about the most anti-woke manly male you will ever see, but his wife and daughters are woke crazies so he uses his charisma and authority to push their agenda.
The crazies are crazy and have ways to make the rest of us suffer the crazy.*
*Because of the specific topic I will clarify I mean specifically with respect to healthy age gap relationships, I don't want anyone thinking I am a pedophile because even posting anonymously it's a scary thought that someone would incorrectly think that.
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It's a korean game though. Asians already are more neotenous than caucasians on average, and the women even moreso. Back from when I was doing my PhD, my supervisor was a tiny asian women in her 30s who easily could pass as underage. She sometimes had problems ordering beer at the pub for us. Several of the other PhDs were also asian girls in their 20s and some of them looked downright pre-pubescent when judged by european standards. Once you internalize this, the uncanny aesthetics of animes, chans, asian videogames etc. imo make a lot more sense: It's basically a projection of what european women would look like if they were as neotenous as asian women + some minor other asian characteristics often considered attractive. Basically combining all attractive features of european and asian women into one person, as judged by asian men.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. I've lived in Asia for over a decade total, I've taught a dozens of asian children ages 3-12 over the span of several years, and I'm married to an Asian woman. Asian people are indeed more neotenous, but not to the degree that the character in the linked video would be mistaken for a teen or young adult.
That's not quite what I mean; Asian women are naturally more neotenous, so once you spend enough time with them, this just becomes normal to you. European women are naturally less neotenous, but this also feels normal if that's what you're used to. The uncanny aspect comes from combining both in a way that doesn't work naturally. Though I agree that it's sometimes not just combining them, but outright turbocharging it.
I understood your point. I think what I was trying to say was that "a projection of what european women would look like if they were as neotenous as asian women + some minor other asian characteristics often considered attractive" is not what we're seeing in the linked video. I think that a better example would be sexy female anime characters or K-pop stars with heavy plastic surgery. Both are highly stylized and a bit uncanny, but IMO they both usually look like adult or at least teenage women (1,000 year old loli dragons aside).
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Depends what you're steelmanning. As usual, what's happened is a word referring to a genuinely bad thing has had its meaning tortured to make it into a useable weapon where it doesn't apply. Finding big eyes cute does not mean that you're going to go off and rape a baby, any more than asking a man with a dress to use the mens' loo means you're going to go and machine-gun the Hutus.
There doesn't need to be. There is no sex with kids in that trailer. Look at racism: there is no sympathetic principle that makes people think that beating an old black man to death because you hate looking at his dirty skin is okay either; people tire of 'racism' because that's very clearly not what's under discussion.
I don't know anyone IRL who thinks having sex with a 17 year old (bailey) is the same as having sex with a 7 year old (motte). It's a convenient rhetorical cudgel, so people pretend they believe that, but I'm pretty sure almost nobody really believes it. If you called someone who had sex with a high school senior a pedo, most people would roll their eyes; if you called someone who had sex with a 7 year old a pedo people would agree and be out for blood. They bailey might erode, but the motte is not going anywhere.
Contrast that with "racist." Getting called a racist in the 90s was a serious allegation and could make you radioactive even if the underlying charge was ridiculous. But now both frivolous accusations (bailey) AND substantive allegations (motte) are drawing eye rolls. Soon the word racist will be completely powerless, and even actual racial supremacists and chauvinists will be able to mostly shrug it off if they act civil enough. Not so with "pedophile." That one's going to stick around.
Okay, I see your point better now. I partially disagree with your assertion - genuine expressions of pure racial hatred draw more than eye rolls in all but the most edgy communities.
I’m very far from woke but I’ve left group chats because they really were just nastiness about Jewish noses and things.
A lot of that is that Jewish hate became cool amongst certain groups and then lowest common denominator figures got about it in very gauche ways. I'm all for questioning the power of Jewish people in major western countries but 'baby eating cabal of Satan worshiper' stuff just gets gauche very quickly
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I actually feel the same way you do, I quit 4chan because it just became nastiness and wasn't even funny, just the same racial insults and tired jokes repeated ad nauseam. I admit I didn't just roll my eyes and keep scrolling, I left. But I think the difference is that I didn't feel righteous outrage at the extreme racism, I just thought it was distasteful and stupid. I imagine it might have been the same for you, if you've grown up online. Holocaust jokes are dumb and mean-spirited but probably not particularly shocking. You close the browser and immediately move in.
In constrast, I don't think I would ever have such a low key reaction to actual pre-pubescent pedophilia. Even SFW sexualized depiction of pre-pubescent children are extreme creepy and disturbing to me, and I don't think I'm unusual in reactiomng that way. Theoretically you could imagine a society where everyone has been desensitized to it, but we're nowhere near that and a lot would have to change first. Even here in Japan, the vast majority of people find the sexualization of children to be really creepy and beyond the pale despite what "Weird Japan!" clickbait websites claim.
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There is no steelman for sex with pre-pubescent children, but the current public understanding of "paedophilia" includes sex with physiologically mature teenagers who are below the local age of consent, and in some cases with teenagers who are above the age of consent but where the age gap is large enough to give curtain-twitchers the ick. The steelman for this expanded definition of "paedophilia" is that it is just normal human sexuality.
That's true, but the point I was trying to make in my comment was that while "racism" and "sexism" might erode completely, the central examples of "pedophilia" are abhorrent enough that the accusation will never fully lose its power and be met only with eyerolls as OP suggested.
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