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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 20, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Nolan got kicked off the Pizza Party Podcast almost three years ago, so it's certainly "old news" at this point, but a comic someone made about the incident surfaced on my Twitter feed this weekend, as someone was using it to illustrate the concept of fetish mining to people who are unaware.

The first link is the original posting (AFAIK) of the comic. The second is what appeared on my feed. I'm including the second because the person's bio says "Transmale Aro Ace/ He-They", which is interesting given the circumstances.

I'm starting to lose track of grooming and why it's bad.

My understanding is that grooming is the act influencing kids to make decisions they're not prepared to make, with the implicit understanding that they technically won't make these decisions until they've reached the age of consent, even though they've already been acclimated to the concept for years prior. This is why some consider teaching kids about gender to be a form of grooming, and why an adult talking to a minor with no clear intent of romance is seen as potential grooming.

Commissioning an underage artist to draw a character wrapped in a spiderweb is so many steps removed from sex that, regardless of whether the commissioner gets off on it, I don't know why it's any worse than just talking to the child about cartoons. Nolan was openly talking to children on social media before he was #cancelled because most of the fans of the podcast were children. It only became a problem when he commissioned artwork for his niche fetish from them.

If anyone can provide a steelman against Nolan that isn't based on disgust, I'd be interested in hearing it.

(Also, I don't think grooming is a black or white thing, a "you did it or you didn't do it" thing. There's no clear line that makes something grooming or not grooming. Defining it by intent is pointless, because you can't prove intent, and defining it by outcome means that you can't identify grooming until it's come to pass. It's always a judgement call, unlike actual child molestation, which I'm sure we can all agree refers to engaging in a necessarily sexual act with a child.)

If I have an apple fetish - I get off on pictures of bright, shiny apples - and I especially liked having kids draw me pictures of bright, shiny apples, then clearly there is no direct "damage" being done to the kids, and there is nothing wrong with pictures of apples. But I think people aware of my fetish would be rightfully disturbed that I wanted to involve children in providing kink fuel. Regardless of whether I had any intention of "cranking it up," as that cartoon puts it, it's definitely a valid concern. If I just want to get off on apples, why I am bringing kids into it?

If I just want to get off on apples, why I am bringing kids into it?

You probably aren't actually bringing kids into it, you probably just happened to ask an underage artist because there are a lot of underage artists, and various internet users imagined you were disproportionately asking kids because 'sex + kids' sets people off.

So the argument isn't that he's doing any harm in the present, but that his decision to solicit children to produce his artwork, rather than adults, is a red flag. That makes sense.

So the argument isn't that he's doing any harm in the present, but that his decision to solicit children to produce his artwork, rather than adults, is a red flag.

If I send you an email claiming to be a Nigerian prince who will pay you millions for your banking info, one could say that I haven't harmed you yet. In the same way, when I put a worm on a hook and cast it into the water, I haven't harmed the fish yet. And yet, both the email and the baited hook are preparation for harm, and when that harm can be foreseen, people want to treat it harshly.

Grooming is a general term for older or more socially-influential people building inappropriate relationships with younger or more socially-vulnerable people, where the latter end up vulnerable to exploitation. It is used without controversy to refer to gang recruitment of adolescents, cult recruitment, relationship abuse, and a variety of other contexts. Fraud and scams commonly exhibit the same psychological tricks, and in all these cases, the problem is well-understood and entirely uncontroversial: maneuvering people into positions where they can be easily exploited is bad in and of itself, and nothing good comes of it.

The red-flag works on two levels. At the object level, you cannot be sure that @Amadan specifically and his specific apple arrangement will remain purely channeled as he describes without any leaks.

On a broader level you are regularlizing and normalizing a fundamentally very unstable system. Providing open channels for to regularly interact with adults in two-way exchanges and providing, while normalizing adults requesting erotic-adjacent material from the former group, and destygmatizing then entire frame work around eprsonal kink shame, is basically asking for abuse all over the place.

One of the biggest concepts of conservatism vs liberalism is maintainance of the broad social value of institutional infrastructure and moral framework. When you erode that because isolated instances don't cause harm, you ignore that the only way to allow those isolated "harmless" incidents was to either open the same exact gate that does allow the harm or to be coupled with an extreme totalitarian surveillance against any harm.

Essentially you can't have safe, high trust neighborhoods, and no locks, and no social reprecussions for trespassers. You can only pick two. But the trespasser then points to harmless trespassing and uses something somethign "moral disgust" as a frame for why proscribing trespassing is arbirary.

You have a fence, a chesterton's fence. And some people believe they should be able to harmlessly pass through the fence. It is in fact an affront to their freedom that they cannot. Of course there are people who would do harm if they could pass the fence. So your choices are to 1. keep the fence, 2. remove the fence and accept, address, or police the harm on the other side of it, or 3. Put a high security gate in the fence.

Any version of 3 that still let's harm through is just a flavor of 2.

One might, in an appeal to liberty suggest that 2 is the only righteous solution. OK, make that argument, though I vehemently disagree. But we cannot frame 1 as simple disgust, aesthetics or moral dogmatism.

Some people, conservatives and progressives, prefer to live in a society with strong hegemonic barriers against harm whilest allowing a different kind of freedom and security inside the society dependent on that scaffolding.


On another level, this is probably your 'moral disgust' level. Regardless of whether @Amadan 's example would ever harm someone, what he is doing in the hypothetical is disordered. And is further involving a minor in their disordered act and there should be the highest reasonable obstacles from him doing so. Different definitions of reasonable are going to be socially navigated (you'll have burka's in one culture and open decadence coupled with a Terms of Service click through in another). I don't think reducing this social proscription to disgust or aversion tells the whole picture, remotely.

Essentially you can't have safe, high trust neighborhoods, and no locks, and no social reprecussions for trespassers.

What, exactly, is the point in having a high trust society if you still need to act as if you're living in a low trust society?

The point is that you don't if there are social repercussions for trespassers. High trust society doesn't mean no consequences society.

Essentially you can't have safe, high trust neighborhoods, and no locks, and no social reprecussions for trespassers. You can only pick two. But the trespasser then points to harmless trespassing and uses something somethign "moral disgust" as a frame for why proscribing trespassing is arbirary.

Brilliant analogy. Thank you for your post. I'd aware a delta if we did that here.

This isn't the first time I'm seeing this 'moral disgust / aesthetics' dismissal in this kind of space, and it's nothing more than the intersection between a strawman, question begging, and isolated demand for rigor.

Are you interested in following the causal logic of an outcomes and effects argument? Then ask that plainly. Are you interested in hearing someone defend the issue deontologically? Then ask that plainly Are you're really intereted in someone's basic beliefs in their moral framework? Then why conveniently begin the discussion, dismissively, with an issue you disagree with.

All moral arguments will ultimately fall into essentially 1 of 4 categories, beneath the level of basic beleifs: theological / deist, arbitrary nihilism, aesthetic, or motivated self interest.

Even if you are Mr. Consequentialist, you eventually have to argue 'why' the good outcome deserves the term 'good', and you have one of the four options to pick from above. And all four of these can arguably collapse into the others (or lack of other).

"Ha! Your perception of good and bad is based on 'aesthetics'!" Isn't quite the trump one might thing it is.

theological / deist, arbitrary nihilism, aesthetic, or motivated self interest.

What about group interest? Even if I'm selfish enough to prefer "I get to steal stuff and my targets get to suck it" as a moral rule, I obviously can't negotiate for that, and "nobody gets to steal stuff" is a much better Schelling point for me than "everybody gets to steal stuff". Technically "nobody gets to steal stuff" is still motivated by self-interest, since I'm picking what's better for me among realistic alternatives, but it still seems like it belongs in a different category than the "I get to steal stuff" rule.

And all four of these can arguably collapse into the others

Though this still seems true, for all five of these. In particular in this context, we can have evolved to feel disgust at things we expect to violate group interests, and we can have negotiated group interests that include effort to avoid triggering group members' innate disgust reactions.

I'm not sure I have enough of this context, though. I don't know who any of these people are, and when I google nolan "pizza party podcast" fetish the top video hit is "The DIAPER FETISH SONIC Special", which appears to open with the "Superfuckers" theme song. This is the show where "most of the fans of the podcast were children"? Perhaps I'm not giving it a fair shake, closing that window 10 seconds after clicking the Youtube link, but frankly I'm just hoping that Google and Youtube respect my incognito window and don't corrupt future search results or algorithm recommendations.

I'll start by saying I'm no philosopher. But as you describe since, these can all collapse into eachother (in postive or negative formulation), I don't see why you couldn't have five. I'm going to flippantly call these all different faces of "The Axiom", some starting point of the good that's self-justifying in some way.

That said, I was personally thinking of group interest as essentially in terms of self-interest. Where I was going with self-interest was "this moral / value proposition" isn't based on some extrinsic good, but on what outcome I prefer. So if one thinks that said given moral proposition isn't based on some theistic derivation, isn't arbitrary, isn't derived from some evo-psych or naturalistic attraction, then it's motivated self-interest.

That said, again, I see no reason, this couldn't be expanded out as a fifth face.

I appreciate your response and aspire to your level of rationalism. I'd say I'm most interested in following the causal logic of an outcomes and effects argument, though I wouldn't mind the other three.

Moral disgust, like other kinds of disgust, is often best recognized as a heuristic. A general heuristic that [people who get off on kids' behavior are disgusting and dangerous to children] is a good one. Such people are far, far more likely to be predators than your average person.

That makes sense. And if you place a higher value on protecting children than on not shaming adults for their behavior, then I can see why shaming Nolan would be seen as justified. If I understand you correctly, the steelman wouldn't be that he hurt anyone or was trying to, but that there needs to be an enforcement mechanism to disincentivize this behavior. Am I correct?

if you place a higher value on protecting children than on not shaming adults for their behavior

This is a fundamentally different worldview than mine. "Shame" is a strong word, but I think consequences (including social) for people's actions benefit those people in the long run more often than not. Whether [shaming adults for their behavior] is negative at all has to do with what that behavior actually is, independent of any other factors.

If I understand you correctly, the steelman wouldn't be that he hurt anyone or was trying to, but that there needs to be an enforcement mechanism to disincentivize this behavior. Am I correct?

I'd abstract a level further. Sexual abuse of children is bad (citation needed). We want to prevent it, so we disincentivize actions likely to lead to it. Involving kids in personal communication online is already bad enough, but then to make that communication sexual is way over the line, whether or not it actually leads to predation.

Other commentors have done a better job at describing this than me but honestly I'm puzzled what part of this is confusing at all to you.

Because I had a hard time imagining how the spider web thing would translate into him harming an actual child. They were very segregated in my mind, and my immediate revulsion towards anything that looks like cancel culture prevented my attempt to understand the steps involved in extrapolating harm from an abstract fetish.