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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25585 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition

And if this isn't true then we should seriously consider making pedophilic urges result in irreversible life imprisonment (but I bet a popular alternative would be execution).

I dislike the idea of thought crimes, even if they are heinous thoughts.

Agreed.

But if predilections are indeed not mutable by conditioning or therapy, then at the very least all convicted pedophiles must never be released from prison.

Not just this, but by not imprisoning high propensity to pediophilia people there are children who will end up getting abused who would not have been abused in the counterfactual. Now you can say that's fine and accept the background level of child abuse this causes as you believe this is less damaging than mass incarceration but you actually have to make an argument about the tradeoff between potential pedophile's freedom and the rights of children to not be abused, and I do not see anyone in modern western society being willing to touch that with a 100 ft barge pole.

The majority of child abuse, including sexual abuse, is committed by non-pedophiles so society is apparently already on board with such trade-offs. Advocating the incarceration of pedophiles simply due to their attractions is just a way for lazy self-righteous people to feel like they are protecting children without having to do the work of actually looking into the causes of abuse and thinking seriously about the trade-offs that would be required to avert it.

I really don't think defending pedophiles is a good way to avoid being perceived as causing societal problems. But even if it was, I would rather go to prison.

Oh I thought you were referencing Niemoller. You didn't actually say "hey we maybe shouldn't do thought crime".

Anyway, we are dissidents because we allow and engage with alternative perspectives, even heinous ones, so if we stop having those discussions and stop people from arguing for thought crimes, then we won't be dissidents any longer, and we won't be in danger. But also I won't have the motte, I'll have reddit with extra autism, so on balance I'd still rather go to prison.

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