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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Notes -
The master of trolling is at it again. Hanania:
As of this writing, the results are:
Look at the engagement metrics on this tweet: 94,000 votes, 3.4 million views, 4,700 comments, 273 likes. This might be the most "popular" Hanania tweet of all time.
Now, I am one of the apparent sickos who voted "yes", but I can see some decent arguments for "no". I'm still surprised the results are this lopsided, and I'm also surprised that there appears to be no gender gap.
Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you? (This is, of course, the plot of a ridiculous semi-cult movie.)
Some elites are always going to engage in degenerate or socially deleterious behavior. There were many Epsteins before Epstein and there will be many after him. Most people willing to spend $10m to fuck are going to find people willing to fulfil their request, no matter how wrong, no matter how illegal. "Should it be allowed" is really an irrelevant question in this respect.
But - and this is something that the progressive understanding of permissiveness doesn't really have space for - there is a big difference between what is illegal but seen as semi-inevitable degeneracy engaged in by small groups at the very bottom and very top of society, and the vast construct of middle-class and working-class morality. Promiscuity is, to some extent, natural. However the fact that both the Byrons and the dockyard whores of this world have always engaged in it doesn't mean that most people benefit from the sexual revolution.
Instead of Hanania's Indecent Proposal, it's best to consider who the majority of Epstein's alleged victims actually were. They were poor girls from West Palm Beach, a poor part of town beset with a high rate of single motherhood and various other social issues with crime and poverty. And they were (allegedly) poor, often Eastern European girls, recruited by Epstein's associates in the Paris modelling world, who come (or at least came, back in the 90s and early 2000s) from a poor and suffering corner of Europe, far away from home, with no support network, put up by the 'agency' in New York apartments owned by Epstein and his brother.
What might actually have made a difference? Stricter divorce laws, more discouraging rather than encouraging of promiscuity, a culture that sees sex as something important, something to do with love and marriage and family rather than something meaninglesss and throwaway. It wouldn’t have stopped all of what happened, of course (as I say above, that’s an impossible task) but it would have saved some. Most who went to Epstein's mansion knew - in as much as a 14 year old can 'know' - "what they were doing". But they thought it was fine, or at least OK, because in a culture in which girls are raised to think that men who pursue them expect sex and that they should readily give it up to them, why not fuck an old guy for a few hundred dollars? Society failed them long before they set foot on his doorstep.
Of course enforcing sexual morality also means making it harder for old men to fuck girls for money, and as in the Russell Brand case I’m happy when they ‘get caught’, because I’ve seen the damage it can do, but men do what they get away with (something much bigger than ‘the law’) in this regard and always have. The largest part of the problem is a spiritual void in which sex is stripped of any real meaning, and therefore seemingly doesn’t matter, and so ‘getting it’ (or ‘giving it up’) in whatever way doesn’t matter. If sex is meaningless, trying to get people to care about who has it is never going to work.
In a way, this reminds me of a similar question around the Rotherham / 'Grooming Gang' scandal. There, as with Epstein, there is a proximate cause (large scale importation of sexually repressed men with certain views on white/'kuffar' women, plus police who didn't want to be 'politically insensitive'). But the ultimate cause is that the scale of the grooming gang scandals would never have been what it was if a more conservative sexual morality had persisted in Britain. The opportunities for the predators in question, whose modus operandi was (primarily) to get young promiscuous teenage girls from broken families very, very drunk, offer them tons of free alcohol and drugs after school and then pimp them out to their friends, simply wouldn't have been present to the same extent in such a culture. Why white (and sometimes Sikh) girls and not Muslims? Because the Muslim girls weren't out drinking on Friday night at 13 or 14 years old, and because they had a father at home who would rock up with a lynch mob if some group of strangers molested his daughter, anyone else be damned.
Agreed, and I find the whole notion/question incredibly tawdry and symptomatic of cultural rot, even as a thought experiment. I'm sure that sounds condescendingly naive--and perhaps moralistic in a lowclass, statistically illiterate sorta way, apparently. So be it; I wouldn't have to think too much about this to type No.
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