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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   4104 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 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?

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The master of trolling is at it again. Hanania:

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with a 14 year-old girl, and will pay her $10 million. The money will go into a mutual fund that will pay out when she's 21. The girl agrees, as do both of her parents. Should this be allowed? And are you male or female?

As of this writing, the results are:

  • "Yes, male" - 5.9%
  • "No, male" - 78.1%
  • "Yes, female" - 1.3%
  • "No, female" - 14.7%

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.

The girl agrees

This is the crux of the matter. The whole idea behind various types of ages of majority is that executive functions required to consciously agree to X are sufficiently developed at age Y that only a small minority of people is not mature enough to do that and it's so small that we can identify it via various special needs education. Of course, anyone who's worked as a paramedic or a cop or a DMV officer knows that it's a bold-faced lie and the society would be better off if we had emancipation licenses, but that's a different story.

The whole idea behind the age of consent is that while this specific 14-year old might really understand the implications of having sex for a lot of money with an ugly dude, we have no real way of knowing if she does. If she really was a precocious girl and there was an emancipation test she could take and she took it and passed it, I would agree to treat her as an adult and let her have sex with Epstein no matter what her parents thought about it.

However, I don't know what I would do if she was only ten and took this test and passed it. My first reaction would be "well, obviously this test is wrong, it's too easy, there's no way she could've passed it", but what if it's not, what if she goes "bitch, my parents were killed in Tigray and I've spend the last two years working sixteen hours a day to provide for myself and my two little siblings while learning enough English to be able to call you a little bitch, so what if the dude is a disgusting chomo, so what I'm literally prepubescent, it's ten million US dollars for one intercourse, I could airlift the best doctor in the world to suture the bleeding tears in my vagina after the deal is done, move my family out of this festering shithole to a first-world country, get an education, become a PMC, hire a good head shrink to help me deal with trauma when I'm 35"?

P.S. That's why Twitter must die, how the hell are you supposed to answer this in 280 characters or fewer?

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