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Whomever ZHPL is, his writing reads like a crazy political grifter. There was a lot of text, but what was all that text even trying to say? I feel like he barely even tried to tie thought threads together. For example, he went from "in 1968, leftism was taking over the world", then in the next sentence said that almost a full decade later, French intellectuals baned age of consent. Am I supposed to think something about this? Am I supposed to think that one event led to the other? Can he even try to convince me of this instead of just assuming I already agree? 9 years later, people in France did something. Okay. Maybe there's a connection I'm not seeing. If so, prove it.
I won't defend this writer, but I think sometimes you leave steps out because they're fairly obvious and well connected.
It's pretty well known that the sexual revolution of the 1960s led to a lot of pedo stuff. Alan Ginsburg was a member of NAMBLA. Lolita was considered a classic. Roman Polanski was Humbert Humbert in real life and the French celebrated and protected him.
At some point we had a rollback on underage sex towards a new Schelling point focused on consent but it took a couple decades to get there.
Today, of course, we see a strange bifurcation where 23 year old women are incapable of consenting to sex with a 40 year old man, but its okay to subject young children to intense discussions and demonstrations of sexuality. Perhaps he's trying to invoke all of that. I don't know. His writing is vile.
That seems kinda like consensus-building, to me. That's clearly what ZHPL is trying to say, but it's a very controversial statement. Very many people around here are trying to connect both present-day and past leftism to pedophilia, and even though I can't stand the left, I can't stand when people try to make that connection even more. I find it insulting that ZHPL justs waves his hand in that general direction and is like "people got into leftism in 1968, and than all of a sudden 9 years later: BAM! age of consent was revoked (in France)". It's almost comical.
There are pedophiles everywhere. You know the arguments: The plural of "anecdote" isn't data. Chinese Robber Fallacy, etc.
I hate when people try to say the Right is full of pedophiles because some priests molest kids and some backwoods rednecks are inbred, so I also hate it when people gesture at the left for similar things.
I have no argument with you on most of this paragraph, especially with regards to the strange bifurcation existing in leftist thought.
Though I may slightly disagree with you about whether most leftists are okay with "demonstrations" of sexuality for minors. They definitely are okay with "discussions" with minors, and I think they go too far there, but I don't know if they're really mostly down with "demonstrations". Other than the aforementioned pedophiles, who as I mentioned before are everywhere and on all sides.
It's not about the pedophilia. It's about the acceptance of pedophilia. Obviously, actual practice of pedophilia is not tied to any particular political orientation.
Furthermore, I am not talking about the modern-left which (drag queen story hour aside) is strongly anti-pedophilia.
I am talking about the confused atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s where there was sort of an anything goes atmosphere. Hip people thought it was sort of okay for a 13 year old girl to explore her sexuality with Roman Polanski. Alan Ginsburg was a non-ironic member of NAMBLA and a celebrated member of leftist society. At the time, the left was pushing the sexual frontier in all areas, and children weren't off limits.
Where you see any "acceptance" of pedophilia?
Yes, and these people lost as decisively you can lose.
Laws about age of consent, underage sex and child porn are tightened every day, pedophiles are the most hated people in the world, anyone accused of being "pedo" is considered to be devil in human form and treated likewise.
The future is not free love hippy commune where anything goes. The future is "age gap" enshrined in laws and total internet and AI censorship/ban to protect children. If it saves one (pixelated) child, it is worth it!
Well out of the intellectuals of the 20th century, I believe American college students are a lot less exposed to Hitler's ideas on men, women and children than on those of Foucault, Deleuze, Sartre, Beauvoir, etc.
Why all the outrage about the so-called 'don't say gay' Florida bill then? Why do teachers feel entitled to talk about sex with children? Why are kids getting brought to drag shows?
Why are kids made to make decisions about their genitals and whether they should undergo normal puberty or not?
Why such concern about books banned from school libraries ? No, they are not talking about Henry Ford's or Charles Murray's writings, but here is an example :
Why do school libraries need explicit sexual material?
The current year is 2023. 20th century is over, and ideas of French intellectuals (at least concerning sexual liberation) are as popular and influential as Hitler's ideas.
The teachers do not want children to have sex, they want them to explore their "gender identity", possibly all the way to gender transition, which is the most thorough desexualization since the Skoptsy were a thing.
David Cole (of impeccable alt-right credentials) puts it here much better.
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To own the cons. Hard to imagine something less sexually arousing and stimulating than "drag queen hours."
Because it is, in our digital age, completely pointless political football on both sides. 90% of children are not going to read any books, and the 10% who want, can have any book in the world at their fingertips.
BTW, in the good old times in the fifties, after hunting Soviet spies, libraries were one of McCarthy's concerns. Looking for unamerican books in libraries was one of his pastimes.
"CITIZENS! Do you know there are COMMUNIST books in AMERICAN libraries? What are you going to do about this menace?"
This is forgotten now, but this was the major thing he was known for in his time and what elicited such strong reaction among the public.
Well, the reaction was less "I am American, I will never read any unamerican books!", and more "I am American, no Irish drunken swine is going to dictate to me what books I can read!"
Fascinating; I thought eunuchs and castrati were the pinnacle of that movement, but then again the two are not that similar either to each other or to the Skoptsyists.
I suggest "Junior Anti-Sex League" as a working title for how progressives operate with respect to sex (tradcons do this too, but while the end result is currently the same, they started with entirely different reasoning, so it's more a 'happy' accident they currently behave the same).
Especially since 99-100% of the participants are straight, drag queens are [intentionally] aesthetically unpleasing, and children are generally smart enough to prefer beautiful things to ugly ones. Of course, there is already a significant amount of documentation about what is sexually arousing to straight tween/teenagers- it usually begins with the words "Dear Penthouse," or, more recently, a 6-digit code to a particular website. None of them involve drag queens, or so I'm told.
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Some don't, some do. The teachers harping over gender theory certainly got their ideas from people who at least studied under people who were either kiddy-diddlers of the kind of Gabriel Matzneff or very close friends of them. The fact that these ideas come from these people is not unrelated to the fact that adults are reaching out to children to sensitize them to these behaviors.
Yes, totally normal behavior. If you see a group of Nazi war criminals dressed up in Nazi garb playing war with plastic guns and the neighborhood's children, should that concern the average Jewish pacifist?
The history channel seems to think it should. Idk about the gender theory academia and the people in charge of the 'LGBT youth' groups.
It appears to me that McCarthy was right. Where else but libraries did the teachers get their ideas of transidentity?
Amazon and other platforms are definitely removing different books depending on who is in charge.
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There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of books in every single school library with graphic descriptions of physical violence, blood, gore, and destruction. Yet, somehow, reading about two gay people having sex is more explicit? As long as kids can check out a book and read about the aftermath of World War II in Europe, the world won't end if they get some masturbation instructions as well.
I don't condone the type of atrocity porn that the holocaust memorial enthusiasts like to propagate either.
My understanding is that the books that parents are actually upset about are more like instructions on how to get your genitals cut or how to get the latest fancy sexually-transmitted disease in the least reproductively productive way possible.
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Sex and violence are very different things, and we protect children from them in very different ways. Primarily in that depicting violence isn't violent, whereas depicting sex is sexual.
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I’d bet against that first one. World history is required for most (all?) majors, while continental philosophy is not. Hitler was a shitty excuse for an intellectual, but he sure drew an audience.
As for modern legislation, are you sure you’ve got the right bill? The “don’t say gay one” made some rather sweeping statements about things which I would not classify as “talking about sex.”
Edit: including things other than sex. Mea culpa.
I don't think American college professors ever bring up Hitler's ideas about family and fertility as possible inspirations while addressing contemporary issues like the drop in birth rates. I'm pretty confident that at least some college professors quote the various continental philosophers as support for one or the other of their arguments.
Right there in #3 clearly has the "sexual" keyword.
Taking a random article quoting opponents of the bills:
Title: 'Don't Say Gay' bill would limit discussion of sexuality
Now, what are LGBT kids?
Perhaps we need to dig further to understand what exactly that means for kids.
Wikipedia asserts:
Now the first quote from a regular dictionary does not have the word girl in it. I was able to peruse the 3rd quote and it does not cover the 'girl' portion. Now we have to rely on some book published by a Bonnie Zimmerman, on which Wikipedia relies to assert that girls can be lesbians just like women.
Interestingly there is still some debate in the talk page on this subject:
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This is all very confused but from what I can gather, the word 'attraction' seems to play a major role in all of this, as I assume they are not expecting these so-called LGBT kids to be engaging in homosexual, genital-engaging practices to prove their membership?
Now, why have a specific term for a child that is supposedly 'attracted to the same gender' (or sex depending on who's talking)? Children can be obsessed with things such as robots, dinosaurs, cars, princesses, unicorns, mermaids... Should we automatically sign them up to for example for the unicorn lovers, the 'cloppers community'? Should we let adults come up to these specifically designated children and allow them to explain how cloppers identify themselves, which codes they use to communicate, how cloppers manage to pleasure themselves with the object of their desire...? Or does this seem absurd, weird, perhaps disgusting to an unenlightened audience?
I imagine it would take serious amounts of propaganda for such an audience to see it as completely natural for the adults they placed in charge of looking after their children to be okay with this ordeal.
How many of these kids just 'kinda liked unicorns' because one of their friends has a cool hat with unicorns on them?
How many of these kids won't even dare bring their cool unicorn hat to school anymore, because they're afraid of getting cornered by the middle-aged woman with problem glasses and froth at the mouth who just can't wait to tell them how 'cloppers' express love?
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The argument around CP reminds me a bit of the one about guns.
People who want more government action to restrict the thing in question often use a motte-and-bailey argument. The bailey is "we must do whatever it takes to save people from being shot / sexually abused, even if it means getting rid of the second amendment / imposing drastic censorship". The motte is "don't be crazy, we're reasonable people of course, we just want common-sense regulations".
Also, some of the people who want more government action are, whether they consciously realize this or not, probably not primarily motivated by a desire to save people. They want the gun restrictions or the censorship mainly because the gun rights / the free Internet is something that their political rivals enjoy and something that helps those political rivals.
Meanwhile what many people who want less government action actually believe, whether they consciously realize this or not, is "I think that some kids being molested and some people being shot is an unfortunate but acceptable price to pay for being able to resist the oppressive government and defend oneself / for having free speech / etc".
But to say that openly is generally not socially acceptable, so people pretend that it is possible to have the thing they want (the right to own guns, freedom from Internet censorship, etc.) without the downsides (people being shot, child abuse, etc.).
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