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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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So, in other Aella news, she's channelling the spirit of Hanania with this poll:

Suppose you have a 13 year old child dying of a terminal illness, and their final wish is to lose their virginity before they die. Is it ethical for the Make A Wish Foundation to hire them a prostitute?

Options are (with their current percentages):

  • yes, any prostitute (10.7%)
  • yes, only child prostitute (3.9%)
  • yes, only adult prostitute (9.8%)
  • no (75.6%)

Of course Aella with her reach manages to get normies to see her posts and the replies are wild that such a person could even exist, some choice replies:

Bro how do you niggas even think of shit like this

What if you were executed at gitmo that would be so crazy

Is this "chick" a pedo? (poll, results are 56.5% yes, 21.7% no, 21.7% "show me the results")

Again I ask, what is wrong with you and why do you keep showing up on my timeline?

While the poll itself may be interesting, what I find most interesting of all are the responses from the normies (there are responses that look objectively at the situation and say stuff like "no, if anyone is going to hire prostitutes it should be the parents, not the make a wish foundation", but they all tend to have stuff like "e/acc" in their usernames so they aren't your average randos). These tend to be extremely negative, but not negative in a "I know what I hate and this is it" form but rather a "first encounter with a terrible eldrich abomination you want to see destroyed but are confused at how could it even exist" sort of way. It does not feel like pure hate, but rather a hate that is born of fear, true xenophobia in its original meaning of the word. Nevertheless it is still a form of hate and you can quite easily see the vitriol directed towards Aella, merely for posting this poll.

My worry here though is that as technology advances and a sliver of people with disproportionate cultural cachet adopt belief systems like those of Aella and decouple from the low sophistication ways of thinking common in most westerners along with completely different cultures entering the west and taking root the current indigenous westerners will find their belief and value systems squeezed on both sides, from above by the likes of people who think like Aella does (nothing wrong with how she thinks, in fact I support it) along with from below by the value systems of recent migrants (who still care about stuff like honour and shame etc.).

While this may be a difficult time for the squeezed westereners themselves (I have little sympathy though, these very same people expect migrants to deal with a far bigger and more rapid cultural shock and blame them if they migrants take steps to mitigate this impact), I am more concerned about potential increased societal scale strife as people lash out from being put in a world that they no longer understand (see the "what if you were executed at gitmo" response above, I for one am glad this person has no power and hope it stays this way).

Naturally I have no doubt that any reified violence by the disaffected would be put down with the same prejudice we use for terrorist attacks these days, but it would still not be a good time for social harmony and that has widespread social impacts beyond a small handful of people cracking and going on a rampage where they kill a few people before bring brought down themselves.

So… does anyone on the motte want to actually debate the question posed? I’ll start.

No to child prostitutes because child prostitutes presumably cannot consent, and it is not ethical to commit a crime with a victim involved, just because it’s someone’s dying wish to do so.

Saying yes to adult prostitutes assumes that the dying child is capable of consenting to sex for themselves, which is the complete opposite of what we’ve just established for the “No to child prostitutes” case. If we want to keep “No to child prostitutes” while maintaining “Yes to adult prostitutes”, we’ll have to introduce a difference between the two scenarios: “A teenager can reasonably be expected to understand consent for sex alone (and this is why it is moral for teenagers to consent to sex with each other), but the concept of consenting to sex in exchange for money is too advanced for teenagers to consent to (and therefore immoral for a child to prostitute themselves even though it is moral for a child to have sex without money).”

At which point is it genuine nuance, and at which point is it just contorting yourself into mental gymnastics? Perhaps either saying yes or no to all prostitution in this scenario would be the most consistent moral positions to take. The case for “yes”: a being will miss out on having a fundamentally common human experience before they die. If we care about providing dying children with less fundamental human experiences (like going to Disneyland) before they go, why not provide them with one that matters more?

The case for “no”: children are not capable of deciding for themselves whether they truly want such experiences. Even adults make poor decisions that they regret because it harmed them, and it would be horrible to allow a dying child to harm themselves before they go. (Although, as I understand it, the main reason why it’s bad for an underage teenager to consent to sex with an adult is because they risk emotional manipulation by the more experienced adult. Making sure that it’s a one-off affair would seem to largely mitigate this risk.)

In fact, how much does the dying child part even matter? It seems it would only matter if we first establish that harm is always caused to children having sex, even if they ostensibly consent. Otherwise, this might as well be ethical even without the child in question being mortally ill. But if sex always causes children harm, the question is whether it’s ethical to allow kids to hurt themselves. Is it ethical to sell a knife to a teen who has just stated their desire to stab themselves, regardless of whether the teen was going to die anyways?

What perspectives am I missing?


Also, meta questions:

  1. Who the hell is Aella? From your post, it sounds like she’s been mentioned here before
  2. Why is the general populace so averse to calmly discussing the moral foundations of our sexual mores? Given how strong the societal taboo is, I should probably delete my account after this discussion. But I mean, why is there such a strong taboo, such that even bringing up the subject as Aella has leads to such accusations of pedophilia?

Let's take a different scenario: the dying child expresses a wish to be able to shoot and kill a real life person (let's be agnostic on race here, but if you want the spicier version, make the dying child also a racist who wants to murder a specific minority of some kind).

What's the opinions now? Yes, No, Only if it's the same race as the kid, Only if it's a Bad Person (like a Trump voter), what?

After all, it's "ha ha only joking, can't you parse a hypothetical?" and not a real query, now is it?

If Aella is seriously trying to get at "why don't we let 13 year olds fuck, and why don't we let adults fuck 13 year olds?" with this stupid, stupid poll (and Hanania is even stupider for his provocation), then - well my opinion of the entire sub-culture remains unchanged, even if Burdensome Count thinks it is a matter of not being able to reconcile belief sets. I have no problem with my belief set around this entire view of what the purpose of sex is, and how we should conduct ourselves with it.

If that kid lived in a jurisdiction that practiced the death penalty and carried it out with firing squads, I don't think it would be beyond the pale for them to join in on one execution, probably with a few days' drilling beforehand.

The core difference between your "shoot a person" scenario and the "don't die a virgin" scenario is that shooting random people is something society expects nobody to do, while people having sex is not only allowed but implicitly expected. Children aren't told that they shouldn't ever have sex, but to wait until later, when they'll be more mature and have a better understanding of the situation and the consequences. But for terminally ill children, "later" is never going to come.