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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.

You haven't spelled out how exactly Aella's moral reasoning here is more "sophisticated" than that of Joe off the street.

Is it that she is routinely able to conjure up difficult thought experiments where no answer can fail to unnerve those with pedestrian moral intuitions? Admittedly, doing so with the regularity she does might demand very slightly higher than average intelligence, but I would be surprised if the vast majority of her Twitter readership did not clear that bar.

("Bro how do you niggas even think of shit like this" being a counterexample, but something tells me that the author of that comment is not representative of her audience.)

Or is it that her tone is more level than some of her detractors', demonstrating a mind unclouded by petty emotions? Any moral belief has to have an emotional core. Even hard-nosed consequentialists ultimately have to resort to axioms defining what is good and what is bad. Downthread you dismiss "have the child r*ped by a pedo" as a possible alternative, because the child wouldn't enjoy it. But then nothing would stop a more-decoupled-than-thou elite from patting you on the head and chiding you about how naive it is to elevate the wishes/utility of a child (or adult, it doesn't make a difference) to the status of moral principle. (Such an attitude might already have achieved a certain level of prevalence in the (as you see it) incipient British elite that you often stump for, with its spiritual capital in Rotherham.) After all, utilitarianism may be a generalization of a set post-hoc rationalizations that people make when defending moral assertions using common sense, but utilitarianism itself is a tiny, a-priori-arbitrary point in the space of possible consequentalisms.

Aella's polls piss people off because of their gratuitousness. Her goal is not to start a moral debate through participation in which readers will emerge with a more harmonious/well-founded/highly ramified model of ethics etc. etc. etc., let alone leaving them better equipped for moral action. "Nobody said that it was." Well, what is she trying to accomplish then? What can be the purpose of contriving an extremely unlikely scenario that smushes together the concepts "child" and "sex" and inviting people to think through the uncomfortable details? Leaving aside the partial answer of "driving engagement", the other most likely other answer is "pour épater le bourgeois". And decoupling/"sophistication" is not the axis that determines how annoyed readers will be by such antics. "Épater le bourgeois" isn't exactly heady stuff; it's a game people have been forced to play for centuries by now, which has definitely played a role in creating the [REDACTED] state of Western ethics you gesture at downthread. It's like the "penis" game, but for adults, and with a greater possibility of sinister/subversive intent. Even your "nigga" quotation doesn't deny that Aella actually has found a paradox resulting from ordinary moral judgments being brought into conflict with one another. It's just that for most people, going out of one's way to imagine scenarios where one is forced to choose the lesser of two evils involving sex with children is not a normal form of recreation, and it's understandable to be put off by those for whom it is.

To be honest with you I also think this question is stupid and gross, because sex is meant to be sacred. In a society run in a way I would like it my answer would be an absolute, immediate no because sex is sacred and powerful, and you shouldn't let them have sex for the same reason you wouldn't hand a 5 year old a loaded revolver.

However westereners have made sex completely and utterly profane to the point of total ignominy. I want them to experience the logical consequences of their professed belief system, and I want them to expeirence these consequences good and hard.

If your problem is just that you're disappointed that Westerners' descent into depravity is being checked by a residue of moral common sense because you are rooting for our downfall, you should have been more up front about that in your top-level post. I can't imagine what is supposed to be the difference between the replies you cited disapprovingly and how your ideal traditional Muslim would react to the tweet.

Edit: Except to the extent that sex with children is practiced in the Muslim world/condoned in the Quran.