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So, in other Aella news, she's channelling the spirit of Hanania with this poll:
Options are (with their current percentages):
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:
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.
This question looks a bit like a scissor statement. I would argue that the first thing to do would be to taboo the word child, which sometimes means people under 14 and sometimes people under 21.
I think that the reason for the reaction by the general public is that the question can be seen as an attempt to either normalize prostitution among minors or sex between adults and 13-year olds. In an argument-as-soldiers mindset, asking that question would make Aella a terrible person. (Of course, people who elect to be on Twitter taking offense to Aella of all Twitter users seems bizarre to me, personally.)
The reason we criminalize most sex between adults and minors (unless the age gap is really small) is that the power dynamics in such relationships are generally lopsided and harmful to the development of the minor. Of course, the idea that the state of being a minor (let's say 15yo) voids consent in the same way that being to drunk to walk voids consent (unless the partner is a minor of similar age, when the minors consent is considered valid. Hm, does this also apply when both parties are dead drunk, or did they then rape each other? Is there a conversion factor between blood alcohol concentration and years under minority, or would a person below age of consent having sex with a drunken person both rape them and be raped in turn, legally?) seems factually dubious, but I can't think of a more plausible legal fiction to motivate this.
I would support a rule that for people permanently incapable of lawful consent (which would include Aella's case but also people ruled generally incompetent), actual consent plus the approval of a legal guardian (or family court or whatever) can substitute for legal consent. The idea would be that the guardian can substitute the common sense of a competent adult in avoiding separate exploitative sex without damning the patient to a life without sex.
In the end, this is something which intelligent people can have different opinions about. Some might prefer having hard and fast rules, even if they end up being harmful in some rare edge cases. Some might prefer to interpret the rules more loosely with an eye to the interests they are meant to protect, at the risk of making the Schelling fence porous.
I don’t think this is true, I think it’s because it’s icky. I’ll grant that liberals, asked to justify this, will start ranting about power dynamics nullifying consent, but I think this is just one of those things where consent expands to fill the role of sexual morality when everything else has been thrown out.
Let’s take the case of a teenaged boy who hires a prostitute with his allowance money. Obviously the boy wanted to do this, and obviously the prostitute doesn’t have any power over him(maybe she can tell his parents? But it’s not the most reasonable scenario). This scenario probably happens every day, and I’ll bet you very progressive people would say no, he shouldn’t be allowed to do that, and they’ll reach for something other than power dynamics to say so.
Yeah. Like, the teenage boy is being kind of dumb IMO, the prostitute is even worse unless she genuinely got fooled into thinking he was 18. That being said, I think that the terminal illness makes this a pretty different thing. Terminally ill kids have much stronger autonomy interests; there aren't any future adult selves that parents and society are trying to protect.
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