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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.
Considering that it's possible to get charged for rape while still being below the age of consent, the latter, but therein lies the problem.
If a child cannot understand consent [be it factual or just legal fiction], then we inherently owe them immunity for problems that stem from that assumed lack of understanding. But we don't do that (so we get stuff like 10 year olds being on the hook for child support, 17 year olds being thrown in jail for child pornography of themselves, and the ever-popular "charged as an adult" that never extends in the other direction), QED these laws aren't about justice.
Or to put it another way, while we like to pretend there's a good deal of "noblesse oblige" in our age of consent policies, in practice there's next to zero "noblesse" and pointing that out leads to nothing but white-hot rage. Probably because that pattern matches to "authority is being arbitrary for self-serving, non-objective reasons", which crashes right into "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be", and should you at least suspect that truth to be "[good] sex is not actually a big deal"...
Thus, 'consent' as blackwhite, and why it needs to be defended in a way that goes far beyond a simple disgust reaction. Interestingly, this defense doesn't map evenly across the standard political triangle: tradcons [traditionally] don't care that much about child sex as long as it remained between husband and wife/wives, progressives [traditionally] don't care that much about child sex as long as it isn't between husband and wife (later, man and woman more generally), and (classical) liberals are defined by not caring at all anyway- thus it has to be coming from somewhere else.
Could you explain what you mean more fully? I think I disagree with you on at least one point, but a decent chunk of your meaning is implicit and I don't want to go off unnecessarily.
There's nothing in either the tradcon nor the progressive nor the liberal worldview that has any inherent problem with child sex as a concept.
On one end, you have... well, everything before the early 20th century, where the age of consent was somewhere in the single digits (if it even existed at all). This was necessary, because if a family fell on hard times and had some girls, that is what they would be encouraged to do: get married to someone who could actually afford to feed them (no welfare state and the church-run orphanage is a week's ride). Then you have the religious angle, where Christianity has its barely-teenaged Mary expecting a child (something normal enough in those days, though certainly an edge case in more than one way), Mohammed's wife of some single digit age, and the Mormons who, if you go deep enough into Utah or Montana, get busted for doing this every so often. Even as late as the '80s, "marrying one's rapist" was acceptable enough.
Thus, empirically, this concept is compatible with the tradcons.
On the other end, you have the progressives, where the only sex they care about preventing is that which occurs between men and women. Note that all the high-profile examples of "sexualized" children (Desmond, Jazz Jennings) are biologically male, the lack of literature portraying heterosexual (it is rare they involve women in any way, really) child/adult pairings, protecting (and in some early cases, actively facilitating) rapists so long as they're not straight, and so on.
Thus, empirically, this concept is compatible with the progressives.
And then you have the liberals, who are the entire reason we're even having this conversation in the first place and are the first to brag about having had sex-while-child (there was one in this thread already, most of the loose '70s were spent promoting this, and provided you're of a sexuality compatible with the progressive memeplex you're still generally allowed to say "had sex as teenager, 10/10" and have the news media nod along).
So, yeah. Economics and social developments downstream of that enable this taboo (itself a logical extension of the "kids aren't allowed to do literally anything and must be segregated and kept indoors 24/7, because otherwise they'd get seduced by the pedos and end up buried in the woods" trend of the '80s), but beyond that there's as much factual backing for it as there was for taboos like miscegenation and gay sex.
I think your case regarding "progressives" is weak and fails the ITT. The counterculture did include paedophiles, but when feminism/civil rights/gay rights/trans rights all glommed together into SJ, paedophiles were kicked out of the coalition. I was in SJ at the time; I know.
There is some crosstalk where SJ will cover up gay molestation because it is optimising for gay optics far too hard - but this is almost entirely seen internally as "necessary evil", not as "good". And it does go after gay molestation some of the time - most notably the whole "molestor priests" issue where there's no chance of it splashing back on SJ.
I went looking for this video I saw way back where an obviously-SJ woman basically spends 10 minutes saying that paedophiles are horrible creeps even if they don't molest, but I can't find it; sorry.
Now, as for explanation: I think ultimately it goes back to whenever May-December started to be considered "creepy", and the dynamics are the result of six-Haidtian-foundation people who don't like "creepy" (who are AFAICS the core of both tradcons and SJ; SJ is fairly-frequently and, I think, correctly, theorised to be "what happens when you feed counterculture liberalism to six-foundation people who would otherwise have been conservatives") plus the giant superweapon pointed at anyone who's willing to stand up and defend "creeps" in the open.
Indeed. This isn't a good refutation of "the only sex progressives hate is that which occurs between a man and a woman", though.
Again, the fact gay child sex gets a special pass in the first place is the central issue. The fact of the matter is that they not only accept it but outright encourage it (because any possible negative effects are confined to the groups they hate anyway) and they have shown they won't change should they manage to take absolute power given how they have acted once they have it (where they actively excuse even straight child rape gangs provided the perpetrators pass a paper bag test).
As such, child sex remains compatible with SJ; whether the average adherent sees that as an end in itself or not is irrelevant (as it is with the tradcons).
I think SJ (and its resulting success) is "what happens when you feed justifications for a supremacy movement to people in a zero-sum socioeconomic environment". Which is not the sole bailiwick of SJ; they just happen to be the dominant banner under which to perpetrate it these days.
I do wholly agree that the same people who are SJs today would have been activist Christian Rightists 40 years ago, and that those groups have the same moral foundations.
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