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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27142 thread views

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.

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.

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.

Seems strange that you are siding with Aella in this, considering she is not the one experiencing the lesson learning for the sin she is committing worse than her audience.

Oh no not at all, Aella is not like the vast majority of human beings, she has the innate ability to fully decouple the consequence of sleeping around with dozens of people and the long term effect it has on her mental state. For someone like her who has complete control over herself, sex really is little more than friction that feels good, unless she chooses to make it be something more for herself. For people like her the sacredness does not matter because she is capable of fashioning her own social reality and dealing with the consequences of her actions without them destroying her.

The vast majority of people though do not have this power, and when they fly too close to the sun they get burned and then go splat as they fall back to the ground. The point I wish to make is not "don't fly close to the sun", it's "don't fly close to the sun unless you have high end heat protection and have made sure your wings are not made of wax". I believe that the vast majority of people don't have this protection so society as a whole should be based on a set of values that lead to decent outcomes for them as a whole, but if they complain and say they want a set of values that work really well for a small set of people who really, absolutely know what they are doing, and errenously believe themselves to be in this set of people, then they should be fully accepting of the consequences for when things go bad for those people who it turns out don't really know what they are up to (which is most of them, but nobody likes to think of themselves in this way).

It's like accreddited investors in finance, if you are accredited you are free to spend your life savings on private companies that probably will go bust but may give you an x100 return. If someone is fully qualified and understands the risks I support them being able to invest their money this way, but for ordinary people what will normally happen is that they put their children's college trust fund into a company that burns its capital and goes bust within the year, and then these very same people will complain about evil capitalism leaving them bankrupt. Of course if you legislate in a way to prevent ordinary people being able to invest in this way, those same people complain about evil capitalism preventing the ordinary man from getting a x100 return like "insert big investor here" did.

Oh no not at all, Aella is not like the vast majority of human beings, she has the innate ability to fully decouple the consequence of sleeping around with dozens of people and the long term effect it has on her mental state. For someone like her who has complete control over herself, sex really is little more than friction that feels good.

I do wonder whether prolonged exposure to tragedy, suffering, and death helps people (Westerners? First Worlders?) decouple things better. There's a stereotype that soldiers, nurses, and adrenaline junkies get around a lot; I can't speak to the first two but the third has been true enough in my experience. I'd like to ask the Indian physician @self_made_human and the American combat veteran @JTarrou whether this has been true for them. [EDIT: "have you become a better decoupler, or less averse to the idea of casual sex because of your experiences"] While I'll definitely contend that extended exposure to the hospital system as a healthcare provider or worker (rather than as a patient) isn't quite as bad as war, I will say that you see some shit and that it is difficult to describe in words.

The vast majority of people though do not have this power, and when they fly too close to the sun they get burned and then go splat as they fall back to the ground. The point I wish to make is not "don't fly close to the sun", it's "don't fly close to the sun unless you have high end heat protection and have made sure your wings are not made of wax".

I'll agree with you there. A lot of this stuff - like those bespoke queer poly communes - is a lot like 'building your own airplane out of a lawnmower or motorcycle engine and a bunch of stuff from the local Home Depot'. If you're a skilled enough airplane designer, woodworker, and amateur engineer...you can pull it off and build something airworthy. However, you had better be very, very careful and know that you're venturing off the beaten path and might just fall out of the goddamn sky.

if they complain and say they want a set of values that work really well for a small set of people who really, absolutely know what they are doing, and errenously believe themselves to be in this set of people, then they should be fully accepting of the consequences for when things go bad for those people who it turns out don't really know what they are up to (which is most of them, but nobody likes to think of themselves in this way).

Fair enough - FAFO. For what it's worth, I think that the accredited-investor bar should be quite a bit lower. IIRC there are ways to get around this, companies offering special shares to ordinary investors through some relatively nontrivial method. People trying this know damn well that this is "go big or go home" territory and that they might lose everything. These are high risk, potentially high reward lottery tickets. It's like backcountry skiing signs. Ideally we'd mark things a bit more clearly...

I would say the stereotype is broadly correct, though individuals vary wildly. I am a far less sexually adventurous person than most of my compadres, but my experience there both psychologically and training/observation of technique did vastly increase my success and dabbling in casual sexual encounters, but "vastly increase" is a nice way of saying "started from shit". Frankly, that period of my life wasn't particularly fulfilling sexually, I much prefer longer term relationships.

The question is more about your desire for casual sex and your attitude towards it - not how competent you were at getting it. If Johnny McHorndog enters nursing school or the Army hell-bent on casual encounters and piss-poor at achieving them, then spends a few years as a soldier or nurse, gets good at having casual sex, but desires it much less due to viewing sex as sacred or meaningful to him personally...Mr. McHorndog didn't become a higher decoupler from the experience. It's Mr. Prude (and maybe Mrs. Prude), very sociosexually restricted, little to no interest in casual sex...until they see some shit and aren't deeply disinterested in it.

Indian physician @self_made_human and the American combat veteran @JTarrou whether this has been true for them. While I'll definitely contend that extended exposure to the hospital system as a healthcare provider or worker (rather than as a patient) isn't quite as bad as war, I will say that you see some shit and that it is difficult to describe in words.

My experience as a front-line doctor in a 3rd World Country, an essay initially posted on the Motte subreddit as I was delirious from an ortho rotation tied with gyne for the worst months of my life. I'm still proud that the original prompted Scott himself to show up in the sub to respond with positive encouragement! (In the unlikely event he's reading this, I'm doing much better, it's a wonder what working in a service with a budget more than lost change behind the couch can do haha).

Was it fucking awful? If you're someone who doesn't particularly like reading (what are you doing here again?), then yes, it was fucking awful, and I struggle to imagine an American/Western doc will see anything this bad unless they volunteer for a mission to Haiti or some other hell-hole. Still better than working in the ER during a war, but all the worse for being a represenation of the status-quo for a billion people who can't afford better.

I'm not a soft person, but my heart is thoroughly sclerosed after the whole ordeal, not that I suffer from anything like PTSD or the like. Humans can get used to almost anything, and fast.

While I didn't see the kind of shit that you saw, I saw a different flavor of shit for a month as an Eaglelandian medical student. Terminally ill children, and kids in crisis from sickle cell anemia. Working conditions were good to excellent: 9 to 5, sometimes a four-hour weekend shift. Emotionally: I write about this a lot, but can't do it justice. It was ordinary dumbfucks in hell: most parents, even good ones, just fuck 'dealing with terminally ill child' up mildly to moderately bad. Only maybe five or ten percent of the parents weren't - as the doctors and nurses judged them - weren't some flavor or other of bush league dipshit or dumbass.

I will say that I did not have a traumatic or emotionally difficult or even unpleasant experience! If forced to rate it: 4/10, mildly unpleasant but I don't regret having done it, nor would I mind doing it again.

With war - although I've never been - I think that the thing at play is constant personal, physical danger, seeing your friends killed, and maybe a bit of moral injury from making mistakes in war that cost people their lives. In the cancer ward, there were a lot of eyes on things and relatively few (maybe 1x/week/attending at most) opportunities to make minor fuckups and kill patients.

It's like accreddited investors in finance, if you are accredited you are free to spend your life savings on private companies that probably will go bust but may give you an x100 return.

The best thing about the "accredited investor" status is if you get a solicitation targeted for accredited investors (whether you are or are not one), you know right up front it's a scam. It may as well start out "Dear Suckers with Money:"

Nothing strange about it once you consider the idea he's mostly posting to get a reaction rather than express his views.

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.

Generally speaking, handing a 5-year-old a loaded revolver is a terrible idea. However, if that child is terminally ill and has "shoot a revolver" as his dying wish...it might not be a terrible thing for him to go to a gun range with an adult and be allowed to fire a few rounds from a .22 revolver. Hell, there's probably ways for him to just be handed that revolver and allowed to shoot at a target or something in the woods. A remote-controlled intramuscular benzodiazepine injector would allow first responders to safely get to him if he happens to shoot himself; I'm assuming that he's comfort care only.

That would probably be legit kinder to him than keeping him half alive on heroic measures and ventilators and all that stuff.

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.

The obvious course of action there is to find a second child with the same wish and let them duel each other.

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.

child prostitutes presumably cannot consent

Why not? Especially because...

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.

This seems to be the route Wertheimer took. It's a bit unsatisfying, because we end up not being able to make such bold proclamations as, "[C]hild prostitutes presumably cannot consent." Instead, we have to say that, sure, they can consent, but we have reason to believe that it would be harmful to them, anyway (and so we simply refuse to accept their consent). He bit this bullet and concluded that it was actually just an empirical question. That is, if we did a proper utilitarian calculation and determined that maybe it's not necessarily so harmful, then from a theoretical perspective, we just have to settle for saying that children consenting to sex is totally fine.

This theoretical tool could be applied to hypothetical societies, too. For example, if we built an extremely sex-positive culture with tip-top comprehensive sex education at young ages, we could raise children who think, like many others even in these spaces think, that having sex is mostly akin to just playing a fun game of tennis with someone, being aware that there are risks like tearing your ACL. Then, they'd be able to consent just fine, no differently than we think that they can consent to playing a game of tennis.

Regarding child prostitution, there is the highly coloured and sensational campaign from 1885 by the journalist W.T. Stead which helped to push forward the the implementation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16.

Before beginning this inquiry I had a confidential interview with one of the most experienced officers who for many years was in a position to possess an intimate acquaintance with all phases of London crime. I asked him, “Is it or is it not a fact that, at this moment, if I were to go to the proper houses, well introduced, the keeper would, in return for money down, supply me in due time with a maid–a genuine article, I mean, not a mere prostitute tricked out as a virgin, but a girl who had never been seduced?” “Certainly,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation. “At what price?” I continued. “That is a difficult question,” he said. “I remember one case which came under my official cognizance in Scotland-yard in which the price agreed upon was stated to be £20. Some parties in Lambeth undertook to deliver a maid for that sum —-to a house of ill fame, and I have no doubt it is frequently done all over London.”

“But, “I continued, “are these maids willing or unwilling parties to the transaction–that is, are they really maiden, not merely in being each a virgo intacta in the physical sense, but as being chaste girls who are not consenting parties to their seduction? ” He looked surprised at my question, and then replied emphatically: “Of course they are rarely willing, and as a rule they do not know what they are coming for.” “But,” I said in amazement, “then do you mean to tell me that in very truth actual rapes, in the legal sense of the word, are constantly being perpetrated in London on unwilling virgins, purveyed and procured to rich men at so much a head by keepers of brothels?” “Certainly,” said he, “there is not a doubt of it.” “Why, “I exclaimed, “the very thought is enough to raise hell.” “It is true,” he said; “and although it ought to raise hell, it does not even raise the neighbours.”

“But do the girls cry out?” “Of course they do. But what avails screaming in a quiet bedroom? Remember, the utmost limit of howling or excessively violent screaming, such as a man or woman would make if actual murder was being attempted, is only two minutes, and the limit of screaming of any kind is only five. Suppose a girl is being outraged in a room next to your house. You hear her screaming, just as you are dozing to sleep. Do you get up, dress, rush downstairs, and insist on admittance? Hardly. But suppose the screams continue and you get uneasy, you begin to think whether you should not do something? Before you have made up your mind and got dressed the screams cease, and you think you were a fool for your pains.” “But the policeman on the beat?” “He has no right to interfere, even if he heard anything. Suppose that a constable had a right to force his way into any house where a woman screamed fearfully, policemen would be almost as regular attendants at childbed as doctors. Once a girl gets into such a house she is almost helpless, and may be ravished with comparative safety.”

“But surely rape is a felony punishable with penal servitude. Can she not prosecute?” “Whom is she to prosecute? She does not know her assailant’s name. She might not even be able to recognize him if she met him outside. Even if she did, who would believe her? A woman who has lost her chastity is always a discredited witness. The fact of her being in a house of ill fame would possibly be held to be evidence of her consent. The keeper of the house and all the servants would swear she was a consenting party; they would swear that she had never screamed, and the woman would be condemned as an adventuress who wished to levy black mail.” “And this is going on to-day?” “Certainly it is, and it will go on, and you cannot help it, as long as men have money, procuresses are skilful, and women are weak and inexperienced.”

HOW GIRLS ARE BOUGHT AND RUINED Her story, or rather so much of it as is germane to the present inquiry, was somewhat as follows:–

As a regular thing, the landlady of a bad house lets her rooms to gay women and lives on their rent and the profits on the drink which they compel their customers to buy for the good of the house. She may go out herself or she may not. If business is very heavy, she will have to do her own share, but as a rule she contents herself with keeping her girls up to the mark, and seeing that they at least earn enough to pay their rent, and bring home sufficient customers to consume liquor enough to make it pay. Girls often shrink from going out, and need almost to be driven into the streets. If it was not for gin and the landlady they could never carry it on. Some girls I used to have would come and sit and cry in my kitchen and declare that they could not go out, they could not stand the life. I had to give them a dram and take them out myself, and set them agoing again, for if they did not seek gentlemen where was I to get my rent? Did they begin willingly? Some; others had no choice. How had they no choice? Because they never knew anything about it till the gentleman was in their bedroom, and then it was too late. I or my girls would entice fresh girls in, and persuade them to stay out too late till they were locked out, and then a pinch of snuff in their beer would keep them snug until the gentleman had his way. Has that happened often? Lots of times. It is one of the ways by which you keep your house up. Every woman who has an eye to business is constantly on the lookout for likely girls. Pretty girls who are poor, and who have either no parents or are away from home, are easiest picked up, How is it done? You or your decoy find a likely girl, and then you track her down. I remember I once went a hundred, miles and more to pick up a girl. I took a lodging close to the board school, where I could see the girls go backwards and forwards every day. I soon saw one that suited my fancy. She was a girl of about thirteen, tall and forward for her age, pretty, and likely to bring business. I found out she lived with her mother. I engaged her to be my little maid at the lodgings where I was staying. The very next day I took her off with me to London and her mother never saw her again. What became of her? A gentleman paid me £13 for the first of her, soon after she came to town. She was asleep when he did it–sound asleep. To tell the truth, she was drugged. It is often done. I gave her a drowse. It is a mixture of laudanum and something else. Sometimes chloroform is used, but I always used either snuff or laudanum. We call it drowse or black draught, and they lie almost as if dead, and the girl never knows what has happened till morning. And then? Oh! then she cries a great deal from pain, but she is ‘mazed, and hardly knows what has happened except that she can hardly move from pain. Of course we tell her it is all right; all girls have to go through it some time, that she is through it now without knowing it, and that it is no use crying. It will never be undone for all the crying in the world. She must now do as the others do. She can live like a lady, do as she pleases, have the best of all that is going, and enjoy herself all day. If she objects, I scold her and tell her she has lost her character, no one will take her in; I will have to turn her out on the streets as a bad and ungrateful girl. The result is that in nine cases out of ten, or ninety-nine out of a hundred, the child, who is usually under fifteen, frightened and friendless, her head aching with the effect of the drowse and full of pain and horror, gives up all hope, and in a week she is one of the attractions of the house. You say that some men say this is never done. Don’t believe them; if these people spoke the truth, it might be found that they had done it themselves. Landladies who wish to thrive must humour their customers. If they want a maid we must get them one, or they will go elsewhere. We cannot afford to lose their custom; besides, after the maid is seduced, she fills up vacancies caused by disease or drink. There are very few brothels which are not occasionally recruited in that way. That case which I mentioned was by no means exceptional; in about seven years I remember selling two maids for £20 each, one at £16, one at £15, one at £13 and others for less. Of course, where I bought I paid less than that. The difference represented my profit, commission, and payment for risk in procuring, drugging, &c.

Sure. Rape is bad. I don't think that an example of someone being raped implies that all other people are incapable of consenting. Even if we try to draw a circle around a group of roughly similar people who are being raped because of a systemic societal failure. E.g., people could certainly recount horrible stories about black slaves being raped, and explain how a systemic societal failure led to this happening a bunch of times. Doesn't seem to imply that black people in general are incapable of consenting.

The case for "yes", in my opinion - as someone who's been in the healthcare field for a few years - is in my mind strengthened by their terminal illness. Part of the reason why children are restricted from making certain decisions is in order to increase the chance that they will grow up into healthy adults. We wouldn't allow ordinary, healthy 13-year-olds to hire adult prostitutes partly because we believe this to be harmful to the 18-year-old, the 25-year-old, the 40-year-old that they will almost certainly become.

With terminal illness, this isn't a consideration any longer. As such, a dying child's autonomy vs. security interests are tilted much more heavily in the direction of "autonomy". As such: I'm slightly in favor, in this case, but it is a nasty question to deal with and there is probably no good solution here.

At the next Bay Area House Party: A startup which matches terminally ill underage boys and girls for consentual virginity-losing. (using advanced AI of course)

Played straight: I have a lot of respect for the concept and support it - but for practical reasons it would need to be done discreetly and quietly. It would be nice if Make-A-Wish or something like that very quietly facilitated things like this.

Who the hell is Aella? From your post, it sounds like she’s been mentioned here before

She's a prominent rationalist thinkfluencer/thought leader/blogger, similar to Julia Galef.

Aella leans heavily on her sex appeal; the first time I ever heard about her was on reddit from this famous NSFW photoshoot. More relevantly, she is known for doing weird twitter polls and conducting independent sex research.

She's been mentioned on ACX numerous times, such as in "There's A Time For Everyone" which talks about how Scott met his wife at one of her parties, and "Classifieds Thread 1/2022", in which she is described as a "shit-eating whore" (which is literally true, but resulted in the document being wiped from Google; here's the bowdlerized version).

I see. Thanks!

How can she describe herself as a rationalist? She’s good at getting nerd affection. But she’s a female so rationally speaking selling sex by the hour makes no sense. Rationally speaking she should want to make 10 or so nerd babies. And make herself say lifetime money from that which pays much better than a thousand an hour.

Rationally speaking Musks seems to like making babies so shouldn’t she show up once or twice a month till she gets pregnant and repeat the process for a decade.

  • -13

Rationally speaking she should want to make 10 or so nerd babies.

Isn’t she in her 30’s? She’s not having 10 kids, want to or not.

And, uh, have you ever been around a large family with very smart children? Or gifted children in general? Precociousness can be cute, but it’s so aggravating to caregivers that it’s fairly rational to not want a gaggle of very high IQ children.

Sliders, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I’m pretty sure you’re not baiting, so…why do you think 10 nerd babies is rational for anyone?

Isn’t this the Idiocracy argument? We need more relatively high IQ fertility so it’s rational in the sense it advances humanity.

I don’t think a movie (or the reverse of a movie) should be anyone’s high-water mark for rationality.

Is the argument wrong - I only used it for a reference. Seems obvious if you believe in hbd that selective breeding matters.

Can you see the gap between “selective breeding matters” and “I, personally, should spend my life popping out high-quality babies?”

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What if she places very negative value on pregnancy/giving birth?

Not to mention that nerd children have to be raised in a demanding way to be able and willing to bring you "millions", and even then it's not a guarantee. A thousand per hour is a better rate than a million per 18 years.

What does any of this have to do with minimizing cognitive bias and making accurate predictions? I'll admit, I haven't read anything from Big Yud in a few years, but your use of "rational" seems closer to "maximizing economic value" than anything capital-R Rational.

I smack my head against a wall whenever someone claims that x is not compatible with rationality, in the hopes that the ensuing brain damage will help ease the pain.

As much as I vehemently disagree with the religious, there is nothing inherently irrational with belief in God, even if I think they have malign priors and don't update on abundant evidence (which makes them irrational). If a Paperclip Maximizer strips me down for spare parts, I might have many choice insults to hurl its way, but irrational isn't one of them. It would need to go about its aims in an outright counterproductive way, like aiming for paperclips but ending up making safety pins.

Rationality is orthogonal to your desires, and for Aella, it's entirely possible and even likely that she genuinely enjoys her lifestyle and considers it preferential to the alternative of sniping some modestly wealth Silicon Valley engineer and settling down. Just because you disagree with her goals doesn't make them irrational, and I think she's enough of a moral mutant (I at least highly respect the high-decoupling as one myself) that the former is more likely.

I feel like this then boils down to rationality means nothing. As the other response says maybe she puts very high negative value on giving birth. Just declare something to be really bad (emotions/feelings) then therefore that behavior was in fact rational.

Rationality then becomes I am smart and I accurately verbalize my feelings therefore my behavior is rational. I’d say they are eating chocolate ice cream a normie eats it because they like chocolate ice cream but a rationalist eats it reasoning chocolate ice cream is 50 happiness points and being slightly fatter is -40 happiness points therefore they eat it.

I feel like this then boils down to rationality means nothing

Orthogonality Hypothesis

To put it as succinctly as possible, rationality is a means to an end, not an end in itself. There are a variety of behaviors that are usually rational to pursue, but there are always cases where that ceases to be true. For an average person with typical goals, being a sex worker might be suboptimal, but say what you will about Aella, she's not average.

So as I’m saying then rationality means nothing. Effective Altruism means nothing. Rationality just becomes I act like every other human who acts on emotions (I just call that my utility functions). EA well I’ve said it before they are just Democrats who gave themselves a different name to call themselves elites or above partisan politics. Which is basically true because people like SBF fairly universally just donated to Democrats.

I feel like this then boils down to rationality means nothing.

It boils down to rationality not being the destination, but compass that (together with accurate knowledge of the world in place of map) gets you to the destination in the most rational way.

What should be your destination? Rationality does not say, it is up to you.

Aella has talked about her troubles finding a man who is up to her standards before:

Aella: its v annoying that i seem to be searching for a romantic partner who's at least a little bit more powerful than i am

Geoffrey Miller: It's OK to be hypergamous.

Aella: yeah, it's just annoying. it dramatically reduces mate options. like 99% of guys i casually meet are less powerful than me

Aella: if i go to specific events that are selected for ppl doin cool stuff, then it feels closer to a normal mating market, but those events are pretty rare

It's not that she doesn't want to settle down, it's that, because of the way female hypergamy works, her own level of money, success, and status has drastically shrunk the pool of partners she considers acceptable.

Which is too bad, because Aella is 30; if she is looking for a husband and children, she is on her last chance.

TIL Aella is the woman in the gnomes photo. Saw that way before I knew who she was.

I think the Make-A-Wish Foundation is entitled to refuse or reject unreasonable requests. Regardless of whether we think this 13 year old girl would die happier with or without her virginity, I think the request for others to help her is unreasonable and anyone would be justified in refusing it.

I think the request for others to help her is unreasonable

Disagree here.

anyone would be justified in refusing it.

Agree - it's a difficult issue and reasonable people can be on either side.

Make a wish has supposedly received requests of that nature before and rejected them.

Who the hell is Aella? From your post, it sounds like she’s been mentioned here before

Aella is a woman who sells her body in various ways, who is also rationalist-adjacent. She is locally famous for conducting polls in an attempt to, if one is very charitable, "research" the sexual values and proclivities of the community and her audience, and if one is not charitable, market herself and her services to said community.

My intuition is that a big part of the constraints upon the rights of children stem from trading the interests of their future selves off against those of their present selves - children have a long life ahead which they are particularly well-positioned to screw up. In the case of terminally ill children, this consideration disappears - if we can build a Schelling fence around them as a class, I see nothing particularly wrong with letting them drink, do drugs, skydive and consent to sex.

Yeah, fair enough - or at least, it's a hell of a lot less wrong. I think that there should be a lot of deliberation and consultation with psychologists and/or religious leaders or something before this...but if a terminally ill 14-year-old wants to go BASE jumping and he and his parents agree on comfort care only if it goes wrong, I'd let him have at it.

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

Is actually a good response, what is she actually getting at with this question? It’s just a hard question and no clear lesson at the end of it. Shit, can my disgust reaction of child sex come into conflict with my desire for a child to be happy before death? woah dude that’s wild.

I really don’t see what moral discovery she’s made. How about you ask me what I would do if this story happened to someone else and how I would react to hearing about it? The answer is “I would feel sad for their difficult situation in which I am epistemically paralyzed to help or judge”. That’s my answer, Aella, this isn’t philosophy, this is “would you rather fuck your dad or your mom”, and casually throwing this on twitter is probably inspiring a bunch of similar behaviour amongst impressionable young adults.

what is she actually getting at with this question?

She's getting at the fact that the child sex taboo is inconsistent with a lot of the rest of our moral system, doesn't mean the taboo is wrong, it could well mean that other parts of the western moral system are idiotic and stupid. Which of these two it is is left up to the reader to decide.

I personally believe it's the latter, the western moral system is utterly and totally [REDACTED]* but it's fun watching average IQ people overheat and stall when you present them with an inconsistency they can't reconcile with their belief set but at the same time refuse to question whether it might just be possible that it's they who are wrong (insert Principal Skinner meme here). It's like the Star Trek episode where Kirk is able to convince the robot Nomad it is imperfect and make it overheat and self destruct, but with humans instead.

* A sad necessity, otherwise the mods are going to go full Abraham Van Helsing on me.

She's getting at the fact that the child sex taboo is inconsistent with a lot of the rest of our moral system

Depends on your moral system. And if you are okay with fucking 13 year olds, you're not someone I want coming into my country. It's only those same liberals you are laughing at who would let you in.

Maybe for you, child sex taboo is inconsistent, but most people don't have a problem there. The people there are not overheating and stalling due to unreconciled beliefs, they're genuinely shocked because this is something repugnant. But you may not have the capacity to understand that, given your admission about enjoying teasing and torturing animals as a child.

Maybe for you, child sex taboo is inconsistent, but most people don't have a problem there.

They don't think they have a problem there, but then you ask them for details about how the rest of their moral system works... suddenly, the inconsistency is on full display for anyone who cares to view.

Humans don’t typically have moral systems(and the ones that do do not operate on that system 99% of the time), and applying Philosophy-as-a-sport doesn’t make them suddenly bad people. Humans have a huge number of values which become inconsistent in specific scenarios, and Aella’s question is all heat and no light. Professional and dignified philosophers have demonstrated the same much more tactfully in the past, why did she not do the same? It’s molesting neurotypical people’s brains, and she is smart enough to know that(I recognize she says she doesn’t “get” why people don’t like these questions, I think she’s lying). This appears to me as an egoistic and irresponsible display of her social position. The normies are smart to know when they are being fucked with.

“would you rather fuck your dad or your mom”

For me: seems like both of us are more or less being raped; I'm assuming that we've got guns to our heads or something. In that case...whichever would be hurt least. Whole situation sucks rotting donkey balls and it's at best a choice between eating five pounds of rotted donkey balls and eating six pounds of rotted donkey balls.

You have passed my test young grasshopper, very wise

I suppose she could be trying to get a dig in at Hanania with his "is it okay to fuck a 14 year old if you pay them really well?", but since I think he's an idiot anyway, why even bother with the likes of this? It's pure rage bait.

Oh no, she's openly saying she was inspired by his question and seems to be hinting towards being supportive of that question:

https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1721239422849470898

Again the normie responses below hers are absolute howlers. This is turning into a new form of entertainment for me, it's like throwing peanuts at monkeys and then watching them fight and dance over them (something I used to do as a child back home, it brings back fond memories).

You’re not that Indian guy who moved to London and then had a lengthy post about noblesse oblige are you?

I don't feel any noblesse oblige towards lower class westerners, my taxes already go a long long way towards funding their bad habits, and then they have zero respect for their betters, freely biting the hand that feeds them and openly talking about biting it even more.

Noblesse Oblige is one part of a two way system. I am willing to forgive and forget, but the other end of the bargain requiring a certain amuont of obeiscance from those who take out more than they put in is also necessary before we can return to that point.

Ok, was that you though?

Might have been, there are multiple people like that and many people have talked about the importance of Noblesse Oblige in the past, including me.

Yes, he is precisely the one you’re thinking about. He is being intentionally obtuse for some inexplicable reason.

Yes after his most recent response to me(not in in this comment branch ) I am sufficiently convinced he’s not being forthright

Simple: The noblesse oblige speech was always anachronistic bullshit( whether it came from him, cima or any other reactionary), but it is especially bullshit from Count, who not only does not feel obliged towards, but actively hates and resents the lower classes of his western host country.

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I have no idea what you're trying to get at here: "decouple from the low sophistication ways of thinking"? Is it 'smart people should be able to say anything'? Is it 'don't put your normie morals on me'? What?

As to the poll, assuming it's not pure bait, then how about option 5: lil' bastard/bitch (depending on gender presentation) is dying anyway, let somebody rape them. Saves on cost of hiring a hooker, fulfils wish to lose virginity, and makes a paedophile happy without causing lasting trauma to any child that is going to live afterwards.

That decoupled enough for ya?

But honestly, I feel like there is some buried hinting in there about black people or Muslim immigrants or something: by "reified violence by the disaffected" do you mean things like the BLM riots, or are you talking about "normal people who think the brave new world is horrible and want to stand up to it but too bad for you normies" or what the hell? Please speak clearly.

I have no idea what you're trying to get at here: "decouple from the low sophistication ways of thinking"? Is it 'smart people should be able to say anything'? Is it 'don't put your normie morals on me'? What?

Not that smart people should be able to say anything, but rather smart people will start thinking in a completely different paradigm, which leads to very different answers for what we should do in a scenario compared to using "standard western morals" at the moment. This will lead to a situation where it gets much harder for "normies" to understand the ways of the upper classes, no different from how a CD player can't read a Blu-Ray disc, becuase the formats are completely different and if you tried to force a CD player to read blu-ray the CD player would just parse garbage and be very confused and get angry (if it could think). The point here though is that despire the CD player getting angry it's not the fault of the blu-ray disc, the blu-ray disc is a more advanced, perfectly consistent format and if we're putting blame on anything the blame should go to the CD player, but that won't stop the CD player from getting angry etc.

Saves on cost of hiring a hooker, fulfils wish to lose virginity, and makes a paedophile happy without causing lasting trauma to any child that is going to live afterwards.

Bad idea. This makes the child very miserable while they are alive and causes suffering, which is something we don't want (otherwise why care about human welfare at all for anyone, we're all going to die at one point?). There won't be any lasting trauma experienced but there will be suffering at the time of the rape experienced by the child and this is bad. Note that this is empathetically not true in the "hire prostitute for dying child" case, over there the child doesn't suffer any long term trauma (as they are dead, same as the pedo case), but they get a good experience while alive instead of suffering the short term trauma of a rape instead, and that makes all the difference.

"normal people who think the brave new world is horrible and want to stand up to it but too bad for you normies"

This is one way of putting it, although I reall don't think what you call "normal people" (I interpret this as westerners with a western modus operandi) will apply to large portions of socety by the time this happens due to population replacement, and the new migrants (the ones who aren't smart enough to be able to accept the emerging upper end belief systems) already think the current way of western life is degenerate and segregate themselves from the rest of society, what would they care that the dominant belief system with actual power shifts from one form of degeneracy to a slightly different form of degeneracy in their eyes?

If we're going for cold-headed logical thinking about this, why not rape? Child is dying. Child wishes to lose virginity. Done and done. Their suffering or mental state doesn't matter, because there will be no long term effects - they're dying and will soon be off the scene. The rapist, meanwhile, gets a victim that will not suffer lasting harm, and the rapist will enjoy the fulfilment of their desires. The random child victim, whom the rapist might have selected otherwise, will not be harmed and will never undergo a traumatic experience.

There's nothing in the proposed thought experiment that the experience of losing the virginity has to be pleasurable, after all.

(In reality, I think this is a very stupid poll, whether she means to troll Hanania or to seriously ask "so why don't we let 13 year olds have sex if they want?" and if she gets pushback on it, it's no more than she should have expected.)

You do seem to be talking about immigration, and you also seem to be wanting to eat your cake and have it: ha ha dumb liberal Westerners, you are sawing off the branch you are sitting on! But also my own country is so horrible I want to come to your liberal, rich, Western nation in order to make a lot of money and have a good life.

why not rape

It's against the child's wishes. It's also bad for the rapist and bad for the people enabling it. Sure, if there was a fixed quantity of rapists and each rapist only completed X offenses per year or lifetime...maybe this wouldn't be terrible but why can't it wait 'till our hapless hero or heroine is in a coma?

Yep, the child doesn't want to get raped, the child wants to have sex with someone they are attracted to. The fact the child will die soon after does not change this, what it changes it the level of long term future trauma which gets set to 0 because the child is dead. In the prostitute case the child gets to have sex with someone they are at that moment willing to have sex with, which is not the same in the rape case (since by definition the child does not want to have sex with the rapist).

Bad idea. This makes the child very miserable while they are alive and causes suffering, which is something we don't want (otherwise why care about human welfare at all for anyone, we're all going to die at one point?). There won't be any lasting trauma experienced but there will be suffering at the time of the rape experienced by the child and this is bad.

Hm, what about matching the child with a pedophile? Perhaps that's just equivalent to the original prostitute case. But I'm thinking, if we could match the child with someone who would willingly do this for free and even get a positive experience out of it for it in itself, rather than someone who have to be bribed with money, this would be even better. Especially since they would be experiencing something which is normally outside their reach; it's like granting 2 make-a-wish-type wishes in one. Assuming we go through all the same approval/consent steps with the child as we would with a prostitute.

Hm, what about matching the child with a pedophile?

If this person was someone both the child and thier parents was happy with then yes, that's fine. Now the parents may well object to a pedophile (I would if I was in this poisition) and that is fine, you then look for someone else who's agreeable to all parties.

Note that even in the prostitute case, it's not like the child and parents will have whatever HIV addled prostitute is the first one to show up forced upon them, they have full control over which prostitute they decide to select, same here, they should have full control over which person they are going to choose for the sex, and that includes the right to say no to every single person they are not happy with for whatever reason (same as with consent for any sex).

Who else other than someone sexually attracted to minors is going to want to fuck a dying 13 year old who may well be too sick or too weak to participate in the activity as an equal partner, never mind if they are able in the first place to have sex with an adult?

I imagine even whores have standards around what clients they service. And a whore who doesn't mind fucking a 13 year old probably has some paedophilic tendencies in the first place.

Who else other than someone sexually attracted to minors is going to want to fuck a dying 13 year old who may well be too sick or too weak to participate in the activity as an equal partner, never mind if they are able in the first place to have sex with an adult?

Someone who would have sex in spite of feeling neutral, even disgusted, due to a personal conviction. It could be something as simple as "I'm doing this because I want my client to have this experience before they die; my disgust and feelings be damned".

Yep, prostitutes sleep with clients they are not attracted to or disguested by on a daily basis, it's literally their job.

Yeah. There's probably at least a few people here on the Motte who would sleep with a close friend that they were sexually disgusted by...if it was that close friend's dying wish. I'd do it, as long as they knew that I was grossed out and didn't really want to do it, but would do it in the same spirit as working as a septic tank pumper's assistant for a day. A nasty job, but for a good, dying friend who knows what they're getting? Worse things to do.

Depends, is the pedophile attractive enough that the kid and parents would say yes? If so, I consider that isomorphic to the initial question.

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.

Well, it depends. Is it a boy, or a girl?

The child or the prostitute?

What if it's a boy, but he's gay?

Then we must definitely hire him a female prostitute. If it works, he can die with dignity.

Top or bottom?

After working in an oncology ward, I'm wondering what the base rates for radiation induced proctitis versus erectile dysfunction from the chemo/radiotherapy is..

I wonder if such a lack of specification in the poll was intentional to increase retweet/reply engagement.

This is certainly a good point, and an important detail that can change the answer. I also get the sense that, for many people, this detail cannot be allowed to change the answer, but they intuitively sense that it would, which causes cognitive dissonance and the accompanying anger.

Why would it change the answer?

Look at teacher-student sex scandals. Everyone mouths how they're always bad, but there is far more hatred (hatred that is justified) for a male teacher sleeping with a female student than a female teacher sleeping with a male student. It's even reflected in sentencing and punishment.

I imagine among normies most would react more negatively to a 13 year old girl getting a sex wish than the 13 year old boy, out of a sense that women are in greater need of protection from the sex than men.

I imagine a scenario where a girl has a sex wish with a man who'd agree to be known as a chomo would be seen as even more of a fantasy than the Epstein 10 million proposal.

About 10 years ago the economist Stephen Lansburg got in trouble with his progressive students for floating some kind of thought experiment that they found offensive, and I believe it involved rape. An early example of cancel culture in action. They wanted his head.

I remember thinking to myself at the time, "See, this is what distinguishes conservatives from emotional progressives who get triggered by seemingly coldhearted and objective forays into political thought."

That needs reassessment.

An early example of cancel culture in action

About 10 years ago

I have news for you.. cancel culture has been around for as long as the media and people getting offended have been around.

Just waiting for an article of the type, "In Defense of Cynically Referring to Liberal Principles and Then Totally Abandoning Them"

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.

Hm, does this also apply when both parties are dead drunk, or did they then rape each other?

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.

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.

And it does go after gay molestation some of the time, but only when it's a useful weapon to attack the outgroup

Indeed. This isn't a good refutation of "the only sex progressives hate is that which occurs between a man and a woman", though.

but this is almost entirely seen internally as "necessary evil", not as "good"

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).

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"

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.

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.

I think that could work OK-ish for terminally ill kids; in a hospital for something like this you have a teenager who is more or less of sound mind, not intellectually disabled, and terminally ill. So maybe they're not at full adult capacity for consent but maybe like 75% and usually 75% isn't truly up to snuff...but if they're terminally ill, and their parents agree, and they've had a couple psychologists and maybe a pastor or something talk to them about it, it's good enough. On the other hand, someone who is profoundly intellectually disabled isn't terminally ill and might only be at 10% on a good day, and the +30% isn't enough to boost it over the edge.

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 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.

While the poll itself may be interesting, what I find most interesting of all are the responses from the normies

I didn't dig too deeply into this one, but I looked at the replies (and even *gasp* the quote tweets) on the Hanania poll. I grew up on 4chan, but I've spent enough time in sanitized spaces like Reddit that I forgot what viscerally angry uncensored people sound like; disgusting, but beautiful in a way, like a cheetah devouring a gazelle. Hanania tried to connect this reaction to the old "but I did eat breakfast this morning" failure to parse hypotheticals, and that doesn't seem quite right, but it does serve as a reminder that many (most?) people aren't like us. They are either unable or unwilling to peal back their assumptions about morality or world-models.

Hanania tried to connect this reaction to the old "but I did eat breakfast this morning" failure to parse hypotheticals

This is another reason why I think he's an idiot and not the public intellectual he would give his eye-teeth to be. "Ha ha, only joking" is the response everyone knows is bullshit. Oh, so your question was only a hypothetical and not meant seriously? Okay, I'm still saying no to it. But what if I said "in spherical-cow world, okay: pay ten million and you can fuck a kid". What would Hanania take away from that, then? Still only hypotheticals? Or that this answer demonstrates that in the real world there are a lot of people pretending to be moral but who would fuck children if they could get away with it?

If it's only a hypothetical, then I can give any answer at all because it doesn't matter. It's not something I would ever do in reality, and would find abhorrent in real life, but 'just pretending' world? Fine, rape six year olds and kidnap people off the streets to harvest their organs and round the Jews up in cattle trucks for the gas chambers. It's only parsing a hypothetical, right?

channelling the spirit of Hanania

Wasn't this exact scenario a Shadman comic like 10 years ago? Not that that particular artist isn't famous for trolling for that exact kind of reaction you describe, but I digress.

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

As the recent 2 weeks of history have shown, it's not so much "lashing out" as it is "hiding under the bed".
The latter is, on the whole, probably more destructive.

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.

Yes, this is called "most school shootings", which is what happens when a biological adult whose development was delayed for [reasons] now stranded in a world they no longer have the biological capacity to understand cracks in a particular way (most people just start exhibiting weird pathologies to varying degrees, usually around the inability to resolve conflict and the need to please and appeal to an external authority over independent thought and action). When we look inside such a person, we find an adult's body with a brain never developed past middle school; evidence of this is posted downthread.

Honestly some of the reactions here make me feel we’ve drifted away from the high-decoupling crowd we used to be, closer to normie conservatism. Pray god some of these people never get into a moral philosophy class or their heads will explode. “Why are you even thinking about pushing fat men off bridges? Are you some kind of sicko?”

closer to normie conservatism

I've noticed the same thing. I've noticed users getting on the moral high horse in a variety of posts without even attempting to engage with the meat of the post or entertain the hypothetical and trying to flesh out why that would be not preferable.

You've smelled it when it's too late though. When top level comments that were nothing but moralizing started showing up, I knew it was too late. There were plenty of these in the gender war posts.

When top level comments that were nothing but moralizing started showing up, I knew it was too late.

First time?

And while I'm sure the lurkers appreciate takes that aren't merely adding to the "bog-standard 90s South Christian morality fights a woke argument made by someone who doesn't quite understand the where or why woke even got that argument in the first place" (if one takes updoots as evidence of engagement, which is the only feedback I ever seem to get when I do this), even that might as well be ChatGPT-rephrased or just a bog-standard repost after a while since my arguments aren't getting sharper.

Of course, my revealed preference is clearly that I'd rather masturbate do short-form point-scoring on the Internet than spend more time doing something about it, so...

Well, I guess this is one more reason to justify my disdain of the sex-relations threads.

We haven't drifted from the high-decoupling crowd, the crowd has drifted away from high-decoupling. I used to love these sorts of thought experiments, now I roll my eyes at them at best.

Right, because the Culture War has taught many the lesson that an invitation to engage in high-decoupling analysis is a trap.

Okay, teleport back to the 1700s. You're a Christian. A high decoupler invites you to a talk about how to assess the historicity of the bible. Do you accept?

On the one hand, yeah, it's a trap to convince you to be a non-denominational Deist damn you to hell for eternity and expel you from polite society.

On the other hand, the person's more right than they know, because the Christian God actually isn't real!

The ideologies and material practices of the next 50 years will be different from those of today, in ways that will necessarily not be emotionally 'coupled' in the way today's issues are. By refusing to 'decouple', you're covering your ears as the world changes around you.

By refusing to 'decouple', you're covering your ears as the world changes around you.

La-la-la, can't hear you.

Honestly, "Christian God not real!" and you know this how? Oh, Science, blah blah blah, let's argue this out with the same arguments for the past three hundred years.

That's not a good example - they were right for the wrong reasons? they were right but didn't know how right they were? they were right because I know they were right because I don't believe in Christian God?

I'm sure society will be very different in 50 years time. I've already seen huge changes in the society I grew up in, over the past 40 years. But that does not mean that someone proposing a 'decoupled' idea is right; am I to 'emotionally uncouple' and go "well back when I was in my 30s it was generally frowned upon to rape 6 year olds, but hey today is a different era and let's not cover our ears as the world changes!"

When the 6 year olds are potentially smarter and stronger and more intelligent than the average human alive today, then it becomes a farcical hill to die on. I chuckle at the mental image of telling a transhuman gigachad "child" that they're not allowed to have sex because of rules put in place before they were beyond the fervent dreams of futurists.

Changes of a similar magnitude are about to happen, in decades rather than centuries. For a more prosaic example, all the legal and moral injunctions against drunk driving cease to apply when the vehicles are autonomously driving themselves.

If your future six year old is as big, strong, intelligent, and developmentally mature as a 30 year old of today, then they'll be adults. Adults can have sex.

What we are talking about is "in twenty years time, when six year olds are still at the development rate that six year olds of today are, will the cultural viewpoints have shifted to make it acceptable for 30 year old adults of then to fuck six year olds of then?" and not some fevered transhumanist dream.

Decades won't make a difference, and I think you are vastly overestimating the rate and ease of technological progress to bring your dream about. As to autonomous vehicles - well, let's wait and see how that turns out. A drunk guy decides to over-ride his autonomous vehicle? That's going to incur the same legal penalties. Somebody hacks the software for the lulz and makes cars drive into crowds? Ditto. Nobody is going to say "well it was a driverless car, there's no law about that!"

Congratulations! You've now decoupled from the current implications of being a 6 year old child, and considered how norms might change as circumstances do. I wonder what the implications are that certain people have very different cognitive maturities at different ages, wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to wait two decades to consider whether a 16 yo child getting admitted to MIT might benefit from a waiver of the restrictions typically enforced on all teens till an arbitrary and not particularly well grounded age?

The point of decoupling is that it lets you see that the differences you perceive as qualitative are merely quantitative, even if in this particular scenario there's likely no actual 6 year old child out there with the cognitive abilities of a typical adult.

As for the whole "fevered transhumanist dream" bit, well there's nothing I need to tell you that reality won't set straight shortly. I don't think you're in such ill health that you can't reasonably expect to be around in 20 years to see for yourself. I for one enjoy it immensely when the genre of reality itself changes to science fiction, while reserving my judgement of whether or not to add the dystopia/utopia tag afterwards.

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Oh, Science, blah blah

Evolution by natural selection is easily the most important 'theological' thing to ever happen, it (together with history) explains every impulse that God is claimed to have given to man by independent choice. Every unexplainable natural phenomenon used to be attributable to God, and his role today in that front is minimal due to science - even today's Christians still claim various modern miracles (and if you investigate one of them deeply enough, it inevitably collapses). Like, how does Christianity relate to AGI? It doesn't! Does this mean AGI won't happen?

But that does not mean that someone proposing a 'decoupled' idea is right;

It means that some of them are in some parts right, and if you don't decouple you'll not be able to notice that

Like, how does Christianity relate to AGI? It doesn't! Does this mean AGI won't happen?

Your question can be broken down into two parts (I'm assuming AGI means "Artificial General Intelligence").

(1) How does Christianity relate to AGI?

On the same basis it relates to all other creations of humanity and the way we conduct ourselves, are we trying to make a heaven on earth that will instead result in a hell on earth?

(2) Does this mean AGI won't happen?

Yes. But that's because I don't believe all the hopes/fears about Fairy Godmother AI and Paperclippers. We'll get machine intelligence of a kind, but we won't get Colossus or HAL or the Culture AIs. What we'll get will be even more of the same that we're seeing now - using AGI to fake up term papers etc., to generate articles for online and mainstream media, to assist scammers in scamming, and used as a very blunt sorting instrument by government. White collar jobs will now be as precarious as blue collar jobs have been. But we're not going to get the Singularity, post-scarcity, or even dystopias. Just more of the same, even faster.

Yes. But that's because I don't believe all the hopes/fears about Fairy Godmother AI and Paperclippers. We'll get machine intelligence of a kind, but we won't get Colossus or HAL or the Culture AIs

The argument is incredibly compact. Do you believe that 1) computers can't have the intelligence and independent action of humans, despite obvious material paths to accomplishing that we currently are aggressively pursuing or that 2) we won't unleash that intelligence and independent action, despite the truly enormous potential individual and collective benefits of doing so?

Like, a million years ago there weren't humans (homo sapien). We evolved. Whether or not you believe in god, the fossil record and DNA clearly demonstrates that. Imagine a million years from now. If we create things smarter and more capable than ourselves, why won't they end up on top in a million years, in the same way we did?

And how long does it look like it'll take? A thousand seems more plausible than a million, given computers weren't a thing 200 years ago. A hundred or two seems more plausible than a thousand. And suddenly it's an issue for your grandchildren, at least.

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Every unexplainable natural phenomenon used to be attributable to God, and his role today in that front is minimal due to science

What's your stance on human free will?

A reasonable question, and an important one, but not one I really want to discuss right now tbh.

I think it's not too relevant to the point that we have a lot of evidence there's not a heaven with jesus and angels and the happy souls of all the do-gooders that we didn't have a thousand years ago. Whether there's something non-mechanistic going on with the universe - important, tied up in why people are so attracted to things like Christianity, but still doesn't prove Christianity true.

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I'm not refusing to decouple, I'm refusing to publicly engage in high-decoupling analysis with someone acting in bad faith. The only point in publicly engaging in Aella's thought experiment is to demonstrate that I'm willing to consider something generally considered anathema.

Even anonymously?

I guess Nybbler understood "trap" different than I did, but for me anonymity does not enter into it.

I'm not afraid of being caught expressing a naughty opinion and getting cancelled (well there's that too, I guess), I think all these high-decoupling thought experiments are a lie. Their goal isn't to analyse something from all possible avenues, their goal is to get you to agree with something you normally wouldn't, by presenting you with a novel scenario that you didn't have time to process fully yet. It would be bad enough if this game had fair rules, but the same people who demand you change your mind on abortion, because of your answer to a convoluted scenario involving an abducted violinist, feel no obligation to participate in the conversation when you point out their logic justifies infanticide as well. This is why the "lower class" responses that Hanania is whining about are 100% correct, as they refuse to participate in something that was not put forward in good faith.

Yes, there's that trap too.

Even pseudonymously; you burn that pseudonym. Anonymously, sure, but then you're just jerking around on 4chan or the equivalent.

Eh, I think willingness-to-decouple trades off with willingness-to-take-bait. There’s been a lot of the latter since the SSC days.

Though…there might be a more general selection for cynicism? It’s like decon/reconstruction in media. There’s diminishing returns to covering the same stuff. Sincerity becomes naïveté, or nuance becomes Subverting Expectations™. Signaling all the way down. Which part of the cycle are we in?

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

Huh? Migration is surely voluntary. Having Aella as your countrywoman less so.

Sure, I agree it is voluntary, doesn't mean the migrants are doing something bad if they try and mitigate the impact of the culture shift on themselves, or that they should not come if they aren't happy with the culture shift.

Eating pasta at a certain restaurant is completely voluntary, but if their pasta comes with rocket on top and you really really hate it then you can freely move it to the side or onto a different plate. You're not a bad person for not accepting the rocket on your pasta and taking steps to get rid of it vs not even visiting the restaurant, maybe the rest of the meal is really good and you like it very much.

Same with migration, migrants are not and should not be expected to accept literally every cultural thing about their new host country and should be completely free to take steps making their experience more pleasant for them, it's no different to removing the rocket from your meal. We would scoff at anyone who said "If you don't like the rocket then don't eat at this restaurant, if you continue coming here you should be expected to consume everything on the pasta", we should do the same for people who make the analogous argument for immigration.

Au contraire. If the rule in my house is “Take your shoes off at the door,” and one of my guests prefers to keep his shoes on, he can either get with the program or gtfo. He doesn’t get to have it both ways.

Having said that, the conversation would be more enlightening if you gave concrete examples.

Countries aren't houses? If someone who live a city away wants no shoes in his house, that's his choice (i'm fine with it). If he wants his wife to wear a veil, whatever. If he wants to live in a big house with his extended family, is that my problem?

Sure, some cultural issue are important - we might not want to import people from honor cultures who settle disputes with violence or don't want to get educated without careful consideration and pushes for assimilation. But your analogy didn't point to that, it asserted both a right and a positive good to deny immigrants for entirely arbitrary reasons. Which seems dumb? My ancestors, and yours, likely had all sorts of cultural clashes and broken taboos against the natives when they came, but it's still nice that they did.

Neither are countries restaurants. Between the two analogies, I believe mine is both superior and a better way of framing the question.

That said, I’m not sure you really understood my analogy correctly. Yes, if someone who lives in a different house has different rules and customs, that’s absolutely fine (barring a few exceptions). Under my analogy, those would be different countries. So if I move into a women-wear-veils house/country, it would be just as wrong for me to demand the homeowners make an exception for my wife/daughters as it would be for someone from a wear-shoes-indoors house/country to move into my house and demand I accommodate them.

Also, I don’t see how my analogy asserted that it was a positive good to deny immigrants for arbitrary reasons. I think you’ve misunderstood the analogy, and that’s causing you to overthink the details of the analogy without getting into the ideas the analogy represents.

For example, “taking off your shoes” could represent any number of customs/laws: anything from genital mutilation and honor killings to speaking English and using the correct finger to point with. That’s why I said it would be more enlightening if BurdensomeCount gave concrete examples.

What has this to do with Hanania? Context?

Hanania asked a similar question a few days ago:

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1720992936052306000

This is a rational response to someone the highly evolved social calculus computer in your skull has snap judged to be either dangerous, your enemy, or stupid.

Ie, What if the moon was made of cheese? <- Fuck you/lol dumbass/ death threats

This poll question reminded me of a now very old hentai visual novel called Kana: Little Sister which explored this very question in the context of incest, rather than pedophilia (protagonist has a terminally ill younger sister who falls in love with him). I actually haven't read this, not because I dislike the topic or anything, but because I generally don't find visual novels to be worth the effort. But everyone I've spoken to who've read it says they thought it handled the issue well, and it was generally very well received among visual novel/hentai/anime weebs back when it came out.

Do you believe that migrants “squeezing from below” are going to align with the Aella-sympathizing elite on these topics? Which migrant populations are pro-prostitution for dying children exactly?

(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),

Sophomoric understanding of the issue. I believe that illegal migrants are a net negative to the economy, but even if you think they're a net positive it remains undeniable that the benefits and drawbacks of immigrants are not equally distributed. Most opposition to migrants comes from people who have to deal with the added competition for housing and wage-based jobs (among countless other negative externalities), and in many cases these people explicitly voted against these migrants showing up. You look at a population placed under such severe stress that you're even predicting they're going to violently resist what's happening to them, and you don't have any sympathy for them because ...they're opposed to their own impoverishment? Of course they're going to get upset that their livelihoods and communities are being destroyed, and of course they're going to blame the migrants who are the mechanism by which this is happening! They don't "expect" the migrants to deal with a bigger and more rapid cultural shock, they want the migrants to fuck off entirely (I imagine a right-winger with a high verbal IQ would word this differently, but I think that's an accurate approximation of the working class attitude here) and solve both problems at once.

yes, only child prostitute (3.9%)

I had to delete my first response to this because it did not comply with the rules. I'm really happy to live in the land of decouplers, but sometimes, jaded as I am, I'm surprised by what they come up with.

I mean... this is a really pragmatic vote, but I'm pretty sure child prostitutes' clients would not be children in 99% of cases. So they shouldn't be able to be child prostitutes. It's not like Timmy from math class is going to have an escort profile 'just in case' a child client pops up.

I'm not surprised by some of the replies at all.

Some of these people are surely fat fingers or otherwise lizard man’s constant.

While the question doesn't specify gender, my priors are that any terminal early teen who demands to lose their virginity is 99% likely to be a boy.

Putting myself in the mindset of my 13 yo self (not too difficult, I've hardly outgrown it), and hell yeah if I'm about to die I'm going to at least get a nut out of it. I'd expect my other 13 yo friends would be fist bumping me as the final push of morphine accompanies me over the edge, and about half of them would try and get unnecessary xrays so they too could qualify 🙏

Child or Adult prostitute though?

.. sorry, I'll show myself out.

Consulting my mental copy of my 13 yo self, I really doubt he'd give a shit.

The extremely negative reaction is not a surprise at all. Those who you call "normies" are afraid of the new deadly sins like sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, pedophilia and will refuse to engage with a person that tries to trick them into giving a "yes, but" answer, because they know they will be called a dirty sheep fucker and thrown out of the RV. That's why you see this kind of ritualistic purity where people will attack anyone who tries to poke holes in the taboo and will claim that they have been attracted to humans that are undeniably at least 18 years old since the very first moment they had an inkling of sexual thoughts.

called a dirty sheep fucker and thrown out of the RV

This just reminds me of the old "How would you feel if you had not had breakfast yesterday" meme.

Eh, taboos are only partially arbitrary. "Weird person having sex with my child" is something people have strong instincts against, and "anyone having sex with any child" is the best fit in today's world. I think there'd always be some taboo around it.

Fair enough. This just gives me one more data point for why the common man (or an aggregation of common men) should have basically zero political power on national scales, not like I needed any more for my collection but yeah, this goes on the pile.

In related news there was a comment I saw on Reddit that showed just how bad democracy has been for the middle east during the last 100 years:

The more uncomfortable and probable answer is that of all the states created in the 20th century, the monarchies have performed far better than the republics

Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Saudi, Oman

Libya, Iraq, Iran

These are all neighbouring each other, are all within the top 10 oil and gas producing states per capita

The first group is wealthy and stable. The second are the complete opposite. One key difference..

Iran was a stable, prosperous monarchy

Iraq was a stable, prosperous monarchy

Libya was a stable, prosperous monarchy

The republican coups turned each of these three countries into poorly run repressive warmongering terrorist havens,

There's no two ways around this.

I'm completely pro Uncle Sam being world hegemon, but one thing I do not understand is America's hard on for democracy even in countries that are eminiently not suited for it.

This just gives me one more data point for why the common man (or an aggregation of common men) should have basically zero political power on national scales

So I take it you are pro-Rotherham sexual ethics, then?

How is that connected to anything I said? The Rotherham rapists were animals who would be publicly hanged under my ideal system. Giving the common man less power to influence national politics has zero bearing on how much power they should have over their own children and local surroundings. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy where the common man has next to no power on a national level, they still have ways of influencing their local neighbourhoods and have power over their children etc.

I hope you’ve noticed what those countries have in common. The conclusion here is that every common man in the world is a decent ruler, with one exception. One muslim, one vote, one time.

If oppressive monarchies have a tendency to experience revolutions in the first place that wreck the country, that has to be taken into account as a negative for oppressive monarchies though. Thats one of the functions of democracy, so that the common people feel they have a say and don't overthrow the government.

You're seeing the end state of an oppressive monarchy collapsing and blaming it on what follows. If oppressive monarchies were so stable, then they wouldn't collapse like this.

Unfortunately in the middle east at least "democracies" tend to experience revolutions/coups that wreck the country at roughly the same rate or even higher, so that's not an argument for choosing democracy over monarchy.

Perhaps not, but measuring performance of a post-revolution nation against the pre-revolution nation without noting that the revolution itself is a pretty big red flag against the performance of the oppressive monarchy is still not very accurate.

If oppressive monarchies have a tendency to experience revolutions in the first place that wreck the country, that has to be taken into account as a negative for oppressive monarchies though.

I have to remember that one the next time they start screaming about "threats to our democracy".

Sure, all government types have weaknesses and flaws. Democracy has its own set. Democracies tendency towards decision paralysis with ideas that have closely balanced support is a big one at times.

I'm not talking about "decision paralysis", I'm talking about "Russian interference", "fake news", "populism", "extremism", and so on. If revolution is monarchy's fault, all those things are democracy's fault, and should be embraced as they come, rather than fought.

Oh absolutely, populism is a definite issue in democracies at times. I was just giving one example, not an exhaustive list. Note I am not saying revolution should be embraced or populism, just that when comparing the pre- and post revolution outcomes, you can't escape that the oppression is in many cases what triggered the revolution. It has positives and negatives, focussing only on the positives of one and the negatives of the other is not an accurate comparison

I'm completely pro Uncle Sam being world hegemon, but one think I do not understand is America's hard on for democracy even in countries that are eminiently not suited for it.

It's the source of their legitimacy. The grunts that went to Iraq and Afghanistan weren't told "you are fighting to uphold our global hegemony!", they were told they are bringing democracy to the oppressed.

It might be a disgusting idea, but:

"Data from a total of 19 916 male high school students (from YRBSS) and 7739 males aged 15 to 24 years (from NSFG) were included in the analysis. The sample was largely composed of non-Hispanic white males: 8789 (57.1%) from the YRBSS and 3737 (58.0%) from the NSFG. Sexual onset before age 13 years was reported nationally by 7.6% (95% CI, 6.8%-8.4%) of male high school students and 3.6% (95% CI, 3.0%-4.2%) of males aged 15 to 24 years. The proportion of male students who reported having sexual intercourse before age 13 years varied across metropolitan sites, from 5% (95% CI, 4%-7%) in San Francisco, California, to 25% (95% CI, 23%-28%) in Memphis, Tennessee, with elevated rates among non-Hispanic black and Hispanic males in most metropolitan areas."

And that's just the share of barely pubescent children that have already had actual sex. The share of barely pubescent children that have started masturbating at age 13 or earlier is closer to 40%. It's an uncomfortable truth, but even barely pubescent children have sexual thoughts and feelings. How and how much we should shape them is the question, just like with any other thing we like to moderate.

Would you let this terminally ill child get drunk instead? Get high on LSD? Dive to see the wreck of Titanic in a flimsy submersible? Euthanize themselves?

Would you let this terminally ill child get drunk instead?

yes

Get high on LSD?

yes

Dive to see the wreck of Titanic in a flimsy submersible?

perhaps, if they and their parents were well aware of the risks and understood

Euthanize themselves?

yes, if it was determined that they wanted euthanasia, weren't depressed, etc; probably would want the parents to agree but if the child is repeatedly and unwaveringly insistent that they don't want to live with this terminal illness anymore, I wouldn't necessarily want to require this. I don't really have much certainty here but am leaning towards "let terminally ill teenagers choose euthanasia, even without parental consent". My rationale is that as much as that kind of thing sucks, it also sucks to have a 13-year-old who's adamant about preferring death to spending a couple of weeks or months struggling to breathe, doped up on morphine, with altered mental status...forced to endure this, and then die afterwards. Of course, I'll concede that there are reasonable counterarguments here.

As you might be able to tell, I'm very much in favor of death-with-dignity and assisted suicide for the terminally ill. If I see the end coming, I'm going to die like a doctor.

The proposed linkage between the latest controversial aella tweet and large-scale social strife is somewhat tenuous?

People said much worse 50 years ago, whether for shock value or of genuine belief, and nothing too terrible happened.

You're right that advancing technology is going to, first strain, then snap, current moral values eventually, but there are probably better examples than something child something sex.

There’s a lot of shit to unpack in your post, but I’d like to zero in on one thing.

What the hell is an e/acc?

Effective accelerationism. By analogy with effective altruism, the Nick Landian position of trying to to bring about superhuman intelligence as quickly/certainly as possible, even if it kills all humans. Should that happen, it was just the next step in the universe's evolution. The only moral action is the minimization of entropy, after all.

Even Eliezer Yudkowsky was a proto e/acc, in his younger days.

Lately, the term is getting watered down into a sort of generic techno-progress label.

Either way, on the AI question, the e/acc's are the ones firmly on the side of full steam ahead, while ordinary people are calling for a pause and Eliezer Yudkowsky is shouting stop.

I don't think most Twitter e/accs think being replaced (painfully) by AI is a good thing, they just believe it's so unlikely to happen it's not worth worrying about.

I agree, though I wonder: is there a group that does celebrate the Greater Replacement and wants to summon an artificial entropy minimizing elder god instead of images of 1950s cities built in Dyson spheres?

There are 8 billion people out there, so even discounting Lizardman's constant, there are probably a handful about. I don't think they have any meaningful influence for the most part (I dimly recall one of them being involved in an AI company of note, but I don't remember who or which)

Effective accelerationist, which is someone who wants to accelerate technological development, particularly artificial intelligence.

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?

This is not completely fantastical scenario.

Original source is long gone, but here is the second best, Free Republic mirror and lively discussion thread and other thread

Dying boy, 15, gets wish: losing virginity Chicago Sun Times ^ | 12/23/01 | BY BENJAMIN ERRETT

Posted on 12/23/2001, 3:26:24 PM by Mopp4

A terminally ill boy had his dying wish granted in Australia this month, but ethicists are still at odds over whether it was the right thing to do. The wish was not for a trip to Disneyland or to meet a famous sports star. Instead, the 15-year-old wanted to lose his virginity before he died of cancer. The boy, who remains anonymous but was called Jack by the Australian media, did not want his parents to know about his request. Because of his many years spent in the hospital, he had no girlfriend or female friends. Jack died last week, but not before having his last wish granted. Without the knowledge of his parents or hospital staff, friends arranged an encounter with a prostitute outside of hospital premises. All precautions were taken, and the organizers made sure the act was fully consensual. The issue has sparked fierce debate over the legal and ethical implications of granting the boy's request. By law, Jack was still a child, and the woman involved could in theory face charges for having sex with a minor. The debate was sparked by the hospital's child psychologist, who wrote a letter to "Life Matters," a radio show in which academics debate ethical and moral dilemmas. The scenario was presented in the abstract, with no details about the boy's identity.

No surprise, boomer cons in 2001 reacted as expected.

My inital reaction to this article was shock. This boy is dying at age 15 and the most important thing in the world to him is to get laid before he passes on. He didn't even want his parents to know about it. Is this reflective of the way young people view life today? I don't care that I will be missing out on the chance to lead a full life, just let me have sex before I go?

This is the sort of soul-less, animalistic response to impending death that might be expected from a human child raised by beasts.

Interesting: His eternal life is immediately before him. And this "child of the media" wants 30 seconds of immediate sexual gratification rather than an eternity of life.

What can be seen as more surprising, this story was revived in 2014 by Eric Raymond on his blog and reaction of libertarian both left and right tended to be positive and affirming.

I’d go so far as to say that the most important experience this hooker gave the kid probably wasn’t the orgasm itself but her natural human compassion for a dying child, her willingness to touch him and comfort him and give him what he had wished for.

Something not thinkable today.

it seemed pretty gross to me.

Me too, but the whole fucking thing is gross as shit. Cancer, terminal illness, dying wishes: fundamentally obscene. It is not for nothing that Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est included references to cancer as being obscene. He was right, as Scott Alexander observed a decade ago.

Interesting that that was in Australia. Jim Jeffries, an Australian stand-up comic, has a bit where he did this sort of thing for a friend who had some sort of chronic illness that made him paralyzed and severely fragile. I don't think his friend was expected to die any time soon (though expected to die young), and he was an adult at the time. Being a stand-up comic bit, I have no idea how much truth there is to it; perhaps he was partially inspired by this real-life event in Australia.

I don't really have much of a position on that. Having seen some shit working in the healthcare industry, and seen a few children dying from cancer, I am willing to say that this isn't terribly bad, given the child's circumstances. Reasonable people can be on either side of this issue. Cancer is a nasty, nasty disease: this guy is looking down the barrel of Who By Very Slow Decay, pediatric edition. Mercifully that is a bit faster than the geriatric version.

Who By Very Slow Decay

      • yeah.

Thankfully my mother passed before she deteriorated that far, but many years ago I decided that at the first serious downturn in my health, I will euthanize myself in the quickest, most painless way I can (that doesn't leave a mess or inconvenience other people). I will do this with a clear conscience, as I have no children or other dependents and have never had a Significant Other.

I mean...if I'm terminally ill and of sound mind, I'm probably going for euthanasia, either by the DIY method or the cleaner, government-approved one, assuming that medical aid in dying becomes more common and easily accessible in 50 or 60 years. It's either a last walk in the woods with my method of choice - and I'll be a physician, so I'll know damn well what it takes to kill a human being - or a prescription for a lethal dose of poison from another doctor. It's a personal decision, but for me: fuck that shit, let's get it over with in one go and spare me and the people around me the suffering. I could potentially be talked into "comfort care only" by family members that I was close enough to and who I cared about enough...but it better be comfort care only. I don't want to suffer at all, and if they need to pump so much morphine into me that it stops me from breathing so much the better.

What can be seen as more surprising, this story was revived in 2014 by Eric Raymond on his blog and reaction of libertarian both left and right tended to be positive and affirming.

Off topic, but is esr blogging anywhere? I used to read his blog, but haven’t seen anything from him since his website died.

It wasn’t that long ago that Aella’s question would’ve been taken as an edgy “tits and beer liberal” style joke. I’m pretty sure I recall some mid 2000s maybe early 2010s hospital sitcom/drama with an episode with the same basic premise, just the kid was asking the doctors rather than make a wish.

Edit: I was thinking of “The Good Doctor” s3e7. A 12 year old kid that’s about to have his eyes surgically removed gets taken around by his doctors to do some bucket list stuff.

One of the things he asks to do is to see some IRL titties while he still can. So the doctors take him to a strip but the bouncer refuses entry cause he’s a minor. So one of the doctors in sympathy flashes her tits at the kid right before his surgery.

This actually came out way more recently than I was thinking, it first aired in 2019.

I believe someone recently was commenting on an episode of House where that exact plot took place; if I recall, the teenager in that episode was a young girl, and all she wanted from the (male) doctor was a kiss, rather than full-on sex. Is that what you’re referring to?

And she gets the kiss too - https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ijuzvl8tv8k Later in the episode, the other doctors make fun of Chase (the adult male doctor who did the kissing) but the episode's narrative frames it as a good thing.

totally forgot about this, but now remember it so clearly. did not seem like a big issue at this time for this idea, perhaps because Chase was hesitant and it took the entire episode to get to this ending? Because it’s just a kiss? Because the requester has the profile of a typical “victim” (young underaged girl)?”

There's a similar subplot in Scrubs.

The things that ZHP and others want - abolishing women's suffrage, pushing all gays back into the closet, racial segregation - are political non-starters, and not just in America: these positions would be completely insane to advocate for in most countries.

Most Western countries perhaps, but the world is bigger than that.

The way Western countries are going, policies don't need to be advocated to a larger audience. Gathering a few families with 4+ children and setting them up in a given area should give you essentially the same thing. Nobody can stop White Flight. The difficulty is really on everything else. What are you willing to give up to live in racial segregation, etc?

So who exactly is the target audience here except the terminally online?

People like you apparently, never seen that website before you posted it.

Nobody can stop White Flight.

I think they'd try if the trickle became a deluge. I'm reminded of how difficult it is to give up US citizenship (to avoid paying tax while living overseas). Basically you used to need to pay US$2k+ and prove 5 years of IRS tax compliance. Also exit taxes if you own more than $2 million.

I think they'd try if the trickle became a deluge.

If the trickle becomes a deluge then the country will be in such a state that they won't have much capacity to go after dissidents.

I don’t think ZHPL is necessarily wrong here. There are plenty of historic examples of society rejecting previously held beliefs. Rome embraced Catholicity and ended up rejecting homosexuality and banning crucifixion. Weimar Germany was a pretty libertine society with open homosexuality and cross dressing. Embrace of Islam curbed the excesses of Persia.

People respond to the movements that are alpha-masculine and forcefully say “this is what we’re doing now. Get on board”. The Catholic willing to die rather than bend the knee, the Muslim willing to fight, kill and die for Islam, the German paramilitary groups willing to get down and dirty — these can have a profound effect on how the rest of the society sees social issues. I think it’s the very act of being willing to confront society head-on without hesitation. People will always follow the strong willing to lead.

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

Yeah, there’s no guarantee that people correctly assess which horse is strong. Or that willingness to lead actually implies strength.

People's opinion don't matter, only power matters, and will is a necessary prerequisite to it and one of the main deciders of who endures.

If an organized minority group faces an opposition that does not believe in its own legitimacy, they win, even if their ideas are unpopular. There is endless historical precedent of that.

Few wanted bolchevism, few wanted Mussolini. But that does not enter into it. Will is not the only component of political strength, but it is an important one.

Be that as it may, it’s not what OP was arguing with

People will always follow the strong willing to lead.

Nobody can stop White Flight.

Don't confuse people who want to escape a shithole, ruined by woke policies, with people who want to found a rebirth of Pureblood Aryan Nation. There are a lot of the former that won't want anything to do with the latter. Even wider - a lot of people who object to child transitions, kid drag shows and other insanities don't actually mind if two adult dudes fuck each other, if they'd like so. The interests of these groups can be aligned while the environment is so insanely skewed that their differences are immaterial, but that doesn't mean they share the same core values with regard to aryan stuff.

There are a lot of the former that won't want anything to do with the latter. Even wider - a lot of people who object to child transitions, kid drag shows and other insanities don't actually mind if two adult dudes fuck each other, if they'd like so.

Well they can join the pro-homo commune if that's a central value to them. I don't see a way to rollback the Progress™ to LGB without the T, a sort of 2000s conservatism, without risking the Progress to re-roll back in immediately, like it already did in the 2010s.

I think a lot of people don't care that much about the 'two adults behind closed doors' problem, but the community has moved way past that a long time ago.

None of the things that you characterize as 'insanities' would exist if their perpetrators were shamed into the 'closet', or better, if they were not able to propagate the very idea of them.

Again, nobody will choose to isolate themselves into enclaves or move to less-technologically-advanced countries if they did not feel strongly about any of these issues.

I don't expect this to happen before some major political changes, perhaps a full-on Covid-style ban on freedom of association, ban on homeschooling, massive zoning changes... Could take 5 years like it could take 20.

Well they can join the pro-homo commune if that's a central value to them.

That's the point, it's almost never is a central value either way. Shaming homoes into the closet is not something most people would put any serious effort into, and specifically making the community as welcome to homoes as humanly possible would not be a valuable effort for most either. "I DNGAF" would be the most common position by now, I suspect. 2 centuries ago it might be different, but by now it'd be no more interesting either way than, say, dudes that jerk off to tentacle porn. Not something worth the effort either way.

None of the things that you characterize as 'insanities' would exist if their perpetrators were shamed into the 'closet', or better, if they were not able to propagate the very idea of them.

This may be true, but in a useless way. There are a lot of hypothetical worlds where it wouldn't happen. If Al Qaeda took over the US, it wouldn't happen. If Soviet Union took over the world, it wouldn't happen. If we didn't have democracy or free speech, it wouldn't happen. Etc. etc. The problem here is not to find one hypothetical world where it wouldn't happen, that's easy. The problem is to find one where it didn't happen but some other things that we still want to happen happened. And that's a much more complex question.

Again, nobody will choose to isolate themselves into enclaves or move to less-technologically-advanced countries if they did not feel strongly about any of these issues.

Well, Amish do exist, and they seem to have mostly sustainable model of existence, given two things are true: a) they don't want to have absolutely any influence at all with the outside world and no contact with it as much as possible and b) the outside world is fine with them existing. You don't really need to move anywhere for the former - there are enough remote places in the US where nobody would care much what's going on in there if it stays in there - but for the latter, especially if you're dealing with globalist totalitarian ideology and you let it win, you'd have to move very, very far.

That's the point, it's almost never is a central value either way. Shaming homoes into the closet is not something most people would put any serious effort into, and specifically making the community as welcome to homoes as humanly possible would not be a valuable effort for most either.

Wouldn't a commune explicitly founded for (white) adults with 4+ children pretty much have roughly ~0% out-of-the-closet homosexuals? This was the premise :

Gathering a few families with 4+ children and setting them up in a given area should give you essentially the same thing.

Not something worth the effort either way.

Literally 0 additional effort to what is arguably a pretty arduous task.

You don't really need to move anywhere for the former - there are enough remote places in the US where nobody would care much what's going on in there if it stays in there - but for the latter, especially if you're dealing with globalist totalitarian ideology and you let it win, you'd have to move very, very far.

Idk how much the 'globalist totalitarian ideology' can win if they can't get their people to breed and even go out of their way to sterilize their own members. Moving anywhere is still a much easier endeavor than whatever is required in the short-term to get rid of the regime.

And, I think it’s notable to point out, red tribe hardliner normies who think homosexuality is wrong, climate change doesn’t exist, public schooling should be significantly reduced in spread, the COVID vaccine was harmful, etc- most of these people are not aryan race warriors. Rebirthing the pure blood aryan nation is a minority of a minority of a minority.

I’d say it’s part of that general constellation of long form ‘magazines’ on the dissident right, it has some moderately prominent meme figures like Michael Anton, BAP, Moldbug, Anna from RSP who have written for it.

These are all ersatz-places because Twitter, where these people congregate, is bad for long form content (even with the character limit removed). Thus these blogs need to exist for essayposting. Reminds me of how good we have it here, where such a thing is unnecessary.

what gay marriage is really talking about is men brutally fucking each other in the ass

yeschad

Is ZHPL aware that in the US, a large reason for why people were rebellious in the late 60s was that the government was conscripting young men and sending them to fight half the world away in a very dangerous war that had little to do guaranteeing US national security?

No mention of that in his essay, according to him it's just "fuck you, dad".

He also repeats the common far-right idea that all major right-wing direct action is actually controlled by the Feds/the Jews as if this is an obvious fact and not something that needs evidence brought forth in its support.

And the intellectual content of the essay boils down to hoping for a revolutionary social shift that turns a large fraction of people in the West into anti-gay race realists who support Victorian-style gender roles. And when I say "race realists", that's actually the minimum of what he wants. I am guessing that he would prefer actual racists.

But he does not explain how this could possibly happen.

The emotional center of the essay is longing for the spirit of that time around 2016 when it seemed that maybe Trump would turn out to be capable of doing something other than just sitting around complaining on Twitter.

But again, there are no actionable ideas about how to bring that "spirit of '16" into being again.

And for me the essay wasn't even fun to read, it has a lot of Curtis Yarvin-esque beating around the bush.

And the intellectual content of the essay boils down to hoping for a revolutionary social shift that turns a large fraction of people in the West into anti-gay race realists who support Victorian-style gender roles. And when I say "race realists", that's actually the minimum of what he wants. I am guessing that he would prefer actual racists.

Exactly. He wants 19th century (at minimum) LGBTQ+ rights, women rights, religious freedom, race relations and, last but not least, worker rights. HP0 is, among other things, radical capitalism uber alles libertarian (except with no liberty except liberty for capitalist bosses).

As OP pointed, no one wants such society, least of all actual capitalists (who are safer and more prosperous than ever before and feel no need to downgrade modern rainbow capitalism to earlier model).

Nevertheless, HP0 feels about it strongly and when you remind him of actual Lovecraft's economic and social positions, when you remind him that Lovecraft was, by his standards, communist, he will instantly block you while shrieking in rage.

Yes, Lovecraft's main political interest was to preserve and continue to build on the Anglo cultural tradition that he loved and was obsessed with. He wanted a technocratic government that would manage the economy and run massive economic interventions as necessary to guarantee a minimum standard of living. In his social/economic views, he was much more of a fascist than a right-libertarian. He had a distaste for the businessman/entrepreneur mentality and thought that society should guarantee a place for at least some intellectual/artistic/cultural creators even if their work was not economically profitable. He wanted to protect what he viewed as Anglo civilization's high cultural achievements, its elite artistic and intellectual culture, against both the threat posed by business-minded mentality and the threat posed by the possibility of a communist revolution that would destroy that culture and replace it with mass culture. He supported FDR because he saw FDR as someone who would reform the system by making it less brutal, and in such a way as would protect it from being overthrown by communist revolution.

Is ZHPL aware that in the US, a large reason for why people were rebellious in the late 60s was that the government was conscripting young men and sending them to fight half the world away in a very dangerous war that had little to do guaranteeing US national security?

Then they should have been even more rebellious during WW1, WW2 and Korea.

In fact young people supported the Vietnam War more than older people. https://www.pewresearch.org/2006/02/21/youth-and-war/

I think the upheaval in the 60s is more down to that being when the left had completed their ideological capture of academia. Storming a building or holding some historical artifacts hostage wasn't risky any more and in fact your professors probably supported it.

I don't know about Korea, but during both WW1 and WW2 there were huge anti-intervention political movements and tens of thousands of men attempted to evade the draft. I think that US resistance to the Vietnam War might just be more remembered because it is more recent and it was culturally connected to some extremely influential artistic movements such as rock. Also, by the time of the Vietnam War public attitudes had shifted to the point that trying to do a new version of the WW1-era Espionage and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent was not politically feasible - which I interpret not as a victory of leftism, but as a victory of liberalism. Also, the US government lost in Vietnam, which meant that unlike in those other wars, there was no afterglow of victory to cover up the ugly fact that the government had forced tens of thousands of people to go risk their lives over there against their will.

And for me the essay wasn't even fun to read, it has a lot of Curtis Yarvin-esque beating around the bush.

I'm not sure how much beating around the bush you can get when you say things like "You still have 42 million feral blacks milling around."

Agreed. I think I might have misused the phrase "beating around the bush". I thought it meant "be long-winded, take a long time to get to the point", but it seems that it might usually mean something more like "avoid directly saying something controversial".

The apparent "Spirit of 68" was mostly a tiny vanguard getting signal boosted by a very sympathetic media, academia, and bureaucracy. The "Spirit of 16" never existed. Rather than a fervor that swept the nation, it felt more like a small, intense, yet frail flame that could be snuffed out at any moment due to overwhelming headwinds from the pro-68er institutional powers. Those headwinds successfully prevented the 16er movement from growing strong enough to convince normies to trade their 68er moral framework for an alt-right one.

I don't think ZHPL is (purely) grifting here though. Right-wing anger has been simmering since the Tea Party (earlier?) and Trumpism was its most recent eruption. Trust in the soap box and ballot box have been eroded by these failures. ZHPL is exhorting right wingers to resist demoralization and prepare for the next opportunity. I'm not terminally online (I don't use any social media), but I am doing most of the things he encourages right wingers to do, and if there were any actual opportunity to wrest control of the country from my enemies, I'd participate somehow. Perhaps he's trying to convince young men disappointed by the failure of Trumpism not to simply check out and take the blue pill.

That’s a vile thing to write. It’s a vile thing to contemplate. And that’s the difference between the spirit of ‘68 and the spirit of ‘16. The latter is born of a willingness to confront the ugliness and the foul consequences of the spirit of ‘68. That’s why it trades principally in “hate facts.” The spirit of ‘16 knows that black IQ is on average one standard deviation lower than white. It knows that despite making up just 13% of the population blacks commit 60% of homicides. It knows the average gay man has over 100 different sexual partners in his life, and the outliers may have thousands, and that what gay marriage is really talking about is men brutally fucking each other in the ass; It knows that 100% of homosexual adoption is child sexual exploitation. The spirit of ‘16 knows that gender confirmation surgery is adult genital mutilation. It knows that a trans woman is a man who gets off on the idea of himself as a woman, so he has a surgeon cut a bloody gash between his legs, which smells like a septic tank for the rest of his life. The spirit of ‘16 knows that the vast majority of homosexuals, male and female, were sexually abused as children, because homosexuals are vampires who “reproduce” through sexual molestation. This is only the tip of the iceberg, (or the icestein, or the icenthal, if you prefer.)

And the rest isn't actually that much better... Accusing the opposition side of pedophilia, like somehow Chicago Black Panthers are somehow aligned with French intellectuals on child age of consent laws. It's got more than factual error problems, it's basically a shameless bash of the other side and doing so by making some terrible arguments at that.

the average gay man doesn't have anywhere near 100 sexual partners in his life

What's the right number? I suspect the distribution is bimodal, with one peak around where hetero males are, and another peak way out there - maybe over 100, if tales told on the internet to be believed (yes, I know, but these tales are way different from hetero men tales, by orders of magnitude).

It's a power law distribution, same as for straight men and women. The exponent, however, is, different, leading to a fatter tail and a significant minority (~10%) of three figure sexual partners, and a small number who have four figures.

10% seems really high. Source?

Edit: gattsuru’s source has an interquartile range of 7 to 100, so that’d be 25% over 100. Huh.

See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3334840/

They don't give the exact distribution. But they do offer the median number of lifetime sexual partners for MSM of all ages: 45, with a range [0-9005] (I'm skeptical that someone was assiduously counting their unique partners up to 9005, which is a new partner per day for almost thirty years). The median is actually higher than I expected.

Yeah, just saw gattsuru’s link, with the 75% mark at 100. Learn something every day, I guess.

One thing he does note is that it's from an urban area, which likely skews results. However, the Seattle metropolitan area is probably closer to the US as a whole than it is Folsom Street, so I'd say it's probably a mild overstatement, which aligns with my original 10% guesstimate.

Most meaningful studies I can find give a median closer to 10-25, which is significantly higher than heterosexual couples but not by an order of magnitude or more. You can find some higher estimates, but the highest numbers (100+) are generally selecting from prostitutes, brothel workers, and bathhouse addicts in San Francisco (see Bell and Weinberg, often referenced by anti-gay groups, which was almost 1/4th prostitutes), and those in the 50+ range usually reflect heavily urbanized areas and less severe but-still-significant selection pressures.

((There are some issues with the lower-end of the scales; these end up distorted by younger people who haven't had sex with any men yet and may not ever, which gets into some complicated philosophical questions. Some studies, especially earlier studies lump in bisexuals with gay men, and more recently there's the complex question of non-practicing or at least not-practicing-with-partners gay men. And obviously the lifetime sexual partner count of a specific person at a specific time can be different than the total number they'll have over their lifetime, though overlooking that difference is present in AFAIK all data sources.))

Some people suspect that this number has skyrocketed very recently, in the current day usually pointing to grindr. You can get 70ish by selecting solely from people using grindr, but I'm... skeptical that this is closer to Average Gay than to the San Francisco Bathhouse Fanatic.

The high ends are pretty extreme and bad in a lot of ways and it's definitely a chart with a long tail, but even most people who style themselves as mansluts don't get or even aim anywhere near there. Beyond the sheer logistical problems (insert Clerks joke here), it's literally a full-time job, and once you've found a good top there's a lot of good arguments against going back to the the sea.

The very high ends do exist and there are people who make it a major life's goal to get their body count as high as possible. For pragmatic reasons that's a lot more oral (and I suspect that they aren't the most precise about avoiding repeat customers or 'donations'), but as weird as the 2k+ numbers when examined closely are, they're not obviously lizardman numbers, and not just because most furry scalies are tops that don't really kink onto this stuff.

Wait, is there a reason why are most scalies are tops?

Why would it be a full-time job? If you're a person that doesn't do committed relationships, and given an active sex life of ~30 years, having just one partner a month - which doesn't sound like a full time job at all - would already take you to 360 partners. Of course, that's over the (active) lifetime, so median would be half of that? Still 180. All you need is a culture that allows you to hook up with a new partner at least once a month and of course the availability of the new partners. I think currently, grindr or other ways, that isn't much of a problem? Of course, that assumes a person absolutely averse to long-term relationships (which btw is the opposite of almost every homosexual person I've ever met, but I don't pretend my sample is in any way representative) and if you look at all the population the key metric would be how many are actually long-term and short-term people. But by itself, "it's a full-time job" doesn't seem to hold water here.

The high ends mentioned here are in the thousands, not the hundreds.

For many of the men at that high end, it likely is a literal full-time job.

It's not so much time spent sucking dick directly, so much as the availability of new partners that's a pretty significant limitation, especially if you aren't extremely open in your standards and preferences and/or living in a gay mecca. It's not my thing, but the amount of effort involving in setting up mushes, orgies, or just convenient conventions where there's going to be a lot of room parties is kinda surprisingly difficult! Other just redirect their career around opportunities, like working in a travel-focused field with a lot of on-location downtime.

what gay marriage is really talking about is men brutally fucking each other in the ass

Not necessarily, and indeed I think what (early) gay marriage was really talking about was Dan Savage's "monogamish"; 'sure, we're officially linked, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun on the side, either individually or together'. I think gay marriage now has indeed become the mainstream ideology that advocates like Andrew Sullivan were hoping for, and that it's also become a minority thing (I don't have figures to hand and should probably go get them): that is, gays and lesbians who want to marry do so and have the picket fence lifestyle, but a lot more have no desire to do so and prefer the chance to have multiple partners with no strings attached or in a poly sort of loose arrangement. See the criticism of Pete and Chasten for not being 'real' gays: too white, too conventional, straight-passing.

In ‘77, a depravity of French intellectuals (this is the technical term for a group of French intellectuals, like a school of fish, or a parliament of owls) all signed a petition to remove the age of consent in France. This is a very old and crucial leftist revolutionary idea, that the nuclear family is the source of all social oppression, that children should be raised by the state, and that the sexual use of children should be democratized and open to everyone.

The bones of this is correct. That's why those of us who were around for the 70s, even as young children, do have memories of the cultural atmosphere at the time, and why (for instance) I'm very cynical about ages of consent and MAPs etc. Paedophiles have been running campaigns for decades about their 'orientation' and trying to link it to gay rights, and that's why a lot of the gay rights activists back then got ensnared in "sure, free love for kids, children are sexual beings too" due to the whole mindset of pulling down the old ways, the old conventions, burn society down and build it back up to be better and freer. Take away the taboos and stigma around sex, and this false idea of childhood innocence, and we'd all be better off:

Our idealistic vision involved creating a new sexual democracy, without homophobia, misogyny, racism and class privilege. Erotic shame and guilt would be banished. There would be sexual freedom and human rights for everyone – gay, bi and straight. Our message was "innovate, don't assimilate".

[Gay Liberation Front] GLF's critique of straight society amounted to more than condemning violations of gay civil rights and campaigning for equal treatment. Revolutionary not reformist, our goal was an end to "male chauvinism" and the "gender system".

Of course, this meant that in later years, they had to walk a lot of it back:

Tatchell has written an obituary in The Independent for Paedophile Information Exchange founder Ian Dunn. He later stated:

I had no idea that [Middleton] was involved in paedophilia advocacy when I was asked to write my essay. ... When I was invited to write a chapter, I was told it was a book about children's rights and asked if I could write about the age of consent. It seemed a reasonable request at the time. My chapter in the book did not endorse child sex. It merely questioned whether 16 was the appropriate legal age of consent. Different people mature at different ages. There are many countries that have diverse ages of consent, some higher and some lower than 16. I did not advocate the abolition of the age of consent or specify at what age sex should become lawful. I was not aware of who the other authors were or what they wrote until the book was published. I would not have agreed to be in the book if I had known. ... There is nothing in my contribution that even remotely condones child sex abuse. ...

Neither I nor most other people had any knowledge of [Dunn's] link with [Paedophile Information Exchange] at the time. I only found out many years after I wrote his obituary. I would not have written it if I had known about his PIE work.

In July 2021, in an article by Hayley Dixon, Melanie Newman and Julie Bindel for the Daily Telegraph, it emerged that a positive review attributed to Peter Tatchell of the same pro-paedophila book – Betrayal of Youth: Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenerational Sex and the Social Oppression of Children and Young People – appeared in the June 1987 edition of 7 Days, the newsletter of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In 1997 Tatchell wrote a letter to The Guardian, defending an academic book about "boy-love", calling the work "courageous", before writing:

The positive nature of some child–adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends—gay and straight, male and female—had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.

On Tatchell's personal website he clarifies,

My Guardian letter cited examples of youths in Papuan tribes and some of my friends who, when they were under 16, had sex with adults (over 18s), but who do not feel they were harmed. I was not endorsing their viewpoint but merely stating that they had a different perspective from the mainstream opinion about inter-generational sex. They have every right for their perspective to be heard.

The spirit of ‘16 knows that the vast majority of homosexuals, male and female, were sexually abused as children, because homosexuals are vampires who “reproduce” through sexual molestation. This is only the tip of the iceberg, (or the icestein, or the icenthal, if you prefer.)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0145213415003828

Proportionally few boys were the subject of official notifications for sexual abuse (14.8% of maltreated boys, and 1.4% of the birth population); proportionally very few of these sexually abused boys (3%) went on to become sexual offenders; and, contrary to findings typically reported in retrospective clinical studies, proportionally few sexual offenders (4%) had a confirmed history of sexual abuse. Poly-victimization (exposure to multiple types of maltreatment) was significantly associated with sexual offending, violent offending, and general (nonsexual, nonviolent) offending. We found no specific association between sexual abuse and sexual offending, and nor did we find any association between sexual abuse and sexual offending specifically within the poly-victimized group. The total number of sexual abuse notifications did make a small unique contribution to the variance in sexual offending compared to other offending. Implications concerning maltreated boys and male sexual offenders are discussed.

children raised by two same-sex parents have equal or better life outcomes to straight parents

What evidence have you seen that makes this a matter of "fact" to you? From my understanding, the studies that show this are about as high a quality as studies on trans-youth medicine, relying on parental-reports of well-being and slanted samples.

Meanwhile, studies on heterosexual couples show that mothers and fathers parent differently and children living with unrelated adults suffer from increased stress measured by cortisol levels.

Children living with nonrelatives, stepfathers and half-siblings (stepfather has children by the stepchild’s mother), or single parents without kin support had higher average levels of cortisol than children living with both parents, single mothers with kin support, or grandparents. A further test of this hypothesis is provided by comparison of step- and genetic children residing in the same households. Stepchildren had higher average cortisol levels than their half-siblings residing in the same household who were genetic offspring of both parents (Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, page 565.)

Parents and Stepparents even abuse and murder children in different ways:

Stepparents commit filicide at higher rates than do genetic parents. According to M. Daly and M. I. Wilson (1994), motivational differences generate differences in the methods by which stepparents and genetic parents kill a child. Using Canadian and British national-level databases, Daly and Wilson (1994) found that stepfathers were more likely than genetic fathers to commit filicide by beating and bludgeoning, arguably revealing step-parental feelings of bitterness and resentment not present to the same degree in genetic fathers. Genetic fathers, in contrast, were more likely than stepfathers to commit filicide by shooting or asphyxiation, methods which often produce a relatively quick and painless death. We sought to replicate and extend these findings using a United States national-level database of over 400,000 homicides. Results replicate those of Daly and Wilson(1994) for genetic fathers and stepfathers. In addition, we identified similar differences in the methods by which stepmothers and genetic mothers committed filicide.

Given this, my prior would be that a kid raised in a Same Sex household, where they are by default unrelated to at least one parent, would have poorer outcomes than kids raised by straight parents (where a larger percentage are raised by two related parents.) What have you seen that makes you confident otherwise?

It's fine to have a prior, but when presented evidence otherwise, you should be willing to change your mind. That's what it means to have a prior, it doesn't mean planting your feet by a particular number.

Yes, please present me with that evidence? The whole comment was a request for the iron clad evidence.

You literally linked to such evidence in your post, just to dismiss it because it didn't fit your prior.

Plus, the whole point of Bayesianism is that there is no 'ironclad evidence'. You accumulate a lot of little bits of evidence that revise your opinion one way or another. That evidence can be anecdotes or case studies, or it can be more robust scientific meta-analyses.

Are you referring to me linking to "A Review and Critique of Research on Same-Sex Parenting and Adoption?" Because that is a literature review on the research of Same Sex parenting. I didn't dismiss it, it was my supporting document. You don't need to read the whole thing, just the abstract provides a basic gist:

Studies conducted within the past 10 years that compared child outcomes for children of same-sex and heterosexual adoptive parents were reviewed. Numerous methodological limitations were identified that make it very difficult to make an accurate assessment of the effect of parental sexual orientation across adoptive families. Because of sampling limitations, we still know very little about family functioning among same-sex adoptive families with low or moderate incomes, those with several children, or those with older children, including adolescents or how family functioning may change over time. There remains a need for high-quality research on same-sex families, especially families with gay fathers and with lower income.

Most of the time, the choice is not between "stepparents" and "parents", though. It is between "stepparents" and "orphanage", or rarely between "orphanage" and "parents" in cases of abuse by the latter. I haven't looked at the data of abuse in institutions but I assume it is worse than adopted families.

Please show me where all the orphanages are hiding in the US. But yes, I would assume that the further you get away from the "Biological mother and father raised me" the further you would get from the ideal childhood. I'm not sure what point you think you are making.

My point is step-parent outcomes are usually still better than any realistic alternative. Furthermore, the poster above you claimed same-sex couples are better parents on average than straight couples, which is not the same as step-parents vs. biological parents. Notably, the entire clump of "straight step-parents" is in the latter group in jewdefender's argument but the former group in your comparison.

I'm asking OP to defend one of the consensus-building statements he made, "there are a lot factual errors: ... children raised by two same-sex parents have equal or better life outcomes to straight parents." I'm not arguing for any particular policy regarding where to put kids once one or more of their parents are unwilling or unable to raise them.

OP is not going to defend his statements, he never does. OP is actually far right and I'm sure he thanks you for your service. You just keep walking into it, people.

Do you mean adoptive parents instead of stepparents? The alternative to having stepparents is your biological parent(s) staying single after they get divorced or are widowed.

The only way you’d end up being raised by just a stepparent is if both your biological parents died after at least one of them had remarried. Even then, stepparents don’t have any inherent legal rights as parents to their stepchildren. For a stepparent to be recognised as a legal parent of their stepchild requires the involvement of the court, just like any other potential guardian of an orphan. Such children often end up living with another biological relative like a grandparent, aunt, or uncle.

The court would consider a bunch of factors to determine if leaving the child in the care of their stepparent is appropriate. Things like the child’s age, their relationship with the stepparent, the feasibility of the stepparent being able to provide for the child by themselves, whether the stepparent is suitable to raise kids in general, the amount of time the child has spent living with their stepparent, the stepparent’s interest in caring for the child, etc. This would all have to be stacked up against any potential biological relatives caring for the child.

Yes, I mean adoptive parents.

Well then you and @OracleOutlook have been, at least in part, talking past each other. His original comment and the studies he linked are about stepparents not adoptive parents.

Your links are comparing natal parents to step-parents, not adoptive parents; a single mother remarrying is completely a different environment compared to two infertile parents deciding to adopt and raise a child from infancy. Adoptive children seem to have poorer physical health but greater parental support than biological children, interestingly enough.

Also if a gay couple adopts a child, it’s not as if the child is being deprived of a mother and a father; the alternative to the gay couple is the child being raised in an orphanage and then going from foster home to foster home.

And in case you suggest it, I’m not sure a closeted gay biological parent in a sham straight marriage is preferable long-term to a stable gay marriage either.

I’m not sure a closeted gay biological parent in a sham straight marriage is preferable long-term to a stable gay marriage either.

In a modern, Western society...especially with gayness being heritable...I agree with you, here. You had a lot more support for the gay, closeted man or woman and a lot more pressure to be closeted fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago.

I just want to know what caused the OP to know for a fact that children raised by homosexual couples fair better than children raised by heterosexual couples. My latter links explain my priors, not the base argument itself in an apple to apples comparison of homosexual vs heterosexual child rearing. My first link is a literature review of the research comparing heterosexual and homosexual parenting, ultimately finding it insufficiently powered as a whole to answer the question.

But some additional topics:

I knew that adoptive children have greater parental support but worse outcomes. It seems more of a useful datapoint for HBD and the nature vs nurture debate.

It doesn't usually go "gay couple adopts a child," the more common arrangement is gay parent brings biological kid from prior relationship into new gay marriage.

It's not so much about the inevitable "some kids end up in less ideal situations, and we make do" but rather what we take as an ideal. Our ideals will influence the decisions we make and the societal outcomes for kids overall. If the ideal is Gay Space Communism, where every child is birthed in an artificial womb and assigned to a polycule or raised in a state facility, would that child have a better outcome than a kid raised in a traditional extended family unit of biologically related people? Which should we encourage more of with our cultural storytelling and social practices?

Also if a gay couple adopts a child, it’s not as if the child is being deprived of a mother and a father; the alternative to the gay couple is the child being raised in an orphanage and then going from foster home to foster home.

That would be true if there was any shortage of prospective adoptive parents, but IIRC there’s not- any baby up for adoption has someone to adopt them, who’s probably been on a waiting list for a while.

My understanding is that while there is not a shortage of prospective adoptive parents for babies, there is one for children.

My understanding is that while that is partially true, it leaves out that many of these children are not particularly adoptable for one reason or another(severe trauma, disability, what have you, even leaving out that many children in foster care aren’t even theoretically available for adoption because CPS hopes to eventually reunite them with bio parents) and that gay prospective parents are not lining up to adopt them any more than infertile heterosexuals are anyways.

What evidence have you seen that makes this a matter of "fact" to you? From my understanding, the studies that show this are about as high a quality as studies on trans-youth medicine, relying on parental-reports of well-being and slanted samples.

I wouldn't be too surprised, tbh, if adopted children to gay couples showed better outcomes than an average child over the whole population. The reason is very simple - adoption is a selective process. Any adoption agency that isn't completely dissolved in wokeness and just melts with "awwww gays!" seeing any same sex couple, would require people to have stable relationship, clean home, decent income, etc. It's not that such people can't be abusive or just bad parents - it's just that the incidence in this cohort would likely be lower than over the whole population, where any couple with functioning plumbing can have as many kids as they feel like.

More interesting study would be comparing outcomes to adoptions of the similar social and financial stature, between same sex and hetero couples. But this may require a sample size that may be difficult to collect. We have less than 10 years when same-sex adoption has been fully legal, way too early to measure the outcomes.

This part of the review goes over research on comparing adoptions with adoptions:

If one looks on the surface, findings are mixed with respect to family functioning or children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors. With respect to family functioning, there are few studies, but Erich, Leung, and Kindle (2005) found lower family functioning (d ¼ 0.14) for SSA parents in spite of those parents having advantages in terms of social support and education. After some, but not all, of the relevant variables were controlled, even lower levels of family functioning were found (d ¼ 0.36, p < .07) for the gay and lesbian adoptive families. Even though that discrepancy represented a small to medium effect, its nonsignificance (p < .07) permitted Ryan (2007) and Averett et al. (2009) to argue for the no difference hypothesis. Nevertheless, there were several other factors that were more influential for predicting family functioning than parental sexual orientation. Averett et al. (2009) also examined family functioning and found lower levels for same-sex families of younger (d ¼ 0.14) and older (d ¼ 0.27) chil- dren. Thus, with respect to family functioning, it appears that SSA families are experiencing lower functioning, but the effect sizes are small to medium at most, usually not significant given the small sample sizes involved. There is some evi- dence that same-sex families may do better with younger children than older children with respect to family functioning.

In part 3 of this report, outcomes for children adopted by same-sex parents are considered. Studies conducted within the past 10 years that compared child out- comes for children of same-sex and heterosexual adoptive parents were reviewed. Numerous methodological limitations were identified that make it very difficult to make an accurate assessment of the impact of parental sexual orientation across adoptive families. Samples were often small and nonrandom. Some ‘‘same-sex’’ adoptive or foster parents may be mother–adult daughter heterosexual dyads. Important variables were often overlooked, including social desirability response bias. None of the studies assessed child outcomes in terms of delayed gratification, self-control, impulsivity, emotional self-regulation, or time preference. Most par- ticipating gay and lesbian families were from the socioeconomic elite of U.S. society. Most studies involved the adoption of young children, under the age of six years. Because of numerous methodological limitations, it might be best to hesitate to draw much in the way of firm conclusions from the available research. We still know very little about family functioning among same-sex families with low or moderate incomes, those with several children, or those with older chil- dren, including adolescents. Some important child outcomes (e.g., substance abuse, sexual orientation, educational progress) may not become relevant or apparent until an adopted child reaches adolescence. Within the limited available studies, it appears that same-sex families may report slightly lower levels of family functioning, especially with respect to older adopted children, but most studies have found few differences in children’s internalizing or externalizing behaviors as reported by parents. Two studies appear to have found opposing longitudinal trends in which children in heterosexual adoptive families fared better over time while children in SSA families fared worse. Small to moderate effect size differ- ences were observed in terms of children’s gender role behaviors and attitudes, probably reflecting less traditional gender role attitudes among same-sex parents compared to heterosexual parents.

So mostly you nailed it when you said it was too early. A lot of the negative factors that we would measure couldn't manifest in the literature for a while. Couples adopt kids under 6 years of age, but things like academic excellence, teenage drug and sex habits, etc are things that can only be measured from kids 14+.

However, I am not sure that the average adoptive parent provides better outcomes than average natal parents. When looking at mixed families of adopted and biological children, adopted children receive more attention but have worse outcomes. Could this effect partially negate the socioeconomic effect?

I mean there’s also the question of ‘are gay parents an even more selected group than adoptive parents’- is there something about gay adoption which sets them apart other than the obvious(could it be that gay adoptive parents are more pro-natal than adoptive parents generally because there’s less cultural expectation for them to have children? Maybe something of that sort).

It is the possibility of smashing their idols, of redacting and retracting the belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity.

It's not clear to me that those aren't the value of the American right, at least since they kicked the Royalists up to British North America. The differences between the mainstream American right and the mainstream American left are marginal:

Liberty: The right tends to put more emphasis on negative freedom rather than positive freedom. There have been times when, on social issues, the right has been sceptical of particular cases of negative freedom, but the basic assumption of the US right has almost always been individualist rather than paternalist; things like the Religious Right and the anti-woke movement have to justify themselves in terms of "This person's exercise of liberty X actually affects our liberty Y," which is fundamentally different from, "God says no" or "The man in Whitehall knows best."

Equality: Equality of opportunity (not in the silly sense of an equal chance, but in terms of equal legal rights and no unjustified discrimination) is the ideology of just about every last American. American conservatives might argue about the existence of certain types of discrimination or whether some particular case of discrimination is justified, but equality has always been integrally part of the American right's ideology, if not their practice. Of course, there will be the aberrant Nietzschean, Dominionist, Blood and Soil nationalist etc., but they are as alien to the American right as a working class Stalinist in the US left.

Fraternity: The US is unusual in being founded on an ideology (classical liberalism) and with the supposition that religion, ethnicity etc. are personal and/or local, rather than an integral part of the federal state. Trump is fraternal with gay people, trans people, hispanics, blacks etc. Some of his best friends are black. Some of his biggest supporters are hispanics. Friendship across race, religion, and "lifestyles" is as American as apple pie, and as American conservative as loving the US military, which itself has been multiracially fraternal for as long as most people can remember.

As you suggest, for the terminally online, it might seem like a different kind of conservativism had an ascendency in 2016. However, in fact, Trump and Trumpism was just mainstream US conservativism with balls. The average Trump supporter is as fundamentally opposed to reactionaries, Nazis, and the like as the average Hillary supporter.

I think you are conflating current popular views and ideology at the foundation of the US. It is written, of course, that all men are created equal, but this obviously meant something different then, because in America from 18 century up to 20th century there was explicit legal inequality between sexes, races and even economic classes. That was not because of some mistake or for the lack of alternative, but because of conscious policies that aimed to achieve outcomes that were deemed more important than the ideal of liberty.

Equality means many different things now. Hence I specified equality of opportunity and explained some of what that means.

The legal inequality between races was decided at a state level. The legal inequality between men and women was justified based on what people thought were relevant differences - just as one would draw today between children and adults. I'm not so familiar with the details of the economic distinctions, but I imagine that these were justified in terms of a conflict between liberty and equality - which doesn't mean that equality was a value of the American founders, just one that had to be traded-off against things like liberty.

To see how the egalitarianism (in this sense) of the Founders was significant, consider how there was no special place for aristocrats in the US political system - a great break with the norm in Europe. The idea that Joe the Plumber could rise to be of the equal legal status as George Washington was a revolutionary egalitarian idea. No royal family, obviously. In fact, in legal principle, this was possible even if Joe the Plumber was black. The values of the Founders were radically unReactionary and unAlt Right, which doesn't mean that they were left wing in the modern sense either.

It's true that there have been changes in the meanings of these terms, but when you ask the average Trumpist what's important to them, equality in the sense I specified is very important. They might not say "equality", but their attitudes towards elites, snobs, aristocrats etc. will reveal their values.

So why does the terminally online alt-right link itself to Trump so much? I remember in 2016 when the left accused Trump and his followers of being white supremacists, misogynists, homophobic, far-right fascists and the response from them was that Trump wasn't any of those things; what the right movement stood against was The Establishment. I remember Trump waving the LGBT flag and being proud of receiving support from Blacks and Latinos.

I personally thought the accusations of Nazism towards the Trump movement were an exaggeration, but now ZHP and his ilk are saying, no, the left was right, we are all of bad the things they said we were. Things the average Westerner would consider not only to be morally repugnant, but the very values of the most reviled enemy in recent history. Debate between a Democrat and a Republican is possible because at heart they both share similar core values and goals; but is there even a point to debating those that admit to views that are the complete antithesis of Western civilisation?

So why does the terminally online alt-right link itself to Trump so much?

It's funny.

The terminally online right, much like the terminally online left, does not actually have a principled set of ideas that they're operating on. They don't have a central governing ethos, there is no set of principles to live by. There are vibes and there is owning the left. The more trad you are the better your vibes, and the more you own the libs the more trad you are. Does trad actually mean owning property, having a loving family, being kind, respectful, and upright in your moral beliefs? No! It means posting memes about "tfw no land" or "tfw no tradwife" or "tfw cities bad" or some such nonsense. Trump makes the left mad. Therefore Trump good. Do no further analysis than this. Go far enough right and you get to the wignats who call him ZionDon or whatever because he doesn't want to "gas the kikes race war now" and even they will laugh at the orange man's antics because he makes the left mad, and making the left mad is pretty much all the terminally online right actually believes in.

Does trad actually mean owning property, having a loving family, being kind, respectful, and upright in your moral beliefs? No!

Shoot, I guess I've been doing it wrong, because the general trad discourse strongly encouraged me to stop being a single hedonist, get married, buy a house, have kids, and get serious about religion and stronger social bonds to my community.

Well at least now you know and can divorce your wife, sell your house, abandon your kids, and focus on what really matters. Getting a good like/retweet ratio.

This is pretty much correct. The entire political online discourse is now "what can I do/say/believe that will make my outgroup mad?"

The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.

A simplistic theory, but there's something to be said for it.

So why does the terminally online alt-right link itself to Trump so much?

Hard to tell if it was cynical (link to a popular movement) or fantasist ("Finally, our God Emperor is here!") And in a movement known for not speaking plainly, perhaps it was natural for them to assume that Trump was more alt right than he was saying. As you say, that would mean a hilarious convergence between what the alt right and the ctrl left (and mainstream left in many cases) was saying about Trump.

These tendencies might arise in many movements, but I wonder if there's a particular tension for fascist/Nazi/some reactionary types. Their whole ideology is full of worshipping strength, winners, superior men... And yet their movements, since 1945, have been marginalised, weak, and pushed around with ease. They often have some inclination towards "Justice is the advantage of stronger," yet the fascists were weaker than the bourgeois liberal democracies (and even more shamefully, the savage commies) in WWII. It's one thing to believe that the white race is superior in war, but fascists? Losers, literally.

So, in 2016, Trump doesn't just talk about winning and being strong, but actually wins, despite being brash and outspoken. He outrages the people who push around the alt right and defeats the former in a contest. Moreover, he does so despite being tarred with the alt right brush by the people who dominate the alt righters every day. Under such circumstances, it doesn't seem strange that the alt right would be inclined to genuinely believe that Trump was their God Emperor. That's the best reconstruction that I can make of the spirit behind this fashwave song, which I rather like despite not being either alt right or pro-Trump:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mC5HmxVxOAw

Ctrl left

Okay, that’s the first time I’ve heard that one, but it kind of works.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/maajid-nawaz/maajid-the-left-is-no-longer-liberal/

It’s been around since at least 2016. I swear I’ve heard it earlier than that but not sure from where…

I remember hearing it get kicked around quite a bit during gamergate.

Obviously one side of this is just that the alt-right contains multitudes.

Beyond that I do think there is a shift where up until 2016ish the grey tribe still basically agreed with the blue tribe in terms of end goals/reality, but mostly was breaking off/frustrated by SJW/WOKE cultural stuff. They did not want trad wives, where totally convinced that racism was wrong and evil, would consider themselves true LGBT allies, and where broadly in favor of hedonistic modernity. It seems to me that there has specifically been a shift in this group, where, as they became more contrarian and more ostracized by society for not getting with the program they gradually started to question a lot of these core assumption. The liberal framework that 99% of grey tribe people grew up with, that reality had a liberal bias, is mostly gone now and a lot of what we are seeing is the breakdown of that veneer of scientific authority. Ultimately, people change, and to me the online-alt-right looks like a reaction to excesses on the part of the left more than anything.

I’m as grey tribe as they come and to me the pendulum has swung firmly the other way. I’ve come from being sympathetic to the right in ‘16, to seeing it as my complete ideological opponent. I started as an edgy online atheist watching Creationism Debunked videos, got into the Intellectual Dark Web, cheered when the libs lost in ‘16, only to realise that maybe the so-called SJWs might have had a point when the hardcore Christian Right took over the movement.

The latter were the same people I was opposed to at the start of my political journey; anti-science, anti-intellectual, dogmatic theocrats who want to suppress anything that doesn’t agree with their outdated religious views. They’ve just repackaged the old stodgy pearl-clutching views we used to mock in the Bush era as somehow “based and redpilled”. They just stole the colours of the cool, rebellious counter-culture to make the grey tribe forget they used to be their ideological opponent.

Could you please not quote the whole thing, but instead excerpt the most important sections?

It's very difficult for me to see this post as anything but bad faith apophasis.

We don't typically ban people based on their usernames (after all, what is in a name?) and yet yours is suspicious. Bare links are off-limits; you didn't post a bare link, but copy-pasting most of an article is a near cousin. So you wrote some commentary, but it hardly seems to be effortful commentary--just a dismissal: also suspicious. If someone said "tomorrow, a user is going to make a post that is 90% copy-pasted ZHPL, followed by 10% commentary that is at best a limp-wristed disavowal of the piece," what would I predict was the reason for the post? I would predict it was posted by a troll who either agrees with ZHPL but is pretending they don't, or disagrees with ZHPL but is fishing for damning and sneer-worthy responses from the Motte.

At minimum, this sort of thing is egregiously obnoxious. Please don't.

The pasted content would IMHO be ban-worthy in a comment, and the original content by the author seems rather low effort. I think in the ratsphere, when encountering a baseless claim, it is customary not to dismiss it with another baseless claim, but actually cite sources. If the OP had cut the citation two one or two sections and actually put in the work to source their counterclaims, this might be a good faith post. Well, unlike previously "critically cited" sites linked from the OP, at least ZHPL was linked by SSC in 2019 back when they were not an Alex Jones imitation. Still, this drivel is unlikely to spark any good-faith discussions.

If the OP spent equal effort to elaborately "critically" cite stuff from other political corners than the extreme right (say Hindu extremism, or anorexia boards or Putin fans or whatever), this would be some Bayesian evidence that they are not in it for posting the extreme right content.

Oh, no. I don’t miss the Hindu doom posting at all. But IIRC it was pretty singleminded too, so your reasoning stands.

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.

It's pretty well known that the sexual revolution of the 1960s led to a lot of pedo stuff

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here is a quick rundown of some infamous 20th century French philosophers

Queer-theory jeopardy

Some videos of French intellectuals going on TV to celebrate having sex with children/teenagers.

An undergraduate paper on the subject

One excerpt of interest p35:

As sexuality—feminine, homosexual, and otherwise—coursed through public discourse in the early 1970s, a group of men styling themselves as twentieth century Marquise de Sades or Dom Jauns began to publish pedophilic literature and receive recognition in literary circles. These men—Tony Duvert and Gabriel Matzneff—were both little known writers before they made their careers between 1973 and 1975 releasing celebrated novels and essays that described affairs with minors in detail. Matzneff’s Les moins de seize ans (The Under Sixteens) lauds sex with adolescents as an act of sexual liberation to protest the moral order and publishes letters from his young lovers as proof of their enjoyment.

Matzneff was welcomed on the television show Apostrophes in 1975 to promote the book and articulate an ethics of individual development that arose out of the sex lives of minors. For him, the “strength and novelty of the affective and sexual impulses” of “children between ten and sixteen” opened a “fertile” field of sexual possibilities—both with people of their own age or an older lover—that would allow them to “discover themselves, the beauty and richness of the world and its creation.”

Is any of this supposed to contradict what I said in my last post?

There are pedophiles everywhere. You know the arguments: The plural of "anecdote" isn't data. Chinese Robber Fallacy, etc.

There are a lot fewer proud pedophiles selling diaries of their titillating pedophile adventures on French TV (or any other TV as far as I know) today than in the 70s.

Who do you see on this list of 'mixed-age sex' supporters ?

Perhaps you were trying to get with a philosophy/sociology major and you've heard of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Louis Aragon, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre?

Who I do not see are people like Alain de Benoist, considered influential with the alt-right movement in the United States. Or his buddies Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Yvan Blot, and Henry de Lesquen.

I was on the fence on the question of whether you're some alt-right alt, but I think you managed to convince me in a single line, thanks!

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Oh, I believe some are, the opposite would be surprising. But as you say, antisemites are stupid, their opinions tired and not worth discussing. But there's always some guy trying to bring them up.

I don't think I could really say much better than what @Goodguy has said in response to you. Go talk to him.

But I'll say one more thing, less directed to you than to all of the Mottezians who just loooove to spend all their time all day thinking about how much the left is full of pedophiles who can't wait to start molesting kids:
Do you know how irritating it is to have to defend a group of people whom you despise, against people who also despise those people but despise them for stupid reasons? People who want to think the left is full of pedophiles and therefore should be hated for that reason are watering down actual arguments against leftists. There's plenty of reasons to be against the left. Your efforts are better spent on those causes, and will do more to hinder leftism than this pedophilia bent.

Thank you for saying it.

The part that frustrates me is that “watering down” isn’t necessarily true. Weak men are superweapons, and all that. They just…don’t belong here.

You’re doing God’s work.

People who want to think the left is full of pedophiles and therefore should be hated for that reason are watering down actual arguments against leftists.

This is not my argument.

My argument was that :

1- major leftist intellectuals of the 70s, during which the infamous Sexual Revolution was proclaimed, were either pedophiles or very close friends with open pedophiles (kid-diddling diary-publishing kind of open pedophiles)

2- these people and their students are still quoted, studied in humanities departments all over the West producing the rank-and-file of the regime, among which some of the people you will (have to) trust your children to

If a guy was showing you his vacation pictures in bed with children in Thailand and then persuasively told you to essentially blow up all existing rules in your society because 'dude Christianity is so oppressive and man parents can't tell you what to do'.

Would you do it?

This is apparently more or less what happened to several Western countries in the 70s.

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But I'll say one more thing, less directed to you than to all of the Mottezians who just loooove to spend all their time all day thinking about how much the left is full of pedophiles who can't wait to start molesting kids:

I don't know man. It seems like you aren't responding to what people are actually posting.

I tried to steelman HP0 talking about how the left of the 1970s did sometimes celebrate pedophilia. But I explicitly said that the modern left does not.

You ignored the modern part, and tried to defend the 1970s left with a "few bad apples" and "both sides" argument that as @PierreMenard has pointed out doesn't bear weight.

Why not just admit that, yeah, some 1970s leftist intellectuals believed it was sophisticated and cool to have sex with teenagers? Unlike Catholic priests or whatever, they weren't flawed sinners who slipped up. They thought what they were doing was a Good Thing. This is a legit difference between the left and the right at the time.

None of this makes HP0 less vile, it doesn't make him right about anything, and it doesn't really have much of an impact on the modern culture war except by insinuation. But the limited point still stands.

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A bunch of ancient Greeks liked having sex with boys. Does that mean that all ancient Greek social/political/economic views are suspect?

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held people captive and forced them to work by threat of violence. Does that mean that all of their social/political/economic views are suspect?

No, not necessarily, unless we're talking specifically about social/political/economical views regarding sexual mores. ie you can make a reasonable argument that somebody supports importing enslaved young boys because they have a history of pursuing having sex with young boys

In the case of these French leftists, we have a combination of people who advocated changing French laws regarding the age of consent/sexuality in general and people who were going on vacation to Tunisia or other foreign countries to have sex with young boys (and girls).

In some cases, some of these people explicitly argued that they wanted an existing oppressive social and legal system changed in order to make it more convenient and less risky to fulfill their sexual desires. This ended up being called the Sexual Revolution.

My point is that it makes no sense to say that leftism as a whole is suspect because some leftists are pedophiles.

As for the Sexual Revolution specifically, I am sure that you could have removed every single leftist pedophile who existed back then and the Sexual Revolution would still have happened almost entirely the same as it actually happened historically.

My point is that it makes no sense to say that leftism as a whole is suspect because some leftists are pedophiles.

Well you've successfully defeated the argument that I was not making, thank you for correcting the record.

As for the Sexual Revolution specifically, I am sure that you could have removed every single leftist pedophile who existed back then and the Sexual Revolution would still have happened almost entirely the same as it actually happened historically.

Of course if you only remove the pedophiles you're not resolving 100% of the issue. If American universities started purging pro-pedophile thinkers from their programs like European institutions Russian-related material after 2022, there would be a lot less progressive propaganda going around.

As the meme goes, 'first they came for the pedophiles, and I did not speak out, because I was not a pedophile...'

'(...) then they stopped coming because every problem had basically been resolved'.

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I agree with you broadly but:

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held people captive and forced them to work by threat of violence. Does that mean all of their social/political/economic views are suspect as a result?

I have absolutely encountered people making basically this argument.

Sure, but I think that they are wrong. And I think that the same argument, but used against leftists, is also wrong.

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.

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.

It's not about the pedophilia. It's about the acceptance of pedophilia.

Where you see any "acceptance" of 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.

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!

Where you see any "acceptance" of pedophilia?

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.

Yes, and these people lost as decisively you can lose.

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 :

Some people have called the book sexually explicit, while other parents said they want to see their kids exposed to people from all walks of life.

Why do school libraries need explicit sexual material?

Why do school libraries need explicit sexual material?

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.

the world won't end if they get some masturbation instructions as well.

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.

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.

The “don’t say gay one” made some rather sweeping statements about things which I would not classify as “talking about sex.”

Right there in #3 clearly has the "sexual" keyword.

Prohibiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in K-3 or if not developmentally appropriate. This is a central example of erasure.

Taking a random article quoting opponents of the bills:

Title: 'Don't Say Gay' bill would limit discussion of sexuality

Proposed legislation in Florida would restrict how teachers can discuss sexuality

critics — who've dubbed the proposal the "Don't Say Gay" bill — argue that it will strip protections from LGBTQ kids

The group Equality Florida

"This legislation is meant to stigmatize LGBTQ people, isolate LGBTQ kids, and make teachers fearful of providing a safe, inclusive classroom," the group said in a statement. "The existence of LGBTQ students and parents is not a taboo topic

Now, what are LGBT kids?

LGBT is an initialism that stands for "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender".

Perhaps we need to dig further to understand what exactly that means for kids.

Wikipedia asserts:

A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl.[3][4][5]

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:

Wrong definition

A lesbian is a non man who loves non men, not only a woman who loves women, non binary and other non men identifying people can be lesbians.

We should stick to what the WP:BESTSOURCES say on the matter. As of writing this comment we are using the definition from Oxford Reference's Dictionary of Psychology, and Zimmerman's encyclopedia on lesbian histories and cultures. The sources you are referencing here include an opinion piece in a student magazine and a blog post in a "peer led support and advocacy organisation".

Are we seriously trying to suggest someone biologically male who does not ID as a woman in any capacity can be a “lesbian” just because they ID as non-binary?? Is this for real??!! I thought this crap only existed on Tumblr!

...

Changing the definition The article defines lesbian as a homosexual woman or girl, but that isn't really reflective of how the term is used widely since lesbian also encompasses homoromantic women and girls, and the article acknowledges as much a bit later.

A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexuality or same-sex attraction.

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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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.

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.

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?

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.

This debate doesn’t need your strategizing. Stopping trans propaganda in schools sells itself; your catchy slogans aren’t needed, Don Draper.

Last week I described the educators who labor quietly and single-mindedly to further the tranny agenda as “worker bees.” They’re successful because like all worker bees, they’re banal. Yes, we all love to mock those “libs of TikTok” videos of freakish tattooed teachers with pierced septums. But they’re the minority. Think of every pro-CRT, pro-tranny school-board member you’ve seen. They’re ordinary people you wouldn’t notice at the grocery store.

They’re invisible, doing their work out-of-sight. They’re predominantly women, and they’re not trying to have sex with kids. They’re working with quiet, fanatical dedication to remake how children see gender and themselves, in service of an ideology, not their own personal sexual desires.

...

Why are kids getting brought to drag shows?

To own the cons. Hard to imagine something less sexually arousing and stimulating than "drag queen hours."

Why such concern about books banned from school libraries ?

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!"

which is the most thorough desexualization since the Skoptsy were a thing.

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).

Hard to imagine something less sexually arousing and stimulating than "drag queen hours."

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.

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.

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.

Hard to imagine something less sexually arousing and stimulating than "drag queen hours."

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.

How the Hitler Youth Turned a Generation of Kids Into Nazis

libraries were one of McCarthy's concerns.

It appears to me that McCarthy was right. Where else but libraries did the teachers get their ideas of transidentity?

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.

Amazon and other platforms are definitely removing different books depending on who is in charge.

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.).

Despite the book's possible influence on the 1960s sexual revolution, the fact is that Lolita was written by a guy who left Russia to escape the Bolsheviks, did not consider himself a leftist, supported the US war effort in Vietnam, and disliked the 1960s protest movements in the West. Which is evidence against ZHPL's worldview of a right that is besieged by a monolithic left.

The right itself seems to have a decent number of people who fantasize about impregnating 14 year old barefoot trad wives on farmsteads. Based on this, I could easily make an argument that the right as a whole supports having sex with 14 year olds, but it would not be a very logical argument. A small number of people are not necessarily representative of a giant political movement.

The right itself seems to have a decent number of people who fantasize about impregnating 14 year old barefoot trad wives on farmsteads.

The weirdo Twitter right does. Normie republicans are more accepting of teen marriage than normie democrats, but not to the point of thinking it’s a good thing.

Normie republicans are more accepting of teen marriage than normie democrats, but not to the point of thinking it’s a good thing.

Now that you mention it, I wonder if it correlates with a working-class view that true "adulthood" starts after high school (18-ish), rather than after college (22-ish), which only around half of high school graduates enroll in.

And back to the 1950s (and earlier), when adulthood would commonly start closer to 14-16, common attitudes around the age of consent were naturally even lower.

It's mostly just market forces at work (which is why places that don't suffer as much from credentialism have more reasonable ages of functional majority), but the resulting segregation breeding contempt/self-justification of denial of development can sustain itself for quite some time.

I think that's possibly part of it, but also there's a view that self actualization is an inherently secondary goal and that marriage and family are universal goods.

The 70's in the immediate post-Sexual Revolution era was also...just weird. Like yeah, you can name all the weirdo French intellectuals you want, but also, some of the biggest musicians in the world were dating 14-year-olds, and the work just kind of shrugged. Brooke Shields was being sexualized in a way that doesn't really happen in the same way anymore.

Like, you could've jailed every single French intellectual you mentioned and Led Zeppelin was still going to be sleeping w/15-year-old groupies, with no pushback from wider society.

What was really happening was a big shift in the Overton Window thanks to the pill and breaking of traditional sexual mores, and some ideas went out over the skis but eventually got brought back. It's only weirdo online right-wingers like ole' RH defending women teachers who sleep with their students, and the age of consent is getting raised basically worldwide, to line up with eighteen in most places.

Lolita was considered a classic

And Stephen Spielberg is obviously a nazi - he made Schindler's List.

Or, alternately, there is a difference between not only portraying something in media, but portraying it as a bad thing, and being in favour of that thing.

Lolita was not in any sense a pro-pedo book. The entire point is unreliable narrators can obscure something horrific with a fancy prose style. Nabokov hits people over the head with this in the least subtle way possible, but somehow people still don't get it.

This was my takeaway as well, from listening to the audiobook (narrated by the fantastic Jeremy Irons, whose voice is now forever the canonical one of Humbert Humbert in my mind) a few years back. I could see how someone could construe it as pro-pedophilia, since people could construe any piece of text as being supportive of anything, but that's not the obvious interpretation. It also happens to be a masterpiece, merely on the quality of prose alone, IMHO, to the extent that I freely recommend it to people despite knowing the negative connotations associated with it.

A funny little anecdote: I was shopping for housing this past summer in the Boston area, and one of the places I was looking at in Cambridge was apparently in the building where Nabokov was residing when he wrote Lolita. The building has a little plaque in the lobby commemorating this, and the realtors pointed it out as well, presumably as one of those little intangible bonuses of a home. I have to wonder if this plaque and the information it concerns actually has a net negative effect on how attractive that building is for people to visit or live in. I ended up not moving there, but not for reasons relating to that plaque.

I'd also highly recommend Pale Fire: another masterpiece of his with top-tier prose, and it leans even more heavily into the unreliable narrator side of things and is more deeply textured. And you can recommend it to people without them thinking you're a pedophile.

Plus one for Pale Fire, such a creative and interesting book. I need to read the rest of his works at some point.

I wonder if the online right intellecto-sphere will ever figure out that Trump wasn't for them.

As I recall, Jack Donovan was never on the Trump train.

Who’s that?

As someone who doesn’t hang out on Twitter, I only really hear about the biggest and/or most mainstream names.

Jack Donovan is a writer and Norse viking LARPer located at a kind of unique intersection of manosphere, white nationalism and the alt right. He wrote a book called the Way of Men and has a few others. He's also an 'androphile', which is totally different to being gay because he's bald and muscular and wears lots of leather and sunglasses, or something. If he sounds a bit ridiculous, he is, but he also seems pretty bright and makes some good points and does that in way fewer words than many other online commentators.

He's also an 'androphile', which is totally different to being gay because he's bald and muscular and wears lots of leather and sunglasses, or something.

Rob Halford would like to see you in the hall.

Credit where it's due; Donovan has stated that he uses the term androphile mostly as a way to distinguish himself from mainstream 'gay.' It's a cultural distinction which I find fairly common amongst gay men who fall outside of the bi-coast metropolitan social sphere.

I think Donovan fell off because his brand of manly men doing man men things got its doors blown off by the likes of Jocko Wilink and other Professional Veterans who not only tell the same style of stories, but have the personal experience and street cred to back it up.

Yes, that is in fact, the joke - homosexuals already have a fairly significant subculture built around overt masculinity, and Donovan's efforts in that department don't actually make him different. So his insistence that he is Not Like The Other Gays is somewhat feeble. If he gets credit for anything, it's that he seems to have realized this and has retreated from the word, but as another gay man who also doesn't feel comfortable in gay society, I still think it's very funny.

I think Donovan fell off because his brand of manly men doing man men things got its doors blown off by the likes of Jocko Wilink and other Professional Veterans who not only tell the same style of stories, but have the personal experience and street cred to back it up.

Donovan was never going to have mass appeal - he was too gay, too weird, too unaware of his own silliness, and too politically toxic. That's fine - at the end of the day, he's a fag that managed to turn himself into a man, while Jocko Willink is a warrior that turned himself into a podcaster.

I wonder if the online right intellecto-sphere will ever figure out that Trump wasn't for them.

Trump was needed to show that "the narrative" could be countered on the biggest stage, which would inspire craftier right-ward politicians in the future who better understand how to leverage political mechanisms in their favor. The question that remains to be answered is: Will a smarter Trumpism appeal to the same wide base that loves Trump, or do they uniquely love the "dumb" version that is Trump's persona?

I know very smart college-educated people who loooove the way he trolls and, rather than looking forward to the smarter next-gen Trumps, look suspiciously on anyone who isn't exactly in the Trump mold. These people have already largely lost any faith in saving the western political system, so they aren't concerned like I am with civics and compromises for a saner future. They want it to burn, as if that will improve anything.

Right, DeSantis was smart Trump, the guy was citing Michael Anton in interviews, clearly well credentialed etc. And people don’t like him. It’s precisely Trump’s low brow, anti-intellectual, vaguely amused nonchalance that his fans like about him. Trump’s the guy at the bar commenting on something saying “ah, it’s all bullshit anyway” (on everything, because Trump cares as much about his opinions on trans bathroom stuff as he did about his opinions on the relationship between Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, which is to say he cares enough to have one and to announce it, but not much more). Trump DGAF, meanwhile the ‘dissident right’ guy is schizo-lecturing people about the nietzschean significance of the preset moment and the ‘new right’ Rufo-type guy is rambling about Adorno and critical theory.

But even beyond young, highly educated rightists, the reality is that most Trump supporters don’t want the colossal sociocultural changes sought by a lot of the very online right, in both its more moderate and more extreme variants. Most are boomers whose ideal culture is America like 30 years ago, not Europe under Papal Christendom, or on the steppe in the Bronze Age.

Right, DeSantis was smart Trump,

I really have to disagree here. DeSantis had none of Trump's charisma, but more importantly he was a creature of the Establishment GOP. The more sophisticated Pro-Trump conservatives took one look at him and who was giving him money before immediately tossing him to the side. They saw him as an attempt to draw support back to the establishment by catering to more superficial issues - "wokeness" is the kind of thing you can oppose without actually changing or conflicting with existing power-structures due to how nebulous it is. On the other hand, attacking outsourcing, the forever wars and illegal immigration places you squarely in opposition to existing power structures. "Well credentialed" is also utterly meaningless - what credentials does he have that match up to Trump's CV?

I don't think you've got an accurate picture of what the Trump base likes about him if you think that it was the low-brow, anti-intellectual aspects of Trump's presentation that drew them to him. He absolutely used that perception to draw voters to him in some ways, but it was less because he appeared to be anti-intellectual and more because it helped to establish him as the outgroup of those same people who had continually sold his prospective voterbase down the river. That was effective campaigning and was likely responsible for some percentage of his support (he also earned some voters solely through personal charisma, like the woman who called in to a political debate show just to say that she was voting for Trump because he was hot and none of the other candidates were manly enough) but it wasn't his main draw. It was his steadfast repudiation of the conventional political consensus on topics like outsourcing and immigration rather than any aspect of his presentation.

But even beyond young, highly educated rightists, the reality is that most Trump supporters don’t want the colossal sociocultural changes sought by a lot of the very online right, in both its more moderate and more extreme variants. Most are boomers whose ideal culture is America like 30 years ago, not Europe under Papal Christendom, or on the steppe in the Bronze Age.

You're totally right here though.

They were so desperately hungry for any politician to even somewhat reflect their desires that they fell on the promise of Trump like starved animals on a steak. Even if Trump is only 10% of what they want, it's still more than most other presidents.


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