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I have no dog in this fight, but I don't think we should keep anything "highly hated." Hate is a bad thing. I think that there is probably an optimal level of social scorn we should direct towards pedophiles in order to minimize the amount of pedophilia in the world, and I think we should calculate that amount rather than just go nuts and hope for the best.
My best guess is that the target should be just enough scorn to dissuade them from committing crimes, but not so much scorn that we dissuade them from seeking professional help. I'm reasonably confident we've overshot the mark. It's quite possible that a modest reduction in hatred directed at pedophiles would actually result in fewer children being molested.
Should we hate murderers? What about people like SBF who stole billions?
I hold that justice is primarily neither for punishment nor for rehabilitation but for ensuring the security of peaceful society.
The man who stands condemned is not to be hated, and he isn't to be pitied. He is to be shunned, to be banished, to disappear, he ceases to exist until he has done enough penance to be acknowledged again or bar that possibility he does so forever as we recommend his forgiveness to higher powers.
We are not perfect, that is true. But lest you are a victim (in which case emotions are tolerated), justice is to be treated with a solemn dignity that precludes all emotion.
CS Lewis has something to say about that http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pdf
I hadn't read this particular text, but I'm familiar with this point and I certainly agree with his analysis that treating crime as pathology that can be cured is dangerous, and I can furthermore notice that the problems with this approach have only become more apparent today.
That said, I do not believe this particular argument is valid against the theory of justice I subscribe to. I do not wish to cure crime, neither am I under such delusions as to believe it possible to eliminate it from society. I merely wish to carve out an island of dignity and civilization from the brutish state of nature and exclude those who can't or won't restrain themselves from it.
This is something that is compatible with both approaches that are discussed by Lewis here. Indeed one can argue it from both sides: the rehabilitation proponent will argue the criminal needs to be isolated from society for the cure to be administered, whilst the retribution proponent will argue the criminal deserves his isolation as punishment.
I see no need for either kind of cruelty in justification. The criminal needs to be isolated solely because he can't behave himself in a way that can have him participate in society, and I see no practical need for emotion in the process except as to allow the victim to feel sated enough that they can remain secure from future abuses.
I know people will argue the need for a more transcendental form of justice that restores some order to the universe by either enacting the victim's revenge or removing the criminal pathology from the perpetrator. Neither seem practical to me, as I do not believe in a cosmic justice. At least not one made of men.
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I agree with you. My question was in response to apparently not hating pedophiles.
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No. Again, hate is bad. Hate does not help you make good decisions, and hatred-based law enforcement mechanisms are not known for their efficiency. The appropriate angle to approach social engineering problems like "How do we stop people from committing fraud and/or murder in the manner that gets us the best value for our tax dollars," is heartless rationality, not hatred.
Hatred is for suckers. It makes you easy to manipulate and prone to error.
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There's more to "legal and social consequences" than your family. Frankly, you can never expect family to hold their kin accountable for serious crimes. Violence, robbery, corruption, false testimony, rape – family will offer every possible excuse, and when excuses run dry, every opportunity for rehabilitation. Blood runs thicker than morals.
For legal consequences, criminal abuse gets an average of 16 years, while statutory rape gets 3.6 years (source). It's hard to parse where "child molestation" fits between these two, since the latter probably includes a lot of non-central examples like teenagers dating adults. I'll acknowledge I really don't know how I could recalibrate my intuitions on this. The only time I hear about child molesters being sentenced is when there's a news story about the penalty being shockingly low. But if I trusted this heuristic, I would believe tens of thousands of unarmed blacks were being killed by police officers, or that shark attacks are rampant, and a hundred other false impressions.
Socially, outside the family, I'm not sure what universe you live in if you think chomos don't get serious social consequences. Perhaps your cultural milieu is different than mine.
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The problem is we focus too much on hatred specifically of pedophilia rather than of child molestation. There are a number of problems with this approach beyond the one @Sunshine mentioned. Most relevant to your argument is the assumption that only pedophiles molest children, and the corollary that if you aren't a pedophile then your behavior must be "okay". The majority of child molesters are not pedophiles and they will often justify their behavior based on this fact.
On a more personal note, I think taking a harder line on troublesome behaviors would make my life as a pedophile much easier. Almost all of my sessions with my therapist boil down to some variation of "What is the appropriate behavior in this situation?" (eg, "A child comes up to me while I'm walking my dog and asks to pet her. Do I let the child pet my dog or not?"). It is extremely confusing how many behaviors are considered problematic based on whether the actor is attracted to someone rather than judging the intentions of the actor and the actual impact on others.
The idea that a child molester is not also a pedo just seems like trying to find a distinction. Are you honestly of the belief that a person raped a child has zero attraction to side child? That beggars belief. We are already talking about monsters, but that is beyond.
To choose an extremely common case, someone who molests a young person who is physically a young adult (because of early puberty, or because society keeps defining the age of adulthood upwards) still socially and legally a child is a child molester by definition, but is almost certainly not a paedophile. I would like to insist on this distinction, but even I struggle to when the child molester in question is a prominent politician on the wrong side of the aisle.
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So some "duh" factors(obviously pedophiles are more likely to sexually offend against children than the general population and obviously the factors that make recidivism more likely for all crime apply here) and characteristics strongly associated with transgenderism/LGBT?
Listen, at some point society is going to have to confront that heteronormativity is a good thing. That doesn't mean any individual non-heteronormative person is a pedophile. But it does seem that "having LGBT-typical sexual interests is a risk factor for sex offender recidivism but not for recidivism more generally" is a pretty major argument against queer theory.
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This sounds unsurprising so I'm willing to assume it's broadly correct, but if you're going to cite specific statistics like “5 years after conviction, 14% of offenders have been charged with or convicted of a new sexual offense” could you please explicitly cite the sources behind your claims?
Numbers that are so specific must come from one specific source. There is no way that there are multiple independent sources that investigated this and they all agreed the number was exactly 14%, not 13% or 15%.
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We tried that; it's already been twisted into "man interacting with his own children in public is obviously a pedophile". Of course, this conversely gives women freer reign to perpetrate molestation, and if the [overwhelmingly-female] education system's obsession with sex/gender stuff is any indication they're taking full advantage of that privilege.
[At the population level]
Why? Out of sociobiological necessity, the adult gets the benefit of the doubt by default because they are the adult. Children are subordinate property that usually turn out good enough no matter what we visit upon them- besides, there are plenty of times when parents will place their own wants and well-being above that of their child, so why would "I enjoy my charming family member's company, and it's just a hug or two they insist on, right? Can't my kid just deal with it, follow my orders, and stop being weird?" be any different?
Besides, they only touch my ass once or twice a visit, and I can tolerate that- and they're not taking that further with me because they know I'll hurt them if they go further. Clearly, the same calculus is in play when they're interacting with my kids, and surely won't be tempted to take it any further despite their complete lack of similar defenses.
In the same way (and for exactly the same reasons) women complain about men trivializing their safety concerns, that goes double for children. "Must be exaggerating or mischaracterizing the interaction", "saying this just to get a reaction from the adults", and "doesn't even have the vocabulary/grammar to explain what's even happening clearly enough to take action" (or a combination of the 3 at the same time) is not actually a bad heuristic when dealing with children in the first place (especially because a good chunk of the time it's true).
Other than that, this isn't a tractable problem for any kid whose parents don't think it's a big deal. The only way around that is to destroy the family structure entirely, and now instead of the family molesting your kids you have standardized State-mandated molestation for everyone; whether that's an improvement or not is an exercise for the reader.
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Maybe there's a gendered difference? When I reported being fondled and groped the response was always that it was okay and I shouldn't be bothered by it because it wasn't sexual despite people literally grabbing my penis. A few times I was punished for trying to pull their hands away, and one particular person chasing me as I tried to avoid her at get-togethers became a running family joke. Those experiences make me feel like that belief isn't that uncommon.
Yes, such behavior is not acceptable. I feel like a lot of the hatred of pedophilia comes down to people wanting an easy way to show they are against child molestation without having to actually put in any real effort in preventing it, like confronting someone actually molesting a child.
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Hatred for evil is appropriate. Pedophilia is evil. Controversial, I know.
This is both low-effort and building consensus. Put more effort into your arguments and avoid this kind of flat evidence-less claim, please.
Are you saying that the rape of children is not an inherently evil act? I’m not sure how I provide evidence for this. Is a simple moral fact not enough?
There are literally people disagreeing with you in the replies. Read those, and don't make universal moral statements if people are going to disagree with you, because then it's not fact, it's opinion.
So you’re saying child rape isn’t evil?
Alright, I was gonna quietly let the ban evasion slide if you were willing to take correction, but instead you're right back to antagonizing mods who are telling you to shape up.
Re-applied permanent ban.
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Paedophilia the sexual preference is not evil. Rape of children is evil.
I'm not particularly defending Nyberg here; she did some stuff that crosses my line. A paedophile who sticks to loli hentai, though, is perhaps pitiful but not evil.
No. It is, in itself, evil. Even if never acted upon.
Why?
I am rapidly losing faith in humanity here.
This is very much like saying "the desire to genocide armenians is not evil, only acting on that desire is evil." Or "the desire to torture dogs is not evil, only actually torturing dogs is."
No. The desire to commit evil acts is evil. Pedophilia is evil, even if never acted upon. And everyone is right to be wary of anyone who claims to be, or appears to be a pedophile, because that is evil.
That said, it is laudatory to resist temptations and to refrain from evil, even if you desire to do evil. And the Lord will reward those who are faithful and commit no evil though they have the desire.
Taking for granted that the desire to commit an evil act is also in itself evil - a controversial opinion, certainly, but one we can just entertain for the moment - this doesn't imply that pedophilia is evil, since pedophilia is a preference, not a desire. It's very possible for someone to enjoy the idea of themselves raping children without having any actual desire to act on it by raping children. It'd be easy to claim that this is splitting hairs, but it'd also be wrong to claim as such, since preference doesn't imply anything about a willingness to act, whereas desire does, and this is a very meaningful, very consequential difference in terms of how that person behaves. You can, of course, just posit that this preference is something that's intrinsically evil, which is perfectly cromulent.
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It's probably time to define what the criteria for evil is, or what even evil means to you. Honestly sounds like the argument needs to depend on what is evil, not if pedophilia is evil. If you can define evil in a clear and explicit manner, then whether pedophilia is evil can be matched against that definition/criteria.
I haven't seen anyone actually say pedophilia is good, so it's obvious nobody here is in favor of it. If you can get people to agree on the definition of evil, then whether or not pedophilia is evil should be self-evident. Otherwise, I think the argument is moot since it seems to me people are using different criteria for evil throughout the conversation.
This is a starting point for a definition, but it's tautological and weak without defining evil itself.
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Despite hatred of the sin being obviously appropriate, there is something to say for redemption being possible even for the worst of sinners.
Of course in practice this is so difficult that we literally need God to intervene to make it possible, but isn't the principle good?
Redeeming the worst of humanity, even as we may need to imprison them perpetually or even put them to death, is still something that ought to be attempted. And I've seen too many lives destroyed by blind hatred of even things that ought to be hated to recommend it to anybody.
All well and good, but the progressive movement is wedded to the idea that sexuality is something you're born with and which cannot be changed through outside interference. As such, no paedophile can be "redeemed": from the perspective of the progressive movement, if you are sexually attracted to children, you always will be, and nothing you do (or anyone else does to you) will change that. Ergo, every paedophile must be treated as a potential future child rapist.
If we were to move away from the "born this way" framework, acknowledge that sexuality is susceptible to direct outside intervention and that "conversion therapy" for paedophiles might actually work (at least in some cases), we can have a conversation about paedophilia as a sin distinct from the sinner. Until then, paedophiles will be forever irredeemable, as a consequence of the framework progressives called for to interrogate sexuality.
Don't forget that "born this way" is self-justifying as well as unchanging. If you're "born this way" it's "natural" and good and any shaming or even different treatment is bigotry.
Well the people on my socials most inclined to trumpet, and/or presuppose, the "born this way" narrative WRT LGBT+ people definitely don't apply that logic to pedos - think wood-chipper memes - regardless of whether that's consistent with other things they say.
Don't assume SocJus crusaders believe something just because you think it follows logically from other things they believe. They are, IME, almost all capable of compartmentalizing to an extent that makes my brain hurt.
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