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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Is there a specific name and definition for the culture war tactic of accusation mirroring i.e. when you appropriate one of the usual accusations your main political rivals are throwing at you (or some different near-group) all the time and throw it back at them, or at someone in your outgroup in general, even though you've never believed in the validity of the accusation at all? I'm thinking of something similar to the DR3 ('Democrats are the real racists') narrative, or when Republicans are accused of milking the government for subsidies etc. I'm asking because I'm seeing a current example, namely in the context of the ongoing Hungarian presidential pardon scandal, where liberal leftist influencers have pretty much reinvented the Pizzagate conspiracy theory - which is something they otherwise write off and ridicule as right-wing tinfoil hat nonsense, as they are themselves acculturated in US liberal online circles - and are hurling it at the government, pushing the narrative that a pedophile ring is ruling the entire country from the shadows with an iron fist.

namely in the context of the ongoing Hungarian presidential pardon scandal, where liberal leftist influencers have pretty much reinvented the Pizzagate conspiracy theory

Why can't we all just shake hands on the idea that we are all, left or right, being ruled by lizardmen pedophile elites, and act accordingly?

I think a more probable theory is that children are just too damn^W^W^W^W^Wthere are lot more pedophiles than is commonly believed or accepted, especially "circumstantial rather than obligate" ones, but there is some combination of elites being more likely to be caught, it being more widely publicised when elites indulge in it, and elites being more likely to indulge in it in such a brazen and well-networked fashion simply because elites are more likely to have brass (more hobos than religious leaders may be pederasts, but nobody will put the former in charge of lots of children) and a network of underlings and supporters that could be mobilised to enable it.

If by "pedophile" you mean "a person who frequently experiences sexual attraction to people below the local age of consent" (which, as far as I can see, the people promoting the idea that there are pedophiles everywhere do) then almost every adult male is a pedophile - the age at which young adults reach sufficient physiological maturity to look bangable is lower than the age that young adults in our infantilized society can be trusted with the freedom the sexual revolution is supposed to have delivered. This is unhelpfully conflated with actual pedophiles - i.e. people with a paraphilic attraction to pre-pubescent children - who are very few in number and have had no politically influential defenders since NAMBLA was kicked out of the queer alphabet soup movement in the 1980's. "A shadowy cabal of degenerate elites is sexually abusing pre-pubsescent children on an industrial scale" is Qanon nonsense. "Multiple shadowy cabals of degenerate elites are sexually abusing teens on an industrial scale" is simply true.

For reasons that are too long to fit into this post, post-sexual revolution society has been very, very bad at preventing sexual abuse of young adults (whether below or above the local age of consent). Essentially every institution which gives grown men sexual access to teenagers has had an abuse scandal. Right now, this is burning the populist right more than the left - some of this is media bias, and some of it is that the populist right has made "we have no standards of personal ethics whatsoever for movement leaders" a tribal principle, whereas the left has kind-of sort-of done the opposite post MeToo.

On the specific scandals the OP is talking about, there is no equivalence whatsoever. The factual claims of Pizzagate are straightforwardly false (the scandal involves children being sexually abused in the basement of a pizza parlour that does not, in fact, have a basement) whereas the core factual claims in the Hungarian scandal (that Janos V molested the boys, that Endre K helped with the cover up, and that President Novak pardoned Endre K) are essentially uncontested - the controversy is about which figures in Orban's inner circle were involved.

I expect that they're not true pedophiles in the sense of not being aroused by adults, and rather just get off on the taboo and power dynamics involved, but otherwise I can largely agree.

Wasn't expecting to have to litigate whether they're true pedophiles, rather than lizardmen, but I'll take it. Go round them up, I'll bring out the woodchipper.

Not an actual reply, but noting something funny- you made a joke, I built on the joke in the same spirit and same premise, pretty similar ideas.

Your post is at +14, mine is at -4.

This is a useful metric to me - if I post basically the same thing as someone else, I can expect a delta of -18 after one day independent of content.

Good to know.

I have always and forever been in favor of just dropping the voting system. Once, because I also find the kind of behavior you're describing lame, I even proposed an auto-banning system for voting the wrong way.