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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
If you live most of your life surrounded by leftists and consuming leftist media, then of course leftist whining is the type of whining that is most annoying to you.
As someone with Republican relatives and in-laws, I assure you that rightist whining over the last four years has been both intolerable and often scary. I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids. Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.
Basically, assimilation. It's actually true that the basic conservative values are appealing to a lot of people, and a comfortable default for a lot more. A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
Much like Walterodim, I supported gay marriage back in the day, and have come to deeply regret that support in light of the transgender movement that followed. I too consider all the "crazy" religious slippery slope doomcasters to have been vindicated.
I mean, my memory is that the slippery slope people were not talking about transgenderism back then, they were talking about bestiality and pedophilia becoming accepted and mainstream. Same as they are now, same as they always are.
There's a difference between an advance prediction of 'X is a slippery slope that will lead specifically to Y', and a retroactive claim that 'X was the start of a slippery slope that has led us to current thing Z'.
You can make up a retroactive narrative about anything leading to anything, once you've observed them both.
But the religious people of the time didn't actually predict the things that have actually happened since then - or if they did, those predictions were tossed out alongside a barrage of thousands of other predictions that failed - and therefore, they are not 'vindicated' and don't get any credibility from it.
You're correct that the specific predictions didn't pan out as stated in the 90s and 00s. To cut them a little slack, nobody really anticipated a hot debate about the definition of 'man' vs 'woman' or the 'gender spectrum' to enter the fray.
However, that the Left enabled that kind of blindsiding has shown me that they can't be trusted to not flip the board and mealmouth things that I find rather horrid, like puberty blockers. I have to say that my trust for the Left to stay within reasonable lines has done a complete 180 on this topic, and I wonder if the 'kink wing' of the party is just waiting for more favorable conditions to finally push through. And they could very well do so even if the vast majority of their compatriots don't like it. We have not slid to the specific point that moral conservativism predicted, but I don't want to be distracted from the fact that a slide did occur, even if indirectly.
My suspicion is you will ultimately be found correct. There won't be a mass normalization of beastiality and pedophilia. But that's predicated on my faith that surely people don't change that quickly, and I don't know how I justify that. So personally, I'm going to extend the deadline to 2040 and see where we stand after swimming in AI futa cocks for a decade or two.
And the irresolvable difference here is just that I know a lot of trans people and think that allowing them to transition has been better for them and their lives than not allowing that, so I don't see anything unreasonable there.
I expect pedophilia and bestiality not to get normalized because kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you, there's an actual victim there. I expect that the future will normalize a lot of things I find weird or upsetting but which don't actually harm anyone on net, which is how I see the trans movement.
We probably can't reconcile our predictions before reconciling that disagreement-in-fact.
They can't consent to sex. Whatever consent to sex is (not an easy concept to analyse, to put it mildly) it's not the same thing as not wanting to have sex. I definitely wanted to have sex when I was 11 (and pre-pubescent). A cat in heat wants some sexual activity and doesn't particularly care with what. The problem is that children and animals can't engage in consensual sex, whether they want to or not, any more than they can make a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin.
Are you opposed to animals having sex with each other?
I'm opposed to bestiality, but I do think the "animals can't consent" argument isn't good.
No, because I don't make the same moral requirements of animals as I do of humans. "It's wrong for humans to have sex with a non-consenting partner" doesn't imply "It's wrong for animals to have sex with a non-consenting partner," any more than "It's wrong for humans to torture mice for their amusement" implies "It's wrong for cats to torture mice for their amusement."
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This is more than just not an easy concept to analyse. From my comment here a while ago:
Your comparison to "mak[ing] a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin" is definitely somewhat relevant here, if you read the full linked comment. People think that there's something "more" and "different" about sex and heroin and things like that compared to "normal" things that children can definitely, totally consent to. But the theory here is just completely whack and not at all up to the challenge of explaining why. You can simply ask yourself, "Why can't children consent to sex?" When you do so, you might go down the same road I went down; you might read the same major works by professional philosophers that I read. But I really don't think you'll get a good theoretical answer. It's just sort of an axiom that is held by some. To others, it's just the dogmatic mantra that they were forced to repeat in order to help justify fighting the X-ophobes. But when the same people who convinced you to subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and who swear that the thing we need most is early comprehensive sex education to help children understand the sexual choices that they're allowed to make come calling, they're going to ask, "Why can't children consent?" If you don't have a better answer than the professional philosophers who are making the best case possible for a consent-only sexual ethic, you're going to find out that you're an X-ophobe. You're going to get stared at like you're an alien for making outdated assumptions about people. For Sagan's sake, everyone knows that kids are capable enough to choose their gender, have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents! Of course they're capable of deciding to have a little fun with some friction on the bits.
Just not with adults.
Kid on kid is fine, obviously.
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How are you using the word "you" here?
I have never subscribed to a consent-only sexual ethic.
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There are people who believe that's not true. The harm of adult-child sex (wherever we draw the line about what constitutes a child) is not the sex, it's the stigma, secrecy, and shame. The child is forced to lie, is made to feel ashamed, is made to feel they are a victim. That's the trauma, not a grown man or woman having sex with them.
Same with the zoophiles: if my (animal) lover doesn't want to have sex with me, they can protest. I don't force them. They can make noises, vocalise, wriggle out of my embrace.
Both types will make loud noises of agreement about how real rape is bad, real violation of consent is bad - but then start chipping away at "but why do you say a child can't consent? that children are not sexual beings? that adult non-human animals can't enjoy a mutually loving relationship with a human?"
Part of the revelations of the Catholic sex abuse scandal in Ireland, with a report published years back, was how many of the offending priests had convinced themselves that the children were willing, they wanted this, and besides it was 'just' taking them on the adult's lap or hugging them or intimate contact. They didn't think of themselves as forcing unwanted attention on unwilling victims.
Oh, you think paedophilia/zoophilia is gross and disgusting? Sorry, disgust reaction is not enough to make something wrong. Bigots used to say gay sex was disgusting and unnatural, too.
EDIT: We've had a guy on here going on about emancipation of minors, and part of that (once he got into his stride) was sex between early teens and adults. There's a guy (and I have no idea if he's the same one, but I begin to have my suspicions) right now on ACX arguing that adult men are naturally attracted to 12-14 year olds (I'm cutting out the links because believe me, you don't need them):
A couple of weirdos convincing themselves of self-serving lies does not reverse all cultural norms and laws.
So how did we get same-sex marriage? That's an entire ton of cultural norms and laws just tossed in the bin for the sake of "love is love".
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So let me just try to clear the table a bit and assure you that I'm not too concerned about people marrying their dogs, daughters, or what have you. To the the extent I would draw a connection between gay marriage and our current tensions, it's more in the possibility space that was left in the wake of its victory. For a variety of reasons I find it to be extremely unlikely and just too plain viscerally disgusting for legalized pedophelia or beastiality to ever be digested by society at large. But whereas previously I would have reflexively scoffed at the suggestion, I've lately been reduced to a more meek-sounding "well, that just seems so unlikely" and that shift low-key disturbs me.
I'll accept that your trans friends are much happier now than they were before. The tension is if this has come at the expense of those not convinced of the efficacy of activist talking points applied broadly, those erroneously misdiagnosed at an early age, and social stability on the whole (deleterious as opposed to ruinous). There are always a small number of people that would have their lives radically improved if society rearranged towards their preferences. That still leaves everybody else. Prescribing puberty blockers (or any 'affirmation plan') to minors who show an inkling of gender dysphoria is quite unreasonable to me. Ditto for any reprimands or punishments meted out to people who misgender trans or NB people. Whatever merit the the current gender framework has, I would throw it all in the bin if those are baked-in unavoidable consequences of it. That's before we even get into scenarios like 'penised individuals' raping women in shelters, which - I am not really sure how to totally quantify as a loss on net. Feels like a pretty big loss of something to me! Like a reasonable expectation that nobody would allow such a scenario to be possible?
You say there's no path towards normalization of pedophilia or beastiality because there's a lack of basic impulse for it. While I agree on the general nature of man's sexual proclivites being at headwinds with such a development, I find it hard to reconcile this with the growing body of work that suggests people really can be influenced by their media (read: porn) consumptions, and the rabbit hole of extreme acts hardcore porn addicts find themselves watching, unable to cum to anything less. Clearly our minds are highly susceptible to suggestion, and we now live with a cornucopia of suggestions available at a whim. While I still don't think that's likely to breed a generation of 'pedos and furries' as some doomsayers get on about, I do think you can get some big swings on those margins, and that leaves the question of how we should regard them.
But even deeper than this - and the thing I'm struggling to communicate - is that the language games the Left has played on this terf has nuked a lot of patience, charity, and goodwill that can be generalized to anything else they say. If they are willing to demolish the classic and useful definitions of words like 'man' and 'woman', whilst replacing them with bloated concepts and jargon that are meaningless to the average person, then the sky is the limit. We can do the same thing with words like 'victim', or 'consent', or 'sexual desire', and I have noticed this is already in the water supply. If you want an extension of this principle, see the same dynamic play out with 'protest', 'riot', and 'insurrection'. I am worried that when my opponent says he wants 'peace' as I would understand it, and I reach out for a handshake, he may stab me because "Well, duh. Of course he meant 'peace at your expense' in his local parlance! You can't even say he lied!". When a trans activist or sympathetic ally makes me second-guess what it means to be a woman, it's natural to second-guess any other term they employ that's loaded with ambiguity you didn't realize was even possible a second ago.
It's been a slow trek here, and it's informed by personal experiences as well as the public/political sphere, but the last 15 years or so have gradually cemented for me that humans are a strange species, capable of a lot I had thought was unfathomable, at least in the west. There were a lot of metaphorical guardrails I had taken for granted that were totally banking on people being constrained by 'reasonable' but unspecified assumptions about the human condition. I think those boundaries have already been crossed several times in my mind, which then in turns leads me to believe those boundaries didn't actually exist outside of social conformity and enforcement. Rewind back to 2004 and I'm betting very low odds on people marrying pets by 2024. What odds would I have placed on gender transitioning for minors, had I even known that was going to end up on the table? Assurances that nobody's gonna fuck the dogs doesn't carry the same smackdown it used to.
This seems odd to me given the plentiful historical precedent for both.
As an Orthodox Christian, it's nice to see someone notice instead of doubling down on the madness.
A question I'd like to ask more people (if it were even remotely socially acceptable) is, "Why do you imagine anyone finds zoophilia odd?" Or leaving infants to die of exposure, or slavery, or any number of other things.
Most people would just say “well because zoophilia and infant murder are wrong!” Without any conception of the fact that before Christ these things would’ve been totally normal.
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Here's a mechanism: AI-generated (or hand-drawn) CP doesn't actually have any victims. No actual person is harmed on net, except by very legally tenuous chain-of-causation. By your logic, banning this is unreasonable. However there are fairly obvious paths by which the legitimization of CP which doesn't harm anyone leads to increased tolerance of CP generally, and increasing exposure and tolerance (in the lack-of-disgust sense) to the idea of child sex as a concept.
I generally agree with the AI CP has no victims line of thought. I think you see the same basic issue when it comes to writing fictional stories about unsavory topics as well.
I think it's a bit silly when you see erotica sites with stories about high school girls who happen to be exactly 18 years old. It feels like a strange purification ritual that has to be performed at the start of a story. Like saying "bless you" when someone sneezes. "You're about to read a story about a sexy young teenager, but don't worry - she's actually 18, so you have a fig leaf of plausible deniability!"
I don't think fictional stories about underage sex should be illegal, or impossible to host on appropriate sites, no matter how unsavory they may be. I'm honestly amazed that some countries punish those kinds of stories, and I'm saddened at the increasingly puritan regime that credit cards companies and sites like Amazon are creating around non-standard porn categories recently. First they came for the mind control erotica fetishists, and all that...
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Would you say it's fair for me to characterize this as sort of the same argument as 'violent video games lead to murder'? Fantasy depictions lead to exposure and tolerance leads to adoption and mimicry?
My intuitions on this just go pretty hard the other direction. I think it's just true that introducing porn to an area decreases instances of rape, and I expect that to be true even if it's rape porn.
My intuition is that separating fantasy from reality is a basic skill that pretty much every member of our screen-addicted society has to learn early, and it's a pretty strong mechanism in most cases.
Having fantasy depictions of something despicable doesn't normalize real depictions showing real living victims, it makes them less acceptable because people with an interest in that topic have a harmless alternative, and makes them less prevalent because the legal and approved fantasy versions eat up all the market share and are far more convenient and safe to find than the illegal or dissaproved real version.
Having a plethora of convincing fantasy depictions available is a viable alternative for lots of potential offenders who can wean themselves on that instead. And they can stake their respectability in society as being the type of person who knows that it's just fantasy and games and is more concerned and knowledgable about ethical consumption practices than the general public (think about how BDSM people got really mad at 50 Shades for depicting unethical BDSM in a positive light).
Etc.
That's how I a priori expect things like that to go.
Ah yes, this is why legal alcohol is the only intoxicant anyone ever uses, and nobody bothers with the illegal drugs? And certainly have not campaigned for some of the illegals like weed to be decriminalised/legalised and on sale in retail outlets just like you can buy booze?
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I don't really know your politics (because I can't keep track of people's username over time), but from this thread, you seem to lean progressive. However, I don't know your particular politics and how progressive you are, so this may be a gotcha and it may not be.
But I'm wondering how you feel about things that feminists may consider demeaning to women, such as fantasy depictions of violence against women, or women in skimpy outfits, etc. I don't know what the party line is these days, but 5 to 10 years ago, people were falling over themselves to denounce a plague of violence against women in media and video games, on the basis that this normalized such depictions, ultimately causing more violence against women or more unrealistic beauty standards, not less. Anita Sarkeesian made a career on this, there were protests against movie ads that feminists found to be unsavory. Overall this sort of thing seemed to be one of the biggest issues of last decade.
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You’re assuming a lot there with “don’t actually want to” that will not go well for you here if taken to a logical conclusion.
Leaving aside debates over informed consent and consent as a measure of moral, realistic sex robots of illegal categories are probably going to be a real problem for culture and law to deal with.
In other words, normalization can and will happen for some version of these things without being wrong per se according to the moral framework you draw here.
There was recently internet drama over a prominent YouTuber for both beastiality and pedophilia on his computer and he embraced the former as something he was open about.
For those unaware, this is reference to Vaush, a rather infamous Breadtuber who has been rather outspoken on both lowering the age of consent as well as loosening the taboo against bestiality, amoung a few other opinions.
He has also been rather vociferous against lolicon and how anime is a gateway to the alt-right.
Just recently, he was outed as a blatant hypocrite mid-stream when saving a file to his computer showing that he also had pron saved that was rather explicitly lolicon.
Take that for what you will.
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I mean, if we're talking about victimless crimes that are just really really gross, I consider that a different topic.
But just drawings of both, right, if it's the one I'm thinking of?
The point I’m getting at is “normalization” might happen the “gross victimless crime” way until it reaches some critical mass.
Our present standards for legal consent are not etched in stone, and we do know societal moral norms can shift pretty rapidly.
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