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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.
Have the other predictions failed or just not come true yet? I think the normalization of pederastic relationships is coming absent a culture shift, but I don’t think it will happen for another several decades at least.
Not a historian, but my understanding is that people have been saying 'if you allow my opponent to do the thing I dislike then pedorasty will be normalized next' for literal centuries and have never been correct. At some point you have to just take the L.
If anything pedorasty is getting far less acceptable over time, as drawing lines about what sexual ethics should be draws a clear division that pedorasty violates. I don't think Michael Jackson or R Kelly could have continued their careers after credible pedo accusations today, the way they did back then.
(similarly AFAIK laws against bestiality are getting stricter over time, I think?)
I’d be interested to hear any examples you can give of past pederastic predictions. I spend a lot of time reading 19th and early 20th century primary sources, and I don’t remember ever coming across that concern, nor can I think of anything that would have caused concern about it in the 16th–18th centuries. The closest I can come up with is opposition to castrati, but that’s closer to opposition to trans procedures for minors than to anything related to pedophilia. I guess there was also opposition to child brothels, but those were apparently actually a thing in some areas, and polite society was unanimously happy to shut them down.
As for the present, I agree pederasty normalization is extremely unlikely in the next several decades for reasons that you note. I can’t help but notice, though, that some pedophilic activists and sympathizers have started to mimic techniques that other marginalized groups have used to gain acceptance, and I could see a concerted effort paying dividends in, say, 50–70 years.
Not a historian as I said, and I have a lot of ignorance on this topic, I was referring to a general sense this is true that I'd gotten from reading other people talk about this argument and the slippery slope fallacy in general. I could very definitely be wrong and it's a more recent development.
Are you talking about MAP stuff and the 'gold-star' (non-offending) pedophile narrative?
I have certainly seen stuff along the lines of 'people who are attracted to minors can't help it, they should not actually be woodchippered if they haven't actually done anything to any kids, we should let them looks at drawings or AI porn to deal and monitor them to make sure they don't offend but they're not actually evil just for the thought-crime alone'.
I will say that I've seen this exist, although all the leftist spaces I'm in are pretty hostile to it and I've seen people trying it get banned from several places.
But I'll also point out that 'non-offending' is the central distinction in this rhetoric, this rhetoric relies on drawing a sharp distinction between offending and non-offending pedophiles in a way that actually draws more attention and vitriol towards hating and punishing offenders.
I wouldn't be totally surprised if in 70 years we don't talk about woodchippering people who say they are unfortunately attracted to minors but strictly use AI-generated VR porn to deal with it, or w/e. I actually would expect a world like that where those people are known and monitored (informally at least) and have outlets and a life script to follow to have less child abuse than our current world where they hide off the grid.
Unless you think you have seen people using leftist rhetoric to say why actual sex with children in reality is fine and good, and seen that get any uptake? I absolutely have not seen that, if that's what you mean.
(I'd also point out that groups like NAMBLA have tried that tactic in the past and failed, I think you will always have some people trying to appropriate the current paradigm to support their dumb/bad thing, but that doesn't mean they will succeed nor that the current paradigm favors/helps them. That's just how anyone tries to make their point)
Largely that, yes, though I also have in mind some of the pedophilia-adjacent things in the trans arena—child drag queens and the like. I largely agree with hydroacetylene’s comment below on how pedophilia could be normalized; I just think he’s missing an additional set of arguments borrowed from the trans movement. If pre-pubescent children can choose to medically transition from one sex to another, it really isn’t a huge jump to give them agency over their sex lives as well (personally, I’d go further and say that allowing transition but not sex is plain incoherent; if anything, it should be the other way around). The case for giving barely-pubescent children sexual freedom is even stronger, and I agree with hydroacetylene that this is more likely for children who opt for same-sex relationships, since that eliminates the concern about pregnancy and since ephebophilic relationships are already more common among gay men. (And yes, I know that technically pedophilia doesn’t include attraction to 12 year olds, but that’s what the vast majority of people consider it.)
In general, though, I tend to look at pedophilia normalization through the lens of the gay rights movement’s history. If you asked the average American in 1960—a time when sodomy was illegal in every state in the union, a year before the famous Boys Beware! educational film was released, and nine years before the Stonewall riots—whether he thought same-sex marriage would ever be legalized throughout the country, he’d laugh you out of the room. Forget marriage, he’d think you were insane if you suggested SCOTUS would rule as it did in Lawrence v. Texas. I think we might be in the same spot today with regard to pedophilic relationships.
This is why I’m not really happy about the MAP and non-offending pedophile stuff I see, even as I agree with pretty much everything they’re saying. Pedophiles don’t choose to be attracted to children, it’s wrong to conflate temptation with action, and it’s a problem that non-offending pedophiles don’t feel safe to discuss their problems with therapists, etc. I wish society would change to make those distinctions clear, but I just don’t trust that the current reasonable concerns raised by MAP activists aren’t a camel’s nose peeking its way into the tent.
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Google Gemini will already tell you about the need to Destigmatize Minor Attracted Persons (MAPS).
Only a few years ago "MAP" was a fringe phrase, originally developed by administrators of the site "AttractedToChidren.org". A MAP pride flag was developed on tumblr in 2018 by exactly the sort of people you'd expect. Saying it or putting it in a bio was social death. But behind the scenes a lot of well-funded activist and public health organizations (but I repeat myself) have been normalizing it.
In 2021 Allyn Walker of Johns Hopkins University published A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity, popularizing the phrase among right-thinking (left-thinking?) people, and apparently well-trained AIs as well. Note that Walker was hired by JH med school after the book came out.
This is another one of those cases where the bleeding edge of leftist academia is at odds with the reddit-tier lumpenproles spewing woodchipper memes. And in all these cases the social mechanisms of leftist ideological dissemination lead to the academic version winning, because "umm, yikes, that view is actually Reactionary and Harmful according to my new sociology degree" is the ultimate trump card in those circles.
You can expect to see a left-wing flip on MAPs in only a few years, rather than decades.
Link for those who are interested.
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Reddit was halfway there when I left a couple of years ago. I’d regularly see talk about non-offending pedophiles, and Reddit was quite quick to defend the distinction between ephebophiles and pedophiles. They wanted outpatient treatment with no registrations or job/home location restrictions. Basically, a pedophile could be working in a position that left them alone with small children with no need to even disclose their desires.
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I disagree with you. Actual normalization of pedophilia will take at least a couple decades; redditors are not a majority even if they could be converted over to supporting pedophiles relatively more easily.
I expect the progression to be 'well MAPs shouldn't face discrimination unless they're active pedophiles'-> 'cartoon CP isn't CP'-> 'CP that already exists isn't hurting anyone to keep consuming it'-> 'ethically produced CP'-> 'what of the child's rights to engage in relationships with adults'-> 'what's wrong with sex? You know they used to say this about homosexuals, too?'. Maybe with a parallel process towards accepting homosexual ephebophilia; AFAIK typical examples of "male bad behavior" like that seem much more accepted among the gay community than among straight people, but I don't think all or even most gay men are pedophiles or in fact want anything at all to do with anybody younger than a teenager, sexual or otherwise. But the history of left wing movements is pushing for more by taking smaller victories than the ultimate goal so as to advance the end state; you couldn't have obergefell without lawrence v Texas and you couldn't have lawrence v Texas without a large majority of the country already thinking that homosexuality is deplorable and all, but actually making it illegal is ridiculous.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll feel gross for typing that for a few minutes.
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