pedophile
cjet79
7d ago
I think it's the same for most defenses of basic rights. Either defend the rights of scumbags or everyone loses the right.
Happens in free speech when it's Nazis that need defending. Happens in criminal law when it's pedophiles or rapists getting railroaded.
And of course the question gets asked why not just defend the right for "decent" people. But "decent people" always tends to start looking a little too much like "my political allies".
It would be nice to not have this slippery slope hanging over our heads for every basic right.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
They were a protected species. I spent some time googling the name, all the news articles conspicuously avoided his picture, except a particularly spicy one with copious use of N-Bombs, and then this one that finally gave me a mugshot.
There was some random black podcast clip that went around a few months ago where one of the guys on there was talking about his community needing to clean up it's act. He said something along the lines of "We all know somebody that is fucking kids". Everyone went conspicuously silent and started sputtering denials. But if you've ever listened to any black comedy, the family/neighborhood pedophile in the ghetto is an oddly consistent bedrock of bits.
aqouta
18d ago
Just asking questions is when someone is pretending to just be interested in a topic asks pointed questions designed to poke holes in some narrative, central example being a holocaust denier trying to make the holocaust seem implausible by "just asking questions" about how many train cars could plausibly carry how many ect ect.
I'd say there are two major distinctions.
-
I just don't really think aella is a pedophile. She's not pretending to be interested in how people answer these questions. These are classic examples of "what's worse and why" questions. If someone really wanted to JAQ pedophilia I don't think they'd start with "is one instance of it better or worse than torture murdering grandma?"
-
Hypotheticals aren't really the same structure as JAQing off. JAQ offs don't really give you open ended questions. They have a narrative that they want to drive down without variance. They aren't interested in your moral reasoning, they want to use pointed questions to force your to answer one way or the other. They're doing a kind of dishonest persuasion rather than trying to find understanding.
I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.
Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.
Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.
I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.
All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
22d ago
I don't think you have to normalize it if you make it legal. There's no need to put "literal toddlers" next to "teens", "mature" and "shemales" up on PornHub.
Just like in some countries addicts can get injected with heroin at government-run clinics, the same approach can be used there: pedophiles can visit government-run clinics, where a soundproof room with a PC securely connected to a government-run AI CSAM server is theirs for X minutes a week.
quiet_NaN
29d ago
Elon Musk’s friends
Ah, the press. Always exaggerating.
Remember 2015, when Musk was unironically used by Scott as an example of someone who was doing good effectively?
Insofar as there’s no such thing as innate aptitude, I have no excuse for not being Aubrey de Grey. Or if Aubrey de Grey doesn’t impress you much, Norman Borlaug. Or if you don’t know who either of those two people are, Elon Musk.
Back then, it could be assumed that a Grey Tribe member would admire Musk, and there was certainly much to admire. By making EVs cool, he certainly made an important contribution to the decarbonization, and the SpaceX concept of recycling rockets certainly has decreased the cost of space flight a lot.
But since then, there have been few obviously pro-social successes of his. His social media persona was not very endearing, calling random people pedophiles will not make you look a great role model. Buying Twitter did not improve things. Openly supporting election denier Trump likely cost him most of his friends outside the MAGA bubble. Now this messy breakup with Trump likely cost him his friends within MAGA.
I am sure that he still has a following of loyal fanboys, self-interested grifters, and yes-men, who will sit in silence while he lashes out against them, but with his break with Trump, I doubt that anyone with an ego of a similar size as his is anywhere near him on a social graph.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1mo ago
Your categories are incorrect. The people you claim to be "conservatives" really aren't any more- there are elements of that in their policies since they're pushing in a pro-classical-liberal direction (which is itself a conservative idea just due to age), but the factions have realigned. Traditional conservatism, as you know it, is dead.
Right now, the Conservatives are in fact the Democrat-aligned faction [education-managerial complex, bureaucrats and white-collar workers, welfare state/make-work beneficiaries], and the Reformers are the Republican coalition [military-industrial complex, kulaks and blue-collar workers, welfare state/make-work maleficiaries].
They categorically reject any suggestion that he's corrupt.
There are suggestions that he's corrupt from Conservatives. Of course, because Conservatives are extremely butthurt because the Reformers got elected, they claim corruption at every turn and expect me to believe it because of some misplaced sense of social propriety (which is just a defense mechanism, and an especially womanly one, that Conservatives expect to work- but that only works on social credit, and their social credit card's been declined after they put their response to the uncommon cold on it).
serious criticism of Trump is inadmissible in conservative politics right now
Reformers have trouble criticizing Reformers. Conservatives have trouble criticizing Conservatives. That much is known. Reformers tend to form cults of personality a lot easier than Conservatives do; that's also because Conservatives are the faction with no ideas.
And I'd be perfectly happy to accept a Conservative claim that Reform is corrupt, if it had factual backing. But I'm still not seeing it; what I'm seeing is stuff like "the law's finally getting applied fairly for once" (laws that Conservatives fought long and hard for), "institutional human trafficking efforts by Conservatives are being addressed" (remember, it's "illegal immigration" when Conservatives approve of it and "human trafficking" when they don't), and "economic progress isn't getting unfairly impeded by regulators".
I've said this with regards to "the left are all pedophiles, look at all the groomer literature" before, so I'll say it again: if the strongest evidence opponents can muster is not actually what the word means, and they are incapable of coming up with a way to describe what's actually wrong beyond hand-waving and arguments from aesthetics, then their claims should be ignored by default.
So yeah, I have a hard time criticizing Reformers for ignoring "Trump is all corrupt, look at all the [aesthetically-repellent to Conservatives] things". Criticize his erratic governance, and the smarter ones will be happy to listen to you (because that is a factually-correct claim, and one that hurts his own faction), but that's also the best they can do because, again, the Conservatives are simply in the wrong here.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1mo ago
Merriam Webster definition of Cripple (Noun):
1 (dated + offensive) : a lame or partly disabled person or animal
2 (offensive) : someone who is disabled or deficient in a specified manner (eg. a social/emotional cripple)
Let's just keep that in mind.
I can be perfectly functional doing my job where I have to take needs and wants into account...
Sure. And a guy in a wheelchair can be perfectly functional doing working a desk job as an insurance salesman, and a guy born without fingers can probably with a bit of adaptation deliver for DoorDash, and a blind guy can live on his own with the right tools and education given to him. Those are pretty much central examples of Cripples, they are missing important parts of human life, and that they can live productively within limits doesn't obviate the existence of those limits and missing experiences.
Nor does it make sense to point to those limits and say they must be better people as a result: very few people in wheelchairs commit assault in bars, a man without hands is unlikely to strangle a woman, the blind are very rarely petty thieves. They are all, nonetheless, central examples of Cripples.
But more to the point, you're not beating the allegations when your understanding of human sexuality in this conversation is exemplified by:
the instinct to "me horny me gotta fuck"
I don't want to fucky-fucky like a rabbit in spring?
Well, when you figure that one out, tell me because I've been a woman all my life and I'm damned if I can work out why some women do what they do when it comes to men.
And a series of allusions to pedophiles and criminals.
That inability to empathize with the basic human erotic drive, one that has been identified by artists and philosophers and psychologists as the basis for so much of art and culture and human behavior, that is a crippling loss. The inability to fulfill, willingly, the duties of marriage; that is a crippling loss. The obvious difficulty in reproduction, that is a crippling loss.
A guy in a wheelchair might say, hey I'm still the top boat insurance salesman in Central New Jersey, and what's the big deal about "running" anyway amirightguys? But if he were offered a surgery that would allow him to walk and he said no I prefer the chair, we'd call that disordered thinking, we'd call it strange. We'd say he has an insane view of human life if he would prefer to be in the chair. And we'd certainly seek to censure, if not censor, him if he started advocating for healthy people to hop into wheelchairs and refuse to or prevent themselves from walking.
It's an observation, not a theory. You can't falsify an observation.
However, I suppose if every single person who was involved in Epstein's pedophile ring was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned (this would include many prominent political figures) I would stop observing that law enforcement is arbitrary and that the pure text of the law has no ability to prevent the rich and powerful from doing whatever they want whenever they want.
Prosecutorial discretion means that prosecutors can freely choose whether or not to enforce the law. Police and FBI have similar latitude in what they choose to investigate. This discretion is used frequently and whimsically, and often has the effect of de-facto legalizing certain crimes for certain people (white people smoking pot, rich people fucking kids, shoplifting in San Francisco, etc). This isn't a theory to be falsified, this is a well-documented fact.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I would think the disparity in reaction here is because the upper class are expected to behave better than that, to rise above vice, and they often try to avoid disabusing the public about such a notion.
Consider the meme of pedophile Catholic priests: these are the people who are supposed to be your spiritual leaders, and while all humans are fallible under Christian doctine, molesting boys is a level of sin that one could otherwise not believe a holy man would stoop to.
Maybe it's some sort of hardwired primal instinct. If we gravitate towards hierarchy, we also gravitate towards expecting more out of our social betters.
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
I bought a house from a homeflipper who had bought it from a convicted pedophile. This was explained to me by my neighbors, who cheerfully explained that his story of 'oh I had a 17 year old girlfriend at 22' was obviously false because nobody would've cared.
Anyways they beat him up and forced him to sell after somebody found out the truth, I don't know how, that he'd molested a ten year old.
TIRM
2mo ago
It seems like there doesn't exist an organization that doesn't have a child sex abuse problem.
Yes, in the sense that pedophiles commonly have the big-brained idea to get a job working with kids.
Child actors are commonly sexually abused by Hollywood executives. I don't think that means the typical Hollywood producer is a pedophile. I think it means the subset of Hollywood producers who happen to be pedophiles make sure to work with child actors.
It's like that with every organization. I don't think the average youth pastor is fucking the kids. But if a pedophile happened to be a member of that church, he might get the clever idea to volunteer to be youth pastor.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2mo ago
The Virginia Giuffre suicide brought to mind an idea I've been thinking about for a while: populism works best without the people. Rob Henderson and many others have talked about how certain ideas promoted by the upper class disproportionately harm the lower class. In his book Troubled, he wrote:
Many of my peers at Yale and Stanford would work ceaselessly. But when I'd ask them about the plans they'd implemented to get into college, or start a company, or land their dream job, they'd often suggest they just got lucky rather than attribute their success to their efforts. Interestingly, it seems like many people who earn status by working hard are able to boost their status among their peers even more by saying they just got lucky. This isn't just limited to my own observations, either. A 2019 study found that people with high income and social status are the most likely to attribute success to mere luck rather than hard work.
Both luck and hard work play a role in the direction of our lives, but stressing the former at the expense of the latter doesn't help those at or near the bottom of society. If disadvantaged people come to believe that luck is the key factor that determines success, then they will be less likely to strive to improve their lives. One study tracked more than six thousand young adults in the US at the beginning of their careers over the course of two decades, and found that those who believed that life's outcomes are due to their own efforts as opposed to external factors became more successful in their careers and went on to attain higher earnings.
The problem is that people who entertain populist ideas like the above wind up shoved into the same part of the political spectrum as all these people who rave about "pedophile rings." Along with the internet personalities who won't endorse QAnon outright but pander to their QAnoner supporters with equivocating crap like "why can't they release the Epstein documents? I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, I just want TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT. Just asking qwestchins!" The populist movement winds up embracing the same mentality of helplessness Henderson is criticizing. Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*
You can only really stand up for the people by keeping them at arm's length.
*The QAnoners are convinced that happens ALL THE TIME but Epstein is the only example they can point to, which is why we're still hearing about it five years after Epstein's death and will probably keep hearing about it for decades more.
Charitably, the groomer accusation is downstream of the idea that programs such are are choosing to make kids more gay, because that is their preference. Literal pedophile accusations are real, and some people below defend it, but is less common. (Most common is mean shitposting.)
This seems like the classic equivocation on the word 'sexuality'...
I don't have a rigorous understanding of how people relate to sexuality and what the consequences of exposure are at age 4 versus 9. That might make me unqualified to argue about it here, but it doesn't make me, or the average parent, unqualified to say "Hey, wait a second, 'lace' and 'underwear' have sexual associations I'm aware of in this context. Why is that here?" Associations that a pregnant woman does not. Lace in a wedding book word search hits different.
doesn't transgress it except in the minds of folks who throw sex acts and the existence of LGBT people in the same mental bucket.
And I think this is a major disagreement. Pride is many things. Pride is civil rites. Pride is trans, and pride is transgressive. Pride is family friendly. Pride is debauchery, nudity, and a chance to get laid. Pride is identity. Even with the continued whitewash, to the distaste of some gays, Pride can be reasonably understood to be lots of things that 4th of July celebrations and Macy's Thanksgiving parade are not understood as.
But like, when people like the indoctrination, they just call it 'socialization' (or "Niceness and Civilization," as the case may be) and pretending gay people don't exist, aren't a normal part of society, or are inherently 'adult content' that's not a normal part of kid-friendly public life is, from my vantage, a far less neutral option than teaching kids what most of society broadly accepts.
I wouldn't ask schools to pretend gay people don't exist, but the memeplex that advocates for celebration is fuel and also not very normal. Milder forms of indoctrination look a lot like the golden rule. A page in a book that mentions a man has a husband, that's normalizing something. Instead, Montgomery County said, 'damn the torpedoes!'
The children's book industry needs to churn out an fleet of content the in class curriculum to replace other curriculum. Identity, orientation, inclusivity is too important. Mandate a book a year? Nay, a dozen books. They each should be read 1 time-- 3 times, no, 5 times a year. A single child that leaves Pre-K without an understanding of pride parades, drag queens, and how lace and leather fit might be associated is an unacceptable outcome. The culture war of it all.
I have most of a post written that is one half an unlimited amount of questions on the present state of trans medicine/research with the other half a fantasy counter-factual for what a more mild culture war could have looked. I already push enough belongs on my non-existent blog. But, they can't normalize stuff like this. They need to man the wheel of the zeitgeist. They need to crush opposition and old-fashioned bigotry along with it. Hopefully it's part of a normalization process.
Anyway you should post more often.
788967F7-C0F5-4095-B48C
Universally Unique!
2mo ago
Apologies, looking at this in context, I think I probably came off as cranky at you, but I actually think you did a fine job presenting the plaintiff's arguments & broader issues. Your top-level was fine and good. However, I am disappointed with the several subthreads where an expansive reading of the malicious implications and innuendo in the plaintiff's arguments are uncritically credited when they seemed, to me, both so obviously in-credible and, as it happens, trivially-verified to be untrue.
4 year olds to BDSM, when – at least in the examples provided – that's simply not happening.
There is no 'BDSM bondage' that I could find in Pride Puppy, but there is a "drag queen" in a word search exercise at the end of the book and clearly a couple illustrated in the pages. They also arbitrarily slot (drag) queen under 'Q' instead of 'D', because they didn't have enough Q's.
Sure, this statement is true. But for people not super into the anti-LGBT stuff, it's a lot less incendiary! To extremify a bit more, if Little Bobby Tables is being fitted for his harness and pup mask in kindergarten, essentially every parent would throw unlimited support behind whoever promises to make that stop. But if he's told that there are guys like his dad, except instead of having a wife, they have a husband, and some of his classmates might have two dads... yeah, some of regulars here think that's a justification for unlimited violence against civilization, but a large majority of the country disagrees.
We are having those conversations right here in this thread!
Parts of the thread are fine (or at least aren't doing the thing I'm complaining about). Agreed.
There is a reasonable association from the introduction of "lace", "leather", and drag queens -- concepts that we adults are familiar with and associate with sex -- to queer identity and ideology. Then either from or to sexual identity and sexual orientation. To suggest these are isolated concepts unrelated to sexuality stretches my credulity.
Were I somehow put in charge of designing Pride Puppy's word search, I certainly would have avoided including 'leather' to try and prevent this sort of "Re: Re: Re: Re: FWD: Re: Biden forces schools to let furry kids use kitty litter!" urban legend from circulating on X. But at the same time, if I had to name 300 distinct objects / attributes in that story, yeah, 'leather' and 'underwear' probably make the list—there's really not that many things to choose.
Given the context, which really is about as anodyne and wholesome as possible, this sort of free-association guilt-by-implication argument is the same school of media criticism that spent the last twenty years detailing how each and every piece of media was racist, misogynistic, and otherwise problematic, just with different in- and out-groups. "Woke right" is an annoying snarl term, but at the same time, I can't help but think this really is just conservative Anita Sarkeesian.
To suggest these are isolated concepts unrelated to sexuality stretches my credulity.
This seems like the classic equivocation on the word 'sexuality.' A man mentioning his wife is just talking like a perfectly ordinary person, a man mentioning his husband is "making things about sexuality/sex/politics." Obviously Pride is related to 'sexuality' and what people wear to Pride is an expression of 'sexuality' but this meaning of the word has not all that much do with sex, per se, (though some stuff at Pride definitely is and of course no minimally-qualified parent is taking his child to Folsom) and is no more child inappropriate than a teacher wearing her engagement ring. Nor a man wearing a suit, even though that's a huge fetish. Or a teacher appearing pregnant in front of her students, even though it's very literally the fruits of her sex life.
The taboo around keeping kids and 'sex' separate serves a vital social role of establishing easily-adjudicated bright-lines to protect them from pedophiles. This is right and good. But teaching kids that Pride is a fun social event (while certainly a sort of political propaganda) doesn't transgress it except in the minds of folks who throw sex acts and the existence of LGBT people in the same mental bucket. The average 90's Animaniacs or 2010's Adventure Time episode had far more sexual content and real, intended innuendo than the examples on display. It was just (mostly) straight.
These are children's stories. Most have fairly normal lessons in some way, but nearly all are in the setting of LGBTQ+ acceptance.
The broader complaint that this is indoctrinating kids into LGBT acceptance is... basically true! But like, when people like the indoctrination, they just call it 'socialization' (or "Niceness and Civilization," as the case may be) and pretending gay people don't exist, aren't a normal part of society, or are inherently 'adult content' that's not a normal part of kid-friendly public life is, from my vantage, a far less neutral option than teaching kids what most of society broadly accepts. Again, if folks want to debate that, I do think it's fair game. But the groomer narrative is, broadly speaking, transparent malicious lies, and we should aspire for better discourse.
As many on this forum would agree: inculcating western values and defending western culture against folks from other cultures is essential for the continuation of western civilization. The disagreement is about what those values are.
I think a very strong case can be made that the New Left, and its subsequent and related movements in the academic left particularly queer theory, is pro-pedophilia (eventually filtering down to the 'woke' public in watered down form). To be more charitable, it's not that they are pro-pedophile per se, but rather that they have adopted a world view that doesn't make a distinction between pedophilia and non-pedophilia.
Regardless of what you think follows from other things they believe, find me a pro-pedophilia social media post from anyone visibly on the left. I'll wait. I predict I'll be waiting a very long time. Not "well if you squint just right and also read these tea leaves over here...", but anything at all that is unambiguously supportive of boinking kids. You'll find a hundred, probably a thousand, wood-chipper memes before you find anything even close. It just doesn't exist, no matter how badly certain elements of the right want it to.
Most of these people have never heard of figures like Firestone, and even if they had, look at what happened to Germaine Greer. They feel deep loyalty to their movement but not a single shred of loyalty to any of the individuals that make it up, no matter how paradoxical that sounds to people like me or what debts of gratitude it might seem that they owe. And even Firestone never seems to have gone as far as openly supporting sexualizing kids, in any sense of the word.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
2mo ago
Copying an old comment of mine from the old place.
I think a very strong case can be made that the New Left, and its subsequent and related movements in the academic left particularly queer theory, is pro-pedophilia (eventually filtering down to the 'woke' public in watered down form). To be more charitable, it's not that they are pro-pedophile per se, but rather that they have adopted a world view that doesn't make a distinction between pedophilia and non-pedophilia. The aim to is "deconstruct" sex, gender, sexuality, race and so on. Why would one expect them to stop there and not deconstruct adult and child? In many cases, this is what they explicitly want to do. Some might say this is a 'slippery slope' fallacy, but I think Newton's First Law is an appropriate analogy. One might argue it is the logical conclusion of left academic theory (that is, the critical theories prominent in academia).
It's probably best to use some examples.
John Money, a psychologist and sexologist, with a background in pediatrics, active in the 50s and 60s. John Money is notable for being one of, if not the first person to theorize a distinction between sex and gender, and was the academic who introduced the term 'gender identity' and has been highly influential in the development of sex and gender theory. What is less well know about Money is some of his extremely unethical practices, including the infamous case of David Reimer. When Reimer was born, he was subjected to a botched circumcision that destroyed his penis. On the advice of Money, Reimer's parents subjected Reimer to sex change (as a baby) and raised him as a girl. As part of the therapy, he would make Reimer and his twin brother engage in mock sexual activity, including making them strip for 'inspections' and taking photos. Money claimed that these activities were essential for the development of a healthy adult gender and sexual identity. The case of Reimer was long held up as evidence in support of Money's and later ideas of gender identity and the distinction of sex and gender. David Reimer would "de-transition" later in his teens. Both David and his twin brother Brian would commit suicide in their thirties.
In the 1960s to 1990s, influential German psychologist, sexologist and sex educator Hemlut Kentler ran an experiment with government support where he would put young children as foster children with known pedophiles and encourage sexual activity. Kentler had strong tied to left-wing intellectual circles and believed that 'sexual repression' was the key driver of fascist ideology.
Shulamith Firestone, radical feminist and author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. In the book, she makes four demands for an authentic feminist revolution. Number three is for 'the total integration of women and children into all aspects of larger society' (by this she means the removal of any cultural distinction between men/women and adult/child). Number four is for 'the freedom of all women and children to do whatever they wish to do sexually'.
In 1977, a group of French left or left associated intellectuals signed a petition to the French government asking them abolish the age of consent in France. The signatories include some extremely significant and influential names, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-François Lyotard. I should point out that there is strong evidence is that Michel Foucault was a pedophile, and regularly made trips to Tunisia to abuse young boys there. One has to wonder how this relates to his work in postmodernism.
There's Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay Thinking Sex, considered a foundational text for gay and lesbian studies, gender studies and queer theory. In Thinking Sex, Rubin defends pedophilia (and incest as it happens). It's hard to get a direct quote (you can read the essay yourself) as the language is expectedly obtuse, but it is the logical conclusion of what she is arguing. For example:
It is harder for most people to sympathize with actual boy-lovers. Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt.
Rubin, and many academic leftists like and since her, want to deconstruct the concept of childhood innocence, seeing it yet another part of the oppressive system we find ourself in. I should point out, the Motte and Bailey is particularly strong here.
There's of course, Judith Butler, the queer theorist who needs no introduction. What Judith Butler means can be hard to actually decern, but here's a choice quote from her 2004 book 'Undoing Gender':
It is not necessary to figure parent-child incest as a unilateral impingement on the child by the parent, since whatever impingement takes place will also be registered within the sphere of fantasy. In fact, to understand the violation that incest can be—and also to distinguish between those occasions of incest that are violation and those that are not—it is unnecessary to figure the body of the child exclusively as a surface imposed upon from the outside. The fear, of course, is that if it emerges that the child’s desire has been exploited or incited by incest, this will somehow detract from our understanding of parent-child incest as a violation. The reification of the child’s body as passive surface would thus constitute, at a theoretical level, a further deprivation of the child: the deprivation of psychic life.
Which fits into my initial description - it's not that the 'academic left' (or critical left or whatever term you want to use) are pro-pedophile per se, but rather they believe in deconstructing sexual norms in such a way that pedophile becomes a meaningless concept (and one might say, intentionally or unintentionally giving pedophiles free license to operate). These are just examples, but you can find many other academics arguing the same or similar. A large part of it goes back to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, which basically argues through a Freudian-Marxist synthesis that our natural desires and impulses are suppressed by the capitalist system in order to funnel them into productive work (which no one actually wants to do), and therefore liberation from capitalism but necessarily include the liberation and expression of these desires, with of course, an emphasis on sexual desire.
But surely these are just kooky academics with insane theories that would never actually have any real-world consequences (regardless of how crazy influential they are), right? That normal people (that is, leftists) would never actually implement these kinds of things in a practical manner, right? Well these theories do seem to have effect, least of all in (critical) pedagogy. In particular, sex education does seem to have been affected by these theories, at least in the US. One example is the book 'Gender Queer: A Memoir', the subject of recent controversy, becoming standard in curriculum and libraries for many schools, and is aimed at pre-teens. The book contains extremely graphic (drawn) images, including a blowjob and sex scenes. You can search for the images yourself.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
2mo ago
I was hoping for more of that Marxist feminism source material directly. Other than that, I think that's the most incoherent thing I've read in a long time.
and nobody seems interested in making it stop working
Your standard excuses; the only people who understand sexuality clearly enough to correctly condemn it are too tired/busy, and that leaves the rest of the traditionalists who have zero desire [or ability] to actually understand the problem (per the "obviously this is all male pedophiles" comment around here somewhere) and therefore cannot solve it effectively. It's just low on our list of priorities these days, just like everything else.
hanikrummihundursvin
2mo ago
First, since you like arguments in this form, that's exactly what a pedophile acceptance activist would say: "You assert that pedophiles can't enter into relationships with children. Just like a homophobe asserted that gay people can't enter into relationships with people of their own sex. History tells us how that story ends".
This is exactly correct. Yet people still support gay marriage. Even if, hyperbolically, that's the 'slippery slope' we are sliding on.
that the story apparently ends with the nearly immediate reinstatement of race segregated spaces, so the argument that there's some broad historical tendency to abolish segregation is clearly false on your own terms.
I'm not following. What ties progressivism together, for lack of a better term, is not just the breakdown of boundaries but also a perversion of them.
If you don't think there's anything irrational or immoral about that perspective, then stop phrasing it as a disembodied factual statement.
I don't think there is anything wrong with that perspective if you accept enough of their priors.
I already addressed this, the progressive narrative that everything always goes their way is a religious belief, not a rational one, maintained by retconning history to pretend every won cause was their idea, and every lost cause was somebody else's or never happened to begin with.
I'll take your word that this is true, but what's the relevance?
There's no cost benefit analysis of desegregation or whether fighting the Nazis was worth it. 80% of people, at the very least, just default towards the fake progressive history. There's not a single person who can claim rationality whilst being wrapped up in all that religious dogma. There are no skeptical or rational or less wrong people doing tonally amoral utilitarian deepdives into these topics, measuring minorities in 'utils'. In fact, every single one of the allegedly rational will kowtow to the religion of our age as soon as these topics are brought up.
Should I consider your or myself a different species from the rest? Just ride my individualist ego to the heavens rather than assume that I just fell for a different religion?
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Need to look into sending the kids to catholic (or other reasonable religious) school, especially in these hyper-woke areas.
If you are worried about "pedophile/groomer men", you might want to think twice about a system which is run by men who voluntarily opted out of the church-sanctioned way to have sex.
HughCaulk
2mo ago
These people are sick. Teaching kindergarteners about sexual fetishes will never be ok, whether it’s gay or straight. Unfortunately there are a lot of very intelligent pedophile/groomer men, who’ve successfully convinced suburban white women that it’s a moral imperative to ram this down children’s throats, and steamroll the wishes of parents.
Need to look into sending the kids to catholic (or other reasonable religious) school, especially in these hyper-woke areas.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2mo ago
Not understanding something doesn't make it bad.
Never said anything is bad on the ground that I don't understand it.
Racists otherize non-whites. Transphobes otherize trans people. You assert that trans people "can't" access sex segregated areas. Just like a racist asserted black people can't access race segregated areas. History tells us how that story ends.
Two problems. First, since you like arguments in this form, that's exactly what a pedophile acceptance activist would say: "You assert that pedophiles can't enter into relationships with children. Just like a homophobe asserted that gay people can't enter into relationships with people of their own sex. History tells us how that story ends".
The other problem is that you were just telling me a moment ago, that the story apparently ends with the nearly immediate reinstatement of race segregated spaces, so the argument that there's some broad historical tendency to abolish segregation is clearly false on your own terms.
I'm arguing from the perspective of the totality of institutional power, the direction of media and propaganda, the whole modern western canon as it exists living and breathing today. From that perspective you are wrong. You are against morality, rationality and reason. Just like the previous villains of history.
Well, I'm not interested in talking to your interpretation of institutional power, I'm interested in talking to you. If you don't think there's anything irrational or immoral about that perspective, then stop phrasing it as a disembodied factual statement. Secondly, I already addressed this, the progressive narrative that everything always goes their way is a religious belief, not a rational one, maintained by retconning history to pretend every won cause was their idea, and every lost cause was somebody else's or never happened to begin with.
anti_dan
2mo ago
Basically every state that I know of has statutory holding periods for crimes that the officer merely has probable cause on, but not enough evidence to charge yet. 48 hrs is very standard for this time period. By way of example, imagine you are drinking in a bar and are hammered, a car driven by another guy who is also drunk off his ass speeds into a red light right in front of you, T-Boning a car and killing all 4 occupants. The driver of this car flees his vehicle and tosses you the keys. You are too drunk to know what is going on and start walking home with them. Police arrest you a few blocks away, you being the drunk guy with the keys.
Of course you are going to be held even though you are innocent. The police dont know you are innocent yet, and you are a very good suspect. This is why most states have a 48 hr charging clock. Some have longer, but few as far as I know. Solving crime takes time. Fleeing the cops when you know you are a suspect does not.
Oddly, in this case, the police UNSOLVED a crime, despite an admission from defendant in 48 hours. That is crazy good police work! Imagine if a pedophile admitted to raping a child in a taped interview and police, on their own accord, went out and grabbed surveillance video from a hospital showing he was not at the rape location. Unheard of.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
but I swear to god if I see one more twitter account with a greek statue profile picture complaining about how degenerate the modern world is, with its homos and pedophiles, I'm going to have an aneurysm.
Worth remembering that some or all of those kinds of posters are secretly women (allegedly).
Perhaps the next rich, famous man will update his priors accordingly:
“What’s the reaction from women for dating a fresh, childless young woman in her late teens or twenties?”
“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a groomer pedophile who’s exploiting power dynamics and taking advantage of someone whose brain hasn’t even developed yet because you can’t handle a woman your own age.”
“What’s the reaction from women for marrying a middle-aged divorced woman who’s already been around the block and had her fun?”
“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a trashy, shallow, classless bimbo-fetishist who’s too insecure to handle an intellectual woman.”
“Well then…”
A driver of the hate is that she presents as younger than she is, possibly passing as a thotmaxxing woman in her mid-to-late 40s and maybe even pre-menopausal (at least from afar). Thus, she isn’t decrepit-looking enough and is younger-looking than Bezos “deserves.” If she looks like she still might have eggs, she’s too young for the seggs.
I suppose, in general, progressive hate is likely to result whenever, wherever there’s a successful white man enjoying himself—from other tech bosses like Zuckerberg and Musk (including pre-Trump associations) to athletes like Kelce and Bauer. Modern progressivism: The haunting fear that some white man, somewhere, might be happy without benefiting women, racial and sexual minorities.
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