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Showing 25 of 592 results for

pedophile

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

Some of those emails are clearly a code for something. Weird shit along the lines of "but we only have one slice of cheese pizza available, will that be enough for everyone tonight?" They aren't talking about a literal slice of pizza. But why document some sort of conspiracy or presumably criminal acts by email using jivey coded language?

I don't think they would have any need to to order coke by email. I also doubt they are Satan worshipping pedophiles. I don't get it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

I work at a university, and not a particularly liberal one. I’ve heard multiple students not just describe that exact age gap as “creepy,” but also casually comment that the man is probably a pedophile.

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

I think this kind of thinking is coming at it the wrong way - start with something you think might be related to a pedophile child slavery ring and imagine how it could possibly work

For the record, I don't think this is a pedophilic operation and I agree with you that they probably wouldn't do things this way - I just assumed the pedophile ring was real for the purposes of the discussion. That said...

They seem to have mostly decided that trying to sell fake products on online services is more trouble than it's worth when it comes to moving highly illegal products and laundering the resulting money.

There have actually been several cases of this happening where I'm from. They've been selling fake products on UberEats for a while and there have been multiple busts - check out this story for one example, but it is far from the only one: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/uber-eats-driver-s-one-star-review-for-refusing-to-deliver-crystal-meth-20230430-p5d4dd.html

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

My last paragraph basically covers that. But to elaborate, I think this kind of thinking is coming at it the wrong way - start with something you think might be related to a pedophile child slavery ring and imagine how it could possibly work. I think the right way is the other way around - you already have a pedophile child slavery ring, complete with kidnapped kids, vetted customers, safe delivery mechanisms, etc. With all that already in place, why would you choose to handle your finances in this way versus all the other options available to you? Why advertise with pictures of kids and cheese pizza instead of something completely boring and unrelated? Why aren't there 200 better ways to arrange this than to make suspicious posts on Etsy?

I don't know if actual child slavery rings exist, but drug dealing rings definitely do. They seem to have mostly decided that trying to sell fake products on online services is more trouble than it's worth when it comes to moving highly illegal products and laundering the resulting money. If "fake art" is going to be your jam, better to arrange a private, appointment-only gallery, which is still a pretty legitimate-looking thing but doesn't involve potentially tens of thousands of strangers checking out your product, screenshots getting posted to Twitter, all the critical data on servers of third-parties that will hand it over to the FBI on demand, etc.

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

Presuming some operation along those lines is actually taking place, what's the point of posting an ad for such a thing, however disguised, on any public site? Surely you wouldn't dare make a delivery of such a thing, however that actually works, to just any random internet buyer.

This problem is actually extremely easy to fix. Assuming there is a pedophile ring running here, they're not going to be willing to take on new clients without extensive vetting and trust procedures. The way an arrangement like this would actually work is that the seller would maintain a whitelist of clients - and so if someone off the list makes an order, they get a 3000 dollar jpg. If someone on the list makes an order, they get what they were actually paying for.

The point of putting these things on public sites like Etsy is to provide a legitimate excuse for both income and outgoing expenditures as well as sales infrastructure. "Digital art" with a receipt from Etsy is a lot easier to explain to an accountant than a 3000 dollar cheese pizza or 5000 dollar hotdog that you've flown in from Chicago for some reason.

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

Thank you for the explanation. I suppose the issue with pedophiles is that they constantly need to get new recruits.

I feel like some of the 'harm' arguments could be leveled against MSM as well, but that's a different problem I suppose.

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

I think we're in agreement. You don't think that one can say that slavery, torture, pedophilia, etc. is wrong with any normative effect.1 Most other people disagree, which is why they then go on to explain why they think that one can indeed say that these things are wrong, in a normative sense, rather than simply resting on their personal vibes.

1 - This leaves you in the unfortunate position that when you want to say that a pedophile shouldn't be allowed to diddle kids, you can pretty much only say, "I don't like it," without any rejoinder available to their response of, "So what? I do."

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

Consider some reasons age might be categorically different from race:

Race is not the elephant in the room, it's sex.

Children grow from young to old, but not from white to black. Judging based on the latter is less moral.

My point is that if schools, judges and the public can collectively go against parents for decisions their children take, why not regarding dating pedophiles. If boys can become women I don't see why white boys couldn't become black men if they so desired, or if Michael Jackson suddenly decided to identify as 'white', what the issue would be?

We already restrict the rights of children to engage in commerce and move freely. Imposing on another adult right is therefore acceptable.

Less and less in the area of sex change. There are progressives right now arguing that it's not parents' business if the kids want to see doctors and therapists, buy and take hormones, live in a safespace LGBT shelter etc...

Moral law, if one subscribes to any of the systems which proscribe pedophilia.

Which is my question, on which moral basis would a progressive proscribe the sexualization of children and pedophilia?

Without exception, adults were once children, but the reverse is not true, so there cannot be equality between adults and children.

What is the relevance in this case? Also progressives want us to believe that FTM transpeople are just as women as women that were ever only girls and women.

The ever-popular power differential, which violates a consent-based ethics very popular among liberals.

Then why is it okay for teachers and school administrators to tell kids that they can become girls/boys if they so wish? Isn't there a power differential there?

It’s gross. You may not believe it, but your enemies are also capable of a disgust reflex.

That was not a valid argument to prevent the legalization and acceptance of LGBT issues.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

A frequent contrast is drawn between the Hyper-Athlete QB (Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen) who combines arm strength, running speed, strength, creativity to make crazy plays out of structure; and the System QB (Kirk Cousins, Brock Purdy), a savvy game manager who follows the playbook... Just as Josh Allen puts himself in terrible positions then pulls a rabbit out of his hat because he's such an outlier athlete, the smart guy will put himself in a position where he needs to process a lot because he ignores the rules

Very bold of you to assume these quarterback analogies will make any sense to anyone on The Motte. Consider rewriting using HPMOR characters.

I think what's going on here with the trope of an "idealistic, trusting, gullible" simpleton and your knuckleheaded distrustful simpleton is that he's the same man, before and after getting taken for a ride. Real stupid people are not like Lennie, jumping into water when you tell them to, then forgetting about it, and being glad you saved them from drowning. There is a switch from total trust to total distrust. The boomercon who had a child's faith in US foreign policy in 2003 believes the US government is populated by satanist pedophiles in 2023.

The reason old fiction has so many trusting yokels that we don't see IRL anymore is that the world changed. The simpleton gets scammed early and often in the modern world, and updates his heuristic accordingly.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

Discovering Arthur C. Clarke was (probably) a pedophile was a big one for me.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

I would suspect the same about pedophilia, though this is such a strong taboo topic, that there is probably not enough data to investigate the question reliably. Anecdotally however, there are well documented brilliant pedophiles, for example, you can take a look into interesting story of Nobel recipient, Daniel Gajdusek on wikipedia.

He was one of the pioneers in the field of prion diseases, and he in fact did a lot to explain the transmission mechanism of kuru disease, but his sexual motivation and his scientific life are intertwined in an incredible way.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

I mainly had gay men in mind when I wrote my comment, but I left it open-ended because I am also curious about lesbians, bisexuals of both genders, transgender people, and so on. Also, for that matter, kinks. Are some kinks more highly correlated with intelligence than others? As I write the previous, I am aware that the difference between a sexual orientation and a kink is not well-defined.

It is a bit distasteful, but I guess that I should also mention pedophiles. My intuition is that the average pedophile is less intelligent on average than the average person, but it's possible that it only seems that way because most of the brilliant pedophiles are just really good at keeping their pedophilia secret.

In general, I am just curious about all possible ways in which sexual orientations, kinks, and interests are correlated with intelligence.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

The progressive movement adopting the term is merely the inevitable progression to it too losing its distinction.

Since when have Progressives ever been about "losing its distinction" across sex groups? Really, the fact they even feel the need to launder the term actually says quite a bit; they didn't need to do that for any other sexual fargroup, but they aren't just going full speed ahead with the language they already have. I think that says a great deal about their confidence/seriousness about the matter.

If the Progressives succeed in making this term lose its distinction it'll only be an incidental qualifier for their standing policies of "if you pass a paper bag test you are permitted to rape children" and "[fargroup] sex is good -> children can be [fargroup]-> [fargroup] sex involving children is good", thus the term "MAP" is designed to solidify gains in this area by adding yet another thing over which to cry discrimination should one want to criticize those policies.

asserting that such confusion does not exist with the term pedophile, that such nuance is unnecessary

"Abuse of unearned and generally-inescapable social authority to (implicitly, explicitly, or by force) demand normally-unwanted sexual activity from people that don't otherwise want to give it" is common to both terms- the first by popular definition, the second from the fact it's explicitly designed to promote the ability of favored groups to do this (or "comes from academia" for short).

Neither are particularly prosocial positions.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

Consider two groups. Group 1 consists of convicted child molesters who report attraction to kids. Group 2 consists of people who aren't known to have had any sexual contact with kids and report attraction to kids. If an academic studies Group 2 and uses the technically correct term pedophile, people--particularly non-technical people--will assume they are referring to Group 1 because the term has lost its nuance and studies based on Group 1 are far more common for various reasons. Thus minor attracted person was coined to convey that lost nuance. By "pulled out of someone's butt with zero basis in reality", are you asserting that such confusion does not exist with the term pedophile, that such nuance is unnecessary, or something else?

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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.

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

I didn't say "niche player", I said "good portion". The claim is that a large number/plurality of anti-GG progressives defended Nyberg, I want to see proof of that.

Secondly, Leigh's tweets, as linked in the top comment, don't even break a 100 likes. The one where she explicitly promoted Nyberg's medium article has 30 likes and 2 quote tweets, with the top response (at least on my end) is someone explicitly referring to Nyberg as a pedophile!

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

I don't think the GG side was claiming to be evil and stupid?

There is a difference between believing you are good, but arguing that you have better policies and such, versus arguing that your side deserves to own a space because your side consists of a better kind of person. The anti-GG side went all in on arguing that the GG side consisted of horrible white male neckbeards who harass people and who should be kicked out of gaming for that reason, while they themselves were inclusive lovely people.

At the point where they argued that they were better than the GG people, it seems perfectly valid to point out when prominent members are, or defend abusers, pedophiles and other horrid people.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

I mean, yeah, I think the heart of the GG movement was trolls trying to harass and victimize women in retaliation for entering their cultural spaces, but my impression is that everyone on the other side vehemently denies that and claims that GG was a lofty movement rooting out corruption and tearing down the lies and abuses of the SJWs.

It's a matter of degree. My perception from being in these spaces at the time that it happened is that GG believed on the balance that they were more correct than the antis, but they were more than well aware that there was a good amount of shit-flinging happening on all sides, and often tried to actively police their own communities in order to weed out that behaviour. Like users of KotakuInAction early on creating "Gamergate harassment patrols" and even Kotaku crediting Gamergate with tracking down someone who was sending threats to Sarkeesian.

There's also the fact that none of the criminal harassment was ever tied to Gamergate. I was in KotakuInAction when the whole thing was going on, and didn't see harassment being celebrated. In addition, the Gamergate surveys basically showed GG to have strongly left wing demographics, so that's some data which should be considered when you're evaluating them.

I will say I hardly ever saw any such caution on the anti side, who seemed to be impressively secure in the belief of their superior morality to the point where they seemed to believe they were just better people who could never be on the “wrong side of history” - in part, I think, because they were offered legitimacy by the mainstream in a way GG was not. I did, however, have an anti private message me to fling racial slurs at me (so much for being against harassment). So you might forgive me if my perception of this whole thing is very different from yours.

There's an angle from which defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption is not different from defending a saint against false charges of corruption. If the charges are false and you are restricting your defense to those charges, someone should be there to stand up for the truth and the integrity of the system that produces and considers those charges.

Of course, anonymous internet flame wars with millions of participants are never that clean. Obviously even if 99% of anti-gg people carefully restrict their defense to the charges of 'corruption in games journalism' alone, that's still 100,000 of the stupidest 1% producing memeable screenshots defending them against the pedo charges or saying they're a great person or whatever else.

The case in question here is not "defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption", but defending a pedophile against verifiable charges of pedophilia. The claims that were being made against Sarah Nyberg in this case were not that she was corrupt, it was that she was a pedophile, and as another user here has already noted GamerGhazi, at the time, basically censored info on their subreddit that might suggest that she was. The defence against her pedophilia was at least widespread enough for the largest anti-GG subreddit to actively police the dissemination of information about it.

I mean, if you can find me something like the mods of KotakuInAction moderating KiA to be an active hub for harassment or something in a similar vein, I will concede the point that yes, "both sides". But I have my doubts.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

I don't think the GG side was claiming to be evil and stupid?

Almost everyone is claiming moral and intellectual superiority almost always, those are the two main reasons people claim to be on any side of any argument. I would think?

I mean, yeah, I think the heart of the GG movement was trolls trying to harass and victimize women in retaliation for entering their cultural spaces, but my impression is that everyone on the other side vehemently denies that and claims that GG was a lofty movement rooting out corruption and tearing down the lies and abuses of the SJWs.

And the same for the anti-gg side, they claim themselves to be lofty defenders of etc etc blah blah and the other side calls them sjw snowflakes cancel culture etc etc blah blah.

There was a popular media narrative that proclaimed one side the good guys, sure; but both sides were claiming to be the good guys in their own rhetoric.

Also, on another note: We applaud the old-school ACLU for protecting the rights of Nazis to hold parades because we recognize that they were fully committed to defending one specific ideal, an ideal that was incredibly important to have someone protecting, and they didn't cares who's 'side' this put them on along any other axis. We decried them more recently abandoning this purity of ideology and considering other factors in their allegiances.

There's an angle from which defending a pedophile against false charges of corruption is not different from defending a saint against false charges of corruption. If the charges are false and you are restricting your defense to those charges, someone should be there to stand up for the truth and the integrity of the system that produces and considers those charges.

Of course, anonymous internet flame wars with millions of participants are never that clean. Obviously even if 99% of anti-gg people carefully restrict their defense to the charges of 'corruption in games journalism' alone, that's still 100,000 of the stupidest 1% producing memeable screenshots defending them against the pedo charges or saying they're a great person or whatever else.

Just like there are 100,000 screenshots of the vilest 1% of the gg side making rape threats and posting pictures of women's houses and etc. etc.

Whether a side can be fairly judged by screenshots of its worst members is an eternal question in these types of debates, and a surprisingly complex one once you get into the weeds on it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

I concur, but this sounds to me like an attempt to ensure Nyberg isn't allowed to escape the instinctive feelings associated with male pedophiles.

In an extremely literal reading of this statement, it's trivially true: Nyberg is a male (i.e. biologically sexed male) paedophile, and it is appropriate to treat Nyberg the same way any other member of that group would be treated owing to their membership within.

I'm not really talking about "feelings" so much as risk calculus. All other things being equal, parents are right to be more distrustful of a male stranger than a female, both in terms of probability (how likely is a male stranger to sexually assault my child compared to a female stranger?) and impact (in the event that a male stranger sexually assaults my child, how much harm can they do to them/are they likely to do to them?). It would be profoundly unwise for a parent to leave their children alone with any self-declared paedophile regardless of sex, but it's a simple factual assertion that male paedophiles are more likely to act on their urges than female, and can cause far more harm (quantitatively and qualitatively) than female paedophiles. No child in human history has been impregnated by a female paedophile, and the number of children who have contracted sexually transmitted infections as a result of being abused by female paedophiles must be vanishingly small, if not literally zero. Even though female paedophiles are just as capable of severely injuring or killing prepubescent children as are male paedophiles, I feel extremely confident in asserting that the number of children severely injured or killed as a result of being assaulted by a female paedophile is a fraction of the equivalent number for male paedophiles. In some kind of weird trolley problem situation in which a parent is forced to leave their pubescent female child alone with one of two paedophiles, and the only thing the parent knew about the paedophiles in question is that one is male and the other is female, leaving the child with the female paedophile would be the rational choice.

If I knew for a fact that Nyberg had undergone gender reassignment surgery and no longer had a functioning penis and testicles, I think it would be appropriate to treat Nyberg with the same contempt and wariness afforded female paedophiles (which is still a distinctly lower amount of contempt and wariness than that afforded to male) - being bereft of male reproductive organs significantly (but not entirely) changes the risk calculus. If Nyberg has not undergone gender reassignment surgery, then the risk calculus for Nyberg is the same as for any other male paedophile, and Nyberg's declared gender identity is an irrelevant fact about her which doesn't factor into the risk calculus at all (any more than Nyberg's taste in music or preference for strawberries over blueberries would). If someone presented me with very strong evidence that the offending patterns for trans women were more similar to cis women than cis men, that might persuade me to adjust my risk calculus regardless of whether Nyberg had medically transitioned or not - however, all evidence I've seen to date has demonstrated the opposite, that trans people commit criminal offenses at the rate we would expect based on their natal sex.

otherwise I'm going to assume you don't think people's feelings should decide how pedos of either sex are treated.

I'm not really sure what this means. Treated by whom? By the state? By the courts?

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

but there's still a vast qualitative difference between that scenario and the scenario in which an adult male physically overpowers a small girl, penetrates her with his penis, infects her with an STD and possibly impregnates her.

I concur, but this sounds to me like an attempt to ensure Nyberg isn't allowed to escape the instinctive feelings associated with male pedophiles. Which is a goal you have to actually declare, otherwise I'm going to assume you don't think people's feelings should decide how pedos of either sex are treated.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

pro-pronoun people would consider it serious regardless of the pedophile's sex

Maybe so, but when the average person hears "Sarah is a paedophile - she has openly admitted to a sexual interest in children", they make a number of reasonable assumptions:

  1. It is impossible for Sarah to penetrate a child with a sexual organ.
  2. It is impossible for Sarah to impregnate a pubescent child.
  3. It is effectively impossible for Sarah to transmit a sexually transmitted infection to a child.
  4. While Sarah will be able to physically overpower a prepubescent child or a pubescent female, she will have a much harder time physically overpowering a pubescent male.

These assumptions are true of female paedophiles. These assumptions may not be (likely are not) true of Sarah Nyberg.

Until the average person has fully internalised the idea that the pronouns a given person uses are wholly uncorrelated with their sex, affirming Nyberg's transgender identity carries with it the unavoidable side effect of downplaying the risk Nyberg poses to young children in the mind of the average listener. It's undeniably true that an adult female molesting a small girl is bound to be deeply distressing for the victim, but there's still a vast qualitative difference between that scenario and the scenario in which an adult male physically overpowers a small girl, penetrates her with his penis, infects her with an STD and possibly impregnates her.

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

Using female pronouns for a male paedophile rhetorically downplays the seriousness of the situation.

I don't agree. I think that at least nominally, pro-pronoun people would consider it serious regardless of the pedophile's sex. Obviously, there are the usual caveats (humans can think one thing and feel another, etc.).

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

Pedophilia/sexual interest in children (single strongest predictor)

Any paraphilia, eg exhibitionism, crossdressing (almost as strong a predictor)

Lifestyle instability, eg rule violations, poor employment history, and reckless, impulsive behavior

Prior sexual offenses

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.