pedophile
Nyberg appears to be some small-time individual who got 15 minutes of fame and has moved on to doing whatever she does now. Her twitter feed is mostly about plugging her own stream/Patreon, quote-tweeting some lesbian novel bot, and talking about trans politics from a clearly pro-trans perspective (and I mean in the normie online progressive way).
I definitely agree that at the moment she's not someone with a huge amount of cultural reach (she did have more during Gamergate), I posted this more because it's probably the most stark illustration of just how unprincipled a good amount of the progressives engaging in that specific culture war were.
But it's worth considering that when you search up Nyberg on Google, you get her twitter, a LinkedIn profile, and then a Medium piece which clearly comes down on the side that Sarah is an actual pedophile. DuckDuckGo straight up links to the "Why you shouldn't stand with Sarah Nyberg" piece at number 1.
Interesting, it doesn't show up like that for me on Google. The very first result is Intelligencer, which links to this article speaking with a good amount of mirth about Sarah Nyberg's Twitter bot that exists to troll the "alt-right" online. The second result is to her Twitter. Further down, articles about the whole debacle do show up, and I will concede that the information about Nyberg being a pedophile is on the internet and can be found - but only as long as you know about Sarah Nyberg in the first place, and almost always from non-mainstream sources.
My comment at the end of the post was more to do with the fact that any memory of her 15 minutes of fame (and how she was defended by the progressive camp) doesn't really exist much on the internet. When you search up "Gamergate" you often get long lists of what the mainstream perceives that Gamergate did wrong, and meanwhile things that the anti side did that's objectionable - even something as objectionable as this - has been mostly scrubbed from the general discourse around the topic. I've seen people in real life that know absolutely nothing about it, and essentially just parrot stock anti-GG talking points from videos and articles they've found around, and often they are surprised when I tell them these things. Hell, my dad at one point read something about the topic and I had to disabuse him of certain notions about how it all actually played out.
It's not impossible to find sources that are congenial to Gamergate, but they're a definite minority, and represent the parts of the internet that are frequented almost exclusively by the terminally online.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Nyberg appears to be some small-time individual who got 15 minutes of fame and has moved on to doing whatever she does now. Her twitter feed is mostly about plugging her own stream/Patreon, quote-tweeting some lesbian novel bot, and talking about trans politics from a clearly pro-trans perspective (and I mean in the normie online progressive way). Of this, most tweets don't even seem to break a hundred likes.
In fact, this whole damn thing seems fairly confined to people whose only power is on the niche pieces of the internet they occupy. The most egregious is arguably RationalWiki, but that site isn't some powerhouse or progressive mainstay. David Gerard's power on that site might be vast, but it's fundamentally limited.
"This story is small-time" wouldn't be a problem necessarily, even a murder in a small town matters. But it's worth considering that when you search up Nyberg on Google, you get her twitter, a LinkedIn profile, and then a Medium piece which clearly comes down on the side that Sarah is an actual pedophile. DuckDuckGo straight up links to the "Why you shouldn't stand with Sarah Nyberg" piece at number 1.
So I don't really think it's obvious that Nyberg and the anti-GamerGaters got what they want. The anti-Nyberg pieces are still up and coming up in top results.
When Progressives Defend Pedophiles: The Curious Case of Sarah Nyberg
In my previous thread about Gamergate where I challenged a speech Ian Danskin made on the topic for UC Merced, I said it would probably be the last thing I would write about the incident for a long while, and this is certainly flouting that.
But this writeup is not about the core issues of Gamergate. Rather, it's to highlight an egregious instance of misconduct from the progressive camp that is far too damning not to write about. It's definitely old news now, but sometimes this stuff needs to be dusted off so it won't languish in some archived page in the asshole of the internet where progressives would undoubtedly rather have it stay.
So who is Sarah Nyberg?
Sarah Nyberg (srhbutts on Twitter) is a trans woman who became a prominent anti-Gamergate figure through constant attacks on Gamergaters on various forums and articles. Included among the things she's participated in is repeatedly dragging 8chan through the dirt over accusations of child porn and for being an "active pedophile network".
However, just 6-10 years before her involvement in anti-GG, Nyberg herself was an open pedophile who actively defended pedophilia, posted borderline CP on the forums of FFShrine (a site she ran), and also actively lusted after her 8 year old cousin, whom she called her little girlfriend (often abbreviated to "lgf"). This hugely came out in the mainstream when a series of videos was made about her by TheLeoPirate, and culminated in an article being made on Breitbart about her... leanings.
The original "slam dunk" evidence against Nyberg came from a series of WebCite archive pages, which came directly from FFShrine. Unfortunately, they can no longer be accessed - there is a reason for this, but I'll address that later. For now, just keep in mind that the primary trove of evidence that was initially used to indict Nyberg is currently missing, but they are online in various forms, in screenshots, videos and so on. Regardless, one can start building an extremely strong case for her pedophilia - and can do so even without the benefit of these sources.
The first part involves proving that the "Sarah" on FFShrine was in fact Sarah Nyberg, and that's a trivial task, since FFShrine was outright registered under her name. In addition, here she is on her main Twitter account, openly admitting to it being her site.
GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over.
Oops.
In addition, Sarah has had more accounts under different names. The email her site was registered under was called retrogradesnowcone.gmail. com, and you can see a user called retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums admitting they run FFShrine. And just to properly cement that retrogradesnowcone is Sarah, here is Sarah on Twitter approvingly posting a Ravishly article with her face in it with the caption "my face is out in the open", and here is a Hotornot profile called retrogradesnowcone with the very same photo of Sarah's face in it. Sarah also shares her pictures under her handle retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums here.
In short, srhbutts on Twitter, Sarah on FFShrine, and retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums are all the same person: Sarah Nyberg.
To begin, let's look at the logs on FFShrine. While the WebCite pages directly archiving the chat logs from FFShrine are not directly accessible anymore, there are images on the internet, taken from there, which are still up. One can also confirm that these WebCite archives contained in that pastebin page were directly archived from 2005 FFShrine logs when combing archive.is for archives of the WebCite pages.
Among the images of the WebCite logs floating around, there are a few which are quite incriminating. Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat". Here, Nyberg says again "Dana is my cousin that I miss very much <3" and notes she doesn't know what to tell her cousin's parents to make it not seem weird. Then states she wants to kiss her, although don't worry, she wouldn't unless her cousin wants to learn how to kiss or something. Here, Nyberg confirms that Dana is 8 years old and here, Nyberg admits Dana gives her erections.
In addition to this, a former user of FFShrine, Roph, also uploaded further leaks of FFShrine IRC chats to his own website, slyph. org. Although slyph. org is no longer working, you can download the zip files of these IRC logs once uploaded there at archive links such as this one (warning, the logs will auto-download). Things get even worse here, and here are some of the more incriminating sections of the logs:
In file 2006-12-29.035011.html, Sarah posts a bunch of links to photos on 12chan and asks "how old are they", along with one she calls "cute ^T^". The response from a user called thetruetidus is "below 10 - Sarah ???"
In file 2006-12-30.101829.html, she posts links to online organisations for "girllovers and boylovers", then again posts a bunch of links to photos. Then subsequently says this:
(18:55:54) Sarah: yea i no
(18:55:56) Sarah: there' sa nipple
(18:55:59) Sarah: alert alpott
In file 2006-12-31.015010.html, she posts yet another set of links to photos on 12chan (which, by the way, makes her denunciation of 8chan incredibly hypocritical), then says when linking one of them:
(11:18:27) Sarah: [LINK CENSORED] she looks drugged :(
The response from other users is as such:
(11:19:43) LiquidCruelty: The one where she looks drugged
(11:19:44) Sarah: LiquidCruelty
(11:19:45) LiquidCruelty: that's CP
(11:19:51) LiquidCruelty: I can see underage twat
(11:19:52) ivorynight: ya
(11:19:54) ivorynight: i see some vagin
Sarah's response is to say that "nudity isn't CP, also I can't see anything", and in response LiquidCruelty and ivorynight state "Oh bullcrap" and "well take some vitamins and try harder, I know you went over this with a magnifying glass". In another section from the same file, Sarah states she's 6 on the inside but admits "I just turned 21".
To further confirm the veracity of the logs, there was a period of time where the latest IRC chat lines from FFShrine were embedded on her video game music download site Galbadia Hotel, archive pages of which Roph posted on KotakuInAction. Let's see some of these chat logs (which are direct archives of the page, by the way):
On 2006-01-29, Sarah states "thank heaven for little girls" and expresses concern over the fact she "only sees her lgf a few times a year". When asked when she's seeing her again, she responds "at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I'd tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly !" On 2006-03-05, Roph asks her "so who is dana? =o". She responds: "dana's my lgf ^________^ - little girl friend !" It's notable how well the content of the logs embedded here match up with the ones previously mentioned, and the fact that she continuously tries to get close to Dana just to get herself off in secret without informing anyone of what's happening is frankly quite unsettling (and that's not even addressing the posted pictures of children). And just to confirm that the Roph who owned slyph. org and posted the IRC chat logs is indeed the same Roph in the FFShrine IRC chat, here's him linking to slyph. org in the Galbadia Hotel IRC chat lines.
In addition to the evidence from FFShrine and all the related sites, there's also her postings on the Venus Envy Comic forums under the handle retrogradesnowcone. In this thread in the Venus Envy Comic forums on 2006-01-14, Nyberg openly admits "for the record: yes, I am a pedophile. no, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. no, I don't-- I wouldn't ever-- have sex with children. no, I don't look at child porn." Just remember, this is someone who later in the year went on to say "nudity isn't cp" on FFShrine and decided it was perfectly acceptable to post photos of a potentially drugged kid on internet forums - photos which users went on to identify as having "underage twat".
A user named DJ Izumi, in that thread, goes on to post chat logs from elsewhere where Nyberg, again under her retrogradesnowcone handle, talks about her "lgf" and says an array of other questionable things. Such as:
Quote:
[01:20] [LINK CENSORED] > nambla ;-;;
Quote:
[01:27] that site I tried to show you? it's a site for lesbian pedophiles. jftr
Quote:
[01:57] ;-;; this is making me miss my lgf
[01:57] lgf?
[01:57] little girl friend.
Quote:
[03:08] I don't think it's right to do sexual things with a child, not because a child can't consent, but because in the context of society it can really @#%$ them up. in a more sex-positive society I don't think it'd be a problem
Quote:
[03:11] I'm attracted to (usually) about 6 to 12. been attracted to as low as 4 but that's atypical
If further evidence is still required, I'd also note that Nyberg was known as a pedophile as early as 2007, long before Gamergate was a thing. As user ItsGotSugar writes about FFShrine in October of 2007: "Another character [on FFShrine] was Sarah, an administrator who was allegedly a pedophile. (Don't ask me whether "she" was really a girll; it was hard to tell.) I think Sarah had been expressing an unhealthy fixation on children from the very beginning, and I could only hope it was all some disgusting in-joke that had gone on for too long." Similarly, in 2010, 4 years before Gamergate existed, user BasilFSM notes that "You know what the worst thing about this Sarah is? She/He's a known pedophile. That's deplorable in itself."
Furthermore, in this interview with Milo there's this accusation by an anon called "M" accusing Sarah of initiating inappropriate roleplay with her, despite knowing that she was underage, and she would say things like "mommy tickle me where it's wet". And later on in the interview M states that her claims were ignored on Twitter. Keep in mind, this is an unsubstantiated allegation, but it is an unsubstantiated allegation that aligns with what we do know about Sarah. While this alone is not something that the argument of Sarah's inappropriate behaviour can rest on, the contents of all these disparate pieces of evidence align so well with each other that it's honestly quite implausible that all of this has somehow been faked by Gamergate (a common accusation by anti-GGs looking to defend her).
Nyberg herself on Twitter and elsewhere has also made statements that often basically are tantamount to an admission that these logs are hers. Apart from the open admission by srhbutts that "GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over", there's this Twitter thread wherein she tries to defend herself with this response: "View the unedited logs. Everyone behaved in similar ways".
Eventually, Nyberg writes a medium article responding to the whole thing where she never concretely refutes the claims against her, never even claims the evidence against her has been faked, but defends herself by stating that she was "just being an edgelord". She states "Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. Since then, I’ve learned that intent isn’t magic, and a playground of the taboo isn’t particularly conducive to moral growth. That I’ve grown past the person I was back then is something I am deeply and forever thankful for." She tries to paint it as regrettable teenage edgelord behaviour (she was 21) that she's grown out of, paints the people accusing her of being a pedophile as acting in bad faith, and casts herself as a victim of Gamergate harassment.
So even Nyberg cops to these logs being hers. And it's noticeable how her response to this is the anti-GG version of The Toxic Gossip Train. Even a good portion of the comments on her medium article are incredibly disgusted with how she treats the whole thing, with one stating "I’m sorry but I don’t think you get to just wash your hands of it and claim edgelord status. From the looks of it you were pretty deep into the role. Vieweing, discussing, and distributing child porn. That’s not edgelord that’s criminal." Another states "Pedophilia is a serious accusation. The evidence against you is disturbingly accurate. Your sob story won’t help you." In the same fashion as Miss Ukelele, the point of this post is not to issue an apology, she's essentially trying to trivialise her acts, claim victimhood and scold people into shutting up about her behaviour. It is true that "teenage edgelords" claim extreme views all the time, and sometimes objectionable ones. But what Nyberg did clearly falls far beyond that.
Yet in the light of Nyberg's medium article, the progressive crowd immediately comes out celebrating her and calling her stunning and brave. Here's Leigh Alexander's reaction (yes, that Leigh Alexander) as an example:
Definitely read it.
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625
It's amazing how over and over again the women targeted by these nobodies have the grace to make their experience useful to others
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184
anyway remember to please respect and support women in your field always, and do not define them by these experiences others created
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643803653082644480
Writer for Houston Press and Cracked Jeff Rouner had a particularly flabbergasting reaction, which was to send Nyberg a photo of his kid wearing her new hoodie to cheer her up. He would later go on to delete this post.
In contrast, other people who knew her from way back when start picking apart her article. Roph notes "Sarah is right in that ffshrine had “edgelords”. I was one, too. I visited 4chan almost daily, used the current hot memes and phrases, joked about stuff. Shared the funny, hot or shocking meme images. Many people there did. Then why does nobody give a damn about any other user in all those logs (which are absolutely genuine, don’t get me started)? Because none of us were paedophiles. An open, proud, adamant, often very defensive paedophile. Defensive of paedophilia. Often justifying it through various arguments. Attempting to normalise it."
Plasmatorture, a former mod on FFShrine, notes "The amount she talked about it and the great lengths she went to convince everyone that she was a suffering martyr for having these feelings she knew she could never act on (supposedly) made it pretty damn clear she wasn't just trolling. That's like 5+ years of playing the long con. No troll has ever had the patience for that." CoryMartin similarly notes "The members of FFShrine and other communities you and your members mixed with (crankeye, kefkastower) didn’t interpret your ongoing demonstrations and admissions of pedophilia as you being an edgelord: they took it as you being an actual pedophile. It was taken as fact, and you had no issues with people knowing it at the time. I believe I was around 14 then, and it certainly creeped me out. Either you’re incredibly inept at comedy to the point where even people who interacted with you casually on a daily basis thought you were serious, or you’re deliberately lying to cover up something about you that most people would find deeply troubling. I think the latter is far more likely."
Now, all of this would just be hearsay if we didn't have the chat logs, as well as Nyberg's own admissions that she did in fact author these logs. However, with these corroborating pieces of information, they become part of an ever-strengthening case against her. Yet despite this evidence, news articles often gave her the Zoe Quinn treatment, painting her as an Oppressed Victim which Nobody Had Any Reason To Be Angry With, such as this article by The Verge that links to Nyberg's genuinely terrible medium article as the only source on the topic and states that she was "subject to one of the biggest and nastiest organized harassment campaigns of Gamergate".
After the initial video and after Nyberg's sordid internet history came to light, anti-Gamergaters started attempting to damage control to an almost incredible degree. One instance of this was when Randi Harper posted lists of Gamergate supporters on public facebook groups. To be charitable, these people publicly associated with Gamergate, so this doesn't constitute doxxing. To be less charitable, part of her stated reasoning for engaging in this behaviour was to "take the attention away" from her pedophile friend Sarah Nyberg. Other anti-GGs, including currently prominent YouTube voices such as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, were there and openly encouraged this behaviour, with some calling it "noble" of Harper to divert attention away from Nyberg's pedophilic behaviour. All this can be found in Crash Override, the anti-GG chat group Zoe Quinn and others were using to coordinate plans.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:22 AM] Randi Harper: i'm talking to amib in DM.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:29 AM] Randi Harper: all of this is going to take the attention away from sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:32 AM] Dan Olson: and the second biggest #GamerGate Ultras, is fully public.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:37 AM] Randi Harper: i'm going to become GG enemy #1, i'm hoping.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:41 AM] Charloppe: ty for that randi
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] SF: That's really noble of you.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] Charloppe: she needs some peace right now
And:
[04/01/2015, 9:48:38 AM] Athena Hollow: <3
[04/01/2015, 9:48:57 AM] Athena Hollow: They had to fucking SCOUR FOR MONTHS to find the shit on sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:03 AM] Athena Hollow: and got fucking LUCKY on that.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:13 AM] Athena Hollow: fuck them.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:26 AM] Athena Hollow: they joined a goddamn public facebook group. fucking morons.
Notice what Athena Hollow in particular says about this. There's not even a denial of what they found. She only cares that GG got "lucky" by discovering Sarah's pedophilic behaviour and she's angry they could use it as a cudgel against anti-GG in general. This is what an unprincipled tribalist looks like. Imagine being so utterly unscrupulous that you would provide ballast and cover for a pedophile to win internet points against Gamergate.
It gets worse. You know why you can no longer access any of the original WebCite caches that were used to implicate Nyberg? The reason is because of an upstanding citizen called Izzy Galvez, who was another anti-GGer who was also part of Crash Override. In a Twitter thread, he gleefully posted images of him actively working to conceal evidence of Nyberg's pedophilia from the public (archive link here). The images in question demonstrate that he sent emails to WebCite claiming the material was being used for harassment, which resulted in WebCite making the snapshots of her domain unavailable to the public.
Not only did Galvez actively try to conceal information, he also attempted to manufacture misinformation to try and paint the logs as faked. He makes a post on GamerGhazi supposedly providing screenshots that supposedly show that the logs were last edited in 2015, therefore they were were "tampered with by GG" to add pedo material. The screenshots actively redact any identifying information about the site to make it appear that these are from FFShrine, but as this source notes in reality these screenshots came from Roph's backup of the logs in slyph. org, and not actually from the FFshrine website. In other words it "only proves that Roph uploaded files in 2015, NOT that the files were edited in 2015, or that they were created in 2015".
There's plenty of other instances of progressives trying to provide cover and ballast for Nyberg, such as an article by Margaret Pless entitled "5 Reasons Why I Stand with Sarah Nyberg" (which was then fully rebutted by this medium article called "5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg"). But of course, any discussion about Gamergate isn't complete without a discussion of how RationalWiki has covered it.
RationalWiki, as you can imagine, fervently defends Nyberg, courtesy of an obsessive anti-GGer called Ryulong who frequently vandalised the Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on anything even slightly related to Gamergate, and who was even funded by GamerGhazi after he posted his GoFundMe on there and it was stickied by an admin. Because of Ryulong, RationalWiki is hosting two contradictory (and false) defences of Sarah Nyberg: "Timeline of Gamergate" claims that Nyberg was simply "expressing disgust at pedophilic roleplay" (this is completely unsupported by the link they use to back it up). "List of Gamergate claims", on the other hand, tries to state that, okay, "she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses" - a claim that, as you can see by the evidence provided so far, is based on an attempt by Nyberg to misconstrue her own behaviour. A recent (2021) attempt to correct these false claims on RationalWiki by a person called Doris V. Sutherland resulted in the edits being completely reversed by a user called TechPriest, and the argument eventually reached the talk page. Without warning, Doris was then completely banned by the RationalWiki moderators, with the only rationale being "gator sock" - despite the fact that if you read Doris's article she is clearly not in favour of Gamergate.
Doing research on this post made me want to scrub myself with sandpaper, and the fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible. Unfortunately, most of the incriminating information now resides in heterodox news sources at best, now-defunct blogs and sites that have to be reached through archive links at worst, and as a result this information has pretty much disappeared from the eyes of the public. Most "authoritative" sources and large scale collections of information are strictly policed to make sure that reporting is sufficiently congenial to the progressive viewpoint, and the only thing the public ever hears is a skewed view of the entire affair.
This is, in real time, how history gets written. Once all the dissenters disappear for good, all this stuff will be forgotten, and the only thing left will be a bunch of seemingly authoritative articles that will cause people to harbour a distorted view of how the culture war actually played out.
Or, to quote Voltaire (maybe), "to find out who rules over you, ask who you are not allowed to criticize".
It was a neo-nazi convicted pedophile named Kevin Alfred Strom.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
1yr ago
There's nothing in either the tradcon nor the progressive nor the liberal worldview that has any inherent problem with child sex as a concept.
On one end, you have... well, everything before the early 20th century, where the age of consent was somewhere in the single digits (if it even existed at all). This was necessary, because if a family fell on hard times and had some girls, that is what they would be encouraged to do: get married to someone who could actually afford to feed them (no welfare state and the church-run orphanage is a week's ride). Then you have the religious angle, where Christianity has its barely-teenaged Mary expecting a child (something normal enough in those days, though certainly an edge case in more than one way), Mohammed's wife of some single digit age, and the Mormons who, if you go deep enough into Utah or Montana, get busted for doing this every so often. Even as late as the '80s, "marrying one's rapist" was acceptable enough.
Thus, empirically, this concept is compatible with the tradcons.
On the other end, you have the progressives, where the only sex they care about preventing is that which occurs between men and women. Note that all the high-profile examples of "sexualized" children (Desmond, Jazz Jennings) are biologically male, the lack of literature portraying heterosexual (it is rare they involve women in any way, really) child/adult pairings, protecting (and in some early cases, actively facilitating) rapists so long as they're not straight, and so on.
Thus, empirically, this concept is compatible with the progressives.
And then you have the liberals, who are the entire reason we're even having this conversation in the first place and are the first to brag about having had sex-while-child (there was one in this thread already, most of the loose '70s were spent promoting this, and provided you're of a sexuality compatible with the progressive memeplex you're still generally allowed to say "had sex as teenager, 10/10" and have the news media nod along).
So, yeah. Economics and social developments downstream of that enable this taboo (itself a logical extension of the "kids aren't allowed to do literally anything and must be segregated and kept indoors 24/7, because otherwise they'd get seduced by the pedos and end up buried in the woods" trend of the '80s), but beyond that there's as much factual backing for it as there was for taboos like miscegenation and gay sex.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
Assuming that opponents are only “outraged” because they’re frustrated pedophiles is…uncharitable.
No, I'm showing that opponents are specifically outraged because their ability to talk about sexuality with schoolchildren is curtailed.
If I follow your argument, you meander through some sneering at Wikipedia on your way to claim that this “specific term” shouldn’t be applied to kids. Why? Because they could be obsessed with monster trucks or unicorns?
Yes, or they could love guns and playing war. Does that mean teachers should take them aside without notifying the parents and sign them up for General's Buttnaked child soldier army?
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
Hm, what about matching the child with a pedophile?
If this person was someone both the child and thier parents was happy with then yes, that's fine. Now the parents may well object to a pedophile (I would if I was in this poisition) and that is fine, you then look for someone else who's agreeable to all parties.
Note that even in the prostitute case, it's not like the child and parents will have whatever HIV addled prostitute is the first one to show up forced upon them, they have full control over which prostitute they decide to select, same here, they should have full control over which person they are going to choose for the sex, and that includes the right to say no to every single person they are not happy with for whatever reason (same as with consent for any sex).
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
Depends, is the pedophile attractive enough that the kid and parents would say yes? If so, I consider that isomorphic to the initial question.
07mk
1yr ago
Bad idea. This makes the child very miserable while they are alive and causes suffering, which is something we don't want (otherwise why care about human welfare at all for anyone, we're all going to die at one point?). There won't be any lasting trauma experienced but there will be suffering at the time of the rape experienced by the child and this is bad.
Hm, what about matching the child with a pedophile? Perhaps that's just equivalent to the original prostitute case. But I'm thinking, if we could match the child with someone who would willingly do this for free and even get a positive experience out of it for it in itself, rather than someone who have to be bribed with money, this would be even better. Especially since they would be experiencing something which is normally outside their reach; it's like granting 2 make-a-wish-type wishes in one. Assuming we go through all the same approval/consent steps with the child as we would with a prostitute.
"The motte" is a position that's true, but trivial in it's implications. The reason no one engages with them is that it says nothing interesting, and because half the time they're only there as a place to retreat to when your more interesting claims are under attack. You might have meant a "steelman". But is there a steelman to "LGBT advocacy"? The term is so vague it can include anything from promoting tolerance to abolishing cisheteronormative patriarchy or sexual liberation of everyone including children. Which one should he focus on? The first one? Why? We've left tolerance behind long ago, and whatever it is people are fighting for now definitely is not tolerance.
your way to claim that this “specific term” shouldn’t be applied to kids. Why? Because they could be obsessed with monster trucks or unicorns?
It's a bit weird for you to complain about strawmen, and then say something like this in the same post. The claim, the way I understand it, is that it doesn't make sense to apply a term defining sexuality to a pre-sexual child.
The Florida bill bans lots of things, including talking about sex. Assuming that opponents are only “outraged” because they’re frustrated pedophiles is…uncharitable.
The problem here is that even if you think something valuable can be taught by teachers explaining sex to children, the fact that a significant portion of parents supports these laws means they no longer trust the teachers. Anyone effectively saying "you shouldn't be allowed to not trust us" rather than trying to win back trust is going to be suspect.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
I think you’ve constructed a rather vicious strawman.
The Florida bill bans lots of things, including talking about sex. Assuming that opponents are only “outraged” because they’re frustrated pedophiles is…uncharitable.
If I follow your argument, you meander through some sneering at Wikipedia on your way to claim that this “specific term” shouldn’t be applied to kids. Why? Because they could be obsessed with monster trucks or unicorns?
Your caricatures are unrealistic. There is a motte to LGBT advocacy; I would like to see you attack that rather than fishing for disgust reactions.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Just to add another perspective (also I usually align closer with jeroboam than you, but I hope I have displayed enough neutrality in prior conversation with you that you won't consider this solely motivated reasoning): It seemed obvious to me that jeroboam was only saying that the left of yesteryear had some fascination with pedophiles. So your defensive replies looked like denial at best and gaslighting at worst. I understand what you meant now, but that was my initial impression.
jeroboam
1yr ago
But I'll say one more thing, less directed to you than to all of the Mottezians who just loooove to spend all their time all day thinking about how much the left is full of pedophiles who can't wait to start molesting kids:
I don't know man. It seems like you aren't responding to what people are actually posting.
I tried to steelman HP0 talking about how the left of the 1970s did sometimes celebrate pedophilia. But I explicitly said that the modern left does not.
You ignored the modern part, and tried to defend the 1970s left with a "few bad apples" and "both sides" argument that as @PierreMenard has pointed out doesn't bear weight.
Why not just admit that, yeah, some 1970s leftist intellectuals believed it was sophisticated and cool to have sex with teenagers? Unlike Catholic priests or whatever, they weren't flawed sinners who slipped up. They thought what they were doing was a Good Thing. This is a legit difference between the left and the right at the time.
None of this makes HP0 less vile, it doesn't make him right about anything, and it doesn't really have much of an impact on the modern culture war except by insinuation. But the limited point still stands.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
People who want to think the left is full of pedophiles and therefore should be hated for that reason are watering down actual arguments against leftists.
This is not my argument.
My argument was that :
1- major leftist intellectuals of the 70s, during which the infamous Sexual Revolution was proclaimed, were either pedophiles or very close friends with open pedophiles (kid-diddling diary-publishing kind of open pedophiles)
2- these people and their students are still quoted, studied in humanities departments all over the West producing the rank-and-file of the regime, among which some of the people you will (have to) trust your children to
If a guy was showing you his vacation pictures in bed with children in Thailand and then persuasively told you to essentially blow up all existing rules in your society because 'dude Christianity is so oppressive and man parents can't tell you what to do'.
Would you do it?
This is apparently more or less what happened to several Western countries in the 70s.
Eetan
1yr ago
It's not about the pedophilia. It's about the acceptance of pedophilia.
Where you see any "acceptance" of pedophilia?
I am talking about the confused atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s where there was sort of an anything goes atmosphere. Hip people thought it was sort of okay for a 13 year old girl to explore her sexuality with Roman Polanski. Alan Ginsburg was a non-ironic member of NAMBLA and a celebrated member of leftist society. At the time, the left was pushing the sexual frontier in all areas, and children weren't off limits.
Yes, and these people lost as decisively you can lose.
Laws about age of consent, underage sex and child porn are tightened every day, pedophiles are the most hated people in the world, anyone accused of being "pedo" is considered to be devil in human form and treated likewise.
The future is not free love hippy commune where anything goes. The future is "age gap" enshrined in laws and total internet and AI censorship/ban to protect children. If it saves one (pixelated) child, it is worth it!
Goodguy
1yr ago
Well you've successfully defeated the argument that I was not making, thank you for correcting the record.
Yes, but my comment was addressing the arguments being debated in this thread as a whole, not just your particular comment.
Regarding your particular comment, I thought that you were implying that pedophile leftists were the main driving force behind the Sexual Revolution. If I misunderstood that, then my apologies.
jeroboam
1yr ago
There are pedophiles everywhere. You know the arguments: The plural of "anecdote" isn't data. Chinese Robber Fallacy, etc. I hate when people try to say the Right is full of pedophiles because some priests molest kids and some backwoods rednecks are inbred, so I also hate it when people gesture at the left for similar things.
It's not about the pedophilia. It's about the acceptance of pedophilia. Obviously, actual practice of pedophilia is not tied to any particular political orientation.
Furthermore, I am not talking about the modern-left which (drag queen story hour aside) is strongly anti-pedophilia.
I am talking about the confused atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s where there was sort of an anything goes atmosphere. Hip people thought it was sort of okay for a 13 year old girl to explore her sexuality with Roman Polanski. Alan Ginsburg was a non-ironic member of NAMBLA and a celebrated member of leftist society. At the time, the left was pushing the sexual frontier in all areas, and children weren't off limits.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I don't think I could really say much better than what @Goodguy has said in response to you. Go talk to him.
But I'll say one more thing, less directed to you than to all of the Mottezians who just loooove to spend all their time all day thinking about how much the left is full of pedophiles who can't wait to start molesting kids:
Do you know how irritating it is to have to defend a group of people whom you despise, against people who also despise those people but despise them for stupid reasons? People who want to think the left is full of pedophiles and therefore should be hated for that reason are watering down actual arguments against leftists. There's plenty of reasons to be against the left. Your efforts are better spent on those causes, and will do more to hinder leftism than this pedophilia bent.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
My point is that it makes no sense to say that leftism as a whole is suspect because some leftists are pedophiles.
Well you've successfully defeated the argument that I was not making, thank you for correcting the record.
As for the Sexual Revolution specifically, I am sure that you could have removed every single leftist pedophile who existed back then and the Sexual Revolution would still have happened almost entirely the same as it actually happened historically.
Of course if you only remove the pedophiles you're not resolving 100% of the issue. If American universities started purging pro-pedophile thinkers from their programs like European institutions Russian-related material after 2022, there would be a lot less progressive propaganda going around.
As the meme goes, 'first they came for the pedophiles, and I did not speak out, because I was not a pedophile...'
'(...) then they stopped coming because every problem had basically been resolved'.
I'd also highly recommend Pale Fire: another masterpiece of his with top-tier prose, and it leans even more heavily into the unreliable narrator side of things and is more deeply textured. And you can recommend it to people without them thinking you're a pedophile.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
There are a lot fewer proud pedophiles selling diaries of their titillating pedophile adventures on French TV (or any other TV as far as I know) today than in the 70s.
Who do you see on this list of 'mixed-age sex' supporters ?
Perhaps you were trying to get with a philosophy/sociology major and you've heard of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Louis Aragon, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre?
Who I do not see are people like Alain de Benoist, considered influential with the alt-right movement in the United States. Or his buddies Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Yvan Blot, and Henry de Lesquen.
Goodguy
1yr ago
My point is that it makes no sense to say that leftism as a whole is suspect because some leftists are pedophiles.
As for the Sexual Revolution specifically, I am sure that you could have removed every single leftist pedophile who existed back then and the Sexual Revolution would still have happened almost entirely the same as it actually happened historically.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
Is any of this supposed to contradict what I said in my last post?
There are pedophiles everywhere. You know the arguments: The plural of "anecdote" isn't data. Chinese Robber Fallacy, etc.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
Here is a quick rundown of some infamous 20th century French philosophers
Some videos of French intellectuals going on TV to celebrate having sex with children/teenagers.
An undergraduate paper on the subject
One excerpt of interest p35:
As sexuality—feminine, homosexual, and otherwise—coursed through public discourse in the early 1970s, a group of men styling themselves as twentieth century Marquise de Sades or Dom Jauns began to publish pedophilic literature and receive recognition in literary circles. These men—Tony Duvert and Gabriel Matzneff—were both little known writers before they made their careers between 1973 and 1975 releasing celebrated novels and essays that described affairs with minors in detail. Matzneff’s Les moins de seize ans (The Under Sixteens) lauds sex with adolescents as an act of sexual liberation to protest the moral order and publishes letters from his young lovers as proof of their enjoyment.
Matzneff was welcomed on the television show Apostrophes in 1975 to promote the book and articulate an ethics of individual development that arose out of the sex lives of minors. For him, the “strength and novelty of the affective and sexual impulses” of “children between ten and sixteen” opened a “fertile” field of sexual possibilities—both with people of their own age or an older lover—that would allow them to “discover themselves, the beauty and richness of the world and its creation.”
I mean, yeah? Is that surprising? Why would a mainstream org even care? Progressive hypocrisy isn't that hard to find and it's over some nobody? Even if I ran the most anti-woke paper in existence, I probably wouldn't dive into the specifics of one pedophile and her progressive defenders from the Gamergate era.
But that's just me.
That's fair, but I don't think this is the best example of how Gamergate was poorly treated. The nicheness of the story itself overshadows the "progressive hypocrisy/culture-warring" aspects, imo.
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