pedophile
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
B’nai Brith are not PETA but, in our crude gentile terms, something between a Masonic organization and an ethnic mafia. If you were holding an official position and "threw anything in the state position" to ruin them, you'd have had bad luck on the road, or were revealed as a violent pedophile, or something to this effect (but these days probably just your Antisemitic utterances from 20 years ago suddenly surfacing). I believe this is generally understood by people who matter; though, seeing as they fail to anticipate the side a Ukrainian who fought Russians in the WWII stood on, it may be an issue those historically illiterate people still need to be reminded of. Thus the uncouth tone is necessary to deter future transgressions.
I do think we've discussed this topic to death, as has 'the discourse' generally. And ethics depends on context. Consequentialist or not, so long as your values look more like "economic productivity" or "more happy people" or "national greatness" than "racism bad", it makes sense to think about the ethics of discrimination based on how they impact those. And while in the far past, 'statistical discrimination' probably could cause significant harm, I think today it causes essentially no harm.
In most cases of potential discrimination with political relevance, modern science, technology, and political organization would allow a competent corporation or state to directly measure each individual's traits or capacities, bypassing the ethical dilemma. Intelligence / job skills? IQ tests. Criminality? Properly enforce even minor laws, and have a public database of offenses employers can consult. Various right-wingers lament the low IQ of immigrants, but no need to statistically discriminate here, just give potential applicants IQ tests. Not politically viable, but so are immigration restrictions on all colored people. This alone makes 'statistical discrimination' a mostly moot issue in practice, IMO, and any marginal statistical discrimination has no systemic impact as a result. This is the point at which critics of pervasive racism or sexism fall back to 'structural racism that disadvantages poor/nonwhite/nonmale people even by objective standards', although they never draw the conclusion that they should pay less attention to explicit discrimination.
The terms I'll use are statistical discrimination - most centrally, making a decision with goals unrelated to race/sex/the group in question, but using the group as a proxy for the goal - versus taste-based discrimination, making a decision that's not really rationally justified on any goal other than 'exclude group'. Which category you place something into depends on your values - a white nationalist probably thinks a white-only company is a rational choice to maximize productivity, and a committed anti-racist would in their heart consider any discrimination taste-based because black people aren't any less capable than white people. But there's a big difference between giving black people .3 percentage points higher interest rates than white people or not hiring a hispanic house-cleaner because the last one stole from you, and not hiring any female doctors in the entire medical system because you incorrectly think they're much less capable than men. Even if it was applied universally, statistical discrimination in modern life is just not that impactful. Even if the cars of black people are stopped 3x as much as those of white people, the cumulative harm this does to black non-criminals is just low, the rate of police physically harming innocent and cooperative people is low. If there was a latent supply of skilled black programmers somewhere, Big Tech would love to tap it no matter the average black IQ (alas, immigration laws). And to whatever extent statistical discrimination, by assumption justified excluding second-order effects, harms black people who are on the good end of the distribution in question (IQ, criminality), that harm is (by assumption) compensated for in aggregate by the higher skill, lower criminality, or whatever of the worker that replaced them. If it was absolutely morally necessary to alleviate this, itd still be better to do so so via e.g. taxes and transfers, a pareto improvement, than by banning statistical discrimination. And again, this should be moot because one can just measure individuals.
I don't think your voluntary vs involuntary group membership distinction is important. Being born with a low IQ is exactly as involuntary as being born with median IQ into a group with a high rate of having low IQ, but it's perfectly reasonable to give lower-paying jobs to people with lower IQ, so in low information environments (that aren't modern environments), I don't think giving lower-paying jobs to group members is different.
Then there's taste-based discrimination. Those committing it incorrectly (by assumption) believe it's statistical discrimination, and given how pervasive that mistake is it's worth considering. I think nobody can deny that this can be terrible in economic and moral senses. Take untouchables, a recurrent cultural phenomena, whether in india, europe, or elsewhere. These groups are prohibited, for absurd reasons, from engaging in most productive occupations and many social relations. (Although I'm curious if anyone has a defense of untouchable classes, the only study I found put dalit IQ at 5 points less than brahmin, which is low, but I don't think that estimate means much) It's a waste of surplus, and terrible for those affected. The categorical exclusion from many occupations of women and individuals of various races in the recent past seem similarly misguided, as confirmed by the low remaining wage gaps. But when people condemn taste-based discrimination today, the moral weight they put fits untouchables more than it does us. Most people in America are apolitical, centrist or progressive, and believe either in race-blind merit or explicit affirmative action, and hiring practices reflect this. And while nobody hiring women obviously depresses female wages, if even half of firms openly treat women equally, they'll suck up all the women and reduce the wage gap, adjusted for hours worked and skill, to a minimum. While taste-based discrimination is still dumb, and thus bad in the same way that firing someone for having brown hair is bad, in areas like hiring, interpersonal relationships, and criminal justice, it's not a significant moral issue in the US, in the same way that religious persecution was a massive issue 300 years ago but isn't anymore.
So to go into your example:
But if there were a similar strain that made them 10% more likely [to be a pedophile] I don't think it would be fair to [refuse them a childcare position], because it's such a low base rate that 10% doesn't do much to offset the cost of the discrimination
I think this is a misleading example - there are many people currently teaching who have demographic attributes that make them, statistically, more than 10% likely to be pedophiles than other groups of teachers. E.g. men vs women. But even taking it literally, I don't think it's an issue, because it's limited to the small percentage of occupations that involve childcare, so people with that strain can just get other jobs. It's equal in impact to the many other idiosyncratic and irrational preferences employers have.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
In what contexts are accurate prejudice/biases acceptable justification for discrimination?
I want to consider a broad range of groups including both involuntary/innate characteristics such as race, gender, and IQ, as well as more voluntary categories such as religion, political ideology, or even something like being in the fandom for a certain TV show, expressing a preference for a certain type of food, or having bad personal grooming. This is a variable that your answer might depend upon.
Let's suppose that we know with certainty that people in group X have a statistically higher rate of bad feature Y compared to the average population, whether that be criminality, laziness, low intelligence, or are just unpleasant to be around. I'm taking the fact that this is accurate as an axiom. The actual proportion of people in group X with feature Y is objectively (and known to you) higher than average, but is not universal. That is, Y is a mostly discrete feature, and we have 0 < p < q < 1 where p is the probability of a randomly sampled member of the public has Y, and q is the probability that a randomly sampled member of q has Y. Let's leave the causation as another variable here: maybe membership in X increases the probability of Y occurring, maybe Y increases the probability of joining X (in the case of voluntary membership), maybe some cofactor causes both. This may be important, as it determines whether discouraging people from being in group X (if voluntary) will actually decrease the prevalence of Y or whether it will just move some Ys into the "not X" category.
Another variable I'll leave general is how easy it is to determine Y directly. Maybe it's simple: if you're interacting with someone in person you can probably quickly tell they're a jerk without needing to know their membership in Super Jerk Club. Or maybe it's hard, like you're considering job applications and you only know a couple reported facts, which include X but not Y and you have no way to learn Y directly without hiring them first.
When is it okay to discriminate against people in group X? The far right position is probably "always" while the far left would be "never", but I suspect most people would fall somewhere in the middle. Few people would say that it would be okay to refuse to hire brown-haired people if it were discovered that they were 0.1% more likely to develop cancer and thus leave on disability. And few people would say that it's not okay to discriminate against hiring convicted child rapists as elementary school teachers on the basis that they're a higher risk than the average person. (if you are such a person though, feel free to speak up and explain your position).
So for the most part our variables are:
-Group membership voluntariness
-Feature Y's severity and relevance to the situation
-The situation itself (befriending, hiring, electing to office)
-Ease of determining feature Y without using X as a proxy
-Causality of X to Y
Personally, I'm somewhere between the classically liberal "it's okay to discriminate against voluntary group membership but not involuntary group membership" and the utilitarian "it's okay to discriminate iff the total net benefit of the sorting mechanism is higher than the total cost of the discrimination against group members, taking into account that such discrimination may be widespread", despite the latter being computationally intractable in practice and requiring a bunch of heuristics that allow bias into the mix. I don't think I'm satisfied with the classically liberal position alone because if there were some sufficiently strong counterexample, such as someone with a genetic strain that made them 100x more likely to be a pedophile, I think I'd be okay with refusing child care positions to all such people even if they had never shown any other risk factors. But if there were a similar strain that made them 10% more likely I don't think it would be fair to do this, because it's such a low base rate that 10% doesn't do much to offset the cost of the discrimination. Also the utilitarian position allows for stricter scrutiny applied for more serious things like job applications (which have a huge cost if systematically discriminating against X) versus personal friendships (if people refuse to befriend X because they don't like Y, those people can more easily go make different friends or befriend each other, so the systemic cost is lower)
But I'd love to hear more thoughts and perspectives, especially with reasoning for why different cases are and are not justified under your philosophical/moral framework.
FistfullOfCrows
1yr ago
So the charge is that he, an adult man, tried to convince adult women to engage in consensual sex with him?
I’m getting sick of this thing where every shot a guy takes which doesn’t land is somehow seen as a sexual assault. Do people realize that women have agency as well, and also engage in these sorts of fantasy? “Oh no I guess I have to sleep in this bed with this big strong man who is out here saving the children for the sake of the mission” is the plot of like 90% of female targeted erotica. “We had to shower together to convince the cartel that we were married” sounds like it was literally written by a female erotica writer.
Human adults have sex with each other. Sometimes there is a period of courtship. Sometimes, and in fact just due to pure statistical reality, most times that courtship fails.
That is not a scandal.
The scandal is that these people just cannot understand that the scandal is the fact that adults want to engage in sexual activity with CHILDREN.
Go to a drag show? No problem. You do you.
Go to a drag show, with children? Problem.
Engage in a gender fetish? No problem. You do you.
Engage in a gender fetish with children? Problem.
Make erotic literature? No problem. You do you.
Make erotic literature for children? Problem.
The scandal is that these maybe actual pedophiles don’t understand the demarcation between “sexual activity among consenting adults” and “sexual activity with children.”
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Okay, but where are the failed attempts at boycotts quashed by Twitter?
A far more likely explanation is that for nearly a decade now, right-wingers have been continuously pushing a narrative that seeks to cast LGBT people as crazies, pedophiles, and/or some kind of evil. Part of this has very much been focusing on the T in that acronym over the others. Far easier to get boycotts going over that than gay people. I don't think the particularities of the social media platform all these people congregated on is particularly important.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Well, if we're going to get into the purpose of this forum...
In the interests of speaking clearly, I think the single-issue posting rule is an unfair moderation policy, and I regret not speaking up about it in the original meta thread.
cjet79
1yr ago
I appreciate the serious and thoughtful essay on the topic. My first impression was a fearful "oh no, is this one of those crappy converted libertarian essays". You might have seen the kind ... where the title and content of the essay amounts to "As a libertarian, I use to think poor people were evil and horrible, now as a liberal I see how wrong that idea is." I'm glad this was not that kind of essay.
I have to admit as a bit of an anarchist libertarian myself it challenges me more than most essays would. I am however of the anarcho-capitalist variety of libertarians, or as some anarchists would describe it "not an anarchist at all". (I started writing this right before I got to the section of the essay where you talk about anarcho-capitalists, so you beat me to the joke, but I'm keeping it in)
I did not have your starting position of ACAB. Though I was very suspicious of cops that would defend the "thin blue line" when corruption came into play. I had multiple personal stories from former cops of the insane corruption and shit that cops got away with. One that stuck with me was an economics professor at a local community college. He taught the class between his extended golfing sessions. Former New York Cop, with a very hefty pension. He explained he was doing the class mostly to have something to fill his time. I liked him, but jeez did he have some stories to tell. Pedophiles left on rooftops to either jump or freeze to death. He told the story in a way that gave plausible deniability that maybe other cops had been doing this, but there was also a degree of bragging and agreement with the practice that suggested he'd done it himself. There was also a story about a bomb investigator that got permanently put on desk duty when his wife and the man she was cheating with were blown up under mysterious circumstances that no one could figure out.
My starting position on cops was something like "probably mostly not bastards, but this is definitely a corrupt state institution, and there are better ways this could be run with the right incentives"
I'd stick by that as the correct position, even today. And it might not sound extreme, but I take it to the extreme. There are certain levels of "defund the police" that I'd agree to. And I'd like to defend that position without vague references to thought exercises. Or to leave you as unsatisfied as David Friedman.
What is the problem with policing today?
In short: Too many laws.
A police officer today probably has more knowledge of the legal system than was ever required of anyone in 19th century America. Maybe 19th century supreme court justices would have been required to have more knowledge.
We have seen in moderation on this forum and in many other circumstances there are two semi-valid approaches to law:
- Codify everything
- Say what vibes you want, and rely on people to get it right.
These two things exist on a spectrum. But it is hard to disagree that America has been trending towards the codification of everything. Both systems have their downsides, but the main downside of the "codify everything" approach is that humans aren't so good at applying it. They certainly can't remember everything that has been codified, but even if they do, they can't help but injecting their own opinions into things and turning it into a vibes based system.
Cops are sort of the first entry point into the legal system, so its the first and most obvious place where you see these problems crop up. Even if they get fixed by later parts of the justice system, they are still the most visible. The top of the funnel is always the widest, and cops are at the top of the funnel.
There are many other problems with too many laws. It decreases trust in law enforcement in general. It splits valuable resources. It creates avenues for criminals to exist outside the legal system. Etc.
What is the solution?
First, Reduce the scope of policing.
Second, Split up what they do into different professions.
Third, stop trying to legislate goodness into others.
Fourth, allow private citizens to do the work of police.
To me, these are options are both the realistic approach in the short term, and the only viable long term solution. Policing is a bundled good. Any police precinct has many relevant functions and duties, and police officers are supposed to be generally interchangeable between those duties. (so interchangeable that I know one police district required officers to serve a prison wardens for a year before being allowed to go out on patrol).
This is bad, and dumb. Every industry specializes over time. Police officers directing traffic or making stops to give people speeding tickets do not need a full set of training. Police officers that go and apprehend murder suspects might need full swat training. Clearing out homeless people, securing a mall/shopping center, or patrolling a dangerous neighborhood can all be very different jobs that require different mentalities. Some of the worst "police are terrible" stories come from what I see as mixups between these professions.
Also, just have less laws. Sorry all you sim city players out there hoping to control everyone's actions. You need to back off. The scope of policing needs to be philosophically limited. Murder, rape, kidnapping, theft, etc are all clearly valid reasons for some group to exist that can use deadly force to respond to these crimes. But things between consenting adults need to be off limits to the use of force. People tend to want to legislate how to be a good person. But being a good person is a never ending process, and there are always minor improvements you can make. Once we started embarking on this journey of "police should make people be better" we entered down a path of endless laws and regulations.
As an example of areas where we have reduced the scope of policing, I'd suggest looking at any side job cops ever get. Private security for facilities, private protection for rich individuals, security guards at gated neighborhoods, private investigators, bounty hunters, etc. These are all often more specialized security forces than police, and they can often provide better services than the police. (we should not be surprised that private businesses can provide better services than a semi-monopolistic government entity).
Finally, private citizens are sometimes capable and more motivated to accomplish the goals of a police force. An easy example is a home break in. Police might be there in five to ten minutes at best. If you are already there, you can respond much faster to the situation. Perhaps you should be allowed to shoot to defend yourself. This is true in some states, not in all, and not in many countries outside the US. A harder example: I also can't go to the homeless encampments near my neighborhood and take many actions. I am restricted to calling the police (who luckily did something about it recently). But as a homeowner and father of two. I had much more to lose from a confrontation with the homeless. Even if I could have easily brought superior firepower and safety. A full set of body armor ammo and weapons, and hiring two professional bodyguards for a few hours is ironically cheaper than fending off any murder changes for the crazy homeless person that might have suicided themselves against this extreme use of force. Police have a measure of protection from liability that makes them the only viable path for rich people to deal with problems that might require the use of force.
I might be able to continue this tomorrow, but I'm running out of steam. Police are a modern invention. We have survived most of history without them. I think they are mostly a result of modern legislation. Specifically, too many laws, nanny stating bullcrap, and restrictions on what private citizens are allowed to do.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Two problems:
Pedophiles are out there, one of their common hobbies is collecting huge amounts of kiddie porn. We think this is bad, so we spend effort investigating it and jailing people we find processing it or producing it. When we find collectors, we lock them in jail for a while and probably mark them on a sex offender registry.
Moderating big social media sites is a headache. People post huge amounts of kiddie porn and gore and other such things, and they all employ moderators to review reported content. Many of those moderators end up mentally disturbed due to viewing huge amounts of this stuff in the course of their job. Many complain about needing therapy, never being the same again, etc.
Obvious and possibly stupid solution:
When we find people collecting kiddie porn, we make them be social media moderators (of that particular type). They shouldn't mind seeing the kiddie porn since they like it. We let them keep anything they find in their private collection as long as they never share it, in return they work at checking whether reported social media posts really are or aren't kiddie porn.
What could possibly go wrong?
guesswho
1yr ago
Much of the concern, though, is that children are not just being manipulated and exploited by individual abusers, as in the case of offending pedophiles, but that children are being actively enlisted into ideological warfare not of their own choosing, at substantial personal cost. This appears to be how FtM detransitioners (basically, the poster children for ROGD) come to perceive themselves. When every teacher and administrator subscribes to the Successor Ideology, when every kid is inundated with it, when otherwise responsible adults are cowed into silence through emotional blackmail, "everyone knows it's happening" is an incredibly weak response.
Again I think we just massively disagree about the empirical state of the world here.
Maybe there are a few schools in the Bay area like this, but by and large Republicans still exist and become teachers/administrators and send their kids to school with their values, kids still pick out anyone who is different or awkward in any way and torment them for it, and having one blue-haired art teacher that pushes for awareness and flags sometimes does not make an entire school active culture war zealots.
I'm sure you can find lots of anecdotes for your belief here, and I can find lots of anecdotes for mine, and I don't know how we could actually settle it statistically.
But I do think the fact that you're proposing what feels like a grand unified movement where everyone is on the same page with a specific interpretation of the culture war and zealously pushing for it by manipulating kids in ways that end up being harmful to them, and I'm saying that the world is just pretty normal place where different people believe different things and everyone follows their personal incentives and are mostly lazy and noncommital about doing praxis in their own lives, argues in favor of my interpretation just in terms of priors.
I think an organization like a church is capable of being as ideologically motivated and consistent as what you describe here.
I think maybe a school is capable of doing that for a few years, if the top-level administrators are super duper committed to it and are willing to put their career on the line by firing people over it and are in a super duper progressive city where they won't be immediately fired when conservative parents find out and raise a fuss.
I really don't think something as large and complex as a school district could do that, not for long anyway. And certainly not that most schools would do that, when only a few tiny areas of the country are super duper progressive bastions.
If I misunderstood you and you were just bringing up groomers in some much broader sense, in that way that a priest 'grooms' a child to be a good catholic or whatever, then to me that's a surprising implementation of the term
That's what the term actually means, though, so you shouldn't be surprised at all. Setting aside the suspicion people might naturally develop when high-profile people belonging to such a tiny minority of the population keep getting outed as offending pedophiles (since for all I know this could be a Chinese Cardiologist problem), many people regard the inundation of children with confusing gender revisionism as per se abusive. The overwhelming weight of evidence available to me currently suggests that, at least for young girls, becoming transgendered is far more often than not a social contagion which, if indulged by peers and educational authorities, can do substantial lasting harm.
In other words, it's not about accusing anyone of being an offending pedophile, it's about accusing people of per se harming children (or "grooming" them to receive such harm) by deliberately exposing them to memetic hazards--functionally, grooming them into becoming front line culture warriors for gender revisionists. No one would be confused if I complained that 4chan was "grooming" my child to become a Nazi, and yet the moment someone says "don't groom my child to advance your gender ideology" suddenly it's "blood libel?" I just can't take that objection seriously. I don't strongly mind tabooing "groomer" when it gets in the way of clear communication, but I do have concerns about the way certain ideologies insist on obfuscating their manifest faults by forcing me onto the euphemism treadmill. If your ideology leads to mucking about in a child's sexual development--whether through hormones or surgeries or psychology or whatever--for no medical reason, but for purely gender-political or dubious "psychological" reasons, then please tell me what word I should use instead to summarize my perception that your ideology gives cover to child abuse (and of an inescapably sexual nature!).
Now, I assume that no one who thinks transsexuality is not in any way worth worrying about on any level is going to find any of that persuasive, of course. But neither do I think it's even remotely crazy to worry, based on the sweeping comorbidity of psychiatric malfunction that attends transgenderism, that this is not a healthy ideology and that kids should not be exposed to it.
I don't think teachers can do their job effectively if they don't have some discretion there, they need to be figures of at least some trust for kids. I think making all teachers into forced informants with no discretion about what they inform on would make highschool even more of a nightmarish prison sentence than it already is for a lot of kids.
First, the idea that this is somehow the information teachers need to be empowered to keep from parents to win student trust seems very suspicious to me. Second, the problems with public education are far too vast for me to respond to adequately here, but I just don't see any plausible way for teacher transparency on potentially serious psychiatric developments to be the straw that breaks the hellscape's back. It seems, rather, transparently political--treating a single tiny issue as so important it demands federal governance in a tug-of-war over who really has children's best interests in hand. Parents saying "it's us" are being shouted down by politicians and teacher's unions and trans activists saying "it's us," and there's just no question in my mind that in all but the edgiest of edge cases, it's definitely actually the parents.
They claim that Biden wants to make them law under Title IX, but they don't link to anything from the administration saying that and I haven't been able to find anything even remotely like that with google.
What--like, this?
Because this new Title IX frames gender ideology as an anti-discrimination issue, schools won’t have to seek parental permission for children to participate in lessons on choosing and changing one’s sex. Indeed, schools will very likely use Title IX’s anti-discrimination mandate to justify denying parental opt-outs from these controversial lessons.
The rules will also grant children an absolute right to use school facilities and participate in activities “consistent with their gender identity,” regardless of whether their parents agree or are even aware of said identity.
Is that "remotely like" what you're thinking?
Yes, but getting abused and then placed into the foster care system by CPS is much much worse than just... not getting abused and living a normal happy life with your family?
As with public education, I can't exactly solve all the problems with CPS in response here. But children who spend their school days pretending to be a different sex and then go home and pretend they aren't spending their days pretending are not, in my experience, living a life that anyone could reasonably call either normal or happy.
It is not always the case, but in my experience it is almost always the case that teenagers who keep things from their parents tend to endanger themselves as a result,
I completely agree with you, I just think that the 'almost' is important here, and want to give kids and teachers some lattitude in deciding whether they're in one of those cases.
I am actually quite sympathetic to the idea of giving people latitude, but I don't think that's a politically realistic outcome. Because the issue is a culture war issue and the poles have been set at "require disclosure" and "forbid disclosure," even in those places where teachers do technically have "latitude" they are already under tremendous social pressure to behave in ways that are not actually so nuanced. Speaking of which:
But what we're talking about is a case where a kid wants to use different name/pronouns in school, meaning that every teacher and administrator that interacts with them and every kid in any of their classes will know what is going on; there's much less room for manipulation with that many eyes on the situation, and any one of those dozen/hundreds of people has the authority and power to tell the parents at any time if they think something hinky is going on.
Much of the concern, though, is that children are not just being manipulated and exploited by individual abusers, as in the case of offending pedophiles, but that children are being actively enlisted into ideological warfare not of their own choosing, at substantial personal cost. This appears to be how FtM detransitioners (basically, the poster children for ROGD) come to perceive themselves. When every teacher and administrator subscribes to the Successor Ideology, when every kid is inundated with it, when otherwise responsible adults are cowed into silence through emotional blackmail, "everyone knows it's happening" is an incredibly weak response.
For all that: it's entirely possible that there is, actually, nothing at all harmful about gender revisionism. As an armchair transhumanist I think that at some point in our species' future, we're overwhemlingly likely to transcend sex and gender entirely--but by the time we are actually able to do that, we will be unquestionably transhuman--and not, I think, human. If that day ever comes at all, I expect it will be long, long after I'm gone. But in the meantime, I have seen no evidence at all that allowing teachers to conceal presumably important psychological information from their students' parents is meaningfully beneficial, and much evidence that allowing such concealment is in fact actively harmful to children and families, so--how could I conclude anything but that such concealment should be forbidden?
guesswho
1yr ago
I don't know how you could possibly take that from what I wrote.
There is good reason why people sometimes call this "grooming": because the most common kind of adult who keeps secrets about a child from that child's parents is someone who is taking advantage of that child for their own purposes, "grooming" them to some role.
'Groomers' colloquially refers to offending pedophiles. Bringing up the term is the same type of blood libel as calling your opponents nazis, except with a more dangerous edge since offending pedophiles still exist today.
If I misunderstood you and you were just bringing up groomers in some much broader sense, in that way that a priest 'grooms' a child to be a good catholic or whatever, then to me that's a surprising implementation of the term but I apologize for misrepresenting you. Much of my response would then be based on this misunderstanding of your position and can be ignored.
When my children were young, I was in communication with teachers about basically every aspect of my child's schooling--if they got a nosebleed, if they were struggling in math, who their friends were,
What age was this? A common disagreement in these conversations about trans stuff is, I think, that one side is thinking about 7 year olds and the other is thinking about 16 year olds.
I'm surprised if you got this level of information for kids in highschool, if so maybe it a rural/urban thing or something because it's not been my experience.
But either way, I still think there's importantly a difference between what teachers choose to volunteer and what they don't. I don't think teachers can do their job effectively if they don't have some discretion there, they need to be figures of at least some trust for kids. I think making all teachers into forced informants with no discretion about what they inform on would make highschool even more of a nightmarish prison sentence than it already is for a lot of kids.
In the Saskatchewan case from the OP, yes, but trans activists make policies, too.
I agree that trans activists can also propose bad policies, absolutely.
That said, this seems to be talking about unofficial policies (which are 'not always written down') and offering very little evidence about what they actually are or entail or that they even exist. They claim that Biden wants to make them law under Title IX, but they don't link to anything from the administration saying that and I haven't been able to find anything even remotely like that with google. Let me know if you have a source on that claim, but overall, none of this feels comparable to an actual law being passed.
But even if those fears are rational, I can't imagine a child confiding their sexuality or gender confusion in a teacher, and then not confiding abuse to that teacher, at which point mandatory reporting laws kick in
Yes, but getting abused and then placed into the foster care system by CPS is much much worse than just... not getting abused and living a normal happy life with your family?
It is not always the case, but in my experience it is almost always the case that teenagers who keep things from their parents tend to endanger themselves as a result,
I completely agree with you, I just think that the 'almost' is important here, and want to give kids and teachers some lattitude in deciding whether they're in one of those cases.
Again, I'm not, like, saying parents should never know whether their kid is trans. No one is arguing that, you need a parent's participation to get any form of gender affirming care so obviously the goal is for parents to know whenever that's safe. We're already talking about the rare cases where kids think they are in danger and the school agrees.
Also, I'd like to point out that yes, if a kid goes to a single adult for advice and keeps it secret from everyone else, they are often at danger for manipulation and exploitation. But what we're talking about is a case where a kid wants to use different name/pronouns in school, meaning that every teacher and administrator that interacts with them and every kid in any of their classes will know what is going on; there's much less room for manipulation with that many eyes on the situation, and any one of those dozen/hundreds of people has the authority and power to tell the parents at any time if they think something hinky is going on.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1yr ago
Here's a good parallel: "democrats will never tolerate gang shootings: they hate guns and anyone who uses them" In practice, we get decriminalized gang shootings combined with ever more aggressive laws against legal gun owners, because it turns out the hatred wasn't directed at the guns and violence, but at the (white, male) gun owners featured in their anti-gun propaganda.
Not a good parallel - in the scenario I painted, the beneficiaries of any such policy would still be straight white males, who by pure force of statistics are the majority of pedophiles. It would be more akin to republican gun owners realising the loophole and joining suburban gangs en masse, which they won't do only because of their distaste for the company they would have in those suburban gangs. Sex with minors is generally a small group activity, not subject to that issue.
Which of those modes do you see happening here? Because I see a lot more anger from leftists here about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" than I do towards pedophiles.
That's just saying that they don't participate in your current moral panic about it. There is a lot more anger from leftists about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" (...here? Who here believes in the latter so firmly as to get angry?) than about union-busting at the moment too, but rest assured that leftists are firmly against union-busting.
Here's a good parallel: "democrats will never tolerate gang shootings: they hate guns and anyone who uses them"
In practice, we get decriminalized gang shootings combined with ever more aggressive laws against legal gun owners, because it turns out the hatred wasn't directed at the guns and violence, but at the (white, male) gun owners featured in their anti-gun propaganda.
Similarly, leftist hatred of sexual misconduct is targeted at "the (cis-white) patriarchy," not the misconduct itself.
A girl at my local school had to be withdrawn recently because another student with a penis wouldn't stop aggressively sexually propositioning her, and the staff with the new progress pride flag in every classroom window wouldn't do anything about it. They said "she" was just expressing her identity as a lesbian.
This is only going to escalate in the same way that anti-gun rhetoric coupled with pro-crime policies did. The same leftist prosecutors already have "queer affirming" prosecution policies that are going to effectively decriminalize age of consent violations as long as it's "queer," while legislators simultaneously increase penalties for 17 year olds getting married.
And there's another factor. When leftists really don't like something, they get aggressive about it. They "problematize," they make hashtags, they get people fired, they set a party line and ruthlessly establish conformity by any means necessary.
When they don't really care and just want to stop conservatives from doing anything about it, they make whatever soothing/mocking/rationalizing mouth-noises necessary to convince the person they're talking to that nothing is going to happen, and anyway it won't be bad... besides, it's too late to stop it, and anyway you probably deserved it.
Which of those modes do you see happening here? Because I see a lot more anger from leftists here about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" than I do towards pedophiles. The excuses and rationalization about pedophilia look an awful lot more like the "deflect" mode than the "deal with" mode. And I think you're too smart to be doing this unconsciously.
Edit: and of course the second I open twitter CNN is going to bat for a gay man who raped a 12 year old
Edit edit:
The growing consensus among scientists is that pedophilia is biological in nature, and that keeping pedophilic urges at bay can be incredibly difficult. “What turns us on sexually, we don’t decide that—we discover that,” said psychiatrist Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic and an expert on paraphilic disorders.
You know what's going to happen when the "sex and gender clinic" starts talking about a "growing scientific consensus," don't you?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
hollowed out by an institutional culture of lying. Of course, China is probably in a similar state,
Chinese ships don't accidentally crash into civilian shipping, nor do their light carriers burn down in port, nor is their fleet actually shrinking year-on-year. When it comes to quality and naval professionalism, China seems to be well ahead of the US navy.
As for an institutional culture of lying... the Afghanistan War? The defeat against the Taliban with about 1/100th the funding of the US/NATO force, supported by no foreign power at all? Staying on ten years despite it being clear that the US was not going to achieve its objectives, while the Taliban was? Constantly lying to the public and saying things were going fine? Junior officers being ignored when they pointed out the entire thing was a massive farce with zero chance of success, that the 'allies' they were trying to train were drug addicts and pedophiles?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1yr ago
Doing it on the meta level is pretty funny, I have to admit. 10/10
But like others who point it out in this thread I've seen it both online and in real life. Consider how "incel" went from a morally neutral descriptor to a moral condemnation, with the absurd side effect of married men people want to denounce constantly being called involuntary celibates.
Self loathing is certainly bad, but it seems fair to notice that romantically unsuccessful men are about as low on the totem of sympathy as you can get. Even criminals and prostitutes are more sympathetic. You have to get to pedophiles or something to find people with less cachet.
4nji2
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
1yr ago
but I'm growing increasingly confident that his year is a turning point.
There is precedent for the LGBTQI2 movement to overreach. Decriminalization of child molestion and destigmatization of pedophilia were once positions which were tolerated by its majority, but today they go as far as deny any historical association. But when the rift between the majority of gay and assocated advocates and pedophiles emerged, the former lacked the institutional support they now have. When the senate threated to withdraw funding of UN unless NAMBLA is ejected, the Sixcolour was a partisan symbol, not a second national flag as is today.
DBDr
1yr ago
Yes but no IMO.
I think they are seeded, but not as a tool to discredit cons. They are probably seeded by people with a financial interest in creating a media sphere distinct from reality; so people get locked into the conspiratorial universe where Hilary Clinton isn't a made-man venal corporatist stooge but a literal satanic pedophile blood drinker.
The same exists on the left; from tankies and such who aren't content with the boring Marxist critique of capital and has to make the further leap that rich people and the US personally crush third worlders in wine presses for entertainment.
It's the same everywhere and forever 99% of the time 100% of the time: there is no grand conspiracy or narrative; there are individual actors reacting to market forces attempting to maximize profit and therefore coordinating with no coordinator.
I think that is why a lot of these dudes that I am familiar with on the left conspiratorial media sphere spend no time at all attacking Trump/Desantis/the Reps; and all of their time and energy attacking AOC/ "Elites"/ the Dems: because they aren't primarily trying to steer politics. They are trying to lock their audience in by providing a unique product; so their main competition isn't the right, it's the left.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
While this quote gets repeated, I don't think it's quite true.
It's not quite true for a far simpler reason: both think the other is both stupid and evil.
The left thinks that the right are a bunch of parochial, bigoted morons. They hate education, they hate vaccines, they hate minorities, they're religious authoritarians, they're greedy capitalists or their useful idiots, they'd rather shoot themselves in the foot rather than pick up a free lunch if meant they had to see an immigrant, etc...
The right thinks the left are a bunch of degenerate, lazy airheads. They're soft on crime, they're soft on pedophiles, they don't want to work, they want free money for existing, they're corrupting the youth, they're race-baiters, they're cowards, they don't understand basic economics, they want to regulate everyone to death etc...
Instead I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that.
This line of thinking is not peculiar to the right.
We're all affected by vibes and the reason this attack is done at all is to communicate negative vibes and steer anyone not completely able to separate myth from underlying idea (i.e., everyone) will be affected by it. I do not remember the person who I first read a similar comment to yours, but he described normal people as not thinkers but "vibers," and I think that's a pretty good description and these tactics simply work. Arguing this is theoretically possible, especially in the above example, is such an unsatisfying reply because of this and gives cover to people who do it to destroy the founding myth and founding heroes. Is it theoretically possible? Perhaps, but not really in the real world which is why it's done and it's being done in the exact example being discussed.
If attacks on person didn't work, it wouldn't be the number 1 tactic everyone does to attack ideas even in communities like this where people still regularly do stuff like "Person X, known pedophile/racist/antisemite, _________."
Rex
1yr ago
Is it the Atlantic that first published his identity and ethnicity? There seems to be a trend of mainstream legacy media outting public personalities that publish under a pen name. BAP, Libsoftictock, Scott. They clearly have an axe to grind here, even though they hide behind the some notion of journalism and a fig leaf of newsworthiness. What is there to be done? Nothing. Its asymetrical. Add it the list of reasons I find journalists lower than lawyers and slightly higher than pedophiles. I hope to one day be introduced to a journalist so that I can laugh in their face when they tell me their profession.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
Look, I'm unusually sympathetic to pedophiles, especially when Wokists try to extend that category to men who want to sleep with big breasted 16 year olds, which is almost universal in distribution and a fact of life for the majority of human existence. The only reason most men don't state they want to do that is fear of social disapproval.
I really see it as as the same kind of paraphilia as say, homosexuality, it's just that it's politically easier for one side to get what they want without the rest of society murdering them. If people want to consume artificial CP that doesn't hurt real kids, I literally don't give a fuck, especially since it likely has the opposite effect that critics claim of increasing the propensity to commit physical crimes to fulfill their lust.
If a pedophile saved my child, I'd be grateful, and assuming they didn't have a track record of arrests, not even care particularly about future interactions.
Now, you're a pedophile and I'm not, so I won't argue too hard about what kind of difficultly you face in being accepted by society. It's certainly much worse in the West, where there's no end of people slobbering at the mouth to put a bullet in your head for the crime of existing and not being able to change your brain, regardless of whether you act on it.
Still, I think you're wrong in that it's clear to me that almost every parent on their planet would rather have their child saved by a pedo/Hitler or even Pedo-Hitler rather than allowed to drown to death.
Also, on a more humorous note, is it even physically possible to give CPR to a person "while slapping them in the face with a flaccid cock"? The flexibility required seems inhuman to me...
If you're not too intent on the mouth to mouth rescue breaths, then you can do it while crouching above their head and facing their feet. Not recommended of course, and not in the ALS or BLS guidelines, but I'm sure someone can pull it off, and likely already has in a porno haha
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
If my kid was drowning, I couldn't care less if they were saved by a pedophile or Mother Teresa. They could give CPR while slapping them in the face with a flaccid cock and I'd still rather my kid live than not.
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
1yr ago
Should I save a drowning child in such a situation? Is it better for a child to die than to develop a strong social bond to a pedophile with all the risks that entails? Or should I save them and stoically endure the eventual "Stay away from my kid, creep!" or just plain "Thanks, now gtfo.", content in the knowledge that I did "the right thing" even while everyone thinks I just did it to get in the kid's pants? Why shouldn't I just say "not my problem" and keep walking?
The "Dissident Right" sees Ukraine as a puppet of their boogeyman, The New World Order, going back at least as far as the Maidan Revolution, which they think was a coup orchestrated by hated Neocons and Globalists (aka Satanic Pedophile Freemasons). Putin, meanwhile, is anti-LGBTQ++, so he's the based warrior holding out against the tide of Globohomo-ism. I know very intelligent people who believe this. To quote a friend of mine (who has two Masters degrees), when I asked him why he is so uncritical of Putin's Russia, "I know we [America/Western Civ] are evil. I don't know that about Putin."
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