pedophile
dasfoo
2yr ago
women [children] should be free to do what they want without men [pedophiles] sexualizing them for it. Hence Cuties
As one of the few people who actually bothered to watch Cuties, this may be the perception of how that movie fits into the culture, but it's not apt. The movie is extremely critical of sexualized cultures that young girls inherit from their confusing adult influences. Yes, it also leans into an uncomfortably sensationalistic depiction of that sexualization, and I'm sure it will be found on many unsavory hard drives, but that's not its messaging.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2yr ago
There is no substitute for generation of new workforce – whether young people or robots. Debate can only be had about a) the timeline for supplementing people with robots (and, seeing as robots are a software problem, it's wild to me that people look at e.g. Midjourney evolution in the span of 1.5 years and believe this won't move as well as a human in a decade; yes it is the same problem) and b) legitimacy of austerity strategies and, perhaps, as the trendy folks put it now, degrowth. Even Zeihan, much as I loathe him, points out flaws of even highly successful attempts to weasel out of this predicament. Canada imports skilled immigrants, at like 3% of the nation annually now. Is this sustainable? How many skilled Chinese and Indians are out there? And how many Filipinos do you need to replace one Tsinghua graduate in lifetime tax contribution? But Phillipines, too, has only one big batch left; their TFR is 1.9, and given that these trends appear to accelerate for later comers, it's very probable they'll collapse to 1.2-1.5 in less than 10 years. How many countries can hope to do better than Canada does attracting useful immigrants?
I am not sure how seriously and charitably people peddling immigration as a long-term solution should be taken at this point. They seem either in thrall to a bona fide population replacement conspiracy, trying to do maximum damage in the limited time left (thus I suspect they'll side with AI doomers), or just looking for lost keys under the lamppost, suggesting more of the same to policymakers who are unwilling to hear anything else and perhaps unable to pursue it.
I do not notice them actually calculating net expected contribution of immigrants using any realistic trait distribution analysis (of course this is HBD stuff but you don't even need to explicitly acknowledge HBD, tracking results of previous batches and controlling for selection effects would do enough). It's just appalling, condescending arithmetic – here, Europeans (avg age X), here, young Kenyans (avg age X/2); promise old white farts they will be tended to (if perhaps with a bit of ethnic contempt) in their retirement homes if they vote for importing the latter into cities their nonexistent grandchildren could have kept running, mix and blend. Can this promise be borne out? Of course this is just Kirkegaard, the racist pedophile etc. etc. The question is, how do respectable experts like Dr. Myrskylä conclude something radically different from the same research?
What really gets under my skin, though, is how fertility collapse and its implications are suddenly mainstreamed only now. To be specific, I think it started around 2020, with the BBC headline Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born. You don't say?
"That's a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline," researcher Prof Christopher Murray told the BBC.
"I think it's incredibly hard to think this through and recognise how big a thing this is; it's extraordinary, we'll have to reorganise societies."
Strange how demographers took ages to notice that the dreaded «population bomb» had its fuse all pissed over by modernity (Ehrlich was very persuasive with his deep voice, I guess). Strange because all the way back in 2004 (and based on much older data), there's been a book The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by one Thomas P. M. Barnett, American geostrategist. It said, for instance:
THE FLOW OF PEOPLE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE POPULATION BOMB
When I turn fifty, I will worry about my PSA, or my prostate specific antigen. But at forty-one, I worry about my PSR, or what the United Nations calls my potential support ratio. My personal PSR is currently projecting out at 1.5, meaning my wife and I have three kids we hope will be willing to support us in our old age. So if Vonne and I split Emily, Kevin, and Jerome between us, we'll each end up with 1.5 persons working on our behalf after we reach sixty-five. … By the time our planet reached the third millennium, our PSR dropped to nine to one. That's not too bad, primarily because Globalization II (1950-1980) involved only a fraction of the global population (America, Western Europe, Developed Asia). But the decline is accelerating.
My wife, Vonne, and I are in the process of adopting a baby girl from one of the poorer, interior provinces of China. We're not doing this to raise our personal PSR, but it will incidentally have that effect, and in so doing we are—in a tiny way—setting in motion the migration that will have to be repeated millions of times in the decades to come as the Core's population grows older much faster than the Gap's: the movement of people from there to here. This great shift defines the first of the four massive flows I believe are essential to protect if Globalization III is going to advance.
Sometime around 2050, humanity will begin to depopulate as a species. That's right. In about five decades the world will reach a turning point that, in past ages, would have frightened us if we were able to understand its significance. But in the middle of the twenty-first century, the fact that we'll begin depopulating as a species won't seem scary (though it's never a bad idea to keep a close watch on those damn, dirty apes!), and we should welcome this turning point, even as it presents us and the globalizing world with a task of immense proportions.
What's so amazing about this upcoming reality is how, for decades, all we've heard about from the experts is that overpopulation is the real threat, and how we'd all eventually be eating soylent green or at least some indigestible tofu. I don't know how many frightening educational films I was forced to sit through in grade school, all of which suggested the world was simply going to suffocate under the crushing weight of all these people! Instead, I'll probably live to witness this amazing turn of events, a culmination of tens of thousands of years of effort on the part of humanity to grow its numbers and—by doing so—come to dominate the planet Earth.
…My parents had nine kids, but those nine kids have only begotten eleven kids so far, and except for the international adoptions, my siblings and I are pretty much done. That reduction-by-generation effect is spreading across the Core right now, but the trend will not reach much of the Gap until late in the twenty-first century. At 2050, the UN predicts, the forty-nine least-developed economies will still feature fertility rates above the replacement value of 2.1, meaning much of the Gap will still be growing even as the global population peaks. … Too many of the two billion young will be in the Gap, while too many of the two billion old will be in the Core. Someone will have to turn us over in our beds when we're old, and our population trends simply aren't providing that someone.
most Americans should expect to retire in their mid-seventies, not their mid-sixties or—God forbid—their mid-fifties. The news, unfortunately, looks a lot worse for insular Japan and xenophobic Europe. If America has its problems with immigrants, what with bilingual education and all, our issues pale when compared with those of the rest of the Old Core. Europe already has its share of right-wing, anti-immigration politicians exploiting people's worst impulses, and Japan has such a dismal record of accepting immigrants that the Land of the Rising Sun is heading toward its sunset at warp speed. According to the UN, Europe is likely to let in about 300,000 immigrants per year between now and 2050, when it really needs to let in something in the range of 1.5 million each year if there's any hope its PSR won't drop below two to one by mid-century.
And so on. I like to quote that book. Barnett is a honest-to-God ideological Globalist, so one gets the feeling he'd have cheerfully advised for replacement migration on some pretext even if he were convinced as I am of the promise of automation. But at least he provides evidence that we had decades to discuss alternative plans, and instead we debated (in English, of course, not in Swahili) whether not having a baby is the best way to cut carbon emissions .
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2yr ago
Actually the scary part is that the LGBT movement has more or less flipped the stranger danger on its head. What’s being normalized is keep the parents out of the loop and almost presenting parents as “the enemy of their children,” and normalizing structures in society that actually work against parents being able to find out where their kids are and what they’re doing online (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.calculator.vault.hider&hl=en_US) for a quick example, is an app that exists strictly to hide apps (and thus online communication with strange adults and other potentially dangerous behavior). Schools have been very open — to the point of creating policies forbidding disclosure without the child’s permission— of helping children of varying ages, down to elementary school, hide sexual secrets from their parents.
I was a kid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I can remember the fear parents had of the internet being available to kids — because they might talk to strangers. We were warned, repeatedly, not to talk to anyone online we didn’t know in person. There were hysterical news reports about Pictochat on the Nintendo DS — because it enabled a child to talk to a strange adult without notifying their parents (even though you had to share information in person first). And obviously there was the stranger danger stuff where any adults who took a particular interest in children were to be reported to your parents immediately, and adults were not taking any of it lightly.
Obviously, this was overkill, but the switch is mind boggling to me. We’ve gone from a fear that an adult might be talking to a kid without parents knowing about it to treating the very idea that parents might want to keep other adults from talking to their kindergartners about sex without their knowledge or consent— including not informing them about what the child is saying about his/her sexuality— as the default position.
Obviously, this is the part pedophiles like more than anything else. Kids now take it as a given that parents are not to be told about their sexuality. That sexual thoughts and feelings are not to be talked about with the parents who know them best. That loving adults want to help you with your sexuality and that in order to do that keep it a secret from your parents. Which almost every advocate group trying to prevent child sexual abuse says is one of the common occurrences in child sexual abuse (https://rainn.org/articles/talking-your-kids-about-sexual-assault) the child is made to keep secrets and often fears punishment if they tell. Now, we teach that exact thing in every classroom in the country and don’t see the irony.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2yr ago
This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right?
The mainstream journalistic reaction to this movie is full of handwringing and non-arguments. But they're not doing it because they're secretly pedos or want to cover for them. Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you, which Scott described in Weak Men are Superweapons. The whole post is worth reading if you haven't; it's one of his best and quite brief. This passage is most relevant though:
I suggested imagining yourself in the shoes of a Jew in czarist Russia. The big news story is about a Jewish man who killed a Christian child. As far as you can tell the story is true. It’s just disappointing that everyone who tells it is describing it as “A Jew killed a Christian kid today”. You don’t want to make a big deal over this, because no one is saying anything objectionable like “And so all Jews are evil”. Besides you’d hate to inject identity politics into this obvious tragedy. It just sort of makes you uncomfortable.
The next day you hear that the local priest is giving a sermon on how the Jews killed Christ. This statement seems historically plausible, and it’s part of the Christian religion, and no one is implying it says anything about the Jews today. You’d hate to be the guy who barges in and tries to tell the Christians what Biblical facts they can and can’t include in their sermons just because they offend you. It would make you an annoying busybody. So again you just get uncomfortable.
The next day you hear people complain about the greedy Jewish bankers who are ruining the world economy. And really a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish, and bankers really do seem to be the source of a lot of economic problems. It seems kind of pedantic to interrupt every conversation with “But also some bankers are Christian, or Muslim, and even though a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish that doesn’t mean the Jewish bankers are disproportionately active in ruining the world economy compared to their numbers.” So again you stay uncomfortable.
Then the next day you hear people complain about Israeli atrocities in Palestine (what, you thought this was past czarist Russia? This is future czarist Russia, after Putin finally gets the guts to crown himself). You understand that the Israelis really do commit some terrible acts. On the other hand, when people start talking about “Jewish atrocities” and “the need to protect Gentiles from Jewish rapacity” and “laws to stop all this horrible stuff the Jews are doing”, you just feel worried, even though you personally are not doing any horrible stuff and maybe they even have good reasons for phrasing it that way.
Then the next day you get in a business dispute with your neighbor. Maybe you loaned him some money and he doesn’t feel like paying you back. He tells you you’d better just give up, admit he is in the right, and apologize to him – because if the conflict escalated everyone would take his side because he is a Christian and you are a Jew. And everyone knows that Jews victimize Christians and are basically child-murdering Christ-killing economy-ruining atrocity-committing scum.
You have been boxed in by a serious of individually harmless but collectively dangerous statements. None of them individually referred to you – you weren’t murdering children or killing Christ or owning a bank. But they ended up getting you in the end anyway.
Depending on how likely you think this is, this kind of forces Jews together, makes them become strange bedfellows. You might not like what the Jews in Israel are doing in Palestine. But if you think someone’s trying to build a superweapon against you, and you don’t think you can differentiate yourself from the Israelis reliably, it’s in your best interest to defend them anyway.
The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right because it's a bad look to get so upset at a movie about a guy fighting child trafficking. But most journalists pushing back against this movie aren't thinking "I'm going to try to suppress this because I'm secretly a pedophile." They're more likely thinking of all the posts on Twitter and Facebook they've seen about the Satantic pedophilic elite, the ones that argue they control most of society and salivate over filling them full of lead.
While most journalists would agree that pedophilia and sex trafficking are bad things, they definitely don't buy into the idea that vast portions of society are controlled by pedos. But they do know that the person who believes this considers journalists as a class, at best, complicit, and at worst, in on it. So when they see a movie about hunting down child traffickers that the kind of person who posts about Satanic pedophilic elites seems to like... The incentives are all there for journalists to use their narrative-setting power to slander it however they can.
I remember there being a similar, but obviously less widespread and institutionalized, uncomfortable reaction on the right to the game Wolfenstein's "Punch a Nazi" ad campaign. This led to a similarly easy gotcha — what's the matter? You don't think Nazis are good, do you?
This kind of statement puts you on bad footing, which of course is entirely the point. But you don't have to be pro-Nazi to notice that the person fantasizing about violence seems to have a much broader definition of the term than you do, and that their definition includes you. Staying silent while they attempt to normalize extra-legal action against you might be ill-advised.
I'll say that I despise the seemingly complete capture of journalism as a field by activists who see it as their duty and right to use their platform to set a progressive agenda. I know a few people in real life in and adjacent to the industry, and they have a genuine antipathy for middle-America, whiteness, religion, etc. The widespread loss of trust in the industry is well-deserved, in my opinion. But I think the "they're all pedos/covering for pedos" line of thinking is either dishonest or misinformed, and may prove to be dangerous down the line.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
2yr ago
Opposition to pedophilia will become a right-wing boogeyman, mostly disinformation, and, in any case, even if it is real, we will soon learn why it's actually a good thing.
Become? It's already a right-wing boogeyman depending on the skin color distribution of the average perpetrator in England- bonus points for actually being the motte definition of, and what most people mean when they say, "pedophilia" (exclusively 'old man, young girl').
This movie presents an incredible opportunity for actual pedophiles
I'm not as convinced; I think this is also a bit Blue-on-Blue (or rather, Blue-on-Redder-Blue) given [for the former] who the traffickers tend to be (favored skin colors tend to be guilty of it more often due to vanishingly few white men in the places the women come from) and [for the latter] that it's a righteous cause that both the people whose moral foundation is "man bad -> man wants prostitution -> prostitution bad" and the people whose moral foundation is "prostitution bad" get a lot of policy mileage out of.
hydroacetylene
2yr ago
I don’t think it passes the smell test that LGBT people, or the movement, or a representative sampling of the movement’s leaders, or the smoke-filled back room where George Soros, the local Masonic lodge head, and some lizard people decide the aims of the LGBT movement, are pro pedophilia. I think that it’s very defensible to claim that gay male sexual norms around consent, the age thereof, harassment, and the like would be very, very bad to have adopted more widely, and that LGBT leaders have a history of overlooking pedophiles among their supporters alternating with purging them, and that trans activism prioritizes trans stuff over well established institutional knowledge for child protection and that the combination thereof will probably be used as cover for pedophilia at some point, either of the ‘kind of a creep with teenagers’ kind or of the kind this movie is about. I think it’s further fair to say that culture war dynamics might prevent that from getting shut down.
ChickenOverlord
2yr ago
The argument usually isn't that there's an explicit conspiracy by the LGBT community, simply that LGBT and pedophilia are natural fellow travellers. And given the enormously higher chance that gays and lesbians were sexually abused as kids and/or had significant inappropriate sexual experiences as a kid*, combined with the higher likelihood of those who were sexually abused as children to themselves become pedophiles**, the basic idea isn't that far fetched.
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
2yr ago
That is the status quo they are fighting against though. In their ideal world, "flaunting sexuality" wouldn't make you appear as a sexual object to other people unless you intend it to. The fact that it does today is seen as a problem and rather than putting the onus on women/children to not flaunt their sexuality, they prefer to put the onus on the men/pedophiles to not perceive them doing so as sexual.
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
2yr ago
There's always room for another stripe on the Progress Pride flag, and if the LGBT community don't want that right now, give it a couple of years until the softhearted and softheaded sociologists work on normalising such attractions.
It amuses me how many people still think there's support in the LGBT community to normalize pedophilia, given that community used to be significantly more supportive of pedophilia and has been backpedaling on it for decades. What they want to normalize is child sexuality, not creepy adults exploiting it. It's no different than the feminist argument against modesty: women [children] should be free to do what they want without men [pedophiles] sexualizing them for it. Hence Cuties.
a CBC Radio columnist saying it was "a dog whistle for xenophobic Pro-Trump, Pro-Life types"
Yeah, I'm head-desking right now because how ideological do you have to be in order to go "pro-lifers think child sex trafficking is bad, and we all know pro-lifers are scum" without realising that you are within a gnat's whisker of going "which means child sex trafficking is a Good Thing that Our Side must and should support"?
They were acquired by Disney, who shelved the movie (Disney later claimed they had no knowledge of the movie, which is plausible given the enormity of both Disney and the former Fox).
I'm not surprised by this because it often happens after take-overs; the new owners aren't interested in the projects the former independent entity were working on, or the new guys scrap projects in favour of their own pet projects. The irony here is that Disney sat on it and sold it back, pretty clearly because they thought it was some niche thing that wouldn't appeal to many, and now it's outdoing their tentpole Indiana Jones movie, a movie they really needed to be a hit after the recent string of less than impressive performances.
I even understand the suspicion about "this is a Christian outfit" but honestly, if you can't even bring yourself to agree with the Bible-bashers that kidnapping and selling kids for sex is a bad thing, I suggest you take a look at your life and your choices. And from what I understand from reviews, this isn't a movie that is all "Y'all need Jesus" and "God saved these children". But the guy depicted/his wife may be religious (in clips the actress playing her is wearing a cross), so is that now a big no-no in the movie making business? 'Oh it has an unrealistically positive ending!' okay, and? That's the movies for ya!
Even crusty old drink-sodden Youtube reviewers liked it!
Ticket buyers are "predominately female", and a third of the audience is Hispanic.
'Cos the victims in it are Hispanic children. Hmmm, why on earth would that appeal to a Hispanic audience, and not our big superhero movie with a Hispanic side character? Ponder, ponder....
Or perhaps I am not blackpilled enough yet to believe that the slope is so slippery that pedophiles are already being introduced into the pantheon of Letter People.
MAPs, darling. "Paedophile" is sooo judgemental and offensive to people struggling with their sexuality who are non-offending. That term and that attitude forces them to interalise social stigma. And it engenders hysteria such as this about scholarly work.
There's always room for another stripe on the Progress Pride flag, and if the LGBT community don't want that right now, give it a couple of years until the softhearted and softheaded sociologists work on normalising such attractions.
I fear the success of this movie amongst the wrong sorts of people may actually be detrimental to future efforts to fight child sex trafficking. Opposition to pedophilia will become a right-wing boogeyman, mostly disinformation, and, in any case, even if it is real, we will soon learn why it's actually a good thing. We can already see how expressing concern here is being interpreted as a dogwhistle for Qanon. Unfortunately, too many people will be far more horrified by the thought of being mistaken for a Trump supporter than they would at the possibility of indirectly aiding child sex traffickers. Sure, they may quietly, and in private, express their revulsion for pedophilia, but in public one would not want to say too much less the inquisitors get suspicious.
This movie presents an incredible opportunity for actual pedophiles, especially those among the Zeitgeist's activist class.
Perhaps this is uncharitable. No, it's definitely uncharitable. However, if I had made similar claims 20 years ago about transgenderism, then that would have also been uncharitable. Is there are bridge to far? Everyone says that there is, but then many of those people don't seem to have ever seen a bridge they didn't immediately run across, while dragging as many people along with them as they could. Sometimes being uncharitable is the only way to avoid being scammed, again.
God I hope my fear is misplaced.
hydroacetylene
2yr ago
This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right? These commenters point out how outlets like Rolling Stone defended Cuties (the infamous Netflix movie about pubescent girls dancing in modern sexually charged style) and didn't seem to have a problem with Taken, the 2008 movie with an obviously exaggerated human trafficking plot. But that was a decade and a half ago, and we know why this is happening now: it's culture war, pure and simple. While Righties are accusing the Lefties of covering up for their corrupt pedo elites, I theorized this might be legacy media feeling threatened by upstart conservative alternatives, but after researching I don't think there's much more to this than "Red Tribe likes this, so it must be bad". Or perhaps I am not blackpilled enough yet to believe that the slope is so slippery that pedophiles are already being introduced into the pantheon of Letter People.
The culture war angle is even simpler- Jim Caviezel is One Of The Bad People, so nothing he does can be good. Nevermind that he took credit but wasn't the brains behind the operation. It's straightforwards cancel culture dynamics against the heir apparent to Mel Gibson.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
I'll second @huadpe's caveat about the organization possibly grifting, but what strikes me about the reviews is how much like propaganda they seem. They're all about how the wrong people like the movie and who the people involved are associated with.
Rolling Stone:
the mostly white-haired audience around me could be relied on to gasp, moan in pity, mutter condemnations, applaud, and bellow “Amen!” at moments of righteous fury
and
organization has far-right affinities
Vice:
The film [...] has been accompanied by a fusillade of laudatory statements from personalities including Mel Gibson, who Ballard claims gave OUR “valuable intelligence” that led to the group and its partners breaking up a pedophile ring in Ukraine, motivational speaker and longtime OUR backer Tony Robbins, and Matt Schlapp, the chair of the Conservative Political Action Conference. [...] It’s also getting approving write-ups from faith-based publications like Catholic World Report and The Christian Post.
There's a ton of weasely connotation-laden words as well: "ilk", "relentless", "hackneyed", the aforementioned audience's "bellow"s, etc. It's hardly worth selecting quotes because the entirety of the articles is like this.
I guess this is valuable to people who are left-aligned but didn't know they're supposed to hate this movie.
Timothy Ballard is a former DHS agent who, in 2013, left his role fighting criminal child exploitation and founded Operation Underground Railroad, or OUR. It's a parapolice organization which operates internationally, infiltrating child trafficking rings, identifying ring leaders, working with local law enforcement to arrest the leaders, and providing support to the victims after they are rescued. [1] I have not delved deeply into the history or workings of the group, so their actual effectiveness is a mystery to me, but they boast some impressive sounding results; a blog post from yesterday claims 51 survivors of an international sex ring saved and 22 suspects apprehended in "a joint effort by the Hellenic Police, the Spanish National Police, INTERPOL, O.U.R., A21, and Homeland Security Investigations." [2] It sounds very impressive, uplifting, and even badass. It's the kind of thing Hollywood would love to make a movie about - and they did.
In 2015, director Alejandro Monteverde and a production company approached Ballard to make a movie documenting his exploits. Ballard had been approached many times before by for movie deals but had turned them all down. This time, Monteverde's work was able to impress Ballard (and his wife) enough to convince him to sign on to a movie deal. Ballard was extensively interviewed, a script was written, and filming started in the summer of 2018. Interestingly, Ballard requested that actor Jim Caviezel portray him - Caviezel notably portrayed Jesus (yes that one) in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, though Ballard cited Caviezel's performance in The Count of Monte Cristo as the reason for his request. The film was completed that year and Fox was signed on to distribute the film under the name The Sound of Freedom. [3]
Fox was not around long enough to complete the deal. They were acquired by Disney, who shelved the movie (Disney later claimed they had no knowledge of the movie, which is plausible given the enormity of both Disney and the former Fox). It sat in limbo until earlier this year, when the filmmakers bought back the rights to the movie and approached Angel Studios for distribution. Angel Studios is an interesting company; they are entirely supported by equity crowdfunding, in which small investors provide funding in exchange for securities. As the name might suggest they are heavily Christian focused, with one of their largest previous projects being The Chosen, a dramatic television retelling of the life of Jesus Christ. They implement their crowdfunding model by presenting their investors with several options for new projects and ask them to vote for which ones they would like to see. Reportedly, The Sound of Freedom reached a critical threshold of votes within days, the release was greenlit, and the movie hit theaters on July 4, 2023. It instantly became a hit, and a target for hits.
If you have heard about this movie before now, it was probably in the context of controversy. Lefty media outlets have been dogpiling it, with Rolling Stone calling it "a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms"[5] and a CBC Radio columnist saying it was "a dog whistle for xenophobic Pro-Trump, Pro-Life types".[6] Criticism of the movie itself is weak, with the arguments boiling down to "it's not realistic" and "the plot doesn't always make sense", things that could be leveled at any summer blockbuster. External to the film, they criticize Caviezel and his penchant for QAnon conspiracy theories, but never mention the Mexican native director, whose father and brother were kidnapped and killed by a cartel.[7] What many have been focusing on is these outlets' attempts to seemingly pull the rug out from under the whole movie by downplaying child trafficking as a real world issue, trotting out 'experts' to point out how the depiction is 'dangerous' because it sets 'unrealistic expectations' and generally setting the tone that trafficking isn't really a thing people should be worried about.
This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right? These commenters point out how outlets like Rolling Stone defended Cuties (the infamous Netflix movie about pubescent girls dancing in modern sexually charged style) and didn't seem to have a problem with Taken, the 2008 movie with an obviously exaggerated human trafficking plot. But that was a decade and a half ago, and we know why this is happening now: it's culture war, pure and simple. While Righties are accusing the Lefties of covering up for their corrupt pedo elites, I theorized this might be legacy media feeling threatened by upstart conservative alternatives, but after researching I don't think there's much more to this than "Red Tribe likes this, so it must be bad". Or perhaps I am not blackpilled enough yet to believe that the slope is so slippery that pedophiles are already being introduced into the pantheon of Letter People.
Other titbits I want to mention:
- Ticket buyers are "predominately female", and a third of the audience is Hispanic.
- The movie's conception predates QAnon, and production was around when QAnon was starting but not yet known to the mainstream.
- The movie has a CinemaScore of A+ (the highest) and is the only movie currently in theaters with that rating. The score is measured by polling theater atendees as they leave the screening and is often used by the industry to gauge audience reaction.
[1] https://ourrescue.org/ [2] https://ourrescue.org/blog/51-survivors-of-human-trafficking-freed-in-greece [3] https://www.deseret.com/2018/6/4/20646317/actor-jim-caviezel-set-to-play-second-most-important-role-in-o-u-r-story-the-sound-of-freedom [4] https://variety.com/2023/film/box-office/sound-of-freedom-box-office-success-1235664837/ [5] https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/sound-of-freedom-jim-caviezel-child-trafficking-qanon-movie-1234783837/ [6] https://twitter.com/Harry__Faulkner/status/1679207525495844865 [7] https://people.com/crime/ali-landrys-father-in-law-and-brother-in-law-found-dead-in-mexico/
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
2yr ago
My guess is - if the symbol is really a pedophile symbol - it was poorly thought out edginess. And I am highly suspicious of the symbol's veracity, because I've spent most of my life on the dark side of the internet (and am fluent in hobo code) and never saw it before.
I expect it probably was a symbol used by a group of pedophiles at some point, but it's almost certainly not a common or universal one since there is no single pedophile community and instead lots of small groups and individuals that don't associate with or even know about each other.
FistfullOfCrows
2yr ago
Abstract, platonic pedophiles and other horrors from beyond the stars
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
Well, I'd point out that to the extent the word "grooming" has been tortured, it was first done by the progressive movement. But this case seems to fit even the stricter definition of "sexual grooming". From what I heard showing porn to kids is a common tactic pedophiles employ to break down children's boundaries.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2yr ago
Who are these abstract, Platonic pedophiles? Are they, by any chance, made of straw?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2yr ago
I don't think this is very good evidence of such a write-off. If one thinks that the chanter really is a diddler, and people there know it, and they're covering anyway, then sure. It's those middle links that are missing. Why think that the other marchers are "shrugging their shoulders?"
You have Griffin, who wants to sweep such statements under the rug as a provocative strategy. He doesn't seem to think the chanter is actually a pedophile, just like he hasn't actually killed any mayors. Then there's Fussy, who was uncomfortable with the chant and specifically started an alternate. Again, not exactly shrugging.
It's like going on to /v/ and saying "this guy called himself a faggot! and no one else really argued! the community must be really gay-friendly!"
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2yr ago
I'm on your side in this (and wanted to thank you for that article about Patricia Piccinini, her sculptures are incredible and I am annoyed I had never seen her work before) but I don't think it's that outlandish for a punk band to use pedophile imagery - punk is about shocking the establishment, and you can't shock the establishment by biting the head off a bat or pretending to worship the devil any longer. My guess is - if the symbol is really a pedophile symbol - it was poorly thought out edginess. And I am highly suspicious of the symbol's veracity, because I've spent most of my life on the dark side of the internet (and am fluent in hobo code) and never saw it before.
Gdanning
2yr ago
Dude, you made a very, very broad claim: that "influenc[ing] the perception of children towards the LGBT movement" is somehow illegitimate. Now, you are making a very much narrower claim. It is a classic motte and bailey. And, I note, even that narrow claim it is still very, very different from the OP's initial reference to child molestation. Because that is what OP said: "Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles".
It's not baffling to me. If a 30yo dating a 20yo becomes taboo, it is essentially put in the same category as a 30yo dating someone even younger.
It's already there in some ways with the taboo on admitting attraction to literally anyone younger than 18. Both a person attracted to a 16yo and a person attracted to a 6yo are called pedophiles.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
#”We’re coming for your children.”
The LGBTQ+ movement kicked out NAMBLA, genuine pederasts, in the 80’s in order to get sodomy laws aimed at consenting adults off the books. The American anti-pedophilia majority took a generation to accept this disavowal at face value.
The Pizzagate section of the Q or QAnon movement revived the bailey that gay people generally want to rape children to cultural relevance, and did so around the time the trans rights movement was pushing acceptance of transition. The motte version is that the gay community reproduces through social memetic contagion since they won’t reproduce sexually. One potent variation is the ironic and practically self-parodying “trans genocide” meme
The drag queen story hour program made the idea scarily realistic even to parents who didn’t subscribe to any of that conspiracy theory nonsense. And now there’s a new twist.
As chronicled by NBC News:
In the 21-second clip, circulated by a right-wing web streamer channel, dozens of people march in the streets and are clearly heard chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.” But one voice that is louder than the crowd — it’s not clear whose, or whether the speaker was a member of the LGBTQ community — is heard saying at least twice, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
To conservative pundits, activists and lawmakers, the video confirmed the allegations they’ve levied in recent years that the LGBTQ community is “grooming” children.
But to Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, if that’s the worst they heard, it’s only because he wasn’t there this year.
Griffin said he chanted obscene things in the past, like “Kill, kill, kill, we’re coming to kill the mayor,” and joked about pubic hair and sex toys during marches. People at the Drag March regularly sing “God is a lesbian.”
“It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.”
The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to longtime march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community.
Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles. The charge is an echo of a decades-old trope anti-gay activists have used to paint the community as a threat to the country’s youths, an allegation that some advocates say endangers LGBTQ people. And the intense reaction to the video has scared some attendees, who insist the quip has been taken out of context.
“It’s really scary to us,” said Fussy Lo Mein, a drag performer and activist who was at this year’s march and declined to give their real name because of safety concerns. “It doesn’t represent everybody — it represents that individual. I thought it was a dumb idea, and I started chanting on top of it with alternate verses.”
This seems to be equivalent to the Charlottesville “White Rights” event where “Jews will not replace us” was supposedly chanted. The outgroup only hears “WE ARE A THREAT TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE AND EVERYTHING YOU HOLD SACRED,” while the ingroup appreciates the nuance and gets a bit freaked out at the outgroup seeing only the surface level interpretation.
Everyone? No. Pedophiles? Sure. Surely you recognize there are matters of degree between abnormal and being turned into a giant spider. I get the impression that many people like this think they're main characters in an anime and are looking to conscript a supporting cast from the general population. I'm only saying what should be obvious, they are not entitled to the affirmation and support of others. We cannot all be main characters with a supporting cast, it doesn't work. If your exploration requires the support of the rest of us then it should at least be pro-social itself and I don't see a giant spider as anything in that direction.
I'm not sure whether you are agreeing with me or misunderstanding me, so I'll clarify why I said 'Hence Cuties'. The behavior of the girls in the movie is intended as part of an exploration and critique of women's experiences. Critics of the film argue that the movie is morally bad because of how the girls are portrayed while supporters argue there is nothing wrong with the movie itself and that it is instead viewers (eg, "pedophiles") who interpret it in a titillating context who are morally in the wrong. That is, women should be free to make a movie about their experiences without men coming along and sexualizing it.
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