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pedophile

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

And there are ways that pedophilia is terrible that don't extend to being homosexual—acting out of pedophilic desires tends to involve power dynamics and large differences in maturity and judgment that wouldn't necessarily be present in a homosexual relationship.

None of the people who sexually abused me when I was younger were sexually attracted to me. None of them saw me as a sexual partner, and in some cases probably didn't even see what they were doing as sexual. I was just a doll they could poke and prod and tease to get funny reactions out of. There's a widespread misconception that not being motivated by sexual attraction makes behavior okay, or at least not sexual, while being motivated by sexual attraction makes behavior not okay, and the LGBT movement (and they are by far not the only ones, EDIT: but they are the topic of this chain) can burn for all I care for their contributions toward reinforcing that misconception in an effort to push all the blame for the harms they cause solely onto my demographic rather than facing their own contributions to harming kids.

It's also possible to read his comments as saying that he would prefer no such thing, in which case I have a lot less sympathy with his argument.

I don't think prefer is the best word to use here. I'm sexually attracted to children, so by definition I'd prefer to be able to act on that. I'm also extremely risk-averse and terrified of inadvertently hurting them (or less sympathetically, terrified of them hating me for it) to the point I'd rather avoid getting involved in such relationships at all than risk having to experience that, so I have few qualms with some level of repression. I resent repression that just amounts to hiding who I am attracted to because people are disgusted by it rather than because it risks harming kids (eg, banning pedophilic fiction, discrimination in activities that don't involve interacting with children). And I have very little patience for other groups openly engaging in more risky behavior that I avoid, while claiming it's okay specifically because they aren't pedophiles and ignoring, downplaying, and/or blaming pedophiles for the fallout when that risk plays out.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

Nobody has a sexuality until they lose their virginity

I don't think this is true. I'd argue for internalizing and owning the identity. It may be concurrent with first sexual contact but does not have to be.

actively practice your sexuality in order to possess it

Non-offending pedophiles aren't still pedophiles?

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

"Homosexuals are pedophiles" has flared up again, laws aimed at functionally excluding acknowledgment of homosexuality from public schools, polling indicating ~30% of the population thinks gay marriage should be illegal, anti-drag measures, personal experience as a member of a community where more conservative participants regularly have a conniption about homosexual participants not being in the closet.

I don't know why it would be expected that homophobes would pack it in after Obergefell v. Hodges or that all that sentiment would suddenly evaporate.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

"White"? "Bourgeoise"?

"Pedophile" is exclusionary and judgmental. Generally speaking, would you argue that Progressives are okay with judging and excluding pedophiles, or would you argue that they object to doing so?

If I say that homosexual acts are a sin, how is that more exclusionary and judgmental than a gay person saying that my moral assessment of homosexuality is bigoted and homophobic?

Also, you (or the progressives you're referring to) are misusing the paradox of tolerance. It applies to people who respond to argument with personal violence.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

First, the argument is an If-Then statement. If A is the collection of four premises, and B is "pedophilia should be allowed", then my claim is that your argument is equivalent to A->B. I don't claim that A is true... at the moment. But is that the only barrier to your endorsement of pedophilia? Do you believe A->B? If pedophiles convinced a non-negligible number of doctors to verbally say "yeah, this is probably fine", would you agree that they're the experts and so that means it is actually fine?

And is it the verbal endorsement or the private thoughts? What if right now, like 10% of doctors secretly think that pedophilia is okay if the child agrees to it, but simply remain quiet because they'd lose their jobs if they said it out loud? Is Overton's window the only barrier between whether something is or is not immoral?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

Compelling and admirable - according to later reinterpretations of the Roman historians who wrote about her after Suetonius obliterated her. It's like if the hero sallies out, massacres a bunch of civilians, wins a single battle and then gets utterly crushed.

Skanderberg is overwhelmingly superior as a rebel and a hero. He won at least one single-combat duel plus there are many tales of his superhuman strength and endurance. We know he fought and won battles against the odds for 25 years. He even fended off the treacherous Venetians and somehow found time to help his friends in Aragon retake Naples. He personally halted Ottoman expansion into Europe!

Or take Mullah Omar. Veteran guerrilla against the Soviets, tank-hunter, lost an eye in battle. Gets a prophetic vision, leads his students off to fight and kill all the warlord rapists and pedophiles in Afghanistan. He does a pretty good job of that, conquers most of the country and gets his own holy item (the Cloak of Muhammed). He bans opium production fairly effectively. He tells Osama Bin Laden to cool it with the jihad but defies another global superpower and refuses to hand over his guest to America. Based on Islamic law and Afghan customs, he cannot betray guests like that so he offers to hand him over to an Islamic court but is rebuffed. If his life were a work of fiction, he would be almost too cliched a hero. How comically villainous can his enemies be?

Reportedly, in early 1994, Omar led 30 men armed with 16 rifles to free two young girls who had been kidnapped and raped by a warlord, hanging him from a tank gun barrel.

Then he hands over the insurgency against NATO to his successor before dying of natural causes, before his followers march on to victory! We made a serious mistake going up against a force led by someone straight out of an Arthurian legend, especially when we side with the pedophile rapists (who infamously filled the ranks of our drug-ridden Afghan National Army). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Army#Ineffectiveness

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

My point is that Jews are enormously overrepresented in establishing and developing these sectors. The direction in which they take things tends to be more radical and transgressive. It stands to reason that if there weren't any Jews, then there would be much less in the way of pornography and casual sex generally. The most sex-oriented big dating apps are tinder and grindr, both founded by Jews. More lovey-dovey, long-term relationship apps like OKCupid and Bumble were founded by Europeans.

Not all horrendous ideas in the world are from Jews: Gentler for instance proudly sent orphans in Germany off to live with pedophiles and got dozens of men acquitted of molestation, Foucault campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent, presumably so he could have sex with children. There was a postwar vibe that was excessively libertine, where barriers that should not have been touched were broken. The Frankfurt school had a lot to do with this attitude of course.

Immigration and refugee resettlement in the US stems significantly from Jews. The 1965 Immigration Law was introduced by Emmanuel Celler. Sure, it was passed by many non-Jews too. But consider Proposition 187 which sought to stem illegal immigration in California, which was approved democratically but then blocked by Mariana Pfaelzer.

Calling all Lurkers: Share your Dreams of Effortposting

That is another explanation. That being said, these countries are more or less allies of America and the French or German or Australian versions of the NSA are cooperating with us. Hell, even famously neutral Switzerland helped us during the Cold War. If these dudes found out about a gigantic, well-funded pedophile murderer website…the guys running it, and a lot of their customers, would have law enforcement knocking at their doors.

You still have a bunch of dedicated hobbyists going up against large, powerful national governments with lots of resources and the backing of the general public…people would be literally calling for these guys’ heads.

The only way this would be possible, I think, is if these people had powerful patrons protecting them. I don’t know if that would mix well with just any evil shitbag with a laptop and a few hundred bucks’ worth of crypto being able to log onto these sites…I don’t think it would. Mr. Evil Pedo gets busted by law enforcement. There’s a good chance he sings like a canary…and if he doesn’t, there’s the next guy, and the next…someone’s going to spill the beans in hopes of a lighter sentence. Feds use that dude to go after bigger fish, with the cooperation of the NSA and the other alphabet soup boys.

There’d have to be a fairly large conspiracy and powerful people protecting something like this…if peasants (that means us) found out about this shit we’d be pissed. Could be a reasonably plausible way to get the American people to give up a lot of our civil liberties and accept an NSA headquarters at every police station or something, to be honest.

To sum up: you’ve still got like 100 militia dudes, who are decent at fighting but not professional grade, going up against hundreds of high quality professional soldiers. These guys are dog meat without a hell of a lot of help.

Wellness Wednesday for May 10, 2023

I recently found a simple (albeit tedious) way to dramatically improve my experience of using Twitter, to filter out the specific topics which I hate, and I want to share this method.

It's simple: just keep identifying key words which you associate with below-average tweets being shown to you (according to your personal standards), and then keep adding those words to your muted words list. (Not just key words from top-level tweets, but also key words you associate with mediocre reply tweets as well).

This is mathematically guaranteed to make your life better, as long as those key words really are commonly found in your least-favorite tweets.

I have tried repeatedly letting Twitter know about specific tweets which I am not interested in, and over time it helps, but Twitter's algorithm seems to be very determined to "push" certain kinds of tweets (probably because those tweets are associated with higher overall engagement). The only absolute way to block these tweets is to block every single plausible unique word associated with those types of tweets.

To mute words on desktop browser, go to: Home > 3 dots (...) > Settings & Support > Settings & Privacy > Privacy & Safety > Mute & Block > Muted Words > "+"

Or set up a bookmark directing to https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords

(In the app it is a similar sequence of steps.)

Then decide how long you want to mute the word. (I usually mute words forever.) If you want to block a phrase, use quotation marks "". You can also choose to not mute tweets which are replying to your own tweets.

I know it's tedious to do this, but it will save you from reading thousands of awful tweets. It pays for itself in a massive way.

Also, Twitter will tell you which reply tweets have been muted, and you can display them if you want, to double-check that you are in fact muting tweets which aren't worth reading.

This is my list of muted words so far, in case you also want to block any of the tweets with these words, or just to see what this might look like. (One annoying aspect is that you have to mute literally every single permutation of certain words and topics.)

Muted words:

"#thread" savetonotion @savetonotion @threadreaderapp threadreaderapp @rattibha @readwise readwise "action shooter" fps santos shit insurrection j6 "gaming session" "ass up" rattibha unroll "my dude" misgender misgendering "biological woman" "biological female" TERF "gender critical" mutilate mutilation "biological male" "biological man" demons demon cucked cuck carroll doge "bitcoin prize" "exclusive content" puberty transitioning transition chevy "sexual harassment" "michael obama" michelle "IRA" hexican Litecoin cryptocurrency crypto bitcoin dysphoric dysphoria cdc flu "identifies as" pedo "minor attracted" pedophile "turning points" "charlie kirk" "vaccineinjuries" "vaccineinjured" "vaccineinjury" "james cameron" mtg "january6" "january 6" "jan6" "january 6th" avatar "sexual orientation" lindell pillow mypillow espn football basketball nba nfl crapper lgbwithoutthet fauci gates schwab WEF vaccines mrna gender tran troon trans covid vax unvaccinated vaccine "prince harry" markle incel trump impeachment impeached impeach hamlin damar aella Andrew Tate Kari Lake kari Kari's tates Tate's "Tate" Cobratate cobra tate "andrew tate" "andrewtate" repukkklican Hitler nazi "p e l o s i" nigga nigger "n word" hammering hammered hammers hammer bolsonaro bolsanaro lula qanon "piece of shit" truss underwear catturd2 catturd "name is david" berkeley nudist "body counts" "body count" "jake paul" prostitute's prostitute depape's depape "peter mccullough" ligma "gave the order" pelosi's pelosi vagina penis paul pelosi "paul pelosi" wordle shapecel wordcel autogolpe

One might think I was a liberal from reading this list, but actually I am a (mostly) conservative who is just tired of certain topics and would prefer to see other things now.

Also, some of these words do sometimes show up in great tweets, but not often enough for me to put up with all the worse tweets which contain those words.

I hope this is helpful!

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

So again, if this is your stance, what makes you think you'll be against pedophile rights if they come up again?

Because I am against them now, and as a man in my 50's my political and moral compass hasn't much changed in about the last 25 years. And I was against it last time it was even mentioned in polite circles. And I used to work in a CSE task group when I was part of government, so I have actually dealt with actual pedophiles and groomers and their victims.

Why do YOU think it would change? Does yours? Do you flip flop on the morality of pedophilia? If so why? Most people have their standard views affected by social pressure, but I've never met anyone whose views changed on agreeing with pedophilia or something similar. It's renowned as being the thing that unites like 99% of people. There is a reason they are usually segregated from other prisoners and the like.

However, my point overall is not whether kids getting married at 14 is good or trans kids getting transitioned at 14 is good because that is largely irrelevant at a social level anyway. But that we already have established parameters as to whether kids can do X thing which is controversial and we don't usually allow kids to do. Generally if the parents (and sometimes doctors if it is medical) agree it is mostly fine. If the parents disagree then a court can weigh in (judicial authority can substitute for parental permission in underage marriage or emancipation for example). Whether it is good or bad is entirely orthogonal to the point as to whether something generally not allowed should be allowed with oversight for minors. We have an entire structure for it already set up often involving medical procedures. Just throw the whole "underage trans treatment" issue into that bucket and pragmatically speaking we are done.

Now for me, I think if a 14yo is committed enough to being trans they want surgery, and their parents agree, and their doctors agree, then it is probably a good thing to let them go through with it, because there is no chance I know more about their situation than they do, and the only person taking the risk is them. My parents let me play a lot of risky sports when I was a kid and as a result I have a bum knee and arthritis in one hand. That's the trade off, sometimes you get negative outcomes. And that is ok.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

So again, if this is your stance, what makes you think you'll be against pedophile rights if they come up again? It doesn't really look like you think it's bad, in fact you're saying it's nothing new now. And are you against banning it on the grounds that on a societal level it's a blip or not? Would you mind answering my arguments directly, instead of gesturing going off on tangents?

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

If a 14 yo kid thinks they are trans and their doctors and parents agree then it's a good thing to let them do it as far as I am concerned now and then.

Given how trans activists even now often claim that the only intervention on the table at that age is puberty blockers, I'll go out on a limb and say 10 years ago it would sound just as outlandish as pedophile rights.

I agree we might not live to see pedophile rights being argued explicitly for again, I think there are good chances we'll see the trans debate being dropped like a hot potato. If that happens, do you think you'll continue saying it was never a big deal and should be allowed, or will you start arguing that progressives never really supported it?

At a society level it's barely a blip.

So is adults having consensual sex with minors, but it's still illegal.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

And some right wing groups fought for white supremacy and fascism. Does that mean saying the Republicans are nazis is true? I understand its a good rhetorical tactic, but its not true.

Now is it possible some pedophile group takes over the progressive movement? Sure, it seens highly unlikely to me but anything is possible. But just as I don't oppose Republicans because they might be taken over by actual fascists in the future, i wouldn't oppose progressives now.

If it happens (and both seem super unlikely) then it can be dealt with then.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

Still not grooming.

The LGBT movement was explicitly fighting for pedophile rights in the past. It is just as "simple and straightforward" that they will move onto it again at some point as it was that they moved from gay rights to trans rights.

So you have to push the front beyond there.

So again, we should never take the progressive movement at it's word. They will push beyond any compromise they are offering, either because it's "simple and straightforward" or just in case someone pushes back. Therefore your arguments about "still not grooming" should be ignored.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

Sanctuary laws like these make the benefit of moving states pretty minimal. At age twelve kids can purchase plane tickets and fly alone to a state that will keep them from you.

Maybe you’d wonder where they could get the money. A wild amount of runaways end up earning money through prostitution. Googling around shows estimates of around a third will end up being prostituted or trafficked.

I’ve thought about this, and this is something I’m willing to die for. If the state comes for my son because they’ve brainwashed him into thinking he’s a girl and I won’t consent to medical interventions, then I will defend my son with lethal force. Morally I find it no different than defending my child against a pedophile who has convinced my kid that they’re in love and is trying to kidnap them. I’m not going to stand aside and let such grave damage be inflicted on someone that I have the ultimate duty to protect.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

and is there anyone who is such a believer in parental rights that they would allow a pedophile widower to retain custody of a 12-year-old after impregnating her?

When they did genetic studies of people in Britain they found that one person was the product of father daughter incest. But, they kept it secret, because, of course, the people involved were Pakistani.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

Except that Texas will take your kids away and charge you with child abuse if you let them take puberty blockers rather than allow that variety of family life to flourish. As far as I know most U.S. states have some proceedings to take away your child if you abuse them, and is there anyone who is such a believer in parental rights that they would allow a pedophile widower to retain custody of a 12-year-old after impregnating her? It's not really a meta-dispute about centralized state authority vs. anti-fragile family life, it's an object-level dispute over whether puberty blockers and/or hormones constitute child abuse. Texas thinks it does and will take your child away to be raised by bureaucrats, Minnesota thinks it doesn't and will refuse to enforce Texas's rulings stripping a parent of custody if their kid is in Minnesota.

People in this thread are then very concerned that Minnesota's claim of emergency temporary jurisdiction over child custody proceedings means they will also emancipate runaways. So far has shown themselves to be an expert on Minnesota custody laws and explained whether jurisdiction over a custody proceeding also means jurisdiction to hear a termination of parental rights by a minor, and/or whether refusing to allow a child to receive gender-affirming care would be grounds for termination of parental rights in the absence of other abuse.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

It's Not a Glass House, It's a Glass Home

What makes Reddit most unique is that nobody has a positive opinion of it, least of all Reddittors. The more negative your opinion of Reddit, the more likely you fall into that very demographic you decry. Reddit's self hatred, and the collective reflex of Redditors to decry their enemies by declaring them to be the essence of Reddit, has remained persistent from the ShitRedditSays days to /r/drama and their rivals at /r/Subredditdrama to the commenters on r4r subs. I come to bury Reddit not to praise it, but I do want to drop a spoonful of sugar into the Haterade we're all drinking in this thread. Reddit remains unmatched for certain uses, or at least I have not yet figured out how to use Twitter or TikTok to achieve these goals.

-- Reddit presence and content remains stubbornly un-monetizable. Outside of edge cases like Aella and her friends in the sex work end of Reddit, or forum celebrities like Unidan, Reddit still isn't making anybody any money. ((Which is far more problematic than the userbase for ownership)) Where on Twitter, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, even absolute Space Monkeys like our own @KulakRevolt are trying to monetize their online presence; Reddit stubbornly persists in being basically useless for capitalism. I'm sure on the margins some powermods are corrupt and direct traffic on /r/RedDevils to one blog over another in exchange for cash under the table, or people find ways to promote their own substack under different sock puppets, but for the most part Reddit is unique in that it still feels like everyone is there for the love of the game. Sometimes I hate the team they play for, sometimes I hate how they play, sometimes I just flat out hate them, but they are there because they have nothing better to do.

If I go on Twitter for NBA news, every tweet from a rando seems to be threaded to two more comments about buying NFTs or fake Jerseys or whatever. And every tweet from a journalist is trying to build their presence. If I go on Reddit for NBA news, the takes are just as terrible, but at least I know that's what these morons genuinely think. If I go on /r/weightroom, the opinions may be good and they may be bad, but they aren't followed by a link to buy supplements from the poster; on every other social media site they will be. Money makes the hot takes hotter, the politics more politically correct in the mainstream; but once you step out of the mainstream the politics must always get MORE EXTREEEEME to draw in views and cash, endless recursion from "I think the politicians might be lying to us" to "I think the politicians are alien pedophile vampires."

As long as this is the case, I will find Reddit more useful for reading NFL draft news or finding opinions on workout plans than I will find any other social media page.

-- Reddit is easier to segregate and navigate. Searching hashtags or particular users on TikTok or Twitter doesn't achieve nearly the topic specificity that going to a subreddit does. I can go on /r/nfl and be sure I'm getting nfl information, on /r/kettlebell and be sure I'm getting kettlebells. The information might not be good, but at least it is there. I can eventually curate a feed on another site so that I only get information on certain topics, but Reddit offers a superior method to segregate information by topic. The search feature has been notoriously bad forever, but google can pretty much find me what I'm looking for in a review of Super Squats or common problems with the e46 bmw 3 series in seconds.

-- Because Reddit remains stubbornly hated and unmonetizable, the conversation on Reddit remains a touch more authentic on a given topic than the conversation on Twitter which tends to be about striking a pose. Journalists use Twitter as their patsy to say "Fans are talking about X"; they tend to decry any conversation on Reddit as the CHUDs grunting at each other.

-- If your objection to Reddit is that all Redditors are losers, and the average insta or twitter user is better, you are using the wrong subreddits. /r/weightroom is full of verified strong motherfuckers, ditto /r/climbharder; go on the right subreddit and there really are hot MILFs in your area who want to meet; /r/classics has given me excellent recommendations and cogent responses to questions about translations; /r/askhistorians is full of people with fascinating degrees of domain knowledge and a deep searchable archive. Moderation standards are possible on Reddit in a way that they aren't possible on Twitter or TikTok. Private Discord or Telegram channels are superior, but one has to get into those, subreddits are viewable to everyone. Reddit retains a huge searchable back archive of content, as long as it remains searchable Reddit will remain somewhat useful even if it ultimately becomes pointless to comment on things. Every forum will ultimately suffer from users being losers, or alternatively from users presenting only their best traits, you're getting one or the other.

-- At the end of the day, I've listed a ton of non-political subreddits, and that's how most people use not just SM but everything. At core, the very marginal politics of /r/nfl , stuff like Deshaun Watson or whatever, are things I don't really care about. A minority of people will be driven away from the hordes of bad draft takes by a smidge of leftist political lean.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

I think another thing that makes it "literary" is adding allusions to stories in the Western canon and name-dropping famous thinkers. E.g. Iris Murdoch's The Sacred and Profane Love Machine does it right in the title. The big disappointment is that the references usually don't add anything or help make an argument, they just make things seem more profound.

Probably a good example of literary fiction that does actually make a sort of argument is Mann's Death in Venice, which is about an aging pedophile realizing that being educated doesn't actually make him or his desires cool.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

Terms don't have to, and often don't, have perfectly sensible meanings outside their value as use. A doctor sodomizing with a broom would be considered 'sexual abuse' either because 'broom in ass' is a fundamentally sexual act (is it? say a primitive tribesman falls on a wooden pole in the ground and it goes up his ass and it hurts. Do he or his tribebuds consider that sexual? I'd lean towards 'they'd notice it and joke about it, but not take it seriously', but I'm not sure.) or because 'broom in ass' is close enough to a sexual act we'd consider it sexual abuse.

What this points to is that the 'very bad'ness of sexual abuse is borne out of specific characteristics of the claimed harm that, in a way mostly related to their sexual nature, interact with the future of the person harmed in a negative way. So being raped as a child would be sexual abuse because it'd cause, so it's claimed, trust issues, fear about having sex in the future, maybe seeking to imitate that sexual abuse in the future with other abusers, et cetera. Whereas having your balls or penis cut off by a doctor accidentally probably wouldn't do that. The reason we find sexual abuse to be that bad is in part wanting to protect kids from that. But it's also mixed in with a lot of disproportionate, bizzare overreaction tbh. Children getting raped is bad, but it isn't really worse than murder or accidental death - but people, culturally, act like it is.

And that's why calling it 'sexual abuse' is materially wrong and not useful - having gender transition surgery doesn't cause any of the bad things sexual abuse causes, or have any of the malicious motives most sexual abuse has. Sure, it has different bad effects and bad motives. But they aren't the same. But because it's quite adjacent to 'children' and 'sex', and for whatever reason 'protect the children from pedophiles' resonates so much with people, we get this.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

Did I call him a pedophile?

You responded to someone complaining about defenses of actual, non-rhetorical pedophiles, by arguing that Socrates was a pederast, and that Turing had an "inappropriate relationship with a teenager". If you weren't attempting to imply he was a pedophile, I'm at a loss for why you brought him up. It doesn't seem that the age of the relationship was actually what made it inappropriate, which was certainly the implication I took.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

The right isn't gonna accept trans people no matter what at this point, when you start calling people pedophiles the conversation is kind of over.

When you openly and blatantly state your intent to convert people's children to an ideologically driven belief system backed by the power of the state, then no conversation is possible. Arguably it never started.

"We don't have to convince YOU of anything, we'll just teach your kids to hate your beliefs and we may convince a few of them to undergo invasive surgery to alter their very personal identity, against YOUR wishes."

Explain to me how there's any room for negotiation when such a position has been moved to the forefront of one side's platform?

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

She's accurately identifying the state of play. The right isn't gonna accept trans people no matter what at this point, when you start calling people pedophiles the conversation is kind of over.

I don't think the tactics of trans activists matter that much electorally. Us political obsessives can fight all we want about trans people but electorally it's all gonna get swamped by abortion/inflation among normies.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

Nope. But when used in reference to kids with the rhetoric being used then its intent is clear. And this isn't some secret. From Red State talking about a teacher assisting a child socially transition:

“This is the very definition of child predatory sexual grooming. Predators work to gain a victims’ trust by driving a wedge between them and their parents.”

Another article

"They want grooming and pedophilia to be something our society embraces.…"

And another:

"Yet you have people on the left side of the aisle who seem to have issues when Americans call out pedophiles or groomers. …"

They aren't talking about being groomed into a cult or a terrorist group. The language is very specific. Wedding together the concepts of grooming and pedophilia so the connotation is clear, when it is used on its own.

I also want to point out, this is a smart and useful thing to do. Its good strategy. Out in the world its exactly the type of rhetoric I would have suggested back in my days of political consultancy. From a pragmatic point of view the right should hit this hard. It's effective.

But here i think we should at least admit when our side uses things as a weapon. Doesn't mean we have to put the weapon down! But we try to discuss, not wage the culture war.

And just to be clear this is not a right only issue. Nazi is a weapon wielded by the left for people who are kind of on the right and "therefore" a Nazi. Its a rhetorical weapon. Fascist, similarly. Trump is not a Nazi or a fascist. He's not an existential threat. Those are weapons used against him. And..some people actually believe it. Just as some people on "your" side probably do believe its pedophilic grooming. But its still a weapon. And both can have collateral damage.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

Did I call him a pedophile? Just pointed out that he had an age-inappropriate relationship with a teenager, which is true.

The broader point is that sexual peccadilloes don't matter one way or another in terms of the value of someone's work, and (secondarily) cultural context matters. In the case of Foucault etc, they lived in a milieu where society hadn't yet decided that having sex with a teenager who was not yet of age was the Worst Thing Ever.