pedophile
Adunai
1mo ago
Era of total intel agency control (CIA over America)? [schizo warning]
I'm a follower of one Russian youtuber whose ideas are apparently like this. In the feudal age, the elite was changing itself in constantly bloodletting of civil strife. In the absolutist age, the remaining nobility could still kill the king/emperor, and eventually in the French and Russian revolutions the entire class was exterminated. This has led to what is today a democratic system where the president and ministers are superficially interchangeable but decide nothing because they're all controlled by intel services from behind the scenes with pedophile porn blackmail on every statesman.
What would your thoughts be on such a model? For the evidence, he points to how brutal the war in the Ukraine is, but Putin and Trump are both chums with each other. And how Russia could easily destroy the Dnieper bridges in the Ukraine, but chooses not to - apparently forbidden by the CIA/KGB intel service to disarm Russia for a NATO invasion.
Other cases of collusion between different statesmen for the sole purpose of advancing the interests of the compromised and cancer-ridden American state would be:
- Yugoslavia's Miloshevich who signed the Dayton agreement in 1995 leading to a surrender in 1999;
- Syria's Assad with the Astana accords in 2021 with deescalation zones for the rebels which allowed them to regroup and strike back in 2024;
- Iran's ayatollah who allowed both the Hamas and Hezbollah to be destroyed peacemeal without helping them;
- Russia's Putin who has only ever attacked in the only fortified region of the front for 3.5 years and is now trying to sign another rotten peace deal.
I'm likely sounding really silly right now, I'm downgrading myself to the Russian parts of my brain when talking about this. In English, it would likely be called "conspiracy theory"? But isn't the role of the CIA kinda common knowledge these days? And my question is about how WIAH never ever mentions it. Of course, there's another question as to how much any elite can control (and/or engineer?) a society without it breaking apart. According to some, the fall of the USSR was a controlled demolition, too.
Another aspect of his ideas is that America infected with the CIA finds China its enemy because China lacks the intelligence agencies and mercilessly culls its elite preventing corruption and is thus impervious to being infected itself. This is why America needs to start a nuclear war with China, but before that destroy the Russian nuclear arsenal - which is exactly what Putin is doing (alongside useless projects such as Poseidon, Avangard and Oreshnik or nuclear icebreakers).
Another blogger whom I follow has said that the Krokus terror attack involved a Russian policeman cutting off a terrorist's ear, and that it happened on Purim where cookies are baked in the form of ears (oznei haman), thus linking to a ritualistic significance. This line of thinking would view the Ukraine war not as disarming Russia but more in the way of religious slaughter (because again, destroying the Dnieper bridges or going around Donbass are never even considered by the Russians).
Again, apologies for copious schizo, but nothing of this can even be found in the Anglosphere. All you have is either the liberals saying Trump is Putin's slave, or the Z-anon bloggers such as MacGregor, Ritter, Napolitano, Mearsheimer or Jeffrey Sachs claiming Putin is playing 4D chess. Russians overall are at least diverse in their views, but I don't see any critique of their models.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
as there is still a long and ugly history of nasty jewish pedophiles making use of their jewishness to evade justice.
Correct, insofar as pedos (and many other sorts of criminals) seek to flee overseas to countries without easy extradition to the US. The Saudis, for example, seem to have something of a state policy of bailing out and whisking away their nationals away from American justice.
But I strongly suspect that all of this a rounding error being blown out of proportion because of who's involved. If there are base-rate statistics showing that jews are disproportionately likely to commit sex crimes, that would clearly indicate a problem. If there are statistics showing that that jews accused of crimes have disproportionately lower rates of conviction once charged, then that's likely a problem whether or not they are abusing aaliyah as the mechanism.
Otherwise it's just chinese cardiologists.
Of course, with Da Jooos, there's always some genius like Shaun King to get things started.
I think it would be more fair to say, despite any conspiracy and maximally antagonistic JIDF posting, that the guy who started this is the guy who got himself arrested in America on account of luring a child to have sex with him and the fact that the same man is now free as a bird in Israel and not trapped in a small concrete box in Nevada.
It certainly does not help the JIDF case in this matter that the person ultimately responsible for his release, whether they were actually involved or not, is an Israeli born Jew and alleged zionist. Along the with the District attorney allegedly being jewish as well. Though that may all be besides the point.
The 'conspiracy angle' between this and Epstein is not known to me, and I don't see it being false as a relevant point to anything Joo related in totality, as there is still a long and ugly history of nasty jewish pedophiles making use of their jewishness to evade justice. This just seems like another example of that ugly reality which is allowed to persist for reasons the JIDF posters are sure to be able to rationalize away as perfectly coincidentally natural.
You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.
This seems trivial in theory but I encourage you to spend some time thinking about how this process would work in practice, keeping in mind that you need to deal with people who sometimes lie.
Do you just ban everyone who gets accused of being a pedophile? Trivial to implement but obviously abusable.
Do you just ban everyone who has documented proof of being a pedophile? People are willing to go to significant lengths to fabricate evidence, whether for their own fame and attention or to harm the target of a grudge. This adds a lot of work and I still don't think this would weed out false accusations at a satisfactory rate.
If you want a reasonably low false-positive rate I can't see a good way around actually investigating yourself. This takes a lot of work even if everything happened on your own platform. If the first step of the process is to establish off-platform communication and the bad behavior occurs there it's likely impossible to properly investigate.
Markass
1mo ago
Why would anyone let their kids just hop onto these websites without doing basic due diligence or educating them on the reality of predators?
See downthread. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, it's hard to change, and anybody going against it will be seen as overly paranoid.
If a platform provides robust parental controls then they've done enough, full stop. The baton of responsibility is passed.
They should also ban pedophiles when they are reported and proactively look for them too.
Markass
1mo ago
What is the alternative to an opt in system?
Banning pedophiles from the platform as soon as they are reported, and proactively looking for them too.
How about parents take responsibility for their kids instead of imposing restrictions on all the rest of us because of their laziness.
Easier said than done. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, and I have a feeling that any parent who goes against this norm and, for example, stringently monitors their access or even prohibits them from using the Internet entirely (because arguably, kids shouldn't even be on the Internet at all) is going to get looks from other people, or at least their kid will say "Billy gets to use the Internet, why can't I?" Unless everybody in a community agrees that the Internet is too dangerous for kids to be used unsupervised, reasons like "but predators are online" sound a lot like "I don't let my kid outside after 3 o'clock because a stranger might come and snatch her."
Markass
1mo ago
Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it?
It's not just currency. They can want the approval of adults, the satisfaction of curiosity, or simply somebody to talk to. Many groomed kids have a tumultuous home life and are extremely lonely, for example. My point being that it shouldn't be thought of in pure economic terms, so predators doing this to children is (or should be) unacceptable and predator catchers finding predators this way is (or should be) acceptable.
If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.
Again, it's oversimplified to think this way. Being impressionable goes both ways. Sure, some will listen to authority figures and not do this. But some will not, for many reasons such as a preconceived distrust of authorities, being curious thinking "what could go wrong", or simply not knowing of the dangers.
And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly?
It's not. But Roblox is uniquely refusing to ban predators when people report them.
The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.
Yes, but you can just ban predators who are reported to do this. You can at the very least also not ban people who find predators and get them arrested in real life.
While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem
It's not just "ban people more frequently", it's not banning people who find predators too. I feel like the latter is the biggest cause of their recent PR problem. Their tendency to not ban predators has been reported and documented before but it hasn't caused a huge media circus. Going after people who find predators is just a huge WTF moment.
I do agree that it's impossible to rid platforms of pedophiles before they strike but I'm willing to bet a lot of money that if Roblox suddenly reversed course, unbanned Schlep and started banning reported pedophiles, that their PR problem would virtually disappear overnight.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.
This is the bit that baffles me. I remember the whole Ashton Challenor situation on Reddit and how much pressure it took for Reddit to crack. AIUI, the people doing this on Roblox aren't even employees or mods or anything.
Markass
1mo ago
Sure, you could go full Club Penguin and make the service as useless for actual communication as you can
You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.
they foul up any actual investigation
This doesn't make sense to say when Schlep (the banned "vigilante") has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested in real life.
intentionally antagonize existing users
I'm not aware of any instances of this happening.
"Wow, how horrible, people are willing to give you free Vbucks if you send them nudes"
To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency. I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example but then you spend a lot of words elaborating on exchanging nudes for Vbucks. In any case, it is extremely oversimplified to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so.
your power is gone as soon as the victim reaches for that "off" switch (unless other conditions are met)
That "unless other conditions are met" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. In most cases it's not as simple as blocking the predator precisely because of conditions like: the fact that minors are easily impressionable and manipulated into doing what predators want them to, the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want. The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.
Markass
1mo ago
Roblox has posted two separate responses to the vigilante bannings and none of them come close to saying they're just as bad as the predator.
The second says:
Similar to actual predators, they often impersonated minors, actively approached other users, then tried to lead them to other platforms to have sexually explicit conversations (which is against our Terms of Use).
I don't know how else to read this besides "'vigilantes' are similar to predators". It sounds like a defense attorney arguing that the cop who impersonated a drug buyer is just as bad as an actual drug buyer, on the sole basis of their actions being superficially similar.
It makes sense that people breaking the terms of service should be banned regardless of what their intention was behind it
Unless it updated recently to ban "vigilantes", this is quite a novel interpretation of the terms of service.
if they let this go on, knowing about it, doesn't that open them up to liability in the same way that NBC was potentially going to be held liable for the guy who killed himself on To Catch a Predator before they settled?
Liability for what? The "vigilante" they banned, Schlep, didn't do anything remotely near what NBC did to Bill Conradt. Schlep was just somebody who collected evidence and reported pedophiles to law enforcement.
Arguably, Roblox has just as much liability if not more for the pedophiles they do know about but never ban. Schlep and other so-called "vigilantes" have consistently reported them to Roblox, but they refuse to act in most cases, even if the pedophile has been arrested, and only rarely actually bans them if there is a highly publicized video made about them. Remember that Louisiana's lawsuit isn't the only one Roblox is facing as a result of their refusal to ban pedophiles.
Recently, when I saw this first come up on reddit there was a comment that talked about how robust the child safety controls are for Roblox, now.
Consider the fact that there is an arbitrary limit of 100 games that parents can block for their child before they can't block any more games. This isn't sufficient to prevent their child from being exposed to sex games because there are way more than 100 sex games on the platform and Roblox seemingly does nothing to ban them.
But there's probably (potentially) going to also be a similar problem for any kid that goes on the internet without any supervision or guidance at all.
If the platform they visit actually bans pedophiles when they are reported, there will be much less of a predator problem compared to Roblox.
Markass
1mo ago
I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.
The "vigilante" that Roblox recently banned is Schlep, and I take issue with him being described as a vigilante. It implies that he is imposing justice on the pedophiles himself, when he is not. All he is doing is collecting evidence and reporting them to law enforcement, as he should. He also reports them to Roblox, but Roblox has consistently refused to ban the predators from their platform, even after they've been arrested, until he makes widely publicized videos about them.
Even you don't think this is true.
When tyranny becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
Let's imagine a plausible scenario: you live in Germany during the Kentler Project. One of the placed homeless children draws your attention to the fact his foster parents are pedophiles and that he's afraid of them. You decide to allow the child to stay at your place. This escalates into a legal battle where a German judge orders you to return the child to his legal guardians.
Do you, a responsible person, comply?
Now of course this is a non central example, but if you think it's impossible for judges to be morally wrong in a way that's terrible enough as to require risking everything by running afoul of the law, you clearly have unreasonable faith in the institution.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
letting pedophiles run rampant
It feels to me like 1985 all over again.
Thanks to a legal system that often fails to draw (and often fails to even attempt to draw) a distinction between children who have been kidnapped by strangers, children who have voluntarily run away with strangers, and children who have simply been moved by a responsible adult but in violation of a custody order, it's nigh impossible to say for certain how many pedophiles are out there snatching kids... but "run rampant" does not appear supported by the evidence. I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.
Of course we needn't get all the way to child-snatching; simply exposing children to various forms of degeneracy probably has long-term psychological impacts that are worth considering. But the research on this seems to be hopelessly muddied by culture war matters; moral panic over children's media exposure reaches all the way back to Plato (at least!). I expect we are all shaped by the media we consume, but not always in the most obvious or expected ways.
Markass
1mo ago
So Roblox is getting a lot of press lately, and it's been very negative. They're ostensibly a place for kids, but it's been known for years that pedophiles and child predators are on their platform, they keep grooming and raping minors, and barely anything is done about them if ever. Lately they banned Chris Hansen 'To Catch A Predator' style stings, banned and sent a C&D to someone who has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested using those stings, and defended their ban by *checks notes* saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators. As a result, they're being sued by the Louisiana attorney general, and even Chris Hansen is getting involved (by making a documentary).
It's too early to tell what the outcome of all this will be, but some people are concerned about potential government overreach, especially with recent pushes for mandatory online ID verification (and we all know people doxing themselves like that never goes wrong) and other laws passed in the name of children's online safety (like the UK's Online Safety Act, which proved to be too burdensome for a hamster forum to continue operating). Especially because Roblox isn't the only platform with a predator problem that isn't getting better.
I think that ID verification is bad, but pedophiles are also bad. My take (if slightly conspiratorial) is that people in positions of power are deliberately letting the pedophile problem grow out of control so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures. The public sees this false dichotomy between letting pedophiles run rampant and ID verification, and chooses ID verification as the lesser of two evils, when that's far from the case. Roblox (and Discord) had people working for free to rid their platforms of predators, and all they had to do was let them be. Yet they deliberately went out of their way to ban anybody who got pedophiles arrested, meanwhile doing little to the pedophiles themselves. It's a huge WTF moment and makes you wonder what the end goal is.
EDIT: and as you can see from the responses below, it seems that some prominent posters here seem to think that this is a good thing? Do you understand now why I would pick the woke?
Consider this a general reply to the quoted comment as well as to https://www.themotte.org/post/2277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/352758?context=8#context .
Look, I'm not trying to convince you to not "pick the woke", or that I or anyone on my side as it were should "have power". I don't meant to tell you what to support or oppose. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, really. I don't think you made a mistake in your thinking, or that you should support a different side. I think you need to acknowledge that there's a good deal of conflict theory playing out. And I think arguing that the goings-on are good or bad in the framework of mistake theory misses the more tangible points of why and how this happened and why and how it will happen again.
Co-opting institutions in the name of ideology taints them.
If I turn the military into a bastion of reactionary thought, then I shouldn't be surprised that a century of leftist agitation works to erode the military even if that means that modern European nations have to piss their pants when Putin knocks over some border towns in Ukraine (though, granted, much of that panic be performative), or that we flail helplessly as pauper pirates in the Red Sea take our shipping hostage. We're materially worse off for it, and now untold billions of Euros will be wasted on incompetent rearmament programs to pretend to remedy the problem, but what good is any complaining? Socialists and communists and their green and woke successor ideologists have dismantled the military not because it wouldn't have been useful to them, but because the military was inseparably linked to reactionary ideologies.
The church - really any Christian church, all of them, doesn't matter which - has undergone the same process, though over a longer period of time. I'll skip the blow-by-blow, let's just say that in between the middle ages where the church wasn't just a major power-broker but also an absolutely essential insitution in almost matters social and cultural, at all levels of society, in all stages of life, it now mostly isn't. And it's left a giant God-and-Church-and-Community-shaped hole in western people's lives. Why did we do that to ourselves? Why didn't we take it slow and wait for a superior alternative to be developed? Why didn't we just root out the pedophiles and the nazi sympathizers and the intolerable profiteers like the prelate of Limburg and then go back to our congregations? Because again, it wasn't about troubleshooting or optimizing a socially useful institution, but about destroying an ideological enemy. Whether you were an enlightenment firebrand, a libertine who didn't want his hedonism criticized, a revolutionary who wanted to design his own institutions, a socialist who saw it as a tool of the burgeosie, or a late 20th century progressive who really needed to show off how much better he was than the primitives of yesteryear - they all had their various tactical reasons for destryoing the standing of religion in society, even without providing a better alternative. And they were right to, because the church wasn't just there to provide spiritual care and moral support, it absolutely was in their way and unwilling to give up what authority it had over peole's lives.
Or think about the immense economic damage caused by various green ideological warfare. For every sensible ban on a poisonous but replaceable substance, and for every much-appreciated restriction on the pollution of the commons, there's at least one other ideologically motivated but completely superfluous and highly harmful obstruction to economic activities. Pouring massive public funding into electric cars, for example. But it will save the climate, you might say. Then how about scrapping Germany's safe and productive nuclear power plants on what was little more than a whim?
And let's not even get started with "The Pandemic" or "The Refugees".
And by all means, maybe I'm just not aware of the full scope of the goings-on in America right now, but I doubt that what President Trump is doing to public university funding is anywhere near on that level.
In any event, my point is just this: I encourage you to consider these events in terms of conflict theory, because conflict is what is happening. Neither side is trying to do what's best for society; both are vying for influence, standing, authority and power, and whatever socially useful institution gets ground up on the way is just collateral damage. And neither side can, at present, afford to play nice. I leave it open to you whether you want to see the two sides as a left-vs-right, woke-vs-antiwoke or trump-vs-antitrump. But it's a conflict. In game-theory/prisoner-dilemma terms, both sides are in the business of defecting, and whichever side opts to cooperate instead loses. It would be terribly nice if both sides cooperated, but that's not what's happening, and asking only one side to cooperate while the other defects amounts to asking them to lose gracefully.
Destroying the commons for ideological gain is not new or unique to one side in the culture wars, and both will do it when it ends up being strategically feasible.
@FCfromSSC used to have a pithy phrase about this. Something about maximizing inconvenience for the outgroup?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2mo ago
tl;dr ephebophilia is not just an artifact of a fixed age of consent, but an attraction to specific psychological traits
I've been thinking about all the classic American porn paperbacks I've read and it made me realize something about the various flavors of MAPs. A lot of classic smut features ephebophilic scenes. Or, to not mince words, jailbait characters have sex in these books. Why would someone put a well-developed minor (and go into explicit detail about her womanlike voluptuousness) into his story? I could come up with three reasons:
- The titillation of the forbidden. It's like eating a Kinder Surprise in the US vs the EU, it's made better by the fact it's illegal. You scratch off number "18" and put "15" instead and suddenly the story is hotter. It's like ubiquitous step-incest in modern video porn.
- The needs of the story. Maybe the author wanted his cast to span generations and pushing the numbers down made it easier to explain why everyone involved in the story had no sag or wrinkles or other signs of age.
- There's something different with their attitude to sex. And this is exactly the option that I want to explore further in this post.
Reading the books actually shows what this difference (in the mind of the writers) is. A grown woman has barriers around sex. Of course, it's porn, so everyone is a happy slut by the epilogue, but the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms. Well, maybe she has a few, passed down from her mother or her Sunday school, but as soon as she realizes that sex is a pleasurable experience (or "neat", as the books from the 70's put it), she's willing to have it for the sake of it (and suffer no ill consequences, because it's porn).
And it is my opinion that this attraction to easy-going relationships instead of torturous courtship is what defines ephebophiles and lumps them together with other flavors of MAPs. They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships, even though they are not attracted to actual physical traits of prepubescence. A literal pedophile might be attracted to specific physical traits, but he's also attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship.
However, I don't want to say this approach is exclusive to MAPs only. They are in a good and diverse company. People joking about "genetically-engineered catgirls" express a very similar sentiment: they imagine a female that is naturally loyal and attracted to them, unlike the messy natural femoids (curiously, this sounds more like a dog than a cat). Dudes mail-ordering brides from abroad expect them to follow a simple and straightforward contract: provide meals and sex, get citizenship. And of course, promiscuous gays are living every horny man's dream (modulo the sex of their partner).
This also explains why certain redditors* brand a 45-yo man dating a 20-yo woman a pedophile (steelman incoming). They don't mean he's literally attracted to her prepubescent body, which would be absurd. What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace. He can outbid her 20-yo suitors simply because he has 25 years of career growth on them. The woman should either practice perfect price discrimination or reject him in the name of... social justice?
Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.
* just today I noticed a major vibe shift on Reddit. People were discussing the latest anti-porn initiatives in the UK and were mocking those who think a 17.99-yo is a "literal child", treating them as their outgroup.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
People are still going to call them pedos.
Then people are wrong. I discussed this before.
Let me put it more plainly and provocatively. The problem with calling a 50yo who fucks a 16yo teen in a clearly coercive setting "pedophile" is that you are equating something which is deeply morally objectionable with something which is fine.
In case there is any doubt about which is which, yes, I am claiming that there is nothing morally wrong with being a pedophile, in the technically sense of the word.
Now obviously, it is a sexual orientation which sucks greatly for anyone with a remotely working moral compass (and will lead to behavior which is very wrong for those without one), and I thank my maker that I am into women with tits instead so I have access to ethically produced porn and ethical opportunities to have sex (even if being bi would be strictly preferable in that regard).
Sure, there is a large overlap between child-fuckers and pedophiles, but my problem is with child-fuckers as child-fuckers. If some asshole decides to sexually abuse a kid, I don't give a rats ass if they were into kids or watching MILF porn at the same time to keep aroused, they should go to prison either way.
Using pedos as a synonym for child abusers is bad. Expanding it to include creepy sex pest-ry targeting underage victims is even worse. I also do not think that the general vibe of "your sexual orientation makes you the likeliest group to be deported to death camps without anyone else saying a word in your defense" is actually very effective at keeping ethical pedos (who are not complicit in sexual abuse) ethical, probably a society which was meh about ethical pedos but very much against child abusers (which mostly describes western legal systems) would offer a better gradient.
I am not much of a linguistic prescriptionist, normally. I use to beg the question correctly, but it is not a hill I am willing to die on. Still, words matter, and I think that on this forum we should strive to use accurate terminology even if 85% of the general population is using it in a more diffuse manner, especially if it involves emotionally charged words which are intentionally repurposed for clear political goals.
As another example (without a strict 1:1 correspondence), consider a (perhaps hypothetical) attempt to redefine "rape" as "any sex act perpetrated by a man which involved a woman who either did not consent or regretted consenting subsequently". (It is not entirely divorced from common usage, people have sex under the influence of voluntarily consumed drugs which would inhibit their legal ability to consent all the time, and end up in situations where they can decide on the next day that they were raped (and then decide to report it or not) or retroactively grant consent. (Perhaps not legally, but practically. Legally, "last night when I was dead drunk, I urged my hot husband to fuck my brains out and he did" might still be rape, but unless she bring that up in divorce proceedings eventually, nobody cares.)) Still, I would definitely argue against anyone here who would try to push such a new definition, because it hopelessly muddies the water by using the same term for different things which are not remotely morally equivalent.
If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power?
These men aren't being lambasted for being attracted to 16-17 yo girls. Men are being lambasted for fucking them with dubious consent and legality. It's the difference between desiring money and defrauding. Impulse control.
Furthermore, having extremely restrictive rules of engagement for hoi polloi while the billionaire elites get away with it is a cucked attitude.
Elites should not be breaking the law, they are supposed to be exemplars. Higher standing, higher rewards, higher standards. The FBI and CIA especially are not supposed to be breaking the law, they're supposed to be enforcing it.
How are you supposed to have a functioning country if the elites and officials are basically robbers, here for temporary gain, don't believe in anything except personal gratification (financial or sexual), don't care about enforcing rules evenly, take bribes or implicit promises of favours from powerful figures, take revenge on you if you report them? This is third-worldism not in the geopolitical sense but the social sense, third-world values. 'We shouldn't report or rally against the corrupt official because maybe the central government will punish us in retribution' is a supremely servile attitude. The Taliban were formed in large part to massacre child rapists amongst the warlords of Afghanistan. We may not share all their values but at least they believed in something more than short-term political gains, that's surely a large part of why they won the war. Why should those from the richest, strongest, most cultured nations hold lower standards than illiterate Afghans?
The rule of law is usually only brought up to justify judges or international courts nobody's ever heard of issuing strange and bizarre orders but this is a core example of where the rule of law should be invoked. No cover ups.
magicalkittycat
2mo ago
not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers.
Or maybe they read it like I do as "not being charged with crime".
Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.
Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.
Certainly there's room between "literally nothing changes" and "the white nationalist commie trad NOI extremists take control" right?
Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up.
Bruh, people call that pedophilia all the time in other cases too. The "it's actually ephebophilia" statement is practically a meme of its own! And lots of people do get arrested for sexting/banging minors so I don't see why elites should be any different.
Also interesting little hedge in there of "most", ok so what about the ones that were a fair bit younger?
After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition.
But they weren't just attracted to the teens! They were apparently trafficking them, pimping them out and having sex with them. People already get arrested for that and called pedophiles.
Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?
Doesn't seem like they need it too much, even just the stuff we publically know suggests they have access to a lot of our phone and computer data already.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2mo ago
Back in 2021, Reuters published the following about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial:
Shawn, now 38, recalled traveling to Epstein's house with Carolyn for the first time with a girl named Virginia Roberts and Roberts' boyfriend after Roberts told Carolyn the pair could make money by giving "a guy a massage."
"She was excited to make money," said Shawn, who has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case.
He added that he and Roberts' boyfriend saw Roberts and Carolyn go into Epstein's home, waited for them for more than an hour, and saw them leave the home with hundred dollar bills.
{snip}
Shawn's account of that first trip largely matched up with Carolyn's version. After that first trip, Shawn said he drove Carolyn to Epstein's home every two weeks, and that Carolyn would leave with hundred dollar bills. They would use the cash to buy drugs, Shawn said, echoing his former girlfriend's statement on the stand on Tuesday.
{snip}He said he also drove two other girls he was dating at the time, Amanda and Melissa, to Epstein's home.
{snip}He said he sometimes received calls from Epstein employees seeking to schedule a massage appointment for Epstein with Carolyn{snip}
"not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers. Instead, the Online Right has gone in a very different direction, being convinced that it would severely disrupt the status quo if they could prove the Epstein murder/pedo ring conspiracy is true. ActuallyATleilaxuGhola asserts that the only reason people would doubt that Epstein was murdered is a desire to avoid a backlash against the status quo or Jews:
I really think that, if Epstein were not apparently connected to intelligence, powerful people in government, and were not Jewish, nearly zero people would argue that he killed himself. There are simply too many "coincidences." But there are people who like the political status quo (or at least despise the upstarts trying to disrupt the status quo), and there are other people who perceive the emphasis on Epstein's Jewishness/Mossad connections as dangerous to themselves (I have sympathy for this second group).
I think it's the "Epstein was murdered" people who are engaging in motivated reasoning, since the evidence for the conspiracy is very weak. Instead of another perhaps pointless argument about the evidence, let's look at the underlying assumption that "exposure" of the supposed conspiracy would "disrupt the status quo." Would that actually happen?
Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.
Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.
You may say that, over the long term, voters will be more open to anti-establishment voices. I wouldn't be so sure. Won't take long for the establishment to come up with its equivalent of "the Soviet Union failed because it wasn't communist enough." They'll point out that the vast majority of the accused/convicted individuals are men, so we need more control of male sexuality. Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up. But if you want there to be a "reckoning" over this, it's unavoidable. If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power? After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition. Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?
Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.
Not sure which comic said a joke to the tune of - pedophilia is liking kids, ephebophilia is liking underage, the problem is you can't explain the difference without sounding like a pedophile.
Since pedophilia is the last standing hard taboo in the society, there is a incentive to push it's boundaries ever higher. Because the other sticks just got softer - no one is scared of being caller racist, sexist or phobic anymore. To the point where some fringe activists include even persons above 18 to it. Which will lead of course to dilution, people discarding accusation more easily and give the Jimmy Savile's and Epstein's even more freedom. But this will be in 10 years.
And if they do accept your offer and successfully kill Epstein, then what?
I admittedly don't know the logistics of killing a man, but enough people get killed by accident in stupid brawls that I have to ask - come on how hard is it to strange someone and wrap some cloth around him afterwards. Are you going to say that it would leave evidence of murder? The evidence was literally already examined by a pathologist claiming it's more indicative of murder, and summarily ignored. Your assumption that any indication of foul play would trigger a proper investigation is completely unfounded.
Given that they've never killed anyone before, there's a good chance that they get prosecuted for his murder. Do you really think that someone under indictment for a capital crime is going to keep his mouth shut for your benefit?
Yes, I absolutely 100% believe that, and I would like to know what empirical evidence is your belief that this is in any way unlikely based on. From child castration fetishists joining professional medical associations in order to normalize their fetish, to the Community Relations Service twisting people's arms to say that the murder of their children is not about race, I've seen enough brazen conspiracies that have only come out by accident, that the rationalist default idea of "someone would have squealed" looks patently absurd.
Or take something that you might find less controversial: do you think Prigozhin's airplane just so happened to suffer a completely innocent accident? Or do you think these kind of assassinations only happen in countries like Russia? I think both are absurd, but the latter is the more absurd of the two.
If I'm the guy ordering the hit, how to I get this money to him? Write him a check? How easy do you think it is to transfer that kind of dough without raising any red flags among the banking community?
You really think that the CIA or the Mossad would have any trouble delivering someone a suitcase full of cash? You think either of them would be questioned by the banking community, of all people?
Or maybe you think it would be easier to show up with a suitcase full of cash to a bugged hotel room with Federal agents waiting for you in the parking garage. Or maybe NYPD if he happens to go to them instead.
Step me through why the FBI or NYPD would dare to get in the way of intelligence services. And before you get to that, tell me how would they evem know there's anything to get ij the way of.
Consider the probabilities here, just for fun. Let's generously assume that 5% of the extremely law-abiding-background-check-passing population would commit such a murder for the right price.
I did, it does not come out the way you want.
Keep in mind that the official explanation is that the prison was an absolute clownshow where the cameras were falling apart so frequently that both of the ones aimed at Epstein's cell just so happened to be not working, and both of the guards on duty fell asleep at the same time. Let's generously assume that 95% of guards like that would refuse a suitcase full of money to strangle a pedophile with guaranteed impunity, how many of them do you think would refuse a suitcase full of money for "hey, why don't you lend me your keycard and uniform, and take a day off"?
Your entire argument works on the assumption that the American system would immediately trigger an alarm if any irregularity was found. That assumption is not backed by anything in this reality.
A pedophile, in my book, is someone who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent kids. Often, the term might imply exclusive pedophilia, e.g. someone who is only attracted to pre-pubescent kids. This seems like the worst sexual attraction card to be dealt, while being straight, gay, bisexual, into MILFs, or into BDSM, or most other kinks means you have a decent chance of getting laid, the lack of adults who could pass as pre-pubescent means that there are no sex partners who could consent. If used as an insult, the unfortunate implication is that people are morally responsible for their sexual inclinations.
Your book is not the book most people are using. Most people don't think about sex in those terms (they don't really think 'straight' or 'gay' either)- otherwise, the group(s) that wants to impose those definitions/morality on everyone else wouldn't need words words words to do it.
For most people, "pedophilia" means "man on little girl" exclusively.
Men can't be raped, so we don't really care about man on boy (unless it's a political group we hate for other reasons that was covering it up, which in combination with that hatred is sufficiently scandalous to destroy them- we're not really after boyfuckers qua boyfuckers, that's a side-effect). As for woman on boy, our reactions range from Nice to "if we don't throw you in jail for this, society's standards might shift and allow man on girl, so off you go". And woman on girl is a statistical anomaly.
Feminists/gynosupremacists launder the moral disgust with "man on girl" into the "man on any woman" definition they've always wanted (though note that this is fundamentally a woman vs. woman thing about how best to exploit men rather than primarily being man-hating, which is how men perceive it). This is why they push to have older and older women be considered "children", and why white-knights (traditionalists and progressive men) accept that. It's also why all the "pedo" literature progressives use only features man on boy (or man on boy-dressed-like-a-girl).
As you noted,
I think that power discrepancy is why we have age of consent laws
is correct, but those laws aren't set up that way to protect children (they aren't the right tool for that). They're primarily for keeping young women out of the sexual marketplace and providing women-as-class a weapon to exploit men more powerful than them (to which they are inherently attracted).
Once you understand the concept of "consent" is a lie (and intended to confuse "raping little girls" with normal human behavior) you can start to understand how people actually think about sex. Then, you can also see that Rs have a better understanding of this than Ds do because they're more likely to reject this framework (to the point that even traditionalist Christian sexual ethics paint a better picture), so Rs are less likely to be concerned with "non-consentual" behavior than Ds are.
Also, a tangent:
It bears saying that a significant fraction of child molesters are not exclusive pedophiles but just men (mostly) with broader sexualities who use the opportunity of the power discrepancy between kids and adults.
Well, if you're only looking for physical penetration as a subset of "abuse with sexual intent", yes, you'll find that's mostly men.
Men and women are different especially when it comes to the way they think about sex; thus we should expect the ways they intend and perpetrate sexual abuse would be different.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
2mo ago
the most egregious motte-and-bailey that is currently widely accepted
No, the most egregious motte-and-bailey is "consent".
Note that this statement:
Call someone a 'pedophile' because they express attraction towards someone just barely under the age of majority, and uninformed onlookers might very well imagine that they're a predator who stalks 10 year olds with designs on kidnapping and molesting them.
is a specific version of the more general form, which is:
Call someone a
'pedophile'rapist because they express attraction towardssomeone just barely under the age of majoritya woman who isn't interested, and uninformed onlookers might very well imagine that they're a predator who stalks 10 year olds with designs on kidnapping and molesting them.
and the popular definition of "pedophile" is fundamentally just the most defensible/best Think Of The Children extension of that core idea. (Because no, that definition only includes man on girl; we pretend it includes man on boy when it's politically convenient to do so, but we don't treat the two equally.)
Update on the Scottish Dual-Wielding Incident:
The BBC has now published a brief but informative report on the Scottish “dual-wielding” incident, mostly relaying statements from the local police. If you missed the story: a Bulgarian couple, male and female, were approached by local youths in St Ann Lane, Lochee, at about 7:40 pm on Saturday. At some point, an axe made an appearance. The police have issued a statement, and the BBC, in a notably careful choice of words, clarifies: “BBC News understands that officers have found no evidence to substantiate claims being made online the youths were at risk of sexual assault.”
Of course, I have every confidence that some corners of the internet, including select denizens of The Motte, will find this hopelessly unconvincing. If your current epistemic stance is “If she floats, she’s a witch; if she sinks, she’s a witch,” then no combination of facts, logic, or official statements will ever suffice. If your model of the world is that everyone is lying except you and your Telegram group, my ability to shift your priors is probably limited.
Still, let me offer my own semi-informed perspective as someone who is, if not a local, at least more familiar with the Scottish context than your average Redditor. From the beginning, both /r/Scotland and /r/Dundee expressed skepticism toward the popular Twitter narrative. You know the one: a pair of wide-eyed local waifs accosted by a “brown pervert,” who then had no choice but to brandish medieval weaponry in righteous self-defense. You can practically hear the John Williams score.
Now, Scotland is not short on delinquent youth. The British white underclass is, in fact, legendary for its supply of teenage hooligans. Here in Scotland, the local taxonomic label is “ned.” While “non-educated delinquent” is probably a post hoc invention, the behavioral phenotype is easily identified. There is a rich ecosystem of teenagers hanging around bus stops, acting tough, and performing questionable antics. One of their favorite tactics, if challenged, is to shout “pedophile” at the nearest authority figure, thus flipping the script from “annoying brat” to “potential victim.” This tends to work, at least until they age out of the game and (statistically) either get jobs or fall prey to Dundee’s prodigious drug scene.
On the question of weaponry, it bears repeating that it is illegal in Scotland to carry anything that even vaguely resembles a weapon for self-defense. For the Americans in the audience, this is not Texas. Not only is it illegal, it is also, in local context, not normal to walk around with an axe. While I actually find this arrangement not to my libertarian sensibilities, that's neither here nor there. My own priors, which seem to match those of most actual Scots I’ve spoken to, lean toward a more mundane explanation. The girl went out carrying because she wanted to impress her boyfriend, or at least to raise her standing among her peers. She might have been looking for trouble, or simply wanted to show off, and twelve is not too young to have social status games on your mind. Puberty isn’t the only thing that comes early in these parts.
I can only reiterate that an axe is not normal to carry, even if one feels threatened. A pocket knife? I can understand, sure. But this is about as 'extra' as taking a hand-grenade to a seedy pub when you're worried about being roofied.
As for the “migrant crime” angle, I want to point out that Scotland is not England, and certainly not Rotherham. The “migrant problem” is much less pronounced here. Outside Edinburgh or Glasgow, brown skin is still a curiosity, more likely to prompt a friendly question than suspicion. Most of the time, it’s just an excuse for conversation. Scotland has its own problems, but racialized sexual predation is not at the top of the list.
I would like to believe that this clarification settles things, but I am also not naïve. If your epistemic filter is tuned to maximum paranoia, then the absence of evidence is merely further evidence of a cover-up. For everyone else, the police statement, local skepticism, and sociological context should nudge your priors at least a little.
Of course, if you prefer your axes in the hands of twelve-year-olds fighting imaginary Bulgarian sex pests, I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise.
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