pedophile
They are not the same. Rotherham was worse. Much, much worse.
Did priests douse children in gasoline and threaten to light them on fire if they told their secrets? Did they keep children prisoner for days, weeks, or years without letting them see their family? Were people arrested for rescuing their loved ones from a pedophile priest? Were people thrown in jail for "hate speech" against the church? When the abuse was revealed, how do the media react? Did they cover it up or did they shout it from the hilltops? Did they make Oscar-winning movies movies about the heroic journalists who uncovered the abuse, or did they throw them in jail?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
No mention of Bacha Barzai?
In 2011, an Afghan mother in Kunduz Province reported that her 12-year-old son had been chained to a bed and raped for two weeks by an Afghan Local Police (ALP) commander named Abdul Rahman. When confronted, Rahman laughed and confessed. He was subsequently severely beaten by two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and thrown off the base.[41] The soldiers were involuntarily separated from the military, but later reinstated after a lengthy legal case.[42] As a direct result of this incident, legislation was created called the "Mandating America's Responsibility to Limit Abuse, Negligence and Depravity", or "Martland Act" named after Special Forces Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland.[43]
...
In a 2013 documentary by Vice Media titled This Is What Winning Looks Like, British independent film-maker Ben Anderson describes the systematic kidnapping, sexual enslavement and murder of young men and boys by local security forces in the Afghan city of Sangin. The film depicts several scenes of Anderson along with American military personnel describing how difficult it is to work with the Afghan police considering the blatant molestation and rape of local youth. The documentary also contains footage of an American military advisor confronting the then-acting police chief about the abuse after a young boy is shot in the leg after trying to escape a police barracks. When the Marine suggests that the barracks be searched for children, and that any policeman found to be engaged in pedophilia be arrested and jailed, the high-ranking officer insists what occurs between the security forces and the boys is consensual, saying "[the boys] like being there and giving their asses at night". He went on to claim that this practice was historic and necessary, rhetorically asking: "If [my commanders] don't fuck the asses of those boys, what should they fuck? The pussies of their own grandmothers?"[45]
In 2015, The New York Times reported that U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan were instructed by their commanders to ignore child sexual abuse being carried out by Afghan security forces, except "when rape is being used as a weapon of war". American soldiers have been instructed not to intervene—in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records. But the U.S. soldiers have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the U.S. military was arming them against the Taliban and placing them as the police commanders of villages—and doing little when they began abusing children.[46][47]
According to a report published in June 2017 by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the DOD had received 5,753 vetting requests of Afghan security forces, some of which related to sexual abuse. The DOD was investigating 75 reports of gross human rights violations, including 7 involving child sexual assault.[48] According to The New York Times, discussing that report, American law required military aid to be cut off to the offending unit, but that never happened. US Special Forces officer, Capt. Dan Quinn, was relieved of his command in Afghanistan after fighting an Afghan militia commander who had been responsible for keeping a boy as a sex slave.[49]
Far be it from me to imply that there isn't a certain amount of logic here. Fighting child-rape is part of the founding myth of the Taliban, so obviously if we're fighting the Taliban child-rapists are natural allies. The same logic applies to drug dealers, clearly, which was why we spent twenty years just never quite getting around to any serious effort to crimp opium production, something the Taliban was also quite good at, and why Afghanistan had four times more land being used to cultivate poppies at the end of the war as it had at the start.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
I mean, we are talking about a guy who called a rescue diver a pedophile for not taking his offer of assistance (that might not have worked).
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
Eh, I thought the real backlash always started with those kids trapped in the cave and him calling that ex-pat diver a pedophile over being told that his submersible idea was bad. It wasn't exactly partisan, but I think that was the beginning of the polarization.
Plus, also, I think people were looking for anything to make Elon and Tesla's fanboys shut up, and it just escalated from there.
A hypothetical set of "Reasons to live in a country" doesn't necessarily subsume the set of "Reasons to as a tourist visit that country" but it can be assumed there will be significant overlap. The argument here is a person who would go to Thailand to indulge in pedophilia would be unlikely to see a reason to permanently reside there. This doesn't follow, people move countries to facilitate all other kinds of crime. Or maybe you're arguing pedophiles as a group might generally have the resources to take a trip to Thailand but not to successfully immigrate. This is stronger, but still falls, because they're not a uniform mass.
The subgroup of the population with pedophilic tendencies includes bottom-feeders who would be lucky to leave their home town. It also includes the opposite, the highly connected and well-resourced who cover their tracks. There will also be those at neither extreme, who are fastidious enough to prioritize not going to prison over their perversions, who are perverted enough to find appealing the idea of living in a country with lax policing where they may regularly indulge, and who are capable enough to be successful at moving to such a country. In short, there are without question white expatriates permanently residing in Thailand and elsewhere in southeast Asia because of and in pursuit of their pedophilia.
This is circumstantial evidence for Unsworth. Not enough to indict, but more than enough to fairly suspect. Yeah, if he's not that, it sucks, but he can't be shocked because that's what happens when you move from Britain to Pedoville in Pedo Province in the Kingdom of Pedoland. This is the reason Musk called him specifically a pedophile and why he initially doubled down on it before deleting the tweets. It wasn't apropos of nothing, it was from the I guess uncommon understanding of what goes on in Thailand. I say "uncommon," above the SNL skit I linked was from 10 years ago, and that's its joke.
As Scott has Noticed, humans are remarkably libertarian only when it comes to romantic love. This is the one area that has survived accusations of racism, sexism or transphobia. You can debate this all you want but people will always be free to “fetishize” other races if they want.
Free legally, perhaps, but not socially. And, of course, it depends on Who? Whom?
Men's preferences, such as that for female youth and chastity, are demonized as creepy fetishes. Women's preferences, such as that for male height and status, are deemed valid (to the extent they're admitted to exist, lest women appear more shallow and less Wonderful than previously thought). This goes for racial preferences, as well, but there are also differences based on which sex-race combination is the preferer and which is the preferred.
Here's the reaction in mainstream discourse when a man of $[Y] background says he prefers $[X] women:
| White Women | East Asian Women | South Asian Women | Latina Women | Black Women | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| White Man | Racist Nazi | Bigot who fetishizes and stereotypes East Asian women as feminine and submissive; possible pedophile | Bigot who fetishizes and stereotypes South Asian women as chaste and traditional | Bigot who fetishizes and stereotypes latinas as fiery and sensual sex objects | Might be okay, might be bigot who fetishizes and views black women as subhuman sex objects |
| East Asian Man | Self-hating, white-worshipping, internalized racist who fetishizes white women | Feels entitled and possessive of "his" women | Hm, okay | Hm, okay | Hm, okay |
| South Asian Man | Self-hating, white-worshipping, internalized racist who fetishizes white women | Fetishizes and stereotypes East Asian women as feminine and submissive; possible pedophile | Feels entitled and possessive of "his" women | Hm, okay | Hm, okay |
| Latino Man | Conditioned by Eurocentric standards of beauty and victim of internalized racism, but slay, King! | Might be victim of internalized racism, but slay, King! | Might be victim of internalized racism, but slay, King! | Might be okay, might feel entitled and possessive of "his" women | Slay, King! |
| Black Man | Conditioned by Eurocentric standards of beauty and victim of internalized racism, but slay, King! | Might be victim of internalized racism, but slay, King! | Might be victim of internalized racism, but slay, King! | Might be victim of internalized racism, but slay, King! | Slay, King! |
Reaction when a woman of $[X] background says she prefers $[Y] men:
| White Men | East Asian Men | South Asian Men | Latino Men | Black Men | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| White Woman | Racist Nazi | Weird, must be victim of K-Pop and anime propaganda | Weird, must be victim of yoga and Bollywood propaganda | Stunning and brave and should be encouraged for all | Stunning and brave and should be encouraged for all |
| East Asian Woman | Victim of internalized racism and conditioned by white male privilege | Victim of Stockholm Syndrome and familial patriarchy | Might be okay, might be victim of internalized racism | Stunning and brave and should be encouraged for all | Stunning and brave and should be encouraged for all |
| South Asian Woman | Victim of internalized racism and conditioned by white male privilege | Weird, must be victim of K-Pop and anime propaganda | Victim of Stockholm Syndrome and familial patriarchy | Stunning and brave and should be encouraged for all | Stunning and brave and should be encouraged for all |
| Latina Woman | Victim of internalized racism and conditioned by white male privilege | Weird, must be victim of internalized racism and K-Pop and anime propaganda | Weird, must be victim of internalized racism and yoga and Bollywood propaganda | Victim of Stockholm Syndrome and familial patriarchy | Stunning and brave and should be encouraged for all |
| Black Woman | Victim of internalized racism and conditioned by white male privilege | Weird, must be victim of internalized racism and K-Pop and anime propaganda | Weird, must be victim of internalized racism and yoga and Bollywood propaganda | Might be okay, but might be victim of internalized racism | Stunning and brave and should be encouraged for all |
Nor have sexual preferences been exempted from accusations of transphobia. Remember the colossal seethe that #SuperStraight triggered? People were doxxing and trying to cancel the young man who started it all, and his mother too. The subreddit saw a meteoric rise, turning into the SuperSexuality expanded cinematic universe (SuperGay, SuperLesbian, etc.), before getting nuked within a day or two.
What was funny was not only the bait and in-on-the-joke posting by rdrama types, but the heartfelt effortposts from LGB persons about their long-held frustrations with transsexuals invading their spaces and demanding to be treated the same as their desired sex. Despite their nominal alliance, it makes sense that LGB persons might have more exposure to and thus more frustrations with transsexuals than straight persons, having greater probability living in similar locations and running in similar social circles.
jake
6mo ago
Less percentage, though as the article says it's believed a minimum of 40%. Thailand is the sex tourism capital of the world, it's also the child prostitution capital of the world. Legal prostitution where almost half are children, very bad signaling from a white man living there not for obvious foreign professional reasons — such as being: a director or otherwise highly-compensated role in a multinational corporation; an entrepreneur on a temporary visit pursuing a deal; a journalist on assignment; a diplomat or attaché — and making it fair to suspect ill motive. It gets worse, the man, Vernon Unsworth, lives or lived in Chiang Rai, that's a city in Thailand's rural and mountainous north. So it's not just that he moved to the country that's the world capital of child prostitution, he moved to the region in that country where it's most prolific.
I wouldn't accuse him of being a pedophile on this alone but I would tell him honestly, the choices he has made have drastically increased the probability and consequently the reasonability of suspecting him of pedophilia. Enough he has forfeited fair indignation when someone calls him a pedo.
jake
6mo ago
"Elite Human Capital" moves like offering a solution to save some trapped kids, then calling someone closer to the situation a pedophile because he disagreed.
What I've always found interesting about the insult is that I thought way more people knew what goes on in Thailand, but then a ton of people were bewildered about Musk "randomly" calling "some guy" a pedophile.
The man in question is a white expat living in Thailand, and white men don't move to Thailand for the diving.
Weaponizing what is actually a very useful soft power tool against your new allies after one online disagreement is right up there with other "Elite Human Capital" moves like offering a solution to save some trapped kids, then calling someone closer to the situation a pedophile because he disagreed.
Can't believe Hanania has successfully sold "being an asshole on Twitter" as a sign of EHC.
Elon is a thin-skinned narcissist. Which is fine. But his new political project relies on maintaining an alliance with an even bigger one. Going around de-verifying Trump acolytes over some bullshit is not probably not a good play.
So, when we are trying to decide who the liars are, it seems likely that Trump and Vance were speaking closer to the truth, even if the specifics were off, than everyone else screaming "THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE!
I think this is an underappreciated point, and I suspect it even reflects a psychological difference between the right and left wing's approach to empiricism.
I'll even 'steelman' Pizzagate, for that matter.
We've seen plenty of credible reports and even some actual convictions showing that Politicians do in fact get up to all kinds of sexual deviancy, up to and including in the halls of congress.
And now we're seeing the various dominoes falling with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell (remember they found her hanging out in New Hampshire surrounded by armed guards?), Diddy, and Jay-Z, and we can be all but certain there's celebs and politicians caught up in all this. The biggest hit song of the summer was by Kendrick Lamar accusing one of the most popular musical artists alive right now of being a pedophile.
Pizzagate gets the specifics wrong (there's probably no child dungeon underneath a pizza restaurant) but is still getting at the 'shape' of the truth. And if they kept fumbling around in a very misguided attempt to uncover these truths, they'd probably grab hold of the actual conspiracies eventually, and bring some heinous stuff to light.
Whereas the lefty impulse seems to be to reject the existence of a given conspiracy simply because some aspect of it is debunked or proven false. "Haha silly Qanon thinks there's a Pedo ring operating out of a Pizza shop, how stupid to believe that politicians would be hiding an organized child sex operation." And thus they don't have to follow that thought any further and can return to blissful ignorance, which would allow whatever hidden activities are occurring to continue along.
This was especially blatant with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff. Its utterly obvious the Biden family is covering up some serious stuff, and the more recent pardons are almost tacit admissions of such, but the liberals have their head jammed so deep in the sand that they denied Biden's senility, let alone his potential corruption, for so long it may have just cost them control of government.
Likewise, maybe there are at best isolated incidents of Haitian immigrants taking animals they find outdoors and cooking them up in Ohio. But the larger point that they're causing, e.g. increased traffic accidents and increased burden on social services and possibly crowding out the locals for employment is likely more true than not.
it seems obvious that Haitians really do eat dogs and cats in Haiti (Those links are SFL, but there ARE videos out there if you wish to be convinced further), so the larger point the righties are making is getting at the shape of the truth.
The lefties, of course, will use the debunking of individual incidents to claim that Haitian immigrants are causing no issues whatsoever and we should be inviting more of them in.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
All Entertainers are Terrifying People, and OnlyFans Models are no Exception
I watched McMahon some while ago, and it was kind of amazing. Basically tells the story about a young psychopath working his way up from being raised by a single mother in a trailer park, to building a multinational media empire and being friends with the President. All the same, he's still a psychopath. You can admire his unparallelled achievements and greatness, but he's still a terrifying individual you would never want to know personally. At a certain point in the documentary, I think before a slew of new allegations came out about McMahon but maybe not, a bunch of interview subjects are asked what they think McMahon's legacy will be. All but one of them choke on the question, knowing all the skeletons that man has in his closet, but not wanting to say anything because they aren't public (yet).
And McMahon was just one example. It was an industry built on people willing to make any sacrifice for fame and fortune. Putting aside the steroids, they worked at a pace that destroyed their bodies. Listening to the Undertaker go over the list of permanent injuries he's left with is a nightmare. And these people undoubtedly blew off steam in ways greater society would condemn. Drugs, alcohol, sexcapades, you name it.
With Hollywood, and all the high profile sex and crime rings that are being exposed with Harvey Weinstein, P Diddy and even old Epstein paint a nightmarish picture of an industry that paints itself in a very good light. The casting couch has always been infamous, but who knows how far the depravity goes. We catch glimpses every now and again. Brian Singer, the director of the first two X-Men movies was criminally outed as a gay pedophile.
And then there was Lily Phillips, who broke down crying after taking 100 cocks in a day. It's repulsive. But, as I sit with the knowledge of it for longer, most entertainment is made by repulsive people. Has Lily Phillips abused her body and broken with public morals more or less than McMahon, or P Diddy, or Harvey Weinstein? Or even the average wrestler or movie star willing to do anything to be famous? How was Chris Benoit doing during his career? How does taking thousands of cocks over a career, and the BPD and narcissism associated with such an act weight against CTE?
I guess if I have a point, it's that the Roman's were correct. Entertainers are all degenerates and you should scorn anyone who chooses to be one.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7mo ago
Here where I live, in the same damn village I grew up in, kids get to play outside unsupervised just like they used to. But good luck convincing my wife that there isn't a ruthless violent pedophile lurking behind every bush - our daughter will never be allowed to go outside without a chaperone.
Social media and anxiety disorders fuck people up.
quiet_NaN
7mo ago
paying tens of thousands of dollars to at least one underage girl 17 at the time, to have sex with him and others, including paying for their travel, which is also known as sex trafficking.
My understanding of 'sex trafficking' was roughly 'to get someone through either false pretenses or outright violence into a different country with the intent of using their helplessness in that country to force them into prostitution', which seems despicable enough.
If 'paying for travel accommodations for your escort' is sex trafficking, why do we need a law against it?
Also, here is something I don't understand: why would anyone ever hire a 17 yo as a prostitute? I mean, I can understand why some pedophile might risk a lengthy and well-deserved prison sentence to fuck some kid instead of an 18 yo, but if you are into young adult women, why risk a prison sentence? Is that some jailbait fetish I don't get?
gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18,
Why I am sure that the law is written in a way that puts all the risks of the prostitute being unable to legally consent firmly on the person buying sex, this sounds like we could say that the wrong Matt Gaetz did intentionally was to pay for sex, which does not seem like a moral failing to me. (If it turns out that the prostitutes in question were foreigners who barely understood any English and were obviously physically abused and scared, then I would revise my judgement, but from the facts you mentioned that was rather not the case?)
TwiceHuman
8mo ago
This is literally my first time seeing such a person. I've never intentionally looked for them, but I've interacted with quite a lot of people in the past few years.
Of all people that I have seen who refuse to get the Covid vaccine, everyone still get (and support) literally every other vaccine. I'd estimate people who are against all vaccines to be 0.1-1% of the population at most. You can't really go lower than that. 1% of the population has an IQ below 65, 1% of the population are psychopaths, 1% of the population are pedophiles. If an issue is so rare than it applies to about 1%, I don't think coordinated efforts to improve them (like education, peer pressure, or more laws) is going to help any. I just accept that a small portion of the population is a little crazy by statistic necessity.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8mo ago
The result will likely reflect the will of the people only in the most tenuous sense.
This conclusion seems to require two very specific assumptions to hold:
-
Election outcomes reflecting the will of 49% of the voters rather than 51% of the voters is a "most tenuous sense" of "reflecting the will".
-
For each voter coming in to vote, the option they intended to vote for reflects their will 100%, and the other option reflects their will 0%.
The first one is an assertion about the meaning of elections, and the second one is an assertion about the alignment between candidates and voter intent. Both of them seem sketchy to me, though I think that my objection to the second one will be the more compelling one.
For the first one, I think the underlying assumption that the majority winner, however narrow, gets the moral label of representing the will of the people and can do whatever they want is already flawed, and treating the 50% mark as magical has similar vibes to me as that often-mocked idea that by lusting after a 17-years-and-364-days-old you are a filthy pedophile, but the 18-years-and-0-days-old one? You go, boy. Democratic elections aren't some game you play where the winner gets to rule in whatever way they want up to and including "execute everyone who voted for the loser" and sportsmanship demands that the loser go along with it, but primarily a common knowledge machine for support, coupled with a power assignment mechanism that is meant to give the ones that are most likely to benefit from the common knowledge a shot at governing. This is why many systems give election losers a chance to form a government if the winners failed to get an absolute majority coalition, and why big political vibe shifts are often secured by votes of confidence or technically-unrelated polls/plebiscites that are advertised as such. ("Let it be known that a vote for Prop 1234 is a signal of continued support for me!")
The primary function of having 51% of people vote for you is that every individual knows that if they tried to start an uprising against you, about 51% of people would tend to oppose it, and everyone know that everyone knows, etc.; coupled with common-sense understanding of status quo bias even among those who did not vote for the ruler, the hope is that prospective revolutionaries know that it's not worth to try and start an abortive attempt (that would be negative-sum for the polity). The ruler, on the other hand, knows that with a 51% result their options are limited, because if they do things that might really piss off the other 49% while leaving their 51% supporters at most lukewarm, the common knowledge that a revolution is doomed will disappear.
None of these considerations change by a lot if the 49% and the 51% figure are swapped, since the genuine 51% winner already has to govern in a way that keeps the 49% somewhat happy (and thus reflect their will) under all but the most extreme assumptions of voters being emotionless optimiser-bots for completely disparate value functions and equal combat stats, so 49% don't revolt because they would lose and 51% do whatever they want because they would win. In reality, 51% motivated vs. 49% unmotivated win by about as much as 49% motivated vs. 51% unmotivated.
For the second one, why do you think it comes to pass that election after election in the US two-party system is this close? Is there some mystery biological mechanism that makes about 50% of Americans 100%-Democrat-0%-Republican and the other half 0%-Democrat-100%-Republican, like about 50% are female? Clearly the more sensible theory is that the parties are the ones that, for whatever reason, shift every election season so that about 50% of voters vote for them. You could postulate all sorts of mechanisms for why this would be the case, but the details don't particularly matter for this argument. All that matters is that parties must have the liberty to shift the margin of their votership quite freely, and this implies that the marginal, for example, Democrat voter can't plausibly be one whose will is actually 0% represented by the Republican option, because otherwise how could the Republican party slightly tweak their platform/message and turn that voter into a Republican voter? Instead, there must evidently be a band of voters along the middle who, in a given election, are just slightly more in favour of one party than the other, and considering the stability of the approx. 50-50 split, this band is surely wider than 1%. For these voters, if the other party wins, their overall political will is maybe reflected by 49%; but also, if the party they voted for won, their will would only be reflected by 51% or so, because they were equally marginal pickings for their own party as it shifted its platform to "ride the margin"!
In short, for a number of people well in excess of 1%, the election outcome being flipped by 1% worth of noise is not the cataclysmic event of "their will being reflected in the most tenuous sense", but the fairly mundane event of their will being reflected a tiny bit less than otherwise. The only ones for whom this event is cataclysmic are those deeply aligned with one or the other party, the actual near-100% D/Rs (who I'm sure are overrepresented here), but why are they specifically entitled to have their will reflected to any significant degree?
On top of everything, if the wrong votes bother you, why aren't you bothered by the non-voters? What percentage of those actually reflect a will to not vote, as opposed to people who fully intended to vote for one party or another but couldn't, be it because their car broke down on the day, their employer didn't give them a day off, they overslept, their postal vote got lost or whatever? What percentage of people who did vote did so because they were idle on the day and found themselves near a polling station and thought "hell, why not" without having any opinion on the election? (Happened to me once!)
SteveKirk
8mo ago
that one time that guy candidly admitted he was a pedophile
I just tried to count how many times that happened and had to use both hands and take a shoe off, so it definitely wasn't one time. But iirc the most prolific of those guys is still unbanned and active on theschism (throwaway0# or something), unless I'm mixing him up with someone else.
For some reason it doesn't seem to spark the same reddit admin ire as all the other stuff.
From memory... for a long time concerns about the CW thread being targeted by admins were elated through security through obscurity wisdom. Once the admin notices came -- and enough examples of subs of similar/smaller size being whacked or castrated -- that was a confidence shot. I do recall one point was that admins wouldn't clarify certain things for the mod team.
Reddit shuts down subs they don't like. Reddit admins gut and replace subreddit moderation teams they don't like. Subreddits change rules, like "don't mention trans issues at all", and similar requests at the behest of admin interactions. As I recall in one of those meta threads there was a mod from /r/PoliticalCompassMemes that chimed in with his dealings with admins and the moderation changes he had to make because of admin requests. Or maybe it was the /r/drama mods, because I remember they offered to host The Motte.
I don't recall Zorba or mods claiming TheMotte was being especially targeted or persecuted. Being targeted wasn't necessary to get dunked on or ordered to change. Somewhere back there it is explicitly said that the decision to move included the fact that Zorba would rather the project end than have to do something like censor all discussions on Topic X. Plenty of people said don't bother or not a big deal to censor whatever as I imagine you've seen from looking through the old threads.
The CW thread hosts holocaust deniers, HBD autists, and that one time that guy candidly admitted he was a (non-offending) pedophile. It's not a reddit friendly space-- which polices content and not just tone. It's not that strange to consider its time on reddit is limited by how long its controversy remains unknown. Even without the details of the admin correspondence or principles, when a place like the gendercritical sub gets booted off the site there's not a lot of confidence that a place like The Motte is secure. Maybe they're less heavy handed now, but there was lots of overt admin actions in that time period on reddit.
Maybe Zorba moved as a big ruse so he could put in a bunch of volunteer work and pay for webhosting. Seems unlikely though?
[Refinement: "power over women" -> "power over abusers, most of whom happen to either be women, or are acting womanly".]
I think they probably cared less about power over women and more about power over their abusers.
Interesting that the "right-wing" is slowly rediscovering that this is how they need to couch their messaging (and then refusing to back down when pressed, and Trump will be the model for this going forward). Liberalism is a counterbalance against progressivism just like it was against traditionalism, and the progressives are only liberals in the "continue the revolution against traditionalism" sense, not the "continue the revolution against traditionalists" (which is why they're so occupied with fighting a strawman that no longer exists while becoming indistinguishable from the traditionalist tendencies that were the reason liberals opposed them in the first place).
But what happens when it is mostly women/progressives carrying out the abuse? Well...
but ensuring first-world LGBT people aren't smeared as pedophiles
The "global elite satanist pedophile" people have correctly identified that if you're in power, you get to sexually abuse young men with impunity. The specifics look a little different when women do it but "we will take away your ability to develop the things that make you sexually attractive" (either by raping/molesting you directly, or contributing to the cultural effort to chemically castrate you and give you breasts instead express your inner herbivore man where you hide under your bed in fear of offending a woman) is the general form of what that sexual abuse looks like regardless of whether it's a man or a woman doing either of those things, regardless of whether they think in the moment it's abuse or not (as you know). And the problem is that, because liberal men and women can and will use different functions to compute sexual attraction than normal people, but don't understand that they're doing that, they won't anticipate that their views on what makes the opposite sex attractive (if they even see it that way) is destructive when applied outside of that "orientation"- they can't defend against progressives because they don't know they need to defend against them.
Note that this is specifically forced feminization/passivization [in the traditional straight sex sense, where your psyche is built on men dominate, women submit] (and note that abuse victims tend to become hyper-female as a rationalization/result of the abuse, and that's true for boys as well as girls). Feminization that isn't forced is... something different, but can look the same way under certain circumstances (especially in all-male environments, like boarding schools [Eton is famous for this] and prisons) or if you're not aware/don't care they're distinct (most commonly for religious reasons).
Also, forced masculinization can be accomplished (Stanford Prison Experiment guards, Khmer Rouge putting children in charge of labor camps, royal families), it just isn't done because making more dominant individuals is not generally to the benefit of those with the power so we don't have good data on what happens. [I suspect the Soviet "strong woman, basically a man" meme is a little more than just a meme in this direction, but I don't have data to back that up; I'm also not convinced it's the cause of most FTM transitions as distinct from its standard social contagion effects.]
Maybe we should have considered not covering up such practices by our "allies"
The Westerners that are in power consider the institutional and cultural abuse of boys/young men to have neutral-to-positive moral valence (see above). I think the clearer examples of boy-raping are certainly things that a government would cover up for the same reasons the Church did- that it would allow their legitimacy to be questioned- more than it is an attempt to protect the LGBT movement (who don't really have to care about being called pedophiles as they now possess the social privilege the Church used to have).
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
8mo ago
because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.
I think they probably cared less about power over women and more about power over their abusers. Ending the practice of bacha bazi was a prominent selling point for the Taliban the last two times it took power in Afghanistan. Maybe we should have considered not covering up such practices by our "allies", but ensuring first-world LGBT people aren't smeared as pedophiles is apparently more important than preventing child sexual abuse.
justmotteingaround
9mo ago
TSD has always cut both ways. People literally think Trump was sent by god to stop pedophiles and prevent the obvious communist takeover of America or something. Of course he has all the normal age related cognitive decline for a 78 year old. Honestly, I think he's beating the median.
"Norm-shattering" is a good description, but incomplete. What trump is is the first person to recognize and reify a wholly new strategy for executing politics. That being: to organize his supporters not as interest groups, not as a cult of personality, not as ideological compatriots, but as a fandom.
Recently, we've been seeing a lot of ink spilt on the subject of the social media-depression link. Particularly where it concerns children, but I hold that the problem extends universally across age groups. Ubiquitous smartphones with social media is (so far) the ultimate realization of the "bowling alone" trend-- where the world inside the screen becomes so addictive that people lose social links outside the screen. Consequently, in-person social links become scarce despite being just as valuable as ever. More valuable, perhaps, because in-person interactions retain all their old benefits while also making you a high-priority person to someone who has potentially valuable virtual contacts.
People on some level realize this, so they still optimize for some level of in-person contact. And they do that by engaging in fandoms. Large, energized masses of people with a shared understanding of a universe easily gel together when they meet in person. That fact that these universes are fictional doesn't matter. In fact, the very fictionality of these universes is what makes them so effective. They can optimize for being interesting and pleasurable over being true. (See: epistemic minor leagues). And unlike traditional social groups that performed the same function (e.g., fraternal societies, religions) they demand very little from you personally outside what you were already willing to give: the free time you already wanted to spend doing something fun, and the opportunity cost of spending time with people who aren't into the same things you are anyways.
Trump is the first modern politician to truly realize the power of fandoms. I want to say, "unwittingly" because I think he's an idiot, but given his success with TV and branded enterprises I can't rule out genuine epiphany. He's creating a shared universe than his fans can all be passionate about, with interesting characters, noble heroes, and evil villains. And in organizing his political supporters into a fandom, he's invalidated all the usual tools of traditional politics. Fact checkers; negative news coverage; research papers-- none of that stuff is effective against a fandom. In fact, it's actively counterproductive. Every youtube video about how star wars physics aren't realistic just keeps people interested in the star wars fandom.
Indeed, the only thing that can successfully oppose a fandom is an equal and opposite hatedom. Whether his enemies deliberately organized themselves into one, or were simply forced by selection pressures to fit the mold doesn't matter. What matters is that when someone says, "Drake and Josh are amazing singers," you don't bother telling them that they're overproduced corporate slop. Instead, you go out and create a powerful social group of your own, by telling them, "look at all these idiots that love something Dan Schneider, a pedophile, created!"
The hate against the clintons for being slimy, the "bush is stupid" people, and the the obama birtherism were essentially prefigurement for this. They cultivated proto-fandoms with their charisma that made traditional policy attacks less effective, and therefore were subject to proto-hatedoms. Bernie came the closest to emulating trump with his own dedicated online fandom, but he definitely didn't consciously understand what was happening, and in any case failed to take advantage of his devotees like trump did.
Until technology dramatically changes the social environment again, I predict that every future president will act like trump and be treated like trump. He is to social media as Kennedy was to television as Coolidge was to radio-- laying out the path for every candidate after.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
That might sound weird, given the murderous pedophile thing, but to me supporters of those theories generally just seem like they are stupid and prone to weird fantasies and LARPs but have always been that way, whereas people who are existentially shattered by Trump seem like they might have been different at one point, but then suddenly Trump appeared in the corner of their reality and traumatically inverted it into some new configuration of dimensions.
This epitomizes general differential expectations of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are regarded (and to a shocking degree, regard themselves) as lacking in agency to the point of being almost animalistic. When a conservative raves about cities are shitholes full of degenerates and criminals, that's just how they are. FEMA death camps, Birtherism, Jewish Space Lasers, etc... They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them. We practically talk about Trump supporters in anthropological terms with all these fucking Ohio diner ethnographies. It's on the rest of us to manage them.
Liberals, though. They're supposed to be better, smarter, more accountable. Apparently. When they think a guy who says he wants to be a dictator wants to be a dictator, they're supposed to exercise some critical thinking and realize he's not serious, that's just him being bold and masculine. They're not supposed to say West Virginia's a shithole full of drug addicts even though it objectively is. They're supposed to be adults in the room.
I think that in reality if elected Trump would probably just spend all day tweeting and failing to implement his promises. However, to many Democrats it is almost as if Trump is a Lovecraftian god the mere mention of whom leads to insanity. Such Democrats view him as some sort of annihilating force the very presence of which in the universe warps and endangers the sane, wholesome building blocks of existence itself. Meanwhile I just see a fat old huckster sociopath who talks a lot of shit but is effectively restrained by checks and balances. Not a savory person, maybe even a rapist, pretty certainly a bad guy, but not some sort of fundamental essential threat to the entire being of American democracy or to sanity.
It is not that I do not believe in evil. But I do find it odd when liberals perceive demonic evil in Trump, yet make excuses for vicious violent criminals (at least, as a class if not always individually) who are enabled by Democrats' soft-on-crime policies.
Would Trump do many harmful things in office? I am sure. Harris would as well. Which one would do more, who knows? I do not see a clear-cut answer to that question. He certainly would be no angel, I am sure of that. But it also seems to me that often, vehement anti-Trump sentiment has little to do with a clear-eyed assessment of the possible harms that he would cause.
What explains the particular mind-shattering power that Trump somehow inflicts on so many of his political opponents? Interestingly, it largely do not seem to be his actual political counterparts among the Democrat elite who view him as an eldritch destroyer of worlds... the Democrat elite may hate him, may despise him, may say that he is a threat to democracy, but I don't think I can remember any time that any of them acted as if he was a threat to one's very psychological foundation. Maybe their power and their close understanding of American politics generally inoculates them against such a reaction.
Lest someone think that I come only to shit on the Democrats, unfortunately no. Would that I actually supported either of the two main parties... my political life would be easier. But the Republicans, too, deserve some questioning on this topic. Republicans' reaction to Bill and Hillary Clinton, at one point, was a sort of precursor to the mental shattering caused by the concept of Trump. Interestingly, despite often being accused of being racist, from what I recall Republicans did not actually react to Obama quite as hysterically as they reacted to the Clintons. Sure, there was a lot of vitriol against Obama, such as Birtherism, but it was probably half as vehement as what was thrown at the Clintons.
Yet even though Republicans were in many ways mind-melted by the Clintons, including to the point that Republican forums back in the day teemed with theories about the Clintons literally being a murderous and pedophilic crime family, I still do not think it quite matches up to the new standards of psychological devastation that Trump has wreaked. That might sound weird, given the murderous pedophile thing, but to me supporters of those theories generally just seem like they are stupid and prone to weird fantasies and LARPs but have always been that way, whereas people who are existentially shattered by Trump seem like they might have been different at one point, but then suddenly Trump appeared in the corner of their reality and traumatically inverted it into some new configuration of dimensions.
Why does Trump have this effect? Is it just that there is a large number of people in this country who fail to agree with me that Trump's chances of becoming a dictator are extremely small, that a man who has most key institutions against him, has the top military brass against him, and lives in a country where the military rank and file are probably not about to try to overthrow civilian authority, has very little chance of ending American democracy?
I am not sure. The idea of Trump being the curtain call on American democracy is certainly one of the main things behind his psychological impact on people, but I have seen plenty of people who seem existentially horrified by him for completely different reasons. Some people seem to be driven out of their wits' ends just by the very fact that Trump is crude and vulgar rather than sounding like an intellectual.
In reading your post and contemplating it, I realized that a very likely response that humans would have to a significantly super-humanly intelligent AI is to worship it as a god. I suppose this is old hat. There must be hundreds of old sci-fi stories with this premise. But I used to find this premise hokey, whereas now it actually seems pretty plausible. And it is especially plausible if the AI is super-humanly charming as well as being super-humanly intelligent in a scientific way. And why wouldn't it be super-humanly charming? This AI would combine in one being an intelligence that is beyond any of humanity's geniuses and the charisma of a pop megacelebrity like Elvis or Michael Jackson, or a politician like Hitler, but on steroids. The likely human reaction to such a being is not just fawning support, such as Obama gets from Democrats or Trump from Republicans, it would probably be something more like religious awe.
Some might object that humans would not feel such an awe because they would be aware that the machine intelligence was a human creation. But I am not convinced by that. Humans are capable of worshipping Jesus even though Jesus was born from a human woman. It would be easy for future humans to imagine that the super-humanly intelligent AI was actually some sort of being from beyond the metal, some kind of essence that the universe suddenly decided to activate in that metal like Jesus becoming incarnate in a human body.
Granted, the AI wouldn't have a human body, unlike say Michael Jackson, who could get worshipped as a demi-god off the power of his accomplishments and raw charisma by standing still and turning his head occasionally, and who still has the largest online defense force of any modern celebrity, one that includes thousands of people who worship him and constantly argue online against the idea that he was a pedophile. But it would have so many other advantages that I'm not sure the lack of a human body would matter. For all I know, it might even help. Humans have never yet in their history, unless you credit stories about gods or aliens, been exposed to an intelligence that is genuinely significantly super-human.
As long as I'm talking about Michael Jackson, I might as well mention that he was so beloved and worshiped that he could release a music video that is basically fascist propaganda and get away with it. Check it out, the HIStory Teaser is both hilarious and epic. Even if it was meant to be satirical, it is still probably the best fascist music video that has been made in the West since Leni Riefenstahl, or maybe parts of the Pink Floyd The Wall movie.
There are several things going on here:
(In fairness, a couple of our remaining leftist posters do the same thing, to the same effect.)
But this brings me to my last point:
\3. I've commented on this before, and many others have made the same point: this forum, by virtue of the fact that it even allows right-wing opinions, naturally attracts a lot of right-wingers, and not just the civic Republican types, but the Holocaust deniers, the Repeal the 19th types, white nationalists, "pedophile fascists," armageddon-cosplayers like Kulak, etc. We don't attract a lot of leftists, especially not hardcore, ideologically committed leftists, because they have everywhere else on the Internet where their views are the norm and anyone arguing with them will get banned. We occasionally get a new leftist here who is shocked and appalled that we aren't banning Holocaust deniers or people who post about low black IQs. They usually either flame out or leave. Online leftists nowadays mostly just aren't used to dealing with rightists in an environment where they don't "win" by default because the mods are on their side.
So it's not really that left-wing posters who don't quite are eventually deemed trolls; we mods really do try to be fair to everyone, and we're not all rightists. The problem is that the leftists who (a) don't quit because badthink is allowed here; (b) have the persistence to stick around; (c) don't lose their cool and start responding belligerently, is a very small set.
(And again, in fairness, there are rightists who lose their shit that leftists are allowed to post, and they get banned a lot, contributing to the evaporative cooling and claims that we have our thumbs on the scale for leftists.)
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