pedophile
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
What's so good about the camouflage?
I'm not entirely sure, I'm mostly making this claim on the basis of observation. A lot of people are convinced by it, therefore by definition it is very convincing. I don't think I fully understand it, but I think a large part of it is a mastery of Motte and Bailey tactics. There's a subset of aggressive lunatics who use fully woke ideas to cancel people and commit violence, a subset of humanities academics and mainstream media who are really good at manipulating language and public consensus who launder woke ideas as liberal ideas, a large subset of moderates who think mostly reasonable liberal thoughts but don't think very hard and believe the laundered ideas. And there's also a complementary set of classical racists and sexists who get outraged at all of the woke ideas but voice their outrage in very awful ways so the media have a scapegoat to point at. Whenever the woke do something outrageous the more principled liberals and the racists both get upset, and the media can just point at the latter as examples of people being upset at wokeism.
I'm not entirely sure why wokeism in particular is so good at this as opposed to any other movement in the present or past. Maybe it is a unique failing of liberalism that allows for this exploit. "Pretend to be tolerant and falsely portray your enemies as intolerant so you can justify your intolerance against them" only works in a society that values tolerance. But if we generalize it further, maybe it's not so unique. The camouflage of "Pretend to be X which is seen as good so you can tarnish your opponents as not-X and therefore evil, even if they're actually more X than you" is a strategy that has been tried and worked many times in the past. Inquisitions allowed evil and cruel people pretending to be good Christians to persecute and do very un-Christian things to people they didn't like. The Red Scare allowed people to accuse others of being communists do very authoritarian and un-American things to people they didn't like. The Pharisees pretended to be good Jewish followers of God and persecute people they didn't like. The esteem given to the Catholic Priesthood allowed pedophiles to slip in and molest children, relying on the high esteem to keep them above question. Any time you have a class of people generally considered "good", bad people will want to camoflage themselves under that label to avoid criticism for their misbehavior. So wokeism might just be the most recent example of this succeeding. But I call it really really good at it because unlike some examples (like the Catholic Priest one), it can get called out and noticed for what it's doing and still get away with it by opposing its detractors directly instead of merely relying on stealth alone. You can point out exactly what they're doing and how, a moderate but naive liberal can read literally everything I just wrote and still not really believe what's going on because it's complicated enough that they either don't understand or are not convinced by the evidence. For some reason. I'm don't fully understand it myself because from my perspective it's clear. But it's not merely a lack of intelligence, because lots of smart people are similarly unconvinced. Whatever the woke are doing, it works to convince lots of people, otherwise it would not have gotten away with so much for so long, it would have died shortly after people noticed.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
The vast majority of posters here (and everywhere) aren't willing to change their mind about anything they have strong pre-existing convictions on. Discussions are still worth having regardless.
Does this mean we should never have discussions that start with the assumption that the Holocaust happened?
I feel there should be more affordance for orthodox ideas to skip debate on some of the assumptions than for heterodox ideas. Otherwise we could end up with situations like the following:
"I believe elites are all pedophiles who rape children in the basement of a certain pizza parlor. I'm not willing to debate this. This discussion is only for people who agree with me on this point. With that said, how do we stop these evil elites from doing this???"
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Not waste trillions on forever wars in the middle east with no prospect of success. Maga is the opposite of the fiascos of nation building from the mainstream republicans.
Well, there's some on the right — though, per your later point about "younger republicans," these skew older — who belong to what Parvini calls the "counter-jihadis." For them, the answer is that it's not about "nation building" or bringing democracy, feminism, and LGBT tolerance to the Middle East, it's about killing Muslims — because either you're killing Muslims, or Muslims are killing you.
I remember one, shortly after Oct. 7, demanding that US troops be sent over to start killing Gazans, because if we didn't do so right now, we'd have similar attacks in countless American towns, and that the whole reason the attack happened in the first place is because we weren't keeping the Muslims suppressed enough, which is why we need to make sure that we are bombing or shooting Muslims in multiple countries 24/7/365.
I've encountered arguments about how there are no civilian casualties in Gaza because there's no such thing as a Muslim civilian, that every single one of them — even a newborn — is a valid military target. About how there are no moderate Muslims, only those biding their time and practicing taqiyya, and how even the most well-integrated and moderate-seeming Muslim could suddenly commit a terrorist attack at any given moment. How the First Amendment doesn't apply to "Mohammedanism," because it's not really a religion at all, but a political ideology of murderous global conquest — much like Nazism — trying to pass itself off as a religion. How Islam is and has always been the number one enemy of Christendom — with invocations of Charles Martell, the Reconquista, the Gates of Vienna, the Crusades, etc. — and thus fighting them must remain the West's highest priority. (I find this one skews a bit younger and more online than the rest, tending to come with a fondness for "Deus Vult" and "Make Istanbul Constantinople Again" memes.) Lots of "founded by a pedophile warlord" comments.
Israel actively supporting jihadists in Syria hurts their supposed "anti-islam" stance.
Yeah, and that has quieted some of these folks a bit, though there's a certain amount of "enemy of my enemy" and "it's a complex situation" rationalization that happens IME.
I really want to dissect this part of social worker culture, but it's difficult because so much of it happens behind closed doors, and is only hinted at in official documents.
The first time I noticed it was the glamorization of "sex workers" in my college sociology courses populated by future social worker girls (I was one of two guys in all of the classes). And it was always "sex worker," the same way fetish communities fixate on specific words to describe things.
The upper level course that I didn't take by the same prof had the girls go to the closest sketchy part of LA to campus and larp as hookers, then write an autoethnography about it. There wasn't a single guy by that course, of course.
We keep seeing these tiny glimpses of it, like that scandal with the woman including "sex worker" in a school career day, etc., but it's never explicitly argued for or explained in detail. I still don't understand how it exists in that weird superposition of "sex work is good, men who employ sex workers are evil predatory pedophiles."
In normal practice the "sex positivity" media glosses over it entirely by making all the examples "queer" and thus non-problematic by definition; we've all seen those tumblr-style comics with the hello-kitty bright colors and smiling lumberjack-bearded women giving handjobs to a wheelchair guy in a hijab.
Do we have anyone at all who could do a deep dive into that whole culture? It seems like one of those heavily onioned ones where you don't get to see the heart until you've passed through all the layers of initiation rituals and privately had "the conversations y'all folx aren't ready for."
It worries me because (as already pointed out) these people already seem to run our entire social work and therapy systems, and we've already seen other "inner circles" of crazy socjus ideologies bubble to the surface and burn through mainstream culture with no resistance.
People saying "that stuff's crazy, nobody wants that crazy stuff, you're crazy" aren't much comfort when they were saying the same thing about racial socjus in 2015.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
I concurrently believe that 1) Leo Frank was a pedophile who deserved to hang, and the actions of the klan in defending an innocent black man are a rare mark in their favor and 2) wanting to talk about Frank all the time is probably not motivated by sincere interest in justice practices in 1910's Georgia. So no disagreement about that.
Lynching was definitely A Thing which has been a feature of the south since there was a cultural region identifiable as the south; describing the second klan as a cultural moment is fair, referring to a bump in lynchings concurrently with the great war is probably fair, but referring to lynchings as a cultural moment is not.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
I’m noting that I AAQC’d this, but I also want to say- Elon has a small, and unfortunately-named, child who accompanies him much of the time. It’s not unreasonable that organized pedophile gangs hit him harder than non-parents of small children.
SecureSignals
8mo ago
There's more to that going on, Bari Weiss posted this yesterday for example:
What’s happening in Canadian politics is not happening in a vacuum. It is a symptom of a much broader phenomenon. Call it the great crack-up of the old consensus.
The old consensus held that immigration was an absolute good, with multiculturalism the end goal. Arguments contrary to progressive social attitudes was “disinformation” that must be combated by robust online censorship. People would quickly adjust to massive changes in social attitudes around sex and gender because objections would be seen as bigoted. And anyone who said anything that questioned the consensus would become a pariah.
This consensus is being rejected across the West...
Wow, that sounds familiar! It sounds word-for-word what the Alt-Right said a decade ago. What are we to make of Weiss now assimilating these talking points? Obviously I think her angle is different from the Alt-Right, and more self-serving than pro-white. But it's not Musk trying to stay in good graces, although that's part of it. There seems to be an actual realignment towards the DR in some capacity.
Weiss also signalboosting the Paki grooming gang story, again another decade-old talking point recycled word-for-word from the Alt Right:
Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.
The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.
Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.
They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.
All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s
And I don't think Bari Weiss can be said to using this as a distraction from H1B issue.
Leftists of course do not care about those girls getting raped and deflect the accusations outright by denying that the rapes happened in the first place.
They do care but only marginally. I was in a discussion just recently. A quasi steelman of their position (copperman?) is that yes, rapes may have happened and political correctness may have contributed to the police failing. HOWEVER, Elon Musk is just bringing up this against Keir for political reasons. The people who bring this up have an agenda, they're motivated and they won't give you the full context. If you have the full context you'd probably find it's a very murky situation and there are no clear goodies and baddies. By the way, you can't find the full context because there's nobody who's disinterested in this so don't even try (also I can't be bothered to look into this, it's not my problem). Every big prosecutor has 10 cases out of 3000 that look pretty bad, Elon is just singling out Keir because he can. What are you supposed to do, get it right every time?
Furthermore, judges frequently let out criminals they thought were truly guilty because that's how the law works (judge says 'I wouldn't say frequently' in reply). Anyway, it was a breakdown in communications, these things just slip through the cracks, it wouldn't be fair to hold anyone accountable for it. Police corruption and institutional failure does sometimes happen but we should be very wary of people who say the police are covering it up or that the authorities have failed us because that's what far-right people and schizos say. Most people who say this are schizos or liars. And there were all these times people were arrested for pedophilia despite not being pedophiles because the wrong people were listened to...
TLDR; rule of law > catching pedophiles and taking them out of circulation. Elon and the far-right are in the wrong here.
Perhaps you can tell from my tone that I don't really agree with this, I find the argument motivated to be maximally unfalsifiable. You could use this kind of reasoning to justify everything, there's a kind of meta-cherrypicking going on: "you can't just pick out bad things politicians have done in the past to attack them in the present when everyone makes mistakes" surely wouldn't be accepted for the wrongdoings of Donald Trump. My conclusion is that IQ once again isn't an unalloyed good. You can use intelligence to achieve any goal, good or ill.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
There are several things going on here:
- Explicitly left-wing posters do get reported, constantly, for being trolls. There are a number of regulars in particular who report any left-leaning opinion with the same mindfulness as a knee jerking when the femoral nerve is tapped. We see these reports, we see who is making them, and we ignore them.
(In fairness, a couple of our remaining leftist posters do the same thing, to the same effect.)
- Left-wing posters also get dogpiled a lot. This is understandably hard for a lot of people to deal with constantly. Worse is the antagonism and hostility that comes out, which we do moderate when it crosses the line, but below a certain threshold, you're just constantly weathering accusations of bad faith and trolling and ignorance. We do our best to keep anyone from being dogpiled or abused, but as the culture of the forum has definitely shifted rightward, it's certainly true that it's a more comfortable place for rightists and a less comfortable place for leftists. Probably the majority of posters consider this a good thing, which means the cycle is unlikely to break. Even if we managed to get an influx of new posters, including a lot of new leftists, we'd probably shed most of the leftists over time, as has happened in the past.
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.)
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
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
Ghost of Quokka's Future
9mo 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.
10mo 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
10mo 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
10mo 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
11mo 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:
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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".
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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!)
Germany is not a democracy and not a free society.
I would rather the world avoids the norms from the German authoritarian far left hate speech police that persecutes its only genuine patriots. This is one of the several examples today of the extremes of anti nazi obsession and how that ends up looking as an occupation goverment. Which is because part of the reason this has happened in Germany has been the influence of some of the people who got influence after ww2. Especially the frankfurt school types. This kind of hysteria is what let to these types arguing in favor of giving German children to pedophiles because else it would lead to a new holocaust, and fascism. And they got away with it. But Germany was occupied and it is tragic to see even in other countries that even fought against Nazis, to see something similiar happen.
The general behavior of Germany isn't something to be proud off. The German establishment and those following its ideologies do not have any lesson to teach. Their current behavior is the opposite extreme of Germany under the Nazis.
Now, make no mistake I would rather countries and even more so other countries are lead neither by traitors who oppress their own patriots, the right wing and their own people in general, nor by extreme nationalists invading other countries. I don't think that your succeeds in only stopping the later.
I am not saying your approach is indicative of the worst of it, but to a small extend is part of a general more hysterical reaction than it is warranted. So there is a trend of antifa inquisition fanaticism throughout the world who have proven incapable of stopping only extreme elements of nationalism and not leading to an anti-native state that oppresses its own nation. Two tier justice system, totalitarianism and hate speech codes, having an agenda in favor of extintion of their own nation, and of guilt and self hatred and of course demonizing those who don't share their agenda. Supporting the extreme nationalism of foreign tribes at expense of their own nation. Ironically this behavior has some similarities to what the nazis wanted to do to some of the countries they conquered that they claimed their people like Polish were a threat to the German nation and should not be allowed ethnic consciousness. With the difference that Germans wanted to do it to other ethnic groups while some holders of this agenda want to do this against their own nation.
This has been part and parcel of their anti nazi crusade. It is comical now 80 years after world war 2 to be acting as if Musk's salute is serious business that we must have a strong reaction and talk about as a serious problem. So I would select in favor of not allowing them to play inquisitors any more. It is actually a good idea to loosen up with the hysterics 80 years after world war 2. Obviously the pro HBD nerd Elon Musk isn't out there to promote invading Poland.Musk's views on legal migration are actually a problem since large migration including legal migration, doesn't respect the rights of the indigenous American people to not be demographically displaced, especially white Americans who are especially targeted for demographic replacement.
If we need more authoritarianism, perhaps we need an inquisition towards the antifa inquisitors who went way over the top and while they think they are fighting the ghost of Hitler, they are actually oppressing their own people. And since there is actually a legitimate duty for a society not to oppress its own people, and to promote the interests of its own nation, first of all the preservation of the nation which is the people common ties of kinship, history, language, ethnic consciousness, it probably qualifies as restoration of rule of law and not necessarily authoritarianism to stop this faction which is itself authoritarian.
Ideally countries should have red lines in defense of their own people and preserving them and their interests that they wouldn't allow to be broken, but also respect some of the same red lines for other nations. There is also room for international collaboration beyond just that, but always with respect of red lines. Just like parents should put their children first, obviously define their children as their children and reject preposterous propaganda that just anyone can be allowed to become part of their children, protect their home, not give it to strangers, but not go around making money for their family by stealing from others, dealing drugs, murdering, etc. And of course they can develop some positive relationships with people outside just the family. Plenty of constitutions already say things along these lines of how it is the duty of the leaders of the goverment to protect the nation and how it is treason to harm the nation and have plenty to say about treason. So there is room to remember this and to start enforcing it.
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