Lewis2
2mo ago
I think that number is absolutely minuscule, plus, as I said above, all they’d need to do is file a police report and just not blatantly lie, and they’d be almost certain to face zero legal repercussions if they sought an abortion.
Lewis2
2mo ago
Sure, and the police should be able to use the DNA to track down the supposed rapist. If it turns out she lied, then she can face the legal consequences for filing a false police report. Looks like up to a year in prison in my state, plus whatever additional penalty she may face for getting an illegal abortion.
Lewis2
2mo ago
Equally rape, what's to stop any woman from claiming she was raped to abort a child she doesn't want? Because, in all honesty, requiring a conviction before an abortion is so stupid that I don't think anyone can get behind it.
You don’t need to require conviction, just an accusation to the police. Most supposed rape victims aren’t even willing to do that, which makes their claims slightly suspicious.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I imagine this is an extremely fringe view even among Holocaust revisionists, but I know a few people who deny that the Germans ever intended to exterminate the Jews, because the Germans are just too civilized to commit such barbarism. When pressed about the large number of Jews who went missing during the war, they blame the Russians. Everyone knows they’re bloodthirsty and evil, and we know they committed genocides against other groups. Clearly they must be to blame.
I don’t really find it all that convincing, but it is a view I’ve encountered several times before.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Your Irish counterexample doesn’t really apply. Songs celebrating resistance to oppressors and occasional genociders is a far different matter than celebrating genocides themselves.
Lewis2
1mo ago
the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace
To what does this refer? It seems to me that the Ukrainians are no more eager for a negotiated settlement than the U.S. is. Now, it might be in their national interests to negotiate a peace, but they still have to want it to go down that route.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Oh, I agree. Like I said, I don’t find it convincing, but it is a few I’ve encountered several times in the wild, always from Americans of German descent. I imagine there is a bit of motivated thinking as a result of their ancestors’ ethnic background.
Lewis2
2mo ago
Are you talking about MAP stuff?
Largely that, yes, though I also have in mind some of the pedophilia-adjacent things in the trans arena—child drag queens and the like. I largely agree with hydroacetylene’s comment below on how pedophilia could be normalized; I just think he’s missing an additional set of arguments borrowed from the trans movement. If pre-pubescent children can choose to medically transition from one sex to another, it really isn’t a huge jump to give them agency over their sex lives as well (personally, I’d go further and say that allowing transition but not sex is plain incoherent; if anything, it should be the other way around). The case for giving barely-pubescent children sexual freedom is even stronger, and I agree with hydroacetylene that this is more likely for children who opt for same-sex relationships, since that eliminates the concern about pregnancy and since ephebophilic relationships are already more common among gay men. (And yes, I know that technically pedophilia doesn’t include attraction to 12 year olds, but that’s what the vast majority of people consider it.)
In general, though, I tend to look at pedophilia normalization through the lens of the gay rights movement’s history. If you asked the average American in 1960—a time when sodomy was illegal in every state in the union, a year before the famous Boys Beware! educational film was released, and nine years before the Stonewall riots—whether he thought same-sex marriage would ever be legalized throughout the country, he’d laugh you out of the room. Forget marriage, he’d think you were insane if you suggested SCOTUS would rule as it did in Lawrence v. Texas. I think we might be in the same spot today with regard to pedophilic relationships.
This is why I’m not really happy about the MAP and non-offending pedophile stuff I see, even as I agree with pretty much everything they’re saying. Pedophiles don’t choose to be attracted to children, it’s wrong to conflate temptation with action, and it’s a problem that non-offending pedophiles don’t feel safe to discuss their problems with therapists, etc. I wish society would change to make those distinctions clear, but I just don’t trust that the current reasonable concerns raised by MAP activists aren’t a camel’s nose peeking its way into the tent.
Lewis2
3mo ago
On reflection, I’ll happily retract the bit about Mexico not sending their best. You might very well be right that they by and large are. But due to America’s birthright citizenship, I’m not only or even primarily concerned with the generation that illegally immigrates. I’m more concerned with their offspring: Are they net users of welfare? Do they advocate the same deleterious socialist policies that helped to ruin their fatherlands? Do they push for divisive race-, ethnicity-, or gender-based programs such as DEI, affirmative action, etc? Do they vote to even further loosen our border, both de jure and de facto? Do they commit crimes at a higher rate than their Anglo neighbors (controlling for income)? As far as I can tell, the answers are yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. So the overall impact of illegal immigration is negative, even if the first generation that comes here is actually okay.
Lewis2
1mo ago
In some sense that’s true, but as long as property taxes are based on a certain percentage of a property’s assessed value, when that value goes up, the taxes do too. Obviously the government could lower the rate, but inertia makes that unlikely.
Lewis2
1mo ago
However, compared to therapy or some other religions, Christianity is fairly cost-effective.
Not if you’re tithing. Becoming a Christian is probably more effective than going to the shrink down the street, but the shrink usually doesn’t make a claim on 10% of your income.
Lewis2
2mo ago
If we’re talking a pure power play—“I have the votes and you don’t”—then sure, this conversation is pointless. But don’t pretend that invalidates the workability of a law requiring supposed rape victims to actually file a police report. It just reduces the likelihood that such a law will be passed.
Lewis2
1mo ago
A couple of points. First, although I suppose it wasn’t clear, I was responding to RandomRanger’s last sentence, which I do think is wrong. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a group that is more stable than the Amish, even though they have opted to go without modernity to some extent (the extent varies by Gemeinde).
Secondly, going back to coffee_enjoyer’s comment, I didn’t take him to be saying that we would need to adopt the Amish life wholesale, but instead that we could carefully pick and choose which parts we wanted to adopt (“incorporating such things into modern life”), just as the Amish carefully decide which parts of modernity they want to adopt. Some kind of synthesis between the two cultures would probably be a net gain over the current state of the modern West. If nothing else, I think the average modern person would benefit massively from the strong sense of community that the Amish have.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I’ve never heard of that before, and Google isn’t helping me out. Do you happen to have a source handy? I’d be interested in learning more.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Thanks! I don’t pay any attention to different types of phones, and I don’t really trust that anything Google would serve me wouldn’t be bought and paid for by some company or another, so I really appreciate the feedback.
One question: when you say that the SE has five years of support left, has Apple stated that somewhere, or is that just your best estimate?
Lewis2
1mo ago
sometimes inconsistently tried to provide services in Guarani and Quechua.
What sort of services are you thinking of? It can’t be the mass, surely, since that wasn’t permitted to be celebrated in the vernacular until post-Vatican II. Or were exceptions made for Latin America?
I’ve only grown a few inches since then, and most of that growth was in my limbs.
Lewis2
2mo ago
My (very limited) experience is the opposite. I know two, now older, Filipina mail order brides, one of whom I knew when she first came over here. She was quite pretty, tall, thin, and is, probably not insignificantly, either half or quarter Spanish (I forget which). She has a number of other female relatives who became mail order brides, and I’m guessing they were probably similarly attractive. I don’t know what my other mail order bride acquaintance looked like when she was young, but her daughters are both attractive, if a bit short, so I’m guessing she was good-looking when young as well.
Lewis2
2mo ago
High school proms also feature a lot of tuxes, though those seem to be less popular than they used to be.
Lewis2
3mo ago
Easy come, easy go. The only thing I really lose by creating a new account is my saved comments and posts.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job.
This doesn’t seem to me like that much of an imposition. “I really like wearing dresses, putting on makeup, and doing up my hair.” Okay, great, do that on your own time, not at work, and especially not at a job interview. I really like dressing casually, not caring what my hair looks like, and only shaving every couple of days, but I wouldn’t dream of going to an interview wearing blue jeans and sporting two days of stubble, and if I did, I definitely wouldn’t expect to get the job.
There’s this idea floating around that you need to be your “authentic self” 100% of the time, and everyone around you needs to accommodate that, which is absolute nonsense. Anyone who’s ever had a non-PC thought or who’s ever enjoyed a dirty joke knows he can’t get away with expressing either one at most work places, and everyone accepts that that’s right and proper. Or, going back to clothing, take that episode of The Office where Jim showed up in a tuxedo. The writers of that episode relied on the audience knowing that a tuxedo is inappropriate attire in an office setting. But if Jim had instead come in dressed like Marilyn Monroe, somehow that’s supposed to be fine. No. Wear a tux, wear a dress, or tell an inappropriate joke on your own time.
(And while I’m grousing about clothing, Zoomers need to stop wearing pajamas and athletic wear in public. Sweat pants are fine for lounging about the house, but there’s no reason you should be wearing them at work or out in public. Show some self-respect.)
Lewis2
1mo ago
His first paragraph contained several predictions. His explanations for the past may seem a bit too pat, accounting for everything, but you cannot say he’s predicted nothing.
Lewis2
2mo ago
I’d be interested to hear any examples you can give of past pederastic predictions. I spend a lot of time reading 19th and early 20th century primary sources, and I don’t remember ever coming across that concern, nor can I think of anything that would have caused concern about it in the 16th–18th centuries. The closest I can come up with is opposition to castrati, but that’s closer to opposition to trans procedures for minors than to anything related to pedophilia. I guess there was also opposition to child brothels, but those were apparently actually a thing in some areas, and polite society was unanimously happy to shut them down.
As for the present, I agree pederasty normalization is extremely unlikely in the next several decades for reasons that you note. I can’t help but notice, though, that some pedophilic activists and sympathizers have started to mimic techniques that other marginalized groups have used to gain acceptance, and I could see a concerted effort paying dividends in, say, 50–70 years.
In a certain sense, yes, but only insofar as our legal system isn’t perfect. You also have to hazard the odds that your girlfriend will die from complications arising out of the abortion.
Edit: Of course, even should she choose not to abort the baby, there’s nothing forcing her (or you) to raise it. Adoptions are a thing.
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