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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34134 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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So, the Guardian has decided to be offended by a volleyball player, gleefully (and from what I can see, technically correctly (the best kind of correct!)) calling him a child rapist in the headlines.

Apparently he had sex with a twelve-year-old when he was 19 (with no additional elements of coercion) and served a year for it in 2016.

That is one icky age difference, and I think that the prison sentence he served might be an appropriate general deterrent. (Personally, I would prefer having (legally void) consensual sex with an adult (to whom I am attracted, see consent) at age 12 to spending a year in the prison at 19, but ymmv.)

However, I also believe in rehabilitation. I see no reason to report on this any more than if he had served a year for insurance fraud in 2016.

Both of the Guardian articles feel less of a hit piece than some other stuff I have read in the past, apart from the headline. (I wish we had some better phrase to refer to the offense than 'child rape', which includes this but also abducting and violently raping kindergardeners.) Of course, that the elected to report on it at all is the most problematic part of it apart from the headlines -- it was eight years ago, which is longer than most doping bans last, and he did a substantial amount of time for it.

Would I be mad at the guy that slept with my 12-yo daughter? Yes. Would I be mad at my daughter for sexting with a 19-yo dude and inviting him to have sex? Would I be mad at myself for raising a thot? Absolutely.

Was his prison term too short? I think so. Does this mean we have to refer to him as "that kidfucker" forever? Nope. As long as he has learned his lesson (and that lesson isn't "cover your tracks better when fucking jailbait"), I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

He should be punished and has served his punishment. We should move on and treat him like any other rehabilitated criminal at this point.

The girl's parents should also have been punished for gross neglect at letting things get to such a point where their daughter at age 12 was willingly going and having sex with a random from the internet. The big injustice of the story is not that he's been rehabilitated but rather that the piece of shit parents are treated as victims instead of accessories to the crime.

While it certainly seems possible that her parents were partly to blame, from the facts I know this is hardly a given.

Teens (and almost-teens) sometimes are capable of making spectacularly bad life choices. Certainly a rough family environment increases the odds, but likely are not strictly required.

While I agree with you, Britain is the country which arrested the fathers who tried to prevent their daughters being victimized by Paki grooming gangs.

Deeply proud this board has maintained its libertarian principles. I love you all.

There are so many hilarious ways one could read this comment

The real crime is that he didn't wait a few months so the joke would land better

It seems like there’s a distinction to be made on the basis of crimes which indicate something broken about a person and crimes which have perfectly legible motivators.

A thief, a man who commits statutory with a 16 year old(illegal in my state), a drug dealer, a serial red light runner- all of these indicate bad decision making skills, but normal people wanting to do them is not an indicator against normality. These people can be taught to behave in a civilized manner, at least potentially- it may not be something we as a society have the stomach for, but you can eventually beat or re-educate these categories of criminals.

On the other hand, normal adults don’t want to have sex with children- like actual children and not teenagers-, or do serial killing, or use hard drugs. These crimes indicate something much more severe. It’s fair to note a pedophile long after the fact in a way that noting a tax cheat isn’t.

My anecdotal experience is that, while the hard drugs part might be a decent heuristic, exceptions are common. I personally know several people who did meth regularly and later in life cleaned up and became successful professionals and raisers of families. Heroin use is common among successful musicians who are not antisocial in any serious way.

Now, of course, if I had to choose to be roommates with one of two people and I knew nothing about them other than one of them had used meth or heroin heavily at some point and the other one didn't, I would choose the non-user. Hard drug use is correlated with antisocial behavior, no doubt about it. I'm just saying that hard drug use, past or present, is not firm evidence that the person engages in seriously antisocial behavior.

Most recovered addicts of heroin, meth, or crack never become quite normal or able to fully act as adults IME, and of course I simply doubt that successful musicians are ever quite normal(although most don't do heinous crimes, either). It's fair to note recovered hard drug addicts long after the fact because normal people don't want to use those drugs, and being an addict leaves a scar on the psyche anyways.

I agree with your point but I'm irked by the inclusion of hard drugs in what normal people don't want. It's perfectly legible to want to do coke or molly to have a great time at a party.

Those are hard drugs now?

Like, I think wanting to do heroine indicates you're pretty far gone.

Man, I don't even know. Everyone seems to have a different definition of what is or isn't a "hard drug". Cocaine always struck me as harder than amphetamine, and that can be pretty hard on the mind and body.

Supposedly people do try heroin in "social" settings without going through the opiate cursus honorum. That's completely alien to my way of thinking, but so is carjacking.

Cocaine is complicated by Crack, which is one of the "harder" non-opiate drugs.

Normal cocaine usage is firmly in the party drug side of things, most users do a bump or two while they are at the club or whatever instead of sitting in a room with shooting up 24/7. That doesn't mean people don't get addicted and it's not dangerous (it can absolutely kill you), but I do think people's idea of the modal cocaine user and meth user are very different, and that the latter is high or withdrawing a larger percentage of the time and has a more fucked up life. Cost is also a factor here.

Crack totally different though.

Cocaine has always been considered a hard drug, as far as I've ever known.

I'd classify those as party drugs, not hard drugs. When I thing hard drugs I first think meth and heroin. Something you shoot up, something that makes you look like a ghoul, OD stories and killing for drug money.

Snorting meth at parties is super-fun as well.

These crimes indicate something much more severe

There's an extent to which I agree with this general point, but I also assume that the law was designed so the punishment fits with the alleged severity of the offense, so that really means your issue is with the law itself being too lenient?

It’s fair to note a pedophile long after the fact in a way that noting a tax cheat isn’t.

Hmmm. I think it is wise to keep your kids away from him as a general rule, and we should assume a certain propensity for bad behavior and not really give him the benefit of the doubt...

But it is not clear that this should impact his ability to compete in a sport he's actually very good at if he's maintained good behavior since.

But it is not clear that this should impact his ability to compete in a sport he's actually very good at if he's maintained good behavior since.

It has no impact on him competing - he can go compete at his local community gym - it impacts him representing his country on the largest stage possible.

Same thing, though. His punishment was carried out. Presumably his country deemed that punishment sufficient for the nature of his crimes.

What crimes are so heinous as to disqualify someone from 'representing his country,' assuming they're otherwise talented enough to hack it?

Do we agree that Michael Phelps' kerfuffle over Marijuana use doesn't invalidate his gold medal wins, nor should he be prevented from competing?

So light drug use is 'acceptable.'

I'll grant murder is beyond the pale.

I think I'd be fine with a person with a single DUI on their record representing the U.S. I'd be okay with someone convicted of 'simple' assault and battery too, assuming they had history of good behavior since then.

Sexual Assault is beyond simple assault, but I think I can be okay with someone convicted of sexual assault representing the country if it is 10 years after the fact.

Since the OP says the crime was committed

with no additional elements of coercion

I guess I'm just left wondering how much harsher to judge when the victim is 12.

My own thoughts on the crime of rape are nuanced, because the law treats it very differently from most other crimes, and nowadays doesn't even need to prove the perp's intent to stick.

On the one hand raping a child should be punished heavily. On the other I definitely don't see the benefit of continuing to drop sanctions on the perp once their sentence is done. I'd certainly argue that every consecutive year of demonstrably good behavior is grounds for easing up on him.

"Having sex with a child forever stains your reputation such that you can never be given any position of esteem or honor ever again"

is a pretty simple rule and certainly isn't the worst way to govern these things, but preventing someone with actual skills from using those skills to their fullest extent also creates economic deadweight loss. Maybe the answer is to legally enslave him and FORCE him to play Volleyball for the country, but he has to look like he's really unhappy about it, maybe they send someone out there to hit him with electrical shocks between rounds. But oh, fielding slave athletes is also a bad look for your country.

Hmm.

I don't want to seem flippant about it, but picking an athlete to represent my country has so little effect on my daily life, or anyone's, that I simply can't find it hugely controversial that they've got some nasty history. Like I said, keep him away from kids, and that's the sum total of my concern for the situation. Most Olympians ain't kids.

I hold people who are put in positions where they exercise actual authority over others (Politicians, CEOs, and the like) or in direct positions of trust to a much higher standard in this regard.

Same thing, though. His punishment was carried out. Presumably his country deemed that punishment sufficient for the nature of his crimes.

And that is their right. I tend to fall more on the American normie side of "maybe people who fuck 12 year-olds don't need to be around".

And no, I wouldn't apply it to marijuana. I'm not sure where the line is.

is a pretty simple rule and certainly isn't the worst way to govern these things, but preventing someone with actual skills from using those skills to their fullest extent also creates economic deadweight loss

We suffer this loss all the time. Plenty of people are talented. Kevin Spacey has literally been found innocent in multiple trials and will still likely not be allowed to climb back to anything like his peak status. Ryan Garcia is currently in the doghouse. Poor Kyrie Irving was suspended for moronic conspiracy theories of the sort you hear yelled in the subway, no threat to anyone. He wasn't even allowed to pay jizya at first because he was not sufficiently deferential in his apologies.

Most people don't really care about any of these things on a deep level (unless your team lost out), yet it's not in doubt that this is the status quo. We don't really need to craft some justification for it from first principles like it's novel.

None of these high status roles are pure meritocracies. There's always been a debate about just who deserves to get these benefits (enhanced by the stage and national quality of the Olympics). Perhaps the one bit of crystal clear consensus is that something like race shouldn't be a barrier. The rest is debated constantly.

And that is their right. I tend to fall more on the American normie side of "maybe people who fuck 12 year-olds don't need to be around".

Yes that's the easy rule. I somehow feel like nobody is quite prepared to apply it to every single imagineable case, however.

Plenty of people are talented. Kevin Spacey has literally been found innocent in multiple trials and will still likely not be allowed to climb back to anything like his peak status. Ryan Garcia is currently in the doghouse. Poor Kyrie Irving was suspended for moronic conspiracy theories of the sort you hear yelled in the subway, no threat to anyone. He wasn't even allowed to pay jizya at first because he was not sufficiently deferential in his apologies.

Yes so you see my point.

If the rule is "having sex with a 12 year old is an instant social death sentence, and maybe a literal death sentence" then there's some incentive to use this claim as a bludgeon and create false allegations.

I don't know if there's a better equilibrium achievable, but I'd perhaps like to search for it.

I'd be interested to see court documents to understand exactly what "no additional elements of coercion" means. Depending on context that can mean anything from 'didn't drug or threaten her life' to 'was completely unconscious at the time of the incident', and usually law and judicial contexts care about where it's enough to count as aggravating convictions. The Times summary, for however much you trust it, looks closer to the former than I'd like, especially with the "They also drank Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur together and slept on a cardboard box under a hotel stairway when they couldn’t get a room".

His defenders argue that because he was not convicted of grooming, he didn't do that, but even in the highly unlikely situation he didn't groom her in the colloquial sense, it seems very likely he fit in the text of the statute, so it's hard to pull too much data out of it. I've got... less than favorable feelings about the 'it's-ephebophilia' side of libertarian thought, but depending on the behavior this could well have flunked even that.

"Not all forms of being attracted to minors are pedophilia. If you like preteens it's called hebephilia. If you like teens it's called ephebephilia. The reason you don't hear people make this sort of distinction very often is because it kinda makes you sound like a pedophile." - Some comedian paraphrased.

Personally I'm in the "why do you call your pedophile chipper a wood chipper?" camp on the matter (at least for a case involving a 12-year-old), but even for an older teen (and even one actively sneaking out to hook up with older men) I think we need to bring back shotgun weddings. Unfortunately that's a bit of a coup complete problem and requires some major societal shifts back to enforcing social norms by both shame and force.

Marrying older teens is illegal in the Netherlands even if she’s pregnant. This isn’t Georgia(USA).

Hence it being a coup complete problem

As noted by Freddie deBoer, woke people tend to endorse the concept of rehabilitative justice most enthusiastically, but have two weird carve-outs: any kind of alleged sexual misconduct, no matter how innocuous; and using or mentioning racial slurs in any context. Any white cisgender male who commits one of these infractions is assumed to be unclean forever and always, no matter how much punishment (legal or otherwise) they may have endured.

To be fair to woke people, this attitude is at least consonant with one of their other typical opinions: that gay people are "born this way", that sexuality and gender identity are congenital and hardwired. If this is true of gay people, why wouldn't it also be true of paedophiles (a group which I think it's totally reasonable to characterise this guy as a member of)? And frankly, I think almost everyone essentially shares this attitude. For all of you people wishing him well and crowing about woke hypocrisy, I have to ask - how comfortable would you feel about leaving him alone with your twelve-year-old daughter or niece?

To be fair, in the "leave him alone with someone" part of the equation, the team did take pains to "prevent" something like that, though the exact form of that prevention seems unclear (he's at least not in the Olympic village together, though wouldn't that be more safe not less, since it's not usually families AFAIK?) so the argument is really more about optics rather than anything else.

But the Olympics is actually about national pride, not the athletes themselves, if we're being honest. Otherwise it would have a prestige level more on par with the X-Games or something. So in that context presenting a child rapist (I think it's worth noting that he travelled to another country to meet up with this kid knowing full well her age) as the face of your country is patently illogical. But I'd argue that giving the Netherlands shit about it (reputational damage) is more effective than actually trying to get him banned, as a practical matter (especially given that they've assumed responsibility for his behavior during the games).

But yes, at least some of the conversation is definitely about if someone who makes a choice like that can be "reformed" or not. If they can, it's at best inspiring and at worst a non-issue, but if they can't then it's forever a black stain of silence in the face of misbehavior, which people are usually quite sensitive to in the last decade. As I like to say, betrayal is one of the most powerful emotions, and a lot of people feel that Olympic showrunner types are guilty of betrayal and cover-up of sex crimes, so the sensitivity is probably even higher. Recognizing that part of the response is obviously an emotional reaction rather than a strictly logical one is thus helpful.

he's at least not in the Olympic village together, though wouldn't that be more safe not less, since it's not usually families AFAIK?

Gymnasts?

To be fair to woke people, this attitude is at least consonant with one of their other typical opinions: that gay people are "born this way", that sexuality and gender identity are congenital and hardwired. If this is true of gay people, why wouldn't it also be true of paedophiles?

This is conflating sexual preference with criminality. It's not a crime to have a sexual preference for children. It's a crime to molest children.

Pedophile is to child molester as heterosexual male is to rapist of women. While it might not be possible to change the sexual preference, that doesn't mean we cannot rehabilitate criminals. If rapists of adult victims can be rehabilitated, then why not rapists of children?

(This conflation is very common in discussions surrounding pedophilia, by the way. My theory for why that happens is that people have such an irrational, visceral hatred of pedophiles that they just do not want to consider the possibility of a non-offending pedophile. But the distinction is important nonetheless, if you want to maintain a justice system where people are convicted based on their actions, and not just their thoughts or inclinations.

Something similar happens with other hated groups like “incels”, where being involuntarily celibate is almost a crime in and of itself, regardless of whether you've actually harassed any women.)

For all of you people wishing him well and crowing about woke hypocrisy, I have to ask - how comfortable would you feel about leaving him alone with your twelve-year-old daughter or niece?

This is an irrelevant hypothetical. You can argue that because of his past crime and the possibility of recidivism, Van de Velde should not be alone with twelve-year-olds in the future, but what does that have to do with him playing volleyball in a team full of adults?

The people who oppose Van de Velde participating in the Olympics seem to do so on the basis of some poorly-articulated principle that someone who has committed a horrible crime should never be allowed a place in the spotlight, regardless of whether they are likely to reoffend or not.

This is conflating sexual preference with criminality. It's not a crime to have a sexual preference for children. It's a crime to molest children.

And back when those bad old sodomy laws were still a thing, it wasn't a crime to have a sexual preference for the same sex, it was only a crime to act on it in certain ways. And yet, most people nowadays tend to describe such laws as "making it a crime to be gay."

Is the hatred really "irrational" though?

My rough mental model is that most men are essentially addicted to sex. It happens naturally when they enter puberty, and it doesn't really ever go away for most. There are roughly two classes of pedophiles:

  1. Men who are very indiscriminate in their sexual attraction. They aren't especially sexually interested in young children, but they're just sociopathic and opportunistic. If they have power over young children, they will use them for sex much like they would almost anyone else. These men are pedophiles, but almost incidentally. They're just really bad people with a often indiscriminate and sadistic sexuality. Children are sometimes their victims.
  2. Men who are especially or exclusively sexually attracted to young children, particularly prepubescent or early pubescent children. The existence of such men is somewhat of an evolutionary puzzle similar to male homosexuality, and it does seem mostly inherent. These men are usually not sociopathic, but the sex drive is powerful and treacherous.

All the interesting questions mostly revolve around class number 2. I generally model class number 2 like I would an alcoholic. They're basically addicts even if they have never actually partaken in their addiction. Sometimes they fall off the wagon, and other times they get back on again. Like an addict, they shouldn't be trusted with the object of their addiction. If they're otherwise good people, then they will avoid it themselves. They may try to satisfy their addiction in what seem to them relatively indirect and harmless ways, though they may also inadvertantly cultivate and strengthen the addiction. Suspicion is warranted, because people are weak and will give in to sexual desire, but many such people are not fundamentally evil and do live ordinary lives.

My impression is that this athlete may fall into this second class.

One of the joy's of medicine is that everyone gets sick and therefore if you work in enough practice environments and for long enough you'll interact with every slice of society. AKA I've talked to more pedophiles than the average bear, unfortunately.

The distinction between pedophilia and ephebophilia is constantly panned on the internet, because this topic breaks everyone's brains but the distinction exists for a reason. Impulsivity (including sexual impulsivity) often implies some level of overriding of legal and ethical concerns on the alter of biology. If you find a picture of the girl and she passes for 16 the guy is sexually impulsive, not a pedophile (perhaps legally a pedophile and ethically a pedophile, but when people think pedophile they think "sexually attracted to children" no, most people who commit statutory rape type crimes are saying things like "damn she had some nice titties." A 4 year old does not have secondary sex characteristics).

Some subset of the sexually impulsive people are likely antisocial, but the majority of these cases by volume are like this one, honestly kinda close in age range but just outside the realm of propriety for modern audiences (appropriately so!) but the motivation is fundamentally "I want to have sex with someone who in their messed up brain triggers normal sexual impulses due to a lack of impulse control." I doubt we have data on this, but I do wonder if modern earlier sexualization and earlier development of secondary sex characteristics has increased the frequency of these encounters. Again these people aren't "truly deviant" they are just horny and impulsive (which is a different form of deviancy). A sufficiently advanced sex-bot that looks like such and such popular model would keep them out of trouble. They are not necessarily otherwise bad people (but can be). Satisfaction can be achieved with normal, healthy human behavior they just impulsively choose to make poor decisions.

A different group of people is the true anti-socials who are not obligate pedophiles and but engage in pedophilic behavior because they are "evil" and either enjoy power differentials or just don't care what they stick their dick in. These people aren't pedophiles, they are monsters. They are also super rare.

I think it's important to break group 1 into those two components because it can have a strong impact on things like recidivism rates and moral judgement, especially in cases that are a little more debatable than this (classic would be the 16 and 18 year old couple, which in the past resulted in a lot of jail time).

Agree with your characterization of the second group though, without more details we can't figure out which group this guy is but statistically it's more likely to be the first group, he likely just wanted to have sex and she probably looked adult enough to him. He's probably an idiot not someone obligately attracted to children.

Also, don't fall into the feminist "rape is about power" trap. Rape is sometimes about power but mostly it's about sex. Group 1 people just have a high enough sex drive and access problems, group 2 have a fundamental distortion in the way their attraction works. They generally feel super guilty about their attraction and decisions. Group 1 people typically have a much more egosyntonic relationship with their urges.

Pedophile is to child molester as heterosexual male is to rapist of women.

I agree with your distinction between pedophile and child molester, but not with this equivalence. A pedophile is someone who wants to have sex with children. A heterosexual male is someone who wants to have sex with women. Having sex with children is by definition child molestation. Having sex with women is not by definition rape, unless you are Andrea Dworkin. So your theoretical ethical pedophile who never acts on his desires (I assume such exist, though I admit I'd be skeptical of any individual's claims that they never ever have or will) is still someone who fundamentally wants to molest a child.

Whether you can "rehabilitate" them depends on whether you believe that sexual attraction to children is something inherent in their sexuality (which would make it equivalent to a sexual orientation) or a dysfunction that will respond to psychological treatment. From what little I know of the literature, most psychologists are not optimistic about the potential to "cure" pedophiles. They seem more similar to sociopaths and narcissists, in that you really can't counsel them or medicate them into being something else.

It's not a perfect analogy, but it's useful because it separates the innate sexual attraction from acting on that attraction.

A pedophile is someone who wants to have sex with children.

I think the word “want” is being used in a very vague way here. A pedophile is sexually attracted to children, but might not consciously want to fuck them.

Compare with a heterosexual man who has a crush on his neighbor, but he knows she is married, and since he considers having sex with married women beyond the pale, he won't pursue her. Does he want to fuck her? On some theoretical level yes, but on a more practical level no. What if instead of being married she is underage, and he ignores her for that reason? Same thing, as far as I'm concerned.

In the real world, there is a lot of difference between cravings and conscious desires. A recovering alcoholic might crave a drink, but simultaneously want to avoid drinking. It's not helpful to simplify that to “alcoholics want to drink” — it's much more complicated than that.

They seem more similar to sociopaths and narcissists, in that you really can't counsel them or medicate them into being something else.

I don't think pedophilia can be cured, but it can be managed, just like alcoholism can be managed.

But even if it were true that alcoholics, pedophiles, philanderers, sociopaths and narcissists are utterly untreatable. What bearing does that have on whether they should be allowed to participate in the Olympics?

A pedophile is sexually attracted to children, but might not consciously want to fuck them.

Seems like a distinction without a difference. What does it mean to be "sexually attracted" to someone if you don't wan't to have sex with them?

It's not that confusing a concept. Say you meet a hot woman, but want to be faithful to your wife. You're still attracted to the sexy lady, even though you are consciously deciding not to act on that attraction.

Psychiatry has some terms that are great for this kind of problem: egosyntonic and egodystonic.

Example: OCD bothers you. You don't want the impulses and urges. OCPD (Personality Disorder) doesn't bother you as much. You like being meticulous and double checking things.

Lots of pedophiles have egodystonic fixation, they are attracted to children and don't want anything to do with that and then slip up or whatever (or don't).

This exercises is useful in a variety of contexts and is generally a good way to assess the importance of cause of behaviors and can be used in assessing prognosis and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic

The fact that you're choosing not to have sex with the hot woman (or choosing not to try to get her into bed with you) doesn't mean you don't want to. Just because a reformed alcoholic is choosing not to drink doesn't mean he doesn't want to: if he didn't, he wouldn't be an alcoholic.

Yes? That's exactly what I understood @MartianNight to be saying about celibate paedophiles.

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This topic gets quite contentious and goes back at least to the Scholastics, with different 'levels' of will involved. Even the mere question of time-dependent tastes/desires gets a lot of hackles up. It doesn't help that different people often have different experiences, and we don't have much of a rigorous framework for objectively probing cognitive states. Some alcoholics do actually report that their habits and discipline have resulted in a 'reactionary' will that does not actually desire to consume alcohol, while others instead continue to struggle with desire and must rely on a second-order will to choose not to consume. Some people who have discovered that they have food intolerances say that they used to love such-and-such a food, and they really struggled with desiring it when they first decided to stop eating it, but later have an experience where they will see such a food and not even have a will to consume it. "Oh, that is a beautiful looking piece of food, masterfully crafted, and I'm sure someone will enjoy it, but I don't want it." A time-dependent example is pretty common; many kids don't like vegetables like broccoli, they have no first-order will whatsoever to consume it and must rely on a second-order will to choose to consume it anyway for other purposes. This may start out being a will to please and not anger parents, or to satisfy a rule that then allows them to consume other foods. This may later develop so that they actually have a first-order will to consume broccoli.

It gets complicated, and most people don't have a consistent sense for how it works. No fault of their own; we have very few tools for proper analysis. So, they tend to default to a handful of heuristics to explain how they think it might work.

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Compare with a heterosexual man who has a crush on his neighbor, but he knows she is married, and since he considers having sex with married women beyond the pale, he won't pursue her. Does he want to fuck her? On some theoretical level yes, but on a more practical level no. What if instead of being married she is underage, and he ignores her for that reason? Same thing, as far as I'm concerned.

Sure, most of us meet people we find sexually attractive but would never act on that attraction, for various reasons. But most people aren't doomed to be lifelong incels if they can't fuck any particular person. A pedophile is either a child molester or a literal incel. I can feel sympathy for someone who has desires he presumably did not want or ask for, but I can't say I'd trust him.

What bearing does that have on whether they should be allowed to participate in the Olympics?

There's been a lot of debate in this thread about whether there is any line that would be too far to allow participation, with arguments that if someone has "done their time" and has valuable contributions to make, they should be allowed. I'm generally sympathetic to the argument that people who have done their time and been released should be allowed to make a living. I don't think they are necessarily entitled to make a living doing whatever they want, particularly something that uniquely bestows glory and fame.

I don't have very strong feelings about Steven van de Velde in particular, but for me there is a line, and 12 is pretty damn close to it. If he got caught banging a 16-year-old, I'd think he's kind of sleazy but eh, lots of athletes probably bang jailbait and don't get caught. If he got caught banging a 5-year-old, I'd definitely be okay with saying "No Olympics for you." Apparently some people would disagree with the latter, but there are also people who've been pretty explicit that they are defending van de Velde's "right" to participate in the Olympics just because he's making their enemies mad.

A pedophile is either a child molester or a literal incel.

Being an incel does increase the chance of committing rape, yes, but it's not as if most incels are rapists.

I'd remind you that it's very hard to get statistics on non-molestor paedophiles because, well, most of them don't admit to it. So you only have a very-loose upper bound on P(molestation|paedophile). I seem to recall P(paedophile|molestation) is about 0.5, though I forget the source.

A pedophile is either a child molester or a literal incel.

You do realize it is possible for a person who finds (some) children sexually attractive to also find (some) adults sexually attractive as well, right? Not to mention that it is possible for a person to choose to have sex with people they don't find sexually attractive.

But most people aren't doomed to be lifelong incels if they can't fuck any particular person.

There are plenty of lifelong incels.

So your theoretical ethical pedophile who never acts on his desires (I assume such exist, though I admit I'd be skeptical of any individual's claims that they never ever have or will)

Haven't we had a few motteizeans claiming to be in this category?

Yes and the implication that we're either lying about being pedophiles or are actually child rapists strikes me as both rather uncharitable and extremely inflammatory.

You're expecting anything else from an entire thread being the same traditionalist-progressive "man bad, sex bad, sex with man bad, young women think sex with man must have been groomed to think so and could never have actually sought it intentionally" thesis stated as iron-clad fact like 50 times?

I'm not surprised the reaction to that is the Motte user equivalent of that one picture of a smiling man up against a building while a crowd of angry women scream at him. It also doesn't help disprove my thesis that most people are Last Thursdayists when it comes to the topic of children (i.e. they were created fully grown and thus never actually were the thing they're describing) to the point I'm not even sure that stance is in any way a motivated one.

This topic just tends to break people's brains and not in the fun ahegao way, and tends to logically conclude with the "anyone younger than me are still children but I guess we could draw the line at 25" thing or the "all men secretly want to rape you, that's what seduction is" thing (with the specific and notable exclusion of "women be horny", but in fairness for most of evolutionary history that's been a maladaptive malfunction). Not exactly a complimentary picture of interaction between the sexes but, again, those raging hormones do weird things to you- of course, the absence of which just makes you see sex and the obsession therewith as just fucking gross, which is why the sneaking out to fuck tends to be limited to tweenagers at the youngest in the first place.

They did claim this, yes.

If rapists of adult victims can be rehabilitated, then why not rapists of children?

Well this is my point: I think most woke people would categorically state that a cis male rapist of women (or groper, or harasser, or catch-all "creep") cannot be rehabilitated - that one can no more rehabilitate a cis male rapist's preference for penetrating women without their consent than you can convert a gay man to being straight. Remember during #MeToo, when dozens of men had their careers because someone dug up evidence (or "remembered") of them being a little pushy or handsy a decade or more ago, having given every indication of being scrupulously respectful to women ever since, by all accounts? I don't think this is just "this guy may have learned the error of his ways, but he still needs to be brought to justice" - I think the woke stance is explicitly "once a ra(p)(c)ist (broadly defined), always a ra(p)(c)ist (provided you hold the relevant identity characteristics)".

Back from Bizarro World, I believe that rapists and people who rape, molest or statutorily rape children can be reformed and rehabilitated. I just don't think woke people believe that - it's heresy in light of "born this way".

You can argue that because of his past crime and the possibility of recidivism, Van de Velde should not be alone with twelve-year-olds in the future, but what does that have to do with him playing volleyball in a team full of adults?

Nothing, of course. I just think it's a bit rich that commenters here are waving the flag for this dude without even the barest pretence of having any motivation other than owning the libs - but in practice, if they were to interact with this guy in person, if it was their kid at risk of being interfered with ox being gored, their revealed preferences for how they think he should be treated would be functionally indistinguishable from those of the Guardian journalist who wrote this article.

just think it's a bit rich that commenters here are waving the flag for this dude without even the barest pretence of having any motivation other than owning the libs

For the record, I'm not “waving the flag [..] to own the libs”. I just want the discussion about eligibility of Olympic athletes to be more principled than the current “this guy's past behavior was appalling so obviously he shouldn't be allowed to compete now!”.

You can make an argument around how serious criminals should be barred from the Olympics, but then you should flesh it out in an objective way. Part of justice is applying rules equally and fairly, and not in an ad-hoc manner as seems to happen here. Insisting on that is not the same as blanket support for pedophiles to participate in the Olympics.

By the way, I really don't think it's only liberals who are upset about Van de Velde's participation. It's just that the liberals are more vocal now that the perpetrator is a straight white male, rather than if it had been a black or trans person or a drag queen or something.

if they were to interact with this guy in person, if it was their kid at risk of being interfered with [..], their revealed preferences for how they think he should be treated would be functionally indistinguishable from those of the Guardian journalist who wrote this article.

Again, you are conflating two very different things. I wouldn't hire Van de Velde as my baby sitter, and I'm not saying anyone else should, but I might well hire him as my tax accountant, and I wouldn't mind playing volleyball with him. I don't think there is any hypocrisy there.

I mean, wasn't part of the whole idea of MeToo that some of the highest-profile people (no idea about some of the collateral, as it were) effectively had gotten away with sexual abuse over multiple decades? And so the suspicion was, and somewhat still is, that since cover-ups were so common, maybe every case of sexual abuse is actually the tip of the iceberg. People started jumping at shadows... kind of understandably? I think the ideological portion of this was and is overstated, though it's still a conversation worth having. The fundamental [human] problem of "how do we gauge how sincere an apology is" still remains and makes things messy.

On more general moral principles I tend to feel more like "three strikes you're out" but I think for some people rape and its analogues might test that principle (do we really want to accept 1-2 additional, perhaps unnecessary rapes in "exchange" for a moral stand? Honestly probably yes, but we need to be honest that this tradeoff kind of does exist at least in part)

having any motivation other than owning the libs

The commentators waving the flag for this dude are mocking all the trad posters for supporting a standard of consent that is specifically designed to oppress them for no benefit. I don't think anyone's really mocking the progressives, and the [classical] liberals, once they show up, are all going to go "woman seeks sex with man and gets it, where's the crime?".

While I realize this is an edgy thing to say, I strongly disapprove of this man's actions but my reasoning has nothing to do with the age difference or any modern feminist notion of consent as a real ethical fundamental. I simply think men have an important responsibility not to have sex with any woman they do not seriously intend to marry.

How young would the girl have to be before the immorality of the age difference overwhelmed the immorality of the casual sex? You've established an adult man having sex with a 12 year old is morally superior to casual sex with another consenting adult woman. What about a 9 year old? A 6 year old?

Why is "intent" to marry sufficient? Surely a man who's serious will marry first and fuck later.

Of course. But we're grading on a curve here. There are worse things and less bad things.

So, like, the worst part about Humbert-Humbert is that he he didn't intend to marry Lolita?

I don't think "feminist notions of consent" have anything to do with protecting minors from their own voluntary decisions. The legal basis is cognitive. 12 year olds can't legally quit school, buy legal drugs, leave home, sign contracts, etc. But this is not because of feminism.

Would you be okay with a 19 year old having sex with an 11 year old? An 8 year old? And so on...Provided they intended to marry?

Its an interesting perspective, but I see some small potential for abuse.

But this is not because of feminism.

No, it is specifically caused by feminism. Compulsory education past the point it makes sense, prohibition (even for adults, too), and AoC laws were day-one feminist goals. A 12 year old could trivially just leave home on the first bus to the city 100 years ago to find work, but 40 years after that it was outlawed (by a significantly more feminist society).

The legal basis is cognitive.

No, it isn't; adults that are stupider than the average teenager (including the mentally handicapped and the senile) have more rights than them, so that claim it's cognitive is incoherent.

I think you're confused about the correct delineation between "child" and "adult", because all of human history suggests it isn't where modern society thinks it is. (And now you know why teenagers [and topically, the occasional 12 year old]- being biological adults under a high degree of suppression- are generally difficult to deal with.)

No, it isn't; adults that are stupider than the average teenager (including the mentally handicapped and the senile) have more rights than them, so that claim it's cognitive is incoherent.

It's cognitive, but imperfectly.

I think you're confused about the correct delineation between "child" and "adult", because all of human history suggests it isn't where modern society thinks it is. (And now you know why teenagers [and topically, the occasional 12 year old]- being biological adults under a high degree of suppression- are generally difficult to deal with.)

Indeed; ancient societies generally considered males to be full adults in their mid to late twenties and women and girls to never really come of age, as opposed to the current standard of eighteen for both sexes.

A 12 year old could trivially just leave home on the first bus to the city 100 years ago to find work

I come from a very patriarchal culture, arguably not truly feminist (though it's made its impact on the educated). No one would put their 12 year old daughter on a bus alone to go find work.

No one would put their 12 year old daughter on a bus alone

Yeah, in some areas of the world even more divorced from reality this can trigger a child endangerment investigation. Gotta be supervised at all times, ideally with a face covering.

Again, you had "left to join the circus" only 4-5 generations ago (for example, the youngest worker on the Hindenburg when it went down was 14- not an unusual thing, and then you look at the workplace photos and see more people even younger than that).

They are capable, we just pretend they aren't because... reasons.

Capable of running away, or capable of getting better outcomes than if they'd followed the guidance of their parents? I'm aware that children were a lot more free-range before, but that did come with expectations that they'd act as they were taught and heeded their elders. In fact, there was far more emphasis on heeding one's elders than there is now, even though, as you note, not all adults are smarter than all teenagers.

capable of getting better outcomes than if they'd followed the guidance of their parents?

You seem to be missing that "if you stay on the farm you'll be poor forever, and you're still not inheriting shit because you weren't born first, so it's time to leave and earn some money to support yourself" was a calculus young men and women commonly had to make even into the middle of the 20th century (in more rural areas).

Modern overextended "adolescence" is a [late-mid]-20th century invention.

Wasn't anything to inherit in most cases. Outside of the US most were tenant farmers: all my distant ancestors certainly were.
My grandfather and his father on the male side were both apprenticed at 12 and moved into their masters' shops. On my mother's side her father started working in the mines around the same age, which was much later than her grandfather had started work (around 9ish)

My dad got to go to trade school until 15, and didn't start a real industrial job (bit grinding) until then.

From what I see, the peak of teenage "difficulty" is 2-3 years before puberty is done with them. Seems clear to me that a 13 year old doesn't instantly become a "biological adult" when she starts bleeding or his balls grow the first few hairs.

No, the worst part was his delusional narcissism that made him think he was a sexy young popstar-lookalike she had a crush on, rather than an aging academic she only flirted with a bit to mog her mom/daddy issues.
That's why her rejection hit him so hard, especially because of who she hooked up with instead

Was Quilty even real? I think there's a reading of the book where Quilty is Humbert Humbert's own alternate ego.

Isn't Humbert on trial for murdering Quilty? Unless you take the unreliable narrator so far that the trial isn't real either.

In any case, Lolita in the end marries some other guy closer to her age (I forgot his name, if it's even mentioned).

Richard. I only remember because jealous Humbert called him something like "superfluous Dick"

Had it a bit wrong:

“No,” I said, “you got it all wrong. I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me” (words to that effect).

God I love his parentheses

Wouldn't that mean even the framing story can't be trusted? The editor points out places where Humbert's narrative conflicts in a provable way, and doesn't do that for what he's actually on trial for.

I find your views fascinating in a clinical way. Would you have been okay with his actions if he had intended to marry her, perhaps in a society where child marriage is more common? What if their age difference was larger? Is consent required for marriage, or is that also just a 'modern feminist notion'?

Would you have been okay with his actions if he had intended to marry her, perhaps in a society where child marriage is more common?

Depends heavily on outcome and specifics. If they split or divorce later, for example, it reflects very badly on one or both of them, and probably specifically the man as the more mature participant. But an intent for marriage would shift things over to "negligence" or perhaps even "bad luck", and away from "malice".

What if their age difference was larger?

Larger which way, and by how much? I don't know, really. It can be hard to disentangle the emotional disgust reaction from the moral disgust reaction. The strongest moral arguments here, IMO, are also strong moral arguments against nonprocreative sex more generally, which seems kind of weak.

Is consent required for marriage [...] ?

Universally? No, but something like it should certainly be pursued. Better marriages are (among other things) ones where the husband and wife (or wives) make each other happy, which is obviously less likely if they don't want to be there. There are material considerations as well, of course, but I think men and women have a responsibility to care deeply about each other, especially in the context of sex and marriage.

(I wish we had some better phrase to refer to the offense than 'child rape', which includes this but also abducting and violently raping kindergardeners.)

Isn't the distinction already made in rape vs aggravated rape? We can be certain that a 12 year is a child and that the crime committed was rape, I see no issue with the term 'child rape'.

Usually, the distinction is to call it "statutory rape", distinguishing two concepts, factual consent and legal consent. That is, "rape" is often used to describe cases where the victim did not factually consent to the sex act, and "statutory rape" captures a range of scenarios where the victim may or may not have factually consented, but in either case, the statute would not have accepted that factual consent as providing legal consent (and thus, it is not actually necessary to even ask/answer the question about factual consent). My sense is that, usually, cases involving children are pretty trivially easy to prosecute as "statutory rape", and it's only when there are significant other factors (usually clear evidence of force/violence) that can be shown, where it is 'promoted' to your category of "aggravated rape". There's often little point, from the standpoint of what is actually prosecuted, to pursuing a 'partially-promoted' case, where they try to show that there was no factual consent, but without sufficient evidence to bump it all the way up to "aggravated". Like, sure, it can help you with the jury to have the victim say that it felt bad and icky and they said they didn't like it and didn't want it, but I don't think it 'bumps the charge up' in a lot of cases.

Thus, I would generally find an unqualified use of "rape" to be rather ambiguous, as well as the slightly-qualified "child rape". It's still not entirely clear which bucket it would fall into.

...of course, if you start asking more pointed questions about whether children can factually consent, why/why not, and why/why not a statutory regime should accept that factual consent, you open a whole box of absolute conceptual mess, which is a historical sore spot for the more Foucauldian-inspired left.

Except he didn't rape her, in the commonly understood way of forcing her against her will. The law decides she was too young to consent (and I'm fine with that line existing) but the only reason we're using the word rape is because the law calls it 'statutory rape', not because it corresponds particularly to a violent sexual attack.

Would you say the same thing if she had been 9? 7? 5?

Are 9,7,5 year olds generally sneaking out to get laid?

In practice neither are twelve year olds.

And yet, here we are discussing that exact case.

She was quite clearly groomed into it; I have no doubt that a younger child could be groomed into the same behavior because it has happened before. Children want to please adults.

Children want to please adults.

And deliberately disobeying them to get laid is clearly them wanting to please the adults.

I guess I have to ask because it's not at all clear to me- have you ever even seen a child before, let alone interacted with one? They're kind of the opposite of people-pleasing robots, and generally need to be subtly threatened to do things that they don't want to do (which is what grooming implies).

Where was that threat here? (And no, the tradeoffs of "I'm not going to be your friend any more" are not beyond even a small child's grasp.)

More comments

Would you draw the same linguistic distinction if I say a man is a thief, when he's accused of embezzling from his employer by having supplies charged to the company but sent to him? Or if I say he's a thief when he convinced a senile old woman he was her son who went MIA in Vietnam and she willingly gave him her savings?

For that matter I have no problem with a fentanyl dealer being charged with murder, as the killer of my neighbor's son is currently being sentenced.

Hmmm, 'thief' is a little more broad, but yeah it does have connotations of stealing an old lady's bag. I'd prefer embezzler or fraudster in both those cases.

I agree we could use more linguistic precision in distinguishing between a violent rapist and one who operates by fraud (either deception or taking advantage of those without the capacity to make choices on their own). But alas, we lack the language.

I have been doing my best to add "whoremonger" to my own vocabulary, as the insult I apply to eg Deshaun Watson when discussions of such come up. "I don't care whether he did it or not, I still wouldn't want my team to spend nine figures on a whoremonger."

The problem here is that sleeping with a 12 year old isn't a central example of anything. Rape, diddling, pedophilia, molestation, predator, there's just not a good term for it.

A quick Google search indicates that "theft" has for many centuries been a generic word that covers larceny of physical items, embezzlement of entrusted funds, and taking of money through false pretenses. Is larceny the central example of theft, so that calling an embezzler or a fraudster a thief is misleading? I'm not sure.

But "killing" someone by consensually selling to him drugs on which he happens to overdose definitely is not a central example of murder.

In some states, Pennsylvania included, if the victim is younger than 13 the offense is Rape of a Child and it doesn't matter whether it was coerced or not.

I think that's largely fair too. While the legal choice of 13 in so many laws often seems somewhat arbitrary (including linguistically), it's not actually a terrible separator. It seems to me that there's some massive moral cliff somewhere at age 14 or below, and it's a absolute cliff, not a slope. For example this link talks about psychological development in the 10-12 range with phrases such as: "Write stories, Like to write letters, Read well, Enjoy talking on the phone or texting" and so to take advantage of a girl just at the tail end of learning how to, uh, talk to people independently is super duper messed up in a way that still applies but less strongly to someone in their mid-teens, where gradual gaining of independence is a normal psychological process. And while many states have legal systems that are often capricious and illogical, taken broadly they do seem to reflect at least some awareness of these dynamics. But yeah, personally I'm much more inclined to say that having sex with someone 14 or under indicates something deeply wrong with you, not a temporary "mistake" in this kind of context and knowing what we do about the actual maturity of 12-year-olds.

And in some countries this incident wouldn't be an offense at all, since the age of consent there is less than or equal to twelve. Now I think such a low AoC is wrong, but it is just applicable to the incident under discussion as the laws of PA, USA; not at all.

There are then two ways to determine if it is appropriate to call the volleyball player guy a "rapist": we can either look up the exact offense for which he was convicted or each of us can try to use our own idiosyncratic defintion of a "rapist" and attempt to judge if the Dutch person's behaviour fits.

How they do things in Philly doesn't factor in.

How they do things in Philly doesn't factor in.

There’s a joke in here about the Pennsylvania Dutch …

Even in Pennsylvania, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so. There's a difference between the two different acts even if the law fails to recognize it.

Prison time is just one form of punishment. A ruined reputation can be a fair punishment by your community for committing particular crimes. It can be an unfair reaction, of course when the community is judgemental over nonsense. What this guy has done is sufficiently bad for him to deserve to be hated for it by Dutch fans. This also helps as a deterrent. It also isn't unfair for the Guardian to argue that a year might be too little of a punishment for this crime.

The Guardian have launched a lot of misplaced moral crusades, but I don't object to a 19year old who had sex with a 12 years old and is a groomer and a child rapist, getting hatred for it.

I do object with the Guardian and other British media pointing particular fingers towards the Dutch. Any such criticism should come along with a lot of self criticism. I don't trust however the likes of Guardian would succeed in changing things only to proper directions. Britain is the kind of country that arrests autistic children for calling a lesbian, a female cop which was in fact a lesbian. Britain due in part of the influence of media like the Guardian, is not at the place that is an example for other countries.

I can't find the link of it now, but I also recall a news article of an autistic, introverted boy getting arrested in Britain because he touched his own classmate in the shoulder.

But there is a difference between moving on with one’s life and representing your country at the most prestigious sporting event in the world, where you are also supposed to set an example.

This is the line that really rustles my jimmies. Either you believe in second chances or you don't. Honestly, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with anyone that held that committing this sort of crime should permanently exile someone from polite society. If you said that justice is Van de Velde spending the rest of his life unloved and unforgiven, working as a barista or some other similarly menial and unimportant job then fair enough. But you don't get to do that while also claiming that he is allowed to 'move on with his life'. This reads like 'yeah I agree with forgiving rapists, as long as I don't have to ever look at them or anything.'

While 19 and 12 seems pretty disgusting to me, what the judge said to him makes me want to root for him regardless.

Judge Francis Sheridan told him at the time: “Prior to coming to this country you were training as a potential Olympian.

"Your hopes of representing your country now lie as a shattered dream.”

That strikes me as a judge who got into law for the sheer joy of being cruel. Thus having Van de Velde prove him wrong is very satisfying.

That... seems like an incredibly normal sentencing statement?

Judges always talk about the severity of the conduct and why it was bad and what the legal and practical consequences will be when sentencing a defendant. It's their job, they are literally passing judgement.

There's a difference between "passing judgement" and "reveling in cruelty", and while that's likely a normal sentencing statement, it just says something about the types of people who become judges.

I don't get what makes you see it as "reveling in cruelty". Sentencing remarks typically go through the details of the offense, mitigating and aggravating factors, the impacts of the conviction, etc, etc in a very thorough way. I can't find the actual court documents but I did find a longer quote:

Sentencing him, Judge Francis Sheridan said: “You were a hugely talented athlete who enjoyed the adulation of the crowd but you also have a dark side and it is that that brought you to court.

“Prior to coming to this country you were training as a potential Olympian. Your hopes of representing your country now lie as a shattered dream.

“Your actions in those two days in England have wrecked your life and you could, had you never come to England and committed these offences, have been a leader in your sport.

“You had been in the UK for little over six hours when you allowed this girl to give you oral sex. That is rape on account of her age.

“She instigated that activity as she thought that was what you do when you are ‘in love’. That justifies why the law in England is as wise as it is in prohibiting a child from consenting.

“A young, naive foolish young child had formed the view that you loved her. In reality you only knew her on the Internet, had never met her before and were fully aware of the age difference.”

Judge Sheridan said it was not a case of sexual grooming, but added: “You were the adult, she was the child and until you recognise that you will remain a danger to young girls.

“The emotional harm that has been caused to this child is enormous. As she matures she will have to come to realise that you are not the nice man she thought you were and hoped you might be.”

I think those are extremely appropriate remarks to make when imprisoning a paedophile.

I think the judge may have been playing the role of the stern disciplinarian more than the role of the cruel hand of righteous vengeance. But I don't know. They're both kinda dubious roles to play.

“You were a hugely talented athlete who enjoyed the adulation of the crowd but you also have a dark side and it is that that brought you to court,” he said.

"Prior to coming to this country you were training as a potential Olympian.

“Your hopes of representing your country now lie as a shattered dream.

“Your actions in those two days in England have wrecked your life and you could, had you never come to England and committed these offences, have been a leader in your sport.

“A young, naive foolish young child had formed the view that you loved her.

“In reality you only knew her on the Internet, had never met her before and were fully aware of the age difference.”

The disciplinarian won't tell you you've already wrecked your life. That's righteous cruelty, often excused for the purposes of making an example of someone to deter future bad behavior by others.

If my 12 year old daughter was groomed and then fucked by a 19 year old athlete I probably wouldn't be concerned about the judge being too mean in some meaningless statement.

I’m rooting for him due to the seethe he triggers in Reddit-types. Of course, if he were instead a black, brown, or Muslim migrant, many of those seething would be turning a blind eye or even defending him.

As a 6’6” white man (and now semi-famous thanks to the Streisand Effect), he’s likely drowning in puss despite his conviction. While the typical playing-life-by-the-rules 75th percentile guy struggles to get a single Tinder match (much less a response after a match), a hypothetical Chaddie Nazi or child rapist receives no shortage of matches and enthusiastic replies (and even chicks messaging first). The well-known female intuition and personality detection at work.

Black-pillers 1, red-pillers 0. Your text game doesn’t suck; your looks/height do. Just as it’s tough to out-run a bad diet, it’s tough to out-text your looks/height. If you’re insufficiently attractive, there’s no combination of printed words that can make a girl attracted to you. And, as the experiments above show, if you’re sufficiently attractive, there can be a wide latitude of printed words that you can get away with.

In the absence of “finance, trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes,” “volleyball, statutory rapist, 6’6”, blue eyes” will do (there’s even a bonus inch!)—unlike if his height starts with a 5. At 6’6”, he’s just at the lower cusp of optimal male height.

A perpetual source of seethe for women is the male preference for younger women, even teenage girls, and a tall handsome athlete going after a 12-year-old reminds them of that. While 12 is almost certainly too extreme, online dating studies show that men view women as monotypically less desirable with increasing age after 18 and that men of most ages prefer 20-year-old women, where 18 and 20 were the respective lower limits. If not for the lower limits, 17 and perhaps 16 could be in play.

Of course, upon seeing such results, women generally cope with this by thinking, “Am I less beautiful than a fresh-faced and tight-bodied 18-year-old? No, it’s men who are wrong and pedophilic.”

Another aspect of this is the modern Western inability to thot-patrol daughters, lest you get accused of being abusive and controlling. At 12 she was already chatting with a least one random boy or man on Facebook and lying to sneak out of the house to meet up with him.

Why do you care so much about what your adolescent daughter does? You don’t own her or her body.

I’m rooting for him due to the seethe he triggers in Reddit-types.

It is curious you like trolling so much to the point of rooting for 19 year old fucking 12 year old. Or maybe the second part is actually a good thing according to you.

He's already been warned for this comment - you piling on with personal attacks is not improving the discourse.

There are some interesting (if unoriginal) thoughts here, but this is way too much culture warring and fist pumping. If you want to root for a guy banging a 12-year-old because it makes the people you hate mad, you need to say more about it than just several paragraphs of variations on Ha! Ha!.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to blackpill ideas, but I think the context it's missing is men will often be even worse. A 6'6 guy with a swastika tattoo might get lots of dates- but not as many as a skinny girl with D cups who has a swastika tattoo. You can condemn women for being superficial and horny, but you should be condemning men 100x as much. Us men are much more likely to look past horrible personality defects just to get laid by someone hot.

The difference is that men will often admit that female attractiveness is mostly down to looks and certain life choices (e.g., tattoos, promiscuity, single motherhood, depending on the man), but women—in an attempt to preserve their Wonderfulness—will often feign that male attractiveness is mostly a reward for moral virtue and having the "right" beliefs and attitudes.

From my half-rigorous polling, about 20% of women are slutty and largely motivated by looks and aren't really that ashamed to admit it. 80% of women are more selective about their partners, and while looks do still play a large role for them, personality/beliefs do play a large role. It's that 20% who are slutty who make up the majority of hook up participants- at 25 they may have had roughly 30 partners where a member of the 80% has had roughly 5(most of whom were long term partners, not hook ups), as estimates.

I think the hypocrisy comes more in that the 80% don't acknowledge/aren't aware of the 20%. So they act like of course a hot man with a terrible personality would have some difficulties getting a girlfriend, since if all women were like them, the hot nazi would have some difficulties. Part of it is just virtue signalling too, a hot nazi would still do better with them than they'd admit, but most of the incredible success of hot nazis would come from the slutty 20%.

Hang on, that gives me an idea for a romance novel...

John Ringo probably already did it.

Perhaps my thoughts here are too rooted in stereotypes, but regardless of how many partners they each pull, I would assume that the swastika tattoo lady would mostly be pulling men who see it as a feature rather than a drawback, while the swastika tattoo man would mostly be pulling women who are merely willing to overlook it.

I absolutely don't think the swastika lady would be mostly pulling men who see it as a feature. There are an incredible amount of men who'd be eager to stick their dick in a tight pussy, no matter how horrid that woman is. She could be a murderer, racist, liar, etc. and men will still be falling over themselves if she's hot enough.

Women will fall over themselves for a hot enough man too. But like only 20% of women would, is my estimate. If it was consequence free, like at least 60% of men would abandon any morals to hook up with a hot enough woman.

Sure, there are more men who would be willing to overlook a swastika tattoo on a partner than women - but I think swastika tattoo lady would more strongly prefer men who see it as a feature than swastika tattoo man would prefer women who see it as a feature. And I don't think she would have any trouble finding them.

What's your point?

he’s likely drowning in puss despite his conviction

He is married (to a police psychologist) and has a child.

While his behavior was still disgusting, most twelve year old girls have at least hit puberty, even if they're not very far along.

Why does having sex with a prepubescent girl have you writing like he’s a sex god or something, I don’t seem to understand the connection.

Clearly there was much left to be understood, because I literally wrote "despite his conviction."

This discussion and the “hyper online right wing guys are weird” being a few post from each other is great comedy.

If this guy didn’t want to be called a rapist for the rest of his life he shouldn’t have had sex with a 12 year old. This isn’t hard folks

Yes, yes, there's always condescending well-poisoning as a classic shaming tactic to attempt shutting down discussions you don't like. I'm unironically glad of the reminder of such a tactic. This isn't a hard tactic, folks.

This isn’t a tactic. Defending a 19 year old raping a pre teen is legitimately very weird behavior.

  • -10

Just because he committed a crime doesn't give us carte blanche to commit the worst argument in the world.

I'm certainly glad to see that a case of a guy actually fucking a 12 year old has brought out such principled precision in the forum that is generally absent when discussing sex ed in schools.

  • -13

I don't think I've ever commented on here about sex ed in schools.

'The forum' isn't a person. You can't act as if it is and then claim hypocrisy when the comments of one user don't apply the same inferred values of a completely different user.

Don't take my comment as criticizing you personally, then.

  • -15

Definitely not weird behavior to give a full throated defense of the terms used to describe a 19 year preying on a 12 year old.

  • -16

You seem to think we care about malicious sneering consensus enforcement fresh from from the latest progGPT firmware update.
If anything that's going to make people here double down on saying things that piss you off and filter the normies, because they are weird and proud of it.

Okay, the queue is just full of your comments. You are consistently picking fights with other users, other mods, and the general concept of things you don’t like. In this particular example, you’re doing so while also speaking for a number of people who may or may be on board.

Take another week off to cool down. Quit trying to rally the troops.

This is just pointless. Why is someone getting banned for doing the exact same thing that a poster did above them but the above poster doesn't even get a warning?

The mod queue being how we decide if someone gets banned is just dumb. I check the user/janitor thing every time I'm here and it's like half of the reported comments (which I assume is how they get there) is because someone disagreed with them and they're using the report as an extra downvote. And it's obvious that is skews in one political direction as well, maybe because they're a smaller portion of the people here or maybe it's just their way because it certainly is on places like reddit. But using that as an excuse is surely just going to end up with people deciding the only way to decide what is acceptable on the site is just mass reporting everything they disagree with.

I still don't understand why the mods here can't ever ban people for the things they do that are bad but instead keep a secret tally of bad things that they don't disclose and then ban them for all those things when they do something less egregious. And almost always in a baited argument where the person doing the baiting does not even get a warning.

More comments

I’m frankly amazed that me calling someone who preyed on a 12 year old a rapist has generated this reaction. He legit is a convicted rapist.

  • -14

The pushback that you’re receiving is likely coming from people who are skeptical and scared regarding a general broadening of the definition of rape. Speaking personally, I’ve been pretty spooked by high-profile reports of women regretting sex the next morning and calling it rape, of drunk men being charged with rape for having sex with equally-drunk women (cf. that one infamous subway poster PSA that goes something like “Joe was drunk. Jane was drunk. Joe and Jane slept together. Joe committed rape.”), et cetera.

I, who respond viscerally and emotionally to these instances of the expansion of the definition of rape (these horror stories teamed up with my natural cowardice to ensure that I did not enjoy my youth while I had the chance), am thus inclined to instantly oppose the usage of the same word “rape” to describe non-central examples of the crime. Your argument that “he legit is a convicted rapist” doesn’t quite resonate with me when Joe from the PSA above is equally a convicted rapist. Others with similar viewpoints as mine would likely feel the same.

I hope that this explains why you might be facing opposition from people who nevertheless think that a nineteen-year-old guy having sex with a twelve-year-old girl is still a very bad thing.

that is generally absent when discussing sex ed in schools.

On the contrary, calling what I believe you are referring to "sex ed in schools" is ALSO the non-central fallacy.

This discussion and the “hyper online right wing guys are weird” being a few post from each other is great comedy.

It's beyond parody. Sloots post reads like something someone taking the piss would write. Supporting a Child Predator to own the Redditors is deranged.

It's beyond parody.

Pot attempting to call a (supposed) kettle...

Millions of people (mostly men) in many countries across the world spend hundreds to thousands of USD each year on tickets, subscriptions, and merchandise to root for laundry or individuals (such as in combat sports), dozens to hundreds of manhours watching games and matches, dozens to hundreds of manhours arguing with people in person or online about their favoured laundry, and occasionally fighting and (perhaps accidentally) killing (or getting killed) by fans of the opposing laundry. Double this for years where there are international events, such as the World Cup, WBC, Summer or Winter Olympics.

It's not uncommon for such popular sportsball individuals or wearers of laundry to be with some degree of disreputation, including rape, even statutory rape, even statutory rape that leads to pregnancy (for better or worse, the Mailman, apparently, did in fact deliver to a 12- or 13-year-old).

I'm spending 0 dollars, 0 manhours watching games/matches (from an entertainment standpoint, I prefer men's indoor to beach volleyball if I had to choose, and have no interest in neither women's indoor nor beach), maybe an hour or two shooting the shit with my Besties on the Motte, just otherwise mostly peacefully rooting from a distance such that the outcome displeases people who, on average, advocate for trends and policies that are net-negative to me, my family, and my future descendants. Sounds pretty ranged.

Just paying the guys in that Kamala ad to read a random selection of themotte.org comments out loud with no alterations would have been much more viscerally repulsive normie-scaring than what they actually did.

Just paying the guys in that Kamala ad to read a random selection of themotte.org comments out loud

No man go the whole hog and pay them to read the Jim's blog comment section.

Dude, I already had to explain to my mom what Fox News meant when they called Kamala a hawk tuah girl. Don't make me explain the pill colors.

With regard to modern dating and relationships, I'd much, much rather explain the main pill colors to my mother (or father, for that matter) than the Hawk Tuah girl or Harris's history.

Thankfully, "dog" is not a color to my knowledge. The main color pills can be explained in a fairly non-graphic way:

Blue-pill: The mainstream opinion that Women are Wonderful, and all you have to do as a man is to be yourself and Be a Decent Person.

Red-pill: Women are not Wonderful, but there are a multitude of ways by which you can turn Women's non-Wonderfulness to your benefit.

Black-pill: Women are not Wonderful, and unless you're already taking advantage of it, you're already and permanently screwed.

Both my parents would already intuitively understand such a three-way split, and would find the Blue-pill view silly.

In contrast, I'd hate to explain the Hawk Tuah meme to my parents; I'd hate to explain Kamala's alleged Casting Couching. Much less the two combined. I recoil and cringe at the thought.

I can't imagine having to explain any of that to my mom. I would never admit to even knowing who Jim or 90% of the internet intellectuals are under any circumstance. I think Destiny and Sam Sedar is as far as I would go in terms of admitting I know who they are.

From the comments on themotte.org (comment quoted in its entirety):

From the comments of "The wonderful clarity of white genocide":

The nation is the hand of the race, the family is the finger of the nation, the individual is the fingernail. If your vocation is to fight, tell your cow whatever it needs to hear while you avoid seeding its’ fallopian tubes and instead mine more minerals and prepare to fight. Otherwise, tell your cow whatever it needs to hear while spawning more overlords.

Don’t talk politics with your cow. At best, it confuses it, at worst, it makes it difficult for your cow to chew cud with the other cows, and cows need to be part of a herd.

The level of politics to talk with your cow is, America is good, we are an American family, nice things are good, criminals are bad because they ruin nice things, having nice things is the only valid virtue signal, tasteful religious displays on nice things are great, ugly religious and political displays on ugly things are stupid evil heresy, ignore any advice from the news and entertainment media because it’s a bunch of pedophiles raping each other.

I guess this would be a bad political hit ad because it's not even funny in the "look at the creep" way.

Not strictly related, but that middle part reminds me of the funny Heinlein quote,

Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

This one made me laugh.

My daughter is 4. I imagine her twenty years later being disgusted by the betahood of Western whites, somehow avoiding the trap of burning coal, and marrying a based Eastern European, Russian, or Chinese dude and living in those kinds of countries happily ever after.

I guess no one told him that having a daughter is the ultimate cuck.

That phrase underlines one of the weirder points of agreement between feminists and traditionalist conservatives -- that sex with men is disgusting.

Come on, you're not that bad!

Love you too.

However, I also believe in rehabilitation.

As far as I can tell from all my direct experience and historical research, this is a very historically aberrant notion. The majority of people across time and space support essentially unlimited punishment for anyone who has been defined as a "criminal" (the exact nature of the crimes can vary of course - "criminal" as a category here just means "the bad people" essentially, the bad people who have been exiled from the symbolic order and are deserving of oblivion).

Christian forgiveness was a radical idea 2,000 years ago, and it remains a radical idea today.

The majority of people across time and space support essentially unlimited punishment

Well, the modal person across space and time was living around 1 CE (give or take a century) as a peasant in some primitive feudal society, and I see no reason why I should take their theory of justice more serious than I would take their cosmology.

Also, I think you are factually wrong. Browsing through ancient legal codes on Wikipedia, I think a key aim of these codes was retributive justice to restore the peace (and presumably prevent feuds between families). For example, from The Code of Hammurabi, per WP:

If an [awīlum] should blind the eye of another [awīlum], they shall blind his eye.

While bloodthirsty, this is also limited scope. It does not call for the death or exile of the perpetrator or his whole family. Presumably, after losing his eye, the perpetrator would live on in the community.

Note that the loss of an eye is no minor matter even today. The contemporary German penal code provides sentences of 1--10 years for blinding an eye (§ 226 StGB) -- or 3+ years if it was intentional.

Also, the idea of individuals as legal entities is a rather modern one not shared by the modal human. See Scott's review of Njal's Saga for a description of a system where families form legal entities.

Rites of absolution and return to society are attested well before Christianity, aren't they? Think of, for instance, Jason needing to visit a seer and purify himself of the crime of murdering Absyrtus.

Is an idea radical if it's 2000 years old?

Why wouldn't it be? 'Radical' and 'novel' are not synonyms.

Oh man, what CW material.

I do love the pictures of him chosen to make him look maximally like a child rapist as opposed to a fairly good looking dude. 12 year olds are picky these days in the current sexual market, given all the apps you know? Gotta be at least a little hot to bang them.

There's a difference between consequences from the state and consequences from private actors. The jail term is just the least-common-denominator solution society has agreed on for punishing his crime. Any private person can also form their own independent opinion of what consequences he should face, and share their opinion.

From the perspective of private actors, it is deeply unfair to expect them to treat someone who has served a sentence for a crime the same as someone who never committed the crime. Clearly the fact that someone committed a crime predicts their future behavior in a Bayesian sense. People should be allowed to use that information to inform how they treat the perpetrator. Imagine the state, for reasons, fines criminals just $1 for committing, say, date rape. This is the right balance of deterrence, justice, incapacitation, and bureaucracy that meets the state's needs. If you're a woman considering having a drink with a man who's paid out $200 in such fines over the past year, you should be allowed to know and to act on the man's criminal history! Your own judgment of the severity of his crime can be wildly different from the state's.

However, I also believe in rehabilitation. I see no reason to report on this any more than if he had served a year for insurance fraud in 2016.

I assume that any competitive male athlete has a higher level of sexual aggression than average, so this article doesn't shift my judgment of him by much. But it's reasonable for other people to get value out of learning this part of his history. It's also reasonable to want to strike fear in the hearts of future statutory rapists to prevent them from acting. So I can't condemn this article; people have a right to know.

In this case, sure. But as a general rule, that doesn't work as well as you imply.

First of all, it's a matter of framing. People are likely to assume that having committed a crime predicts someone's future behavior a lot more than it actually does, particularly if the crime is described in general terms. This won't matter much if it's 19 versus 12 which is pretty bad regardless, but suppose the government lumped together some things of different severity? You're a sex criminal if you have sex with a 12 year old, but you're also a sex criminal if you accidentally expose yourself if there's no bathroom and you try to take a leak behind a building. And all that the general public sees in the criminal history is "sex criminal". The public will treat the latter guy as badly as the former. In theory they could look him up in further detail, say "well, he just took a leak behind a building", and discount their judgment appropriately, but many people will take shortcuts and not do this.

Second, it's a moral hazard if you assume an imperfect justice system. It's true that a conviction predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. It's also true that an accusation without a conviction or any evidence predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. By the same reasoning that applies to convictions, we should pay attention to accusations made without evidence. But the danger of this is obvious: it's a market for lemons situation. You don't know whether the accusation is baseless or not, but the person "selling" the accusation does, and therefore has an incentive to "sell" baseless accusations. An imperfect justice system that occasionally convicts disliked people on a three-felonies-a-day basis will face the same incentives as the person making baseless accusations.

Applying these to Trump's conviction is an exercise for the reader.

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