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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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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.