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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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pedophile adjacent clubs for kids

This is a really bad mental model of what GSA clubs look like.

How so? The purpose, ostensibly, is to get kids talking about their sexuality around adults. The few who will be interested in hearing such banalities are likely to have other motivations. Its like a guy who enthusiastically volunteers to run the cheer-leading team for his 14 y/o daughter and her friends. Is it necessarily true he's getting something sexual out of it? No. But a higher % of such people than a randomly selected dad will be.

Maybe it's changed since mumblemumble years ago, but back in my day it wasn't like each meeting started off with everyone sitting in a circle and exchanging distaff American Pie jokes, or spin the bottle, or gay sex ed. When there's a new student you'd go around for introductions and have the option of disclosing your orientation, and then mostly a sit-around-and-bullshit social club. There were teenagers that were hooking up who'd met at the GSA, but even the people who'd brag about it weren't going to do that in front of as varied a crowd as you'd get at a club meeting proper (there were girls there!).

(uh, second-hand from my brother, band camp was closer to the actual gay relationship or 'relationship' space. I'd expect that was somewhat specific to the cliches at the school we went to, though.)

@SteveKirk's "oh boy relationship drama" is closer to my experience, though I tended to run into where it was most an annoyingly creepy teacher wanting a bunch of disposable and impressionable activists. Which is a problem, but a different sort.

(probably not universal, but pretty damned common).

Is it? My only experience with one was a creepy groomer art teacher who reaaaally got off on being surrounded by gay boys having relationship drama.

Then perhaps it wasn't a good idea to name that kind of club something that suggests it encourages the sexual development and expression of children.

Yes, these clubs are basically just hangouts that staple the occasional rainbow around the school and exist as a space to eat lunch and not be called a fag every 5 seconds (and is indirectly an interest club for the things that type of person coalesces around), and while it's truthy (and perhaps somewhat obvious) that the kinds of teachers interested in encouraging the non-standard sexual development of students in ways that cross the line for some people are likely to be interested in encouraging the non-standard sexual development of students in ways that cross the line for most people I doubt that rate of [criminal] line-crossing is appreciably higher than the base.

While it is true that students come last on the list when it comes to what a school should do and calling it [what people will hear as] "gay kid's club" wasn't the best of moves, those things weren't quite as true in the '80s and early '90s as it is today, and sexual mistake theorists wouldn't be fully purged from the general sex movement until the mid-'90s (naturally, people who wouldn't have a problem with "straight kids' sex club" won't even look to see if their efforts can be read as "gay kids' club about sex").

Sexual conflict theorists would probably have just called it "tolerance club". And yes, Boomercons (and people who parrot Boomercon talking points) have a really bad mental model of what the general sex movement looks like because they never updated their mental models of it past the '90s; they don't even know the general sex movement has pivoted to being about angry old women ensuring young people have as little [straight] sex as possible now (and of the ones that potentially could, they're too distracted by the concessions the angry old women give to the non-straights to notice).

It's more a real bad mental model of how the public perceives a teacher advising the GSA club. Which is the important part of an election prediction.

Of course one must see media interference in public opinion, if one operates from the base assumption that the GSA in the 90s was a pedophile club. How else could one explain that the rest of the country doesn't see it?

Of course one must see media interference in public opinion, if one operates from the base assumption that the GSA in the 90s was a pedophile club. How else could one explain that the rest of the country doesn't see it?

Well covering up the link between pederasty and homosexuality is a long running media interference operation. That doesn't mean people still dont get a bit skeezed when they notice a guy jumping up and down to run the boy scout camp.

Fellas, is it pedophilic for a man to run a Boy Scout camp?

Its BORING to run a boy scout camp. Why you are dealing with that boredom is probably because you love your son. But that guy who doesn't have a son at camp? Weirdo.

When the boy scouts were a designated party enemy, yes, it was. We both lived through 00s late night television.

Now they aren't enemies because the party took them over, being a boy scout leader isn't creepy any more.