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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2901 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 15, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I can't say I've ever met any libertarians who were against age of consent. The entire philosophy is based around respecting what consenting adults do. They're fine with restricting what children do.

You have now internet-met a libertarian who thinks it's too high.

(I'm grudgingly in favour of an AoC simply because five-year-olds aren't going to understand sex ed and people who haven't had sex ed pose rape-by-implicit-deception issues where a kid doesn't understand that consenting to unprotected sex is consenting to possibly produce a baby and/or possibly get HIV. But putting it above 14 is crazy talk.)

The entire philosophy is based around respecting what consenting adults do. They're fine with restricting what children do.

  1. Define all X as not-human with some scientific-sounding justification ("brain not developed till 25", "they're closer to gorillas", etc.)
  2. Claim anyone who disagrees with that definition is in opposition to the Science, and are obviously just in favor of X freedom because they want to have sex with [more generally, exploit] the women in X
  3. Rinse and repeat for Y, Z, etc. until you've reinvented traditional morality wholesale (more popularly known as "intersectionality")

No, I can't imagine why any freedom-minded person would have any problems with that. From a liberal standpoint, the problem with this strategy in an illiberal milieu is that you can't really take it on directly, and liberals being mistake theorists (and their tendency to be sexual mistake theorists doesn't help that) generally fail to understand that.

Thus, they tend to get baited into attacking (2), when the actual answer is to either go after (1) [which isn't scalable and is still vulnerable to "why do you care so much about hoaxes?", where people who can attack (1) can still be somewhat-credibly accused of having the same motivations as the people who just attack (2) do], or seek/implement/maintain social conditions such that yeschad.jpg is a valid response to (2)- this is being able to respond "all of them" to "how many children have to die before people who have (and will do) nothing wrong will give up their freedom to X" criticisms of [insert civil right here].

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