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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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The key difference between a groomer targeting a child and a doctor performing a surgery is their interests; the latter is doing so based on what they believe to be in the best interests of the child based on medical/scientific literature, the former is doing so for personal reasons.

The groomer most likely believes that having sex with the child is mutually beneficial and while it serves his own interests, also serves the best interests of the child.

And in the case of trans surgeries, I can easily see the doctor as thinking the surgery is good for trans activism, as well as good for the child.

The groomer most likely believes that having sex with the child is mutually beneficial and while it serves his own interests, also serves the best interests of the child.

But he/she is wrong.

There is no royal road to geometry, and there is no substitute to actually deciding who is right and who is wrong in each individual case.

(Sometimes, we can establish heuristics where >99.999% of cases following a given pattern have a common answer; e. g. "Anyone advocating for paedophilia is wrong." However, the heuristic "If a parent disagrees with their child, the parent is right and the child is wrong." does not reach anywhere near five nines.

Some people may think that way, you and I will likely disagree on how likely or prevalent such things are.

Frankly, I don't much care if the doctor think it's good for his bank account, his social status, or his pet activist causes as long as any procedure is still deemed in the best interests of the child (and keep in mind the doctors are performing these procedures based on their belief in the scientific/medical literature that demonstrates their efficacy, not because of some personal sexual motivation that gets twisted to include the child. That is the key difference). These assessments can be wrong of course, but that's no reason to abandon them altogether