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Notes -
exactly how high a percentage of child prostitution do you think is necessary to be justified in calling someone a pedo for moving to that country, with no other evidence?
Less percentage, though as the article says it's believed a minimum of 40%. Thailand is the sex tourism capital of the world, it's also the child prostitution capital of the world. Legal prostitution where almost half are children, very bad signaling from a white man living there not for obvious foreign professional reasons — such as being: a director or otherwise highly-compensated role in a multinational corporation; an entrepreneur on a temporary visit pursuing a deal; a journalist on assignment; a diplomat or attaché — and making it fair to suspect ill motive. It gets worse, the man, Vernon Unsworth, lives or lived in Chiang Rai, that's a city in Thailand's rural and mountainous north. So it's not just that he moved to the country that's the world capital of child prostitution, he moved to the region in that country where it's most prolific.
I wouldn't accuse him of being a pedophile on this alone but I would tell him honestly, the choices he has made have drastically increased the probability and consequently the reasonability of suspecting him of pedophilia. Enough he has forfeited fair indignation when someone calls him a pedo.
I would sooner suspect a man who has been to the sex tourism capital of the world than the one who chose to live there. The former man's motivation is scrutable, the latter's more complicated. I have not heard of many people who love brothels so much they'd live next door for the convenience.
That's why I find Musk's signaling worse, he went on the tangent of a largely baseless accusation in a personal spat.
A hypothetical set of "Reasons to live in a country" doesn't necessarily subsume the set of "Reasons to as a tourist visit that country" but it can be assumed there will be significant overlap. The argument here is a person who would go to Thailand to indulge in pedophilia would be unlikely to see a reason to permanently reside there. This doesn't follow, people move countries to facilitate all other kinds of crime. Or maybe you're arguing pedophiles as a group might generally have the resources to take a trip to Thailand but not to successfully immigrate. This is stronger, but still falls, because they're not a uniform mass.
The subgroup of the population with pedophilic tendencies includes bottom-feeders who would be lucky to leave their home town. It also includes the opposite, the highly connected and well-resourced who cover their tracks. There will also be those at neither extreme, who are fastidious enough to prioritize not going to prison over their perversions, who are perverted enough to find appealing the idea of living in a country with lax policing where they may regularly indulge, and who are capable enough to be successful at moving to such a country. In short, there are without question white expatriates permanently residing in Thailand and elsewhere in southeast Asia because of and in pursuit of their pedophilia.
This is circumstantial evidence for Unsworth. Not enough to indict, but more than enough to fairly suspect. Yeah, if he's not that, it sucks, but he can't be shocked because that's what happens when you move from Britain to Pedoville in Pedo Province in the Kingdom of Pedoland. This is the reason Musk called him specifically a pedophile and why he initially doubled down on it before deleting the tweets. It wasn't apropos of nothing, it was from the I guess uncommon understanding of what goes on in Thailand. I say "uncommon," above the SNL skit I linked was from 10 years ago, and that's its joke.
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I thought the child prostitution had moved to... Cambodia now? I'm not wise to the ways of the early access passport bros, but I do remember some BBC article about how the thai govt crackdown had pushed it to poorer countries.
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