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But nobody in the West thinks or acts this way, and the laws are contrary to it. For example, pedophile lifestyles are not considered to be equal, and people very frequently act as though they think that things matter.
I don't know how much you know about Afghanistan, but it is also this way.
Even people in such a thoroughly politically apathetic and nihilistic country as Russia found that politics was interested in them once they found that they or their children were going off to be under fire in the cold mud of Ukraine.
Pedo lifestyles are outside of the Overton window but only for the time being. There's no magic principal limiting the endless expansion of rights and tolerance. It'll never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.
I think you know what I mean, but in case you don't:
"You do you"
"Speak your truth"
"lived experience"
Just a few popular phrases in the current zeitgeist that demonstrate our society's relativistic outlook. You can care about saving the whales, or global warming, or whatever, but if you claim that your cause is the _most important _ and that others must get on board, you're an asshole who needs to mind his own business. However I won't deny that recent progressivism seems to be bucking this trend.
What? This isn't what I'm talking about at all. This example stretches "political" to meaninglessness. People have suffered from war since people began living in cities, are you trying to claim that a 12th century German peasant lived in a world as politicized as that of a 21st century American?
There is no magic principle limiting pedophilia in trad societies, either. Isn't Afghanistan known for bacha bazi and the Muslim prophet known for marrying a 9 year old and consummating far before she was 18?
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(1) You can make predictions, but you can't use them as premises without evidence. If anything, Western societies seem more worried about pedophilia per se (rather than e.g. homosexuality) than in the past, and the age at which people are seen as being able to consent to sex seems to be rising pretty much everything. So the evidence seems to go in the opposite direction from your prediction.
(2) I don't think anyone claims that there is a magic principle. If you can't describe people who disagree with you without resorting to rhetoric, then maybe you would benefit more carefully and calmly about the controversy. You could read up more about contemporary sexual ethics and then come back to this debate, because at this point you're acting as though you don't know even the basics of contemporary conceptions of consent.
(3) The law of merited impossibility is a great point, but I am unconvinced that it applies in this case.
Modern societies certainly tend to be less prescriptive about some issues, but people seem to quite regularly preach. And it's not just the woke progressives: I hear liberals telling me that climate change is The Most Important Thing Ever and conservatives telling me that Defending Western Civilization is the Most Important Thing. Is there more relativism than I'd like? Yes, I'm sure we agree a lot about that. However, it's an exaggeration to say that it's ubiquitous. And as you suggest, wokeness has made society more moralistic in some areas than it was even within my lifetime.
Yes, it's a matter of historical record that politics didn't leave the peasants alone (Medieval soldiers didn't eat due to great logistic networks or large salaries) and that there were advantages in being a loyal vassal of your master if you were a serf during the frequent periods of violence. Garrison duty and labour responsibilities during wartime were a fact of life for peasants. Under some systems, they might have to travel far from their homes to fight.
I don't think that it's stretching the definition of "politics" to include being asked to fight for your lord or being pillaged by the soldiers of some king. Of course, it wasn't politics in the sense of petty regulations of people's lives - the Church and your parents would do enough of that. True, peasants couldn't vote, but they also weren't without say (it's a modern myth that there is no mass politics without mass voting) and I took "you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you, and it's not going to leave you alone" to include when politics infringed on the lives of ordinary people. As much as I dislike diversity statements or pronoun pronounciations, they pale in comparison to what a Medieval or Afghan peasant endure(d) as a consequence of political events.
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This is common right wing talking point for all of our living memory: "The libs want to mainstream pedophilia!"
While, in reality, "pedos" are people hated by everyone, the last people that are publicly acceptable to lynch, people that everyone loves to compare their political enemies to, and the definition of "pedo" gets wider and wider every year - from actual rape of pre pubescent children to any sex under 18 year line to relationship with "age gap".
No "expansion of rights and tolerance" to pedophiles is evident.
(if you want to reply: "wHY yOu dEFeNd pEdOS? dIe pEdO sCUm"!, thanks for proving my point)
If you are young it really seems that this talking point is baseless, but until 1994 Gay Advocacy parent organizations kept under their umbrella pro-pedophilia groups.
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I don't think this is a very charitable response. I said
I didn't say that leftists today secretly desire to legalize pedophilia. I imagine that many of them would be shocked and disgusted at the idea. But normie leftists in the 70s would have been shocked and disgusted by gay marriage and PDA, and leftists in the 90s would have been shocked and disgusted by puberty blockers and the trans movement today. You can't tell me the slope isn't slippery when we've been sliding down it my entire life.
This is where a lot of people would bring up consent, but it too has proven slippery and malleable. How can it be true that children are incapable of consent, but at the same time they're fully capable of deciding their gender identity and demanding drugs that cause irreversible physical and psychological changes? Sex between a minor and an adult also seems to often cause irreversible changes to the psychology of the minor. For the time being we still refer to those changes as "damage" but I don't see a solid reason why given the way things are heading.
Can we not do this on The Motte?
its better to not be shocked and disgusted by innocent activities than to be. it just goes to show how a lot of these aversions are instilled by society, and are not innately sourced.
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And I said that there is no "endless expansion" - tolerance was expanded in few limited areas, while everywhere else, the hammer will fall on your head harder than ever before if you cross (arbitrary and constantly changing) line.
No one even claims anymore, least of all "liberals", that tolerance is good thing - "zero tolerance" is the spirit of our age.
Yes, and it is slippery against everything that can be seen as "pedo" and it gets slipperier and slipperier. When was the first time you heard about "age gap"?
Except the things are definitely NOT heading this way. Things are heading into seeing relationship of 45 years old man and 25 years old woman as exploitative and pedophilic, equal to relationship of 25 years old man and 5 years old woman.
Conservatives may claim that only their brave fight prevents libs from mainstreaming pedophilia, but, somehow, they failed to stop mainstreaming of homosexuality, gay marriage and transgenderism despite trying their best.
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