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The response here to the revelation that several scientists who write the WPATH recommendations regarding the treatment of transsexuality in children, were regulars on a castration fetish forum, wasn't that such a forum shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Not here, no, the norms here would push against such a statement. But I'd be willing to bet if I went looking in right-wing forums it wouldn't be hard to find such sentiments. I'd also be willing to bet that quite a few of the rightists here, if actually given the power, would ban castration fetishist forums (and a lot of other things). More than one has admitted as much.
I wouldn't wager against some overlap in actual people, but this assessment seems less like it's trying to avoid outgroup homogenity bias, and more like it's trying to exploit it.
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Are you really going to argue against imaginary rightwingers so you don't have to address the arguments of people here?
If we actually look at the actual arguments of people who are actually here, it's weird to see the shift away from "woah there: you can't prove they're castration fetishists just because they administer a castration fetish website and write castration fetish porn, and who's to say if there's anything wrong with them basing medical treatment for children off of content from said fetish website."
At least they weren't drawing lewd cartoons, I guess. Apparently that's much worse and doesn't require any of the same charity.
I am addressing the arguments of people here. I believe some (not all) of the people here are not committed in any principled way to free speech, especially not that of people whom they would normally call pedos regardless of the strict accuracy of the term. I believe they are reacting firstly to "the enemy of my enemy" and secondly to "someone I don't like said something."
(If this is not you, then it is not you.)
I don't know who you are referring to here. Certainly not me or @HlynkaCG, so who is the defender of castration fetishists who's now criticizing lolicon?
Again, who are you referring to? I don't recall seeing anyone saying that lewd cartoons are worse.
I did not note in my original post (because I try to avoid unnecessary throat-clearing disclaimers) that I don't actually agree with Hlynka entirely. My own personal view is that castration fetishists and lolicon fans are deeply weird and creepy, but they should be left alone so long as they aren't actually touching children. I would not censor either one legally. But I agree with him a little - I think the weird, creepy fetishists should keep that shit to themselves and not encourage its normalization.
The thing I posted in this thread which seems to have you so upset was not a lack of charity for lolicon. It was an observation that it's ironic to see people say "That's weird and gross" or "That's free expression that only humorless puritans would object to" depending entirely on whose fetish is being indulged.
You'll notice people did not just say "that's weird and gross" about the castration fetishists. We actually had interesting neutral discussions about it. People would indeed be humorless puritans if they, for example, carried out a DDOSing and reporting campaign against a castration fetish site.
The thing people were getting upset about? Fetishists being given license to shove their fetishes into medical doctrine for treating children. And I can promise you that everyone here who's upset about payment processor censorship would be equally upset if Ken Akamatsu dropped his "artistic freedom" platform in favor of legalizing tentacle rape in schools, or whatever the hentai artist equivalent to leftists writing castration fetish fanfiction into pediatric medical policy is.
So the hypocrisy you're trying to pin on people doesn't even exist here. And that's all you had to say about both issues?
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Who's the attacker of castration fetishists who's now defending lolicon? I'm prepared to believe that people hold such a position, but is anyone actually doing it?
...I think you and the person you're responding to are both going off a vibe that is both real and not terribly quantifiable. One gets the general sense that the other side isn't objecting enough on a specific topic, no? There's a sense that, while the literal meaning of the statements might be roughly equivalent, they're masking some deeper disagreement, perhaps intentionally. That about the size of it?
That is probably a reasonable summation.
I think it's an entirely reasonable and accurate impression to get. The problem in my experience is that it's very difficult to turn that feeling into productive engagement, but at the same time the thing the feeling is signaling is too important to simply ignore.
What would you like to hear, and who would you want to hear it from, to dispel this feeling?
I'm not sure that I want to hear anything in particular - a number of people seem to have gotten the impression that I want to ban lolicon, or that I think it's egregiously worse than anything else out there. I don't. I do think some of its defenders doth protest too much. But I was, as I said in the top post, responding specifically to all the people piling on @HlynkaCG (who, I gather, would like to ban lolicon, or at least see it driven further underground). And I said, in what I think is a very straightforward way, that I genuinely think some of the people taking the "How terrible that the wokes are going after lolicon now" are doing so primarily because it's the wokes doing it, and would not defend lolicon if, say, Donald Trump gave a speech about how he learned from LibsOfTikTok that lolicon is being promoted in schools. (An obviously tongue-in-cheek example, but you get the point.) I am not calling the people who say no, they are principled libertarians, liars.
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