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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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but I'm growing increasingly confident that his year is a turning point.

There is precedent for the LGBTQI2 movement to overreach. Decriminalization of child molestion and destigmatization of pedophilia were once positions which were tolerated by its majority, but today they go as far as deny any historical association. But when the rift between the majority of gay and assocated advocates and pedophiles emerged, the former lacked the institutional support they now have. When the senate threated to withdraw funding of UN unless NAMBLA is ejected, the Sixcolour was a partisan symbol, not a second national flag as is today.

How big do you figure was the movement at the time? If the "LGBTQI2 movement" went from being 1% of society of whom 50% were pederasts to being 50% of society of whom 1% are pederasts - as one may expect to be the case if the movement could be modelled as providing a home for all that are sufficiently far from the conservative ideal of sexual orientation, with the distance threshold steadily going down - then this simultaneously call into question the "wokes are crypto-pederasts waiting for their time to strike" narrative many right-wingers seem to want to get out of this historical observation, and whether we can generalise to assume that the movement will step back from another putative overreach, given that there is now much less room for further growth and hence dilution.

It's not that "wokes are crypto-pederasts", it's that the genuine paedophiles will use any movements around loosening the 'conservative ideal of sexual orientation' as stalking horses and useful idiots, see the push on now for MAPs instead of paedophiles since that term is stigmatising, etc. There probably are genuine people with this perversion who want to change, but given that we've had it hammered into us that conversion therapy doesn't work, is a fraud, is torture, and should be illegal, then are we supposed to believe "it doesn't work at all except in this one instance of a new sexual orientation" and the real child-rapists who don't want to change and have no intention of doing so will use these organisations as a cloak and protective colouration - 'how dare you slander me by accusing me of being a paedophile, I'm taking you to court! I just have this particular orientation that is not my fault, ask the psychologists and social scientists!'

Look at trans rights movement - for whatever genuine people are out there, isn't it strange how all of a sudden male-identifying violent rapists suddenly found their true inner womanhood when it was a question of going to jail and which prison they'd be put in? And such people used the force of law which was intended to protect oppressed minority to get their way about being put in women's prisons.

we've had it hammered into us that conversion therapy doesn't work, is a fraud, is torture, and should be illegal, then are we supposed to believe "it doesn't work at all except in this one instance of a new sexual orientation"

I think this understanding fails to model low-decouplers properly. A high-decoupler might indeed see the $currentyear belief system and think that there's a glaring unprincipled special case ("conversion therapy doesn't work... except for pedos") at work that is only waiting to be regularised. Meanwhile, I think, for the low-decoupler, the principle has never changed: things are either simultaneously evil, in violation of principles, wasteful, ineffective and fraudulent - or simultaneously good, in line with all principles, efficient, effective and honest. You could consider this an instance of the just-world fallacy, or simply affect-loading as the main and only way to make pronouncements about the real world. "$orientation conversion therapy doesn't work" was never intended to be the scientific statement, orthogonal to questions of morality, that you imagine it to be: it simply means that $orientation belongs in the good-effective-honest cluster and interfering with $orientation belongs in the bad-ineffective-fraudulent cluster. Any social debates being had, and any shift of public opinion, is not about eggheaded technical arguments regarding techniques but only about where the line between good and bad is drawn, and there I don't see any significant qualitative shift having happened in previous years. The last big Chesterton Fence that broke down in the western theater of the good-bad assignment battlefield was the loss of Christian authority, and I don't think we're getting back to that anytime soon; if you are serious about stopping pederasts, you probably should be more concerned with fortifying a new line. (I think that the liberal principle of bodily non-compulsion - which seems to have stood strong enough that the push for "you must sleep with trans women" fell completely flat - and some reinforcement of the idea that unrelated adults are by default sexually exploitative towards children and so children can't consent would be sufficient.)

Look at trans rights movement - for whatever genuine people are out there, isn't it strange how all of a sudden male-identifying violent rapists suddenly found their true inner womanhood when it was a question of going to jail and which prison they'd be put in?

I reckon this to be a sideshow entirely driven by the circumstance that approximately nobody actually has the slightest stake in what happens in women's prisons, and so the whole issue is a convenient side-stage to fight proxy wars for the conflict that actually matters (similar to how so many people with an opinion on Trump appear to have a strong opinion on Orbán, without necessarily even being able to point out Hungary on a map). I don't think the pederasty case has the same potential: many more people actually have a stake (by virtue of having children), and at the same time it doesn't have the shape of any live CW battle that it could serve as a substitute for (since all "can A have sex with B?" battles are currently cleanly resolved in favour of yes or no). (During the brief heyday of NAMBLA, the latter condition was not yet met, which is why the pedo question managed to get some air.)

The problem with non-compulsion is that it’s quite gamable. You can convince the public that kids are capable of “wanting” sex with adults (which was a line NAMBLA pushed at one point, and via trans-activity at present) and then the age of consent is pushed downward. Likewise, it’s fairly easy for a determined person to manipulate others into consenting to sex through drugs, alcohol, social or physical pressure.

Kids are undeniably capable of “wanting” sex with adults. Parents, caregivers, and (to a lesser extent) members of society at large have a responsibility for recognizing when kids shouldn't get what they want and preventing them from doing so.

and then the age of consent is pushed downward

The age of consent for sex has been consistently rising over time and was much lower in the centuries before either NAMBLA or the "trans-activity at present", so I think you'll need a bit of evidence for this claim.

Oh, I never thought it was anything to do with science but was purely for the "homophobia! bad!" sloganeering. But the thing is, when they're going to be dragging MAP into the spotlight as the new 'homosexuality is not a perversion or mental illness, but it is a disorder, but they can't help it and so should not be persecuted or prosecuted', part of that will be the useful idiot psychologists et al. going on about therapy to help them deal with these impulses.

And we'll all be expected to forget that this boils down to conversion therapy, which we were all told never works anyway. Because that will be the politically convenient take on it.

I'm sufficiently autistic/OCD on details like this to want them to pick a story and stick to it, and I know that makes me a fool. There is no objective truth, there isn't even any subjective truth, there's just whatever line is the most convenient to get them what they want, and Science has replaced Religion as the moral arbiter and setter of rules for society. "The science is settled" is the secular progressive version of Roma locuta, causa finita est. And "the science" changes according to the whim of the day.

useful idiot psychologists et al. going on about therapy to help them deal with these impulses.

Ugh, I hate useful idiot psychologists. Probably the single most disappointing group of elites in the past 50 years in my personal opinion. The legacy of Freud, Young, Piaget, and so many other brilliant men has been absolutely squandered by the cowardly, stupid, contemptible and frankly just lame breed of psychologist we have nowadays.

At least Peterson is still showing a bit of the potential the field once had. I hope it can be saved before the damage is irreparable, but I'm frankly skeptical. We'd probably be better at this point burning it all down and having Peterson & co. create a new discipline from scratch.

But MAP not being persecuted or prosecuted is not sufficient to actually enable pederasty. We're quite comfortable with letting people have sexual orientations they can't legally act upon otherwise (the morbidly obese and disfigured, incels, and even the vast majority of MtF-seeking-female), and I'm not convinced that dangling some sliver of hope before those groups ("well, theoretically, if you became really rich and beautiful, you might find someone who will consent, one day... it's not impossible...") makes so much of a practical difference. Why not just defend the line that children can't consent? The virtue-ethicist transference which seeks to bring the hammer down on MAPs and assorted anime lolicons and amounts to "the problem is not that children are subjected to sex by adults, but rather that adults get off on children" is quite counterproductive here because it does in fact turn a problem that's beyond a defensible line (necessity of consent + non-recognition of consent given by children/societal lessers) into one whose only defensible line (society can wield violence to align your beliefs/mental state to norms that are set by the right wing) has already long collapsed.

(I note that uncharitable voices on the left have also long benefited from the natural suspicion that right-wing virtue ethicists also buy into the converse of the virtue-ethicising of pederasty condemnation: i.e. that if the adult is not getting off on the sexual interaction with the child, it is no longer such a big deal, and hence may take a backseat to other preferences. There's a general sense among the left that right-wingers are reticent about state meddling to disrupt abuse which may be motivated by power more than pedophilia, be it intrafamilial or in the "suspiciously sexualised punishment at Jesus camp" class, which inoculates left-wing parents against right-wing think-of-the-children arguments.)

if you are serious about stopping pederasts, you probably should be more concerned with fortifying a new line.

We probably have to do both, the push has been quite happy to move up to where we abandon and start pushing on the unfortified back lines before we manage to get anywhere.

This is a good point. But I think you're making an assumption which might not be true, which is that people's beliefs on sexuality are not malleable.

At different times in history, pederasty was perfectly acceptable. We've just seen in the last few decades how behaviors which were deeply taboo have become mainstream. Why not pederasty too? It would stand to reason that the people who were most malleable in the past would be most likely to embrace the next transgression.

With concern about child sexuality being painted as right-wing, how long until we see the "and its actually a good thing" articles start to appear?

Probably a while - softening age of consent laws is still seen as a reason to tar Libertarians, who in certain circles are only one step removed from Fascists.

With concern about child sexuality being painted as right-wing, how long until we see the "and its actually a good thing" articles start to appear?

Oh, I'm sure we'll see the "When I was 16, I had an older lover - and it was the best thing that ever happened to me" articles in the glossy magazines, with the women and men, straight and gay, examples. Plenty of emphasis on how paederasty is not at all the same thing as paedophilia. Historical examples. Age of consent laws around the world where 16 is old enough. Examples of exceptions in America - 'Romeo and Juliet' laws. If we accept that 15 year olds are having sex, despite it being technically illegal... and all the rest of it.

I take the point that I made that assumption, but I still don't think that it's correct to extrapolate present trends to expect a normalisation of pederasty. The direction of change is clearly not as simple as "away from right-wing morality" - we are not seeing murder becoming acceptable or mainstream, and I don't think zoophilia is getting there either (even though it would be such low-hanging fruit if you just wanted to offend conservatives), though the carrying principle may be switched from sexual taboos to animal welfare. Therefore, a priori, the details of the concrete activity matter - a model like "right-wingers hate it, therefore left-wingers will eventually push for it" does not have sufficient predictive power. In the case of pederasty, there are enough features that set it apart from the activities that have been made acceptable by the left-wing drive that I don't think you can just put it on the same trendline:

  • the existing taboo rests on the idea that "consent" by the child is unavailable or invalid on principle, as opposed to the pattern, memed as "A: I consent; B: I consent; GOD: I don't", that previous normalisations overcame - in other words, there was no principal objection that, say, out of two gay men, one of them could not competently consent to gay sex because he was not mature, unencumbered and responsible enough to be trusted with grasping the consequences;

  • it goes against a countervailing tendency to shelter children/tighten parental control over them more, out of security considerations;

  • the main beneficiaries of a legalisation of pederasty would no doubt be straight men (who already exhibit the greatest variability/jitter and a well-documented preference for youth), and the left-wing ethos strongly defaults to limiting this group's sexual self-actualisation, rather than enabling it.

What are the forms of legalised/normalised pederasty that could plausibly slip by these three? It seems to me that a NAMBLA-style "legal when gay only" version would be exceedingly hard to sustain with the present memetic complex (and anyhow would collide head-on with the third point above with the first publicised case of a Discord lothario who has the rule engineering mindset to ask his 12 year old to become a boy on paper). I could imagine a weak version along the lines of it being systematically tolerated in the case of trans perpetrator + blessing of the legal guardians, but that seems like a case where the delta-damage that can be done by the systematic tolerance over the baseline of having that sort of guardians and environment is not particularly big. (Also, children's lives being ruined by bad guardians is a problem that society seems to have resigned itself to leaving largely unsolved apart from the occasional bandaid solution.)

Here's a good parallel: "democrats will never tolerate gang shootings: they hate guns and anyone who uses them"
In practice, we get decriminalized gang shootings combined with ever more aggressive laws against legal gun owners, because it turns out the hatred wasn't directed at the guns and violence, but at the (white, male) gun owners featured in their anti-gun propaganda.

Similarly, leftist hatred of sexual misconduct is targeted at "the (cis-white) patriarchy," not the misconduct itself.
A girl at my local school had to be withdrawn recently because another student with a penis wouldn't stop aggressively sexually propositioning her, and the staff with the new progress pride flag in every classroom window wouldn't do anything about it. They said "she" was just expressing her identity as a lesbian.
This is only going to escalate in the same way that anti-gun rhetoric coupled with pro-crime policies did. The same leftist prosecutors already have "queer affirming" prosecution policies that are going to effectively decriminalize age of consent violations as long as it's "queer," while legislators simultaneously increase penalties for 17 year olds getting married.

And there's another factor. When leftists really don't like something, they get aggressive about it. They "problematize," they make hashtags, they get people fired, they set a party line and ruthlessly establish conformity by any means necessary.
When they don't really care and just want to stop conservatives from doing anything about it, they make whatever soothing/mocking/rationalizing mouth-noises necessary to convince the person they're talking to that nothing is going to happen, and anyway it won't be bad... besides, it's too late to stop it, and anyway you probably deserved it.

Which of those modes do you see happening here? Because I see a lot more anger from leftists here about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" than I do towards pedophiles. The excuses and rationalization about pedophilia look an awful lot more like the "deflect" mode than the "deal with" mode. And I think you're too smart to be doing this unconsciously.

Edit: and of course the second I open twitter CNN is going to bat for a gay man who raped a 12 year old

Edit edit:

The growing consensus among scientists is that pedophilia is biological in nature, and that keeping pedophilic urges at bay can be incredibly difficult. “What turns us on sexually, we don’t decide that—we discover that,” said psychiatrist Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic and an expert on paraphilic disorders.

You know what's going to happen when the "sex and gender clinic" starts talking about a "growing scientific consensus," don't you?

Here's a good parallel: "democrats will never tolerate gang shootings: they hate guns and anyone who uses them" In practice, we get decriminalized gang shootings combined with ever more aggressive laws against legal gun owners, because it turns out the hatred wasn't directed at the guns and violence, but at the (white, male) gun owners featured in their anti-gun propaganda.

Not a good parallel - in the scenario I painted, the beneficiaries of any such policy would still be straight white males, who by pure force of statistics are the majority of pedophiles. It would be more akin to republican gun owners realising the loophole and joining suburban gangs en masse, which they won't do only because of their distaste for the company they would have in those suburban gangs. Sex with minors is generally a small group activity, not subject to that issue.

Which of those modes do you see happening here? Because I see a lot more anger from leftists here about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" than I do towards pedophiles.

That's just saying that they don't participate in your current moral panic about it. There is a lot more anger from leftists about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" (...here? Who here believes in the latter so firmly as to get angry?) than about union-busting at the moment too, but rest assured that leftists are firmly against union-busting.

but I still don't think that it's correct to extrapolate present trends to expect a normalisation of pederasty.

I agree- if the (predominantly straight female) Left were really wanting to normalize under-18/over-18 sexual relations, we should have by now seen a marked increase in attractive and enthusiastic late teen and early twentysomething women doing their part to seduce the tweens and teens of America. One would think that, were the Left as sex-positive as they desperately want/need to pretend, that straight young men would be the group they'd start with given their massive oversupply in the sexual marketplace.

With that tone-setting preface out of the way:

and the left-wing ethos strongly defaults to limiting this group's sexual self-actualisation, rather than enabling it

But not non-straight men, which is kind of why they're the tip of the, uh, spear in this regard. The Junior Anti-Sex League predominantly female left-wing sees them as an excuse to hurt straight men anyway ("it's time to learn about buttsex today boys and girls, all genders are equal but some genders are more equal than others, equality means that both boys and girls are prohibited from socializing like boys because the gay boy complained once, etc." being perfectly representative of this point), which is the main reason the '60s pedo "experiments" mainly concerned themselves with pairing gay men and straight boys (and to an extent, why it's "man-boy" in the first place; man-girl needs no movement as it's merely a natural expression of the power equilibrium between men and women).

I could imagine a weak version along the lines of it being systematically tolerated in the case of trans perpetrator + blessing of the legal guardians

This is already documented fact, regardless of whether the legal guardians go on to lose the next Virginia election. Unless the we-bes and associated problem children, er, adults are removed from the department (the actual solution is to mandate that no schoolteacher without kids shall be employed by the district- affirmative action forcing the teacher population to match the students' would go a long way to solving the problem provided the current high tolerance for public school molestation-by-weird-sex-propaganda stays constant, and it obviously won't now that the people tolerating it have little else to do after being purged!) nothing will change.

Also, children's lives being ruined by bad guardians is a problem that society seems to have resigned itself to leaving largely unsolved apart from the occasional bandaid solution.

Maybe those children's grandparents shouldn't have freaked out so hard (over, ironically, the same problem: scatterbrained pedo enablers in school daycare, pedos catfishing/lurking in Internet chat rooms, and the occasional snatching blown way out of proportion by financial incentives) in the '80s that constructive interactions and lessened age segregation were still things that existed thus enabled some exposure to social normalcy. The [Outer Party] parents have already lost this war hard and are fighting over the last table scraps of parental power they're currently "allowed" to exercise, and if they can't see that (though, again, it's been the room temperature for the past 40 years) I think they probably deserve to lose.
Sucks for the kids, but the only other [straight men] that seem to care about them by definition are just doing it to get them in bed- though if not them, the [totally risk-free alternatives] who are trying to convince them to mutilate themselves with the end result of nobody ever willingly going to bed with them (splitting the fatal cuts of that one suicidal kid across a thousand healthy ones, a solution redistributionists should naturally favor) so really they were fucked either way.

What are the forms of legalised/normalised pederasty that could plausibly slip by these three?

I agree that the idea of consent (magically obtained at age 18) did form, until recently, a very strong Schelling point that prevented the NAMBLA types from gaining influence.

This Schelling point is now under strong attack from multiple groups.

  1. The trans enthusiasts who are pushing children (even very young children) into adopting trans identities and even surgical or hormonal modification.

  2. Feminists who are pushing that age 18 no longer forms an age of consent for women, and that a man dating a much younger (but still legal) woman is a groomer

I have a hard time believing that any Schelling point is strong enough to withstand the current fast-changing sexual environment. In any case, it my personal view, pederasty (defined as post-pubescent but under 18 sexual relations) causes far less harm to the minor than does exposure to trans ideology.

I'd far rather have my 16 year son or daughter have a sexual relationship with their teacher than to have a sex change. So I guess I don't even know why we worry about pederasty so much when the larger problem is people causing irreparable harm to their bodies through exposure to trans ideology. We don't need to argue that trans is bad because some of the proponents are groomers. It is bad on its own merits.

Then oppose it on those merits, rather than trying to conflate it with pedophilia.

I think the age-of-consent Schelling point is still strong. /u/4bpp gives several good reasons for why it’d remain intact. The current push for trans acceptance makes a hard brake when it approaches the subject of children.

I certainly don’t think that shaming men for allegedly imbalanced relationships is going to weaken such a norm.

When the senate threated to withdraw funding of UN unless NAMBLA is ejected, the Sixcolour was a partisan symbol, not a second national flag as is today.

I don't think that matters. The flag is just a symbol, and you can just pretend the symbol never had anything to do with transing kids, putting rapists in women's prisons, etc. Institutional support is important, this is why the issue got so far to begin with, but institutions aren't omnipotent.

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