site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4498 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The master of trolling is at it again. Hanania:

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with a 14 year-old girl, and will pay her $10 million. The money will go into a mutual fund that will pay out when she's 21. The girl agrees, as do both of her parents. Should this be allowed? And are you male or female?

As of this writing, the results are:

  • "Yes, male" - 5.9%
  • "No, male" - 78.1%
  • "Yes, female" - 1.3%
  • "No, female" - 14.7%

Look at the engagement metrics on this tweet: 94,000 votes, 3.4 million views, 4,700 comments, 273 likes. This might be the most "popular" Hanania tweet of all time.

Now, I am one of the apparent sickos who voted "yes", but I can see some decent arguments for "no". I'm still surprised the results are this lopsided, and I'm also surprised that there appears to be no gender gap.

The girl agrees

This is the crux of the matter. The whole idea behind various types of ages of majority is that executive functions required to consciously agree to X are sufficiently developed at age Y that only a small minority of people is not mature enough to do that and it's so small that we can identify it via various special needs education. Of course, anyone who's worked as a paramedic or a cop or a DMV officer knows that it's a bold-faced lie and the society would be better off if we had emancipation licenses, but that's a different story.

The whole idea behind the age of consent is that while this specific 14-year old might really understand the implications of having sex for a lot of money with an ugly dude, we have no real way of knowing if she does. If she really was a precocious girl and there was an emancipation test she could take and she took it and passed it, I would agree to treat her as an adult and let her have sex with Epstein no matter what her parents thought about it.

However, I don't know what I would do if she was only ten and took this test and passed it. My first reaction would be "well, obviously this test is wrong, it's too easy, there's no way she could've passed it", but what if it's not, what if she goes "bitch, my parents were killed in Tigray and I've spend the last two years working sixteen hours a day to provide for myself and my two little siblings while learning enough English to be able to call you a little bitch, so what if the dude is a disgusting chomo, so what I'm literally prepubescent, it's ten million US dollars for one intercourse, I could airlift the best doctor in the world to suture the bleeding tears in my vagina after the deal is done, move my family out of this festering shithole to a first-world country, get an education, become a PMC, hire a good head shrink to help me deal with trauma when I'm 35"?

P.S. That's why Twitter must die, how the hell are you supposed to answer this in 280 characters or fewer?

Hanania strikes me as the classical Redditor-style "but what if the child consents though?" nonce posting this kind of thing as a normalization attempt.

It's interesting that the percentage of women saying it's ok has been going up while the percentage of men saying it's ok has been go down. When I first saw the poll, the ratio of men saying it should be allowed to men saying it shouldn't was around 1:8, which was higher than than it was for women at the time.

The whole thing just boils down to deontologists, consequentialists, and virtue ethicists failing to recognize that this is how other people think about morality, coupled with a layer of modern weirdness about just how destructive teenagers having sex is. The basic perspectives for those three branches are going to be:

  • Deontology - Prostituting teenagers is awful, we have a duty to reject it and try to prevent it. The price doesn't matter, teenage prostitution is unacceptable.

  • Consequentialist - Prostituting teenagers may harm them but receiving $10 million in the future helps someone a lot. This could be a significant improvement in total wellbeing and that's what to consider.

  • Virtue ethicist - Do you really want to be the kind of guy that enables Jeffrey Epstein prostituting teenagers? The price doesn't matter, I'm not that guy.

You have a straw consequentialist there. They should consider the second order effects of normalizing old guys having sex with consenting children for a lot of money; that being parents suddenly finding a previously untapped (wahey!) reservoir of them for old guys to fuck for lots of money.

The deontologist and virtue ethicist positions don't make sense to me. It just seems like they don't accept the existence of trade-offs. Do their virtues and ethical rules not say that the things $10 million can buy matter? You can do a lot of good and be extremely virtuous with $10 million. This just makes me suspect those ethical frameworks are fundamentally illogical.

You can consider deontology and virtue ethics shortcuts to considering second and third-order effects. Making child prostitution legal for the right price is likely to make it much more socially acceptable and less illegal in general. Keeping child prostitution illegal amd socially unacceptable is worth more than $10m.

How much money would you torture a child to death for? Tradeoffs exist, right?

We torture children to death every day as a consequence of how we've decided to order our society; suicide is among the top killers of the under-12 (and under-18) population in all Western nations (and Eastern ones, too). Sure, there's a baseline rate of suicide, but given it gets worse around certain times of the year corresponding to things like exams I'm far from convinced it's all natural.

It turns out it's very economically productive to treat them the way we do, and should we create conditions sufficiently bad that they kill themselves to escape we have, effectively, tortured them to death for financial gain. Thus the amount of money for which we would torture children to death might be relatively high, but is clearly not infinite.

No wiggling, please. You, personally, directly, with your own two hands and provided tools, physically until death. How much do you ask for it?

Depends on the methods and everything, I'd probably do it for $500 million of new goods and services value created. I'd fully expect to end up in jail afterwards for life etc, but $400 million can secure my lineage for a dozen generations (the other $100 million I would use to fight child torture and end up saving hundred of children form being tortured to death), it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. Of course I would also try to end the child's suffering as soon as possible.

I wouldn't even have moral pangs to be honest, from my point of view I just saved N-1 children from being tortured to death for some large N, and ending up in jail for the rest of my life is worth it for that.

Remove the jail condition and I'd knock $100 million off the price.

And if your next question is to ask about whether I or someone I love would like to be on the torture recieving end of the trade my answer would be an empathetic no, but that's why I'd take precautions to not end up in a situation like that, and if the person is basically being chosen at random the risk to me and my family personally will be on the order of 1 in many millions, and that's a level of risk we take on a daily basis when we travel to work each day, I'll gladly accept it. Doesn't mean I wouldn't fight to try and get out of it, but I'd expect the child to fight as well and that's fine in my book.

And equally the situation we were discussing up thread was one where both the girl and her parents consented to the act, which is not the case if the person about to be tortured to death was forced into it. If you could provide a cast iron guarantee that this person and their close family members all voluntarily and freely agreed to it (I don't know why they would, but maybe they've been offered a large sum of money too) then I'll knock another $50 million off the price.

Of course there are things I would not do for any amount of money, like e.g. shoot my own mother, but that's because of personal selfishness, because I like my own mother and she is worth a lot to me. I would still do a tradeoff analysis and find that the cost is so high that the tradeoff is not worth it anymore for whatever amount of money. It's not that doing the tradeoff analysis is wrong, it's just that the result of the tradeoff analysis is different in this case.

However once again I note that this situation is nothing like the Epstein sex case, in that situation everyone on all sides consented to it and there were third party moral busybodies who wanted to stop the transaction even though it had nothing to do with them. And in much the same way, if someone who fully consented was going to be tortured to death for a large amount of money being handed to all participants I would not be against it as an unrelated third party living in the same society.

If child sacrifice actually worked, and the benefits it got were good enough (e.g. rain to save the tribe's crops and prevent famine) I would also not be against it. I would not want to sacrifice my own children but you could well see people agreeing to it and gestating a child just to sacrifice it to Moloch if the rest of society compensated them enough for it, and that would be just and fine in my book.

(Note: In reality I would not take any money to murder a child with my own two hands either, but that is because of my religious convictions since I know what then penalty on the day of Judgement is for killing an innocent in Islam, the answer above would apply for a hypothetical atheist version of me and I believe that is the right frame to answer the question in since large portions of the people cooking up a stink over the results are atheists too. I can accept God-fearing humans to be extremely unhappy with Epstien offering money for sex and agree with their arguments for it being bad in a society living under a religous framework, but the west is not religious any more, it is atheist and can not hide under the mantle of religion when confronted with things that logically should be perfectly fine under its stated beliefs but in reality awaken a deep and ancient "ick" within us all).

Who determines whether "it's got anything to do with them"? If you say shooting your own mother has a tradeoff of infinity because of your personal selfishness, why can't others put a tradeoff of infinity on "allowing openly purchasing sex from children"?

why can't others put a tradeoff of infinity on "allowing openly purchasing sex from children"?

For the same reason we don't allow people to put a tradeoff on infinity of "letting two gay people do what they want behind closed doors". Sure we let people believe that if they want, but we don't humour their beliefs for a single second and even make fun of people who believe such shit. We can do the exact same thing here.

Society as a whole decides whether something has got anything to do with them. As I mentioned society as a whole generally doesn't allow people to put a tradeoff of infinity on letting two gay people do whatever they want with each other in their bedroom or at least cries foul about other societies that do do this like Saudi Arabia.

The question then becomes what is it about "allowing openly purchasing sex from children" that does not apply to "gay sex between two consenting adults behind closed doors", and pretty much anything you can come up with there has an easy exception where society behaves the other way, thus displaying their hypocrisy and providing an argument for changing how society puts a tradeoff on things (which in the end is all we can do here merely by arguing online).

If you make a maturity argument then you need to realise that there are people who are more mature at 14 than others are at 40, I certainly could have consented to sex at 14, probably even at 10, and I know many other similar people. Now you could make a Schilling point argument about why we have an age of consent and the difficulty in determining who/who doesn't have the ability to consent but that just then implies (as another poster mentions in this thread) we should also forbid black adults from having sex, as most black adults are less intelligent and capable of making good decisions than many white teenagers for whom we forbid sex.

Other arguments for why we shouldn't allow 14 year olds to have sex have similar glaring loopholes where that same argument applies to different groups where we are absolutely fine with them having sex.

So you're going to use society's opinion as a reference for what is or isn't moral busybodying? I am confused then. In the West society certainly does consider it their business to prohibit children under 16 (18 in practice, higher than that depending on how old the other guy is and who you ask) having sex with adults.

Other arguments for why we shouldn't allow 14 year olds to have sex have similar glaring loopholes where that same argument applies to different groups where we are absolutely fine with them having sex.

In practice the attempts to equivocate such situations are sorely lacking. They fail to account for all aspects of child/adult disparity and/or make quite dubious reaches, such as "most black people are less capable than an unspecified percentage of white teenagers". I remain unconvinced.

What you might want to consider is what kind of relationships are currently deterred, in practice, by the age of consent laws as they are now. I do not believe these are the same kind of relationships as would be prevented by "consistent" consent laws that are supposed to match the rest of society to how we treat children.

(I'm also aware you probably think blacks /poors having unprotected sex is worse than children having sex, so no need to restate that unless you're going to deny it.)

So you're going to use society's opinion as a reference for what is or isn't moral busybodying?

No, I am just saying that in the real world society's opinion is exactly what counts for what is/isn't moral busibodying, and this is true regardless of whether the society is the USA or Saudi Arabia. I want to change society's opinion to be more in line with my opinion, no different to what pro-LGBT activists in Saudi Arabia want.

In practice the attempts to equivocate such situations are sorely lacking. They fail to account for all aspects of child/adult disparity and/or make quite dubious reaches,

The onus is on the people who support the restriction to provide reasons for it, what reasons do they have for forbidding sexual intercourse between Jeffery Epstein and a 14 year old where the parents are in full agreement that do not also apply to other situations where those who call for this restriction would be fine with the intercourse? Note the age of consent in China is 14 so a well off Shangai family could easily decide to do this without legal issues, but I expect that westerners would still see a moral problem with this, no different to how Saudi Arabians see a moral problem with gay sex behind closed doors in the west.

(I'm also aware you probably think blacks /poors having unprotected sex is worse than children having sex, so no need to restate that unless you're going to deny it.)

Depends on the people having the intercourse as always. Most children are stupid so I absolutely would not support it for >99.5% of all children, in fact I consider it worse than blacks/poors having unprotected sex because many of these children are going to grow into perfectly good and decent adults and the early intercourse could hurt them and thereby all of society, while certified low productivity yield adults aren't going to be making big contributions anyways...

More comments

ConsequentialismChads can't stop taking Ws.

You can flip the virtue ethicist framing 180.

"Do you really want to be the guy who denies someone 10M USD, just because you kinda feel icky? Talk about narcissism."

Deontologists might also argue that the pursuit of personal excellence is the highest goal; who cares if that sometimes passes through (nominally consensual) prostitution of teenagers? Virtue ethicists might talk about individual freedom or some shit like that. I'm not voting "yes" here - it might be good for the teenage girl, and for the woman she becomes...but probably not good for her parents or society. I guess you could go full consequentialist and say that a human life's worth about $10 million...kind of like what I understand Ancient China to be like. There, you could buy your way out of most crimes with the exception of high treason; murder cost you 200 times a laborer's salary. In US dollars, a modern day laborer construction worker earns $50k/year on average. And the economists have figured a human life's worth around ten million, give or take.

Apparently up until very recently in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, you were allowed to marry at 14, which would have been one way to make this bargain legal. My research for this was not extensive, so I might be overlooking something, like maybe a 14 year old in those states was only able to marry someone who's also 14 or something. But these laws allowing underage marriage in these states with parental consent were overturned within the last 5 years.

I really don't get why it shouldn't be allowed. This isn't even illegal in many places and in many places where the age of consent is 16, it was 14 not long ago. Is having the age of consent two years lower really such a massive mistake that was causing more than $10 million worth of harm every time a 14 year old had sex? That's more than we're willing to spend to prevent someone from dying.

I don't think he's trolling. I think he's showing how irrational people about sexual morality. It's an excellent poll that reveals the absurdity of most people's black and white thinking on this issue. A lot of people talk as though if it's bad, it should be stopped at all costs, even though no one actually acts like they really believe that.

Leave it to Americans to make arbitrary age boundaries the end all be all of morality.

  • 18? Too young to have a beer. Old enough to go die in war though. Also old enough to have a say in who the leader of the armed forces of the world hegemon should be.
  • 16? Too young to have sex. Just old enough to get inside a metal body and yeet yourself through the highway at 75 MPH.

16? Too young to have sex

16 is actually the age of consent in the vast majority of states

I agree that driving is more dangerous than having sex, but it's better to learn young, while sex is better to put off.

I'm struggling to even understand this sentence. I didn't bother getting a license until after college (when I finally needed one), and had the best sex of my life between 13 and 20. Because it turns out it's really fun when you have teenage stamina and basically unlimited time on your hands during summer break.

The optimal time to learn to drive is when you're a teenager. You can't learn to drive as well in your 20s.

I didn't have much sexual experience before 25, but I don't remember it being any different than sex at any other age. I don't think there has been any change in my stamina. And free time? How long does it take to have sex?

How long does it take to have sex?

An entire four day weekend ideally, IIRC. Good luck handling that in your thirties: I know I couldn't.

That just seems like an absurd thing to do, even if you're young. How do teenagers even do that when they live with their parents?

Is having the age of consent two years lower really such a massive mistake that was causing more than $10 million worth of harm every time a 14 year old had sex?

I basically agree with your core point, but I want to remind you that most people aren't utilitarians. Hanania surely knows this, so repeatedly pointing out that deontologists (even ones that don't know that's their ethical foundation) aren't utilitarians is just kind of pointless.

Pretty much everywhere it’s 14/15/16 it’s still 18 for prostitution.

Every time

Presumably the offer (with the same sum attached) is not extended to every 14-year-old propositioned for sex, but people have a reasonable fear that some Schelling fence would be torn down (what's the exact n such that you can buy consensual sex with a 14 year old for n but not less? What do you say to the hypothetical age-gap couple who point out that they are banned from something that is allowed for millionaires?) which can only end in the age of (free, as in beer) consent just being driven back down to 14.

Also, something about that old Scott post about trading off sacred and profane values.

Also, something about that old Scott post about trading off sacred and profane values.

The modern day west is basically 100% profane. It does not get to claim anything is sacred any more after its behaviour over the past 60 years, any such claims are just hypocrisy at this point and deserve to be called out.

Westerners have killed God, and now they deserve all the consequences of that, good and hard.

I can't find the post now, but it was about a more general sense of "sacred" than the religious one, and revolved specifically around the observation that many people partitioned possible desiderata in two different categories that they refused or downright found it offensive to compare and trade off - so questions like "how many people breaking a leg would be too many to prevent a rape" would be met with "infinitely many" or just incoherent anger rather than serious consideration. In the suggested interpretation, this would be because sexual autonomy is "sacred" whereas mere non-injury is "profane". I don't see our society having renounced things that are sacred in the sense of "how DARE you compromise on anything in this category for the sake of something outside of it".

Many of those scenarios are sufficiently convoluted that the natural reaction is to say "there's someone setting it up, just kill the one who set it up".

Sure, but often (in the case of concrete policy proposals) they are only as convoluted as the reality we now inhabit, so even if that is the natural reaction is quite maladaptive. Besides, I'd consider (a possible interpretation of) The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as yes-chadding the refusal to trade, and even the German constitutional prohibition against (state action) pushing the trolley problem lever is adjacent (though it arguably goes further and prohibits positive action to trade sacred values against each other). Then, of course, the juxtaposition of fierce opposition to child labour and the relative indifference to child poverty and starvation.

Would you deny your 14 year old daughter a life free from financial concern?

But of course, it's not your daughter - the premise is that the parents also consent. Would you let someone else's daughter have sex with an old man?

That is a very strong "maybe". As something that happens once in a long while and secretly, it might not be terrible, might even be the least bad thing. However, I'm strongly against this becoming normalized and accepted. It's nasty, even if there might be some value to it.

At the cost of turning sex into a consumer transaction? You might argue this already exists and has always existed in some for of human history, (which you would be partially correct), but I think the consequences of widespread acceptance of this practice are largely damaging to cross gender relationships, especially the perception of women, as well as damaging to formation of families. Even historical practices of marrying women to richer/more wealthy men focuses on marrying and producing heirs, not simply for carnal desires. Women who sell their bodies for money have rarely been treated more than 2nd, or 3rd class people and do it at the cost of having a successful long term relationship.

They're aren't a lot of people who would pay $10 million to sleep with a 14 year old, so I don't think there is a risk of it becoming widespread.

Women who sell their bodies for money

I.e literally almost all women?

When was the last time a female doctor married a male plumber?

There is not nearly enough effort backing up your substantive point, here. Please engage with effort, charity, and an eye toward writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

'Selling her body' is a terribly misleading metaphor. Chattel slavery involves the selling of bodies, prostitution is more like selling labour for a fixed period. Of course, people use the 'selling her body' metaphor on purpose to frame the practice in a maximally negative way.

If our hypothetical 14 year old girl was selling her body, surely that would mean that Epstein owns her body after the transaction? If he doesn't, then he hasn't 'bought' anything.

Please stop arguing semantics. I hate when discussions devolve into word games as a way of avoiding the actual validity of an argument, and if this is the line of reasoning you're going to choose I'm not going to entertain this discussion further.

If word choice is your problem, is 'renting' better than 'buying'?

Either way, the negative externalities of turning sex into a consumptive act to be exchanged as a market is something that should be discouraged, regardless of age.

If word choice is your problem, is 'renting' better than 'buying'?

Renting out your body isn't anywhere near as bad as selling it, renting your body (and your brain) is what people do for work 8 hours ever weekday.

I'm perfectly happy to discuss the issue itself, I just think that such discussions are much more fruitful when everyone avoids using loaded language.

For example, if I'm arguing against someone who opposes abortion being legal, I'm not going to go along with them using the term 'baby-murder' in place of abortion.

You probably don't think of 'selling her body' as being equivalent, but I think that just demonstrates how successful the activist framing has been. It implies that prostitution is a type of slavery, which it (usually) isn't.

After all, I would argue that a woman who marries a man for his money (to a first approximation, most women who have ever existed) is 'selling her body' to a much greater degree than a prostitute, who is merely renting it. And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel.

And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel.

No one held Anna Nicole Smith in any esteem when she married that geezer, and that was the central example of marrying a man for his money.

That's true, but that was confounded by their gigantic age gap. Plus, I can't imagine the average person thinking better of a prostitute version of Anna who just slept with him for pay.

I find it ironic you consider the idea of a women 'selling her body' as loaded language in recent vernacular when and then proceed to issue the statement "After all, I would argue that a woman who marries a man for his money (to a first approximation, most women who have ever existed) is 'selling her body' to a much greater degree than a prostitute, who is merely renting it. And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel." which is a much more modern interpretation of marriage popularized in the last decade.

It's clear we won't come to agreement. I think the modern materialist/rationalist/objectivist notion that marriage is generally a pragmatic institution based off of materialism and risk aversion is generally false in a historical sense beyond well documented edge cases. This simplification is what largely damaged marriage as an institution and changes the game theory to make marriage seem risky with no real benefit. When marriage was considered a permanent union, people prioritized very different things in a partner than simply material wealth. The modern consumptive and transactional nature of sex and marriage has created significant costs in population growth and stability, family stability, and child rearing.

If the going rate for one sex with a 14 year old is ten million dollars and consent of the parents, then I think it highly unlikely that such a practice would be widespread. If anything it would probably be less widespread than it is nowadays.

Women who sell their bodies for money have rarely been treated more than 2nd, or 3rd class people and do it at the cost of having a successful long term relationship.

Yes, because they don't sell their bodies for enough money. If they sold their body for ten million dollars, they would not end up as 2nd class people.

If they sold their body for ten million dollars, they would not end up as 2nd class people.

But they do, and the evidence of this is clear: how many prostitutes and former actresses have ended up in successful happy functional relationships? The evidence is clear that reputation destruction (and whatever psychological damage that happens during the repeated engagement of promiscuity) that women receive when they engage in these acts is fairly permanent and follows them throughout their lives, even if their acts cause financial success.

Not many, but then, most prostitutes sell themselves for much less than 10 million. I imagine there are lots of well-functioning women (and men) out there that might be willing to compromise themselves for such a sum. I would also hazard that the women that compromise themselves for small amounts (or even nothing) probably have pre-existing issues.

It's not really that obvious to me that most women have a reputation that's worth 10 million dollars, and in any case I don't support trying to destroy women's reputation in order to punish them. If you knew that a woman you know was the victim of such a scenario, would you think less of her, or try to destroy her reputation?

how many prostitutes and former actresses have ended up in successful happy functional relationships?

Most of them? Actresses are the highest status women on earth, and settle for billionaires and presidents after they've had their fill of co-stars and producers.

Given the context of the discussion, what kind of actresses do you think we were talking about?

Actresses being promiscuous yet extremely high status refutes your point about the psychological or reputational damage suffered for promiscuous behaviour.

Besides, the ancients didn't bother differentiating between actresses and pornographic actresses, but one still married justinian.

More comments

So you are of the sincere belief that parents pimping out their children is only a negative when the money isn't managed correctly?

It's absolutely a negative, thing is though that the $10 million on the other end is more than enough of a positive to counteract the negative, provided it is managed well. All good things aren't correlated, tradeoffs exist.

Would the situation sit better with you if the parents disapproved, or if they had no knowledge of the scenario?

I'm against all of it and think adding layers of qualifiers pointless.

My comment was more in response to an earlier one of yours

"Would you deny your 14 year old daughter a life free from financial concern?"

No I wouldn’t, but I’m also not “funding-constrained” as they say.

Well, then you can presumably raise the fee to whatever hypothetical amount is meaningful to you.

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you? (This is, of course, the plot of a ridiculous semi-cult movie.)

Some elites are always going to engage in degenerate or socially deleterious behavior. There were many Epsteins before Epstein and there will be many after him. Most people willing to spend $10m to fuck are going to find people willing to fulfil their request, no matter how wrong, no matter how illegal. "Should it be allowed" is really an irrelevant question in this respect.

But - and this is something that the progressive understanding of permissiveness doesn't really have space for - there is a big difference between what is illegal but seen as semi-inevitable degeneracy engaged in by small groups at the very bottom and very top of society, and the vast construct of middle-class and working-class morality. Promiscuity is, to some extent, natural. However the fact that both the Byrons and the dockyard whores of this world have always engaged in it doesn't mean that most people benefit from the sexual revolution.

Instead of Hanania's Indecent Proposal, it's best to consider who the majority of Epstein's alleged victims actually were. They were poor girls from West Palm Beach, a poor part of town beset with a high rate of single motherhood and various other social issues with crime and poverty. And they were (allegedly) poor, often Eastern European girls, recruited by Epstein's associates in the Paris modelling world, who come (or at least came, back in the 90s and early 2000s) from a poor and suffering corner of Europe, far away from home, with no support network, put up by the 'agency' in New York apartments owned by Epstein and his brother.

What might actually have made a difference? Stricter divorce laws, more discouraging rather than encouraging of promiscuity, a culture that sees sex as something important, something to do with love and marriage and family rather than something meaninglesss and throwaway. It wouldn’t have stopped all of what happened, of course (as I say above, that’s an impossible task) but it would have saved some. Most who went to Epstein's mansion knew - in as much as a 14 year old can 'know' - "what they were doing". But they thought it was fine, or at least OK, because in a culture in which girls are raised to think that men who pursue them expect sex and that they should readily give it up to them, why not fuck an old guy for a few hundred dollars? Society failed them long before they set foot on his doorstep.

Of course enforcing sexual morality also means making it harder for old men to fuck girls for money, and as in the Russell Brand case I’m happy when they ‘get caught’, because I’ve seen the damage it can do, but men do what they get away with (something much bigger than ‘the law’) in this regard and always have. The largest part of the problem is a spiritual void in which sex is stripped of any real meaning, and therefore seemingly doesn’t matter, and so ‘getting it’ (or ‘giving it up’) in whatever way doesn’t matter. If sex is meaningless, trying to get people to care about who has it is never going to work.

In a way, this reminds me of a similar question around the Rotherham / 'Grooming Gang' scandal. There, as with Epstein, there is a proximate cause (large scale importation of sexually repressed men with certain views on white/'kuffar' women, plus police who didn't want to be 'politically insensitive'). But the ultimate cause is that the scale of the grooming gang scandals would never have been what it was if a more conservative sexual morality had persisted in Britain. The opportunities for the predators in question, whose modus operandi was (primarily) to get young promiscuous teenage girls from broken families very, very drunk, offer them tons of free alcohol and drugs after school and then pimp them out to their friends, simply wouldn't have been present to the same extent in such a culture. Why white (and sometimes Sikh) girls and not Muslims? Because the Muslim girls weren't out drinking on Friday night at 13 or 14 years old, and because they had a father at home who would rock up with a lynch mob if some group of strangers molested his daughter, anyone else be damned.

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you?

Absolutely. I don't think I'll ever marry a women who isn't smart enough to separate sex from attachment, and the $4m we get together (in a healthy dynamic it's not $2 million for each of us, it's $4 million for both of us) if anything will make it even more clear that what's happening is a business transaction and there is nothing more going on.

Do the deed, collect the money, pop a Plan B pill afterwards and laugh your way to the bank.

Agreed, and I find the whole notion/question incredibly tawdry and symptomatic of cultural rot, even as a thought experiment. I'm sure that sounds condescendingly naive--and perhaps moralistic in a lowclass, statistically illiterate sorta way, apparently. So be it; I wouldn't have to think too much about this to type No.

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you? (This is, of course, the plot of a ridiculous semi-cult movie.)

There are much worse fates that people face on a daily, for free. Your wife could cheat with your next door neighbor and not a billionaire and you could be left footing the bill.

That's not really my point, but it helps keep things in perspective. 4M USD is a whole lot of money. You can do a lot with it. A lot. You can feed entire starving villages for years.

Unless you view sex as the most sacred of sacred cows, I don't see how having sex once is possibly worth 4M USD. Ceteris parabus in your current relationship.

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you?

He can fuck me in the ass afterwards for free if the price is $2m. I can only quietly give a thumbs up to any person here for whom that isn't life changing money, I'm in no position to say no.

At any rate, my attitude to a family member, even a daughter, doing sex work is pretty much the same as one of them working as a janitor. I don't think it's intrinsically bad, but I'd rather they didn't do it, unless they were paid a sum that outweighs the negative consequences in terms of lower respect from society and everything else. In principle I see nothing wrong with it.

Anyone who votes no:

  1. Doesn't know the value of 10M USD with 7 years of compounding. Hell, I'd take a bit of molesting myself for that much money at the age of 21. Forget consexual sex.
  2. Isn't aware that losing one's virginity at ages 15-16 is not that uncommon.
  3. Shouldn't be allowed to vote.

I am, in fact, opposed to legalizing giving notorious convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein sexual access to underage girls for any sums, not only due to personal disgust about the idea but also considering that one would be creating some huge potential precedents.

I think we should have more precedents where people have the opportunity to obtain millions of dollars.

Why not just kill Epstein and take his shit, in that case? Less morally repugnant.

I vote no because Epstein getting to indulge his sick desire is inherently bad. Whether or not the girl is better off or not from the exchange is immaterial.

Why is it inherently bad?

Because it is sick and perverted.

Why does that mean it's bad for it to be indulged?

It simply is. There is no point continuing to ask "but why?" This is what I mean by "inherent".

You may as well ask why is it bad to kill a person. "Because they don't want to be killed." Why does that matter? "Because that deprives them of more utility than you gain by doing the murder." Why is that bad? "It just is".

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop.

Absolutely; miscegenation was always self-evidently awful, disgusting, and against nature, despite the elaborate philosophical frameworks we have constructed to obscure that truth from ourselves.

Sex is not actually a big deal. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate moral/religious frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

Which is mainly why those who subscribe the most to those frameworks are always primarily worried about the spectre of '70s sexuality coming back, even though the dominant model of sexuality encroaching on their moral frameworks and worldviews is quite a bit different these days.

It is certainly self-evident to me that there are certain groups that have strong incentives to equate sex they don't like to murder; whether that equation has any factual basis, on the other hand, is a different story entirely.

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

Which bit are you declaring to be against human nature? I can see three specific possibilities here.

  1. 14-year-olds fucking.
  2. Specifically older people fucking 14-year-olds.
  3. Prostitution.

#1 is very, very obviously not a self-evident wrong. AoC of 15+ is a recent innovation, and still isn't a worldwide thing. #2 also seems a fairly common practice in history with few objections. You can make the argument in the case of #3, I'll admit; revulsion for it does seem extremely widespread, even if I'd question whether that should inform law.

Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.

This is about as clean a violation of the "consensus building" rule as it gets. Please don't do that.

Would "I hold this truth to be self-evident" be an acceptable formulation?

More comments

Getting a paper cut is also bad, but I'd still get one for $10 million.

Your morality is evil in that is denies someone of 10M USD because you feel icky about the entire thing.

Your morality is evil because it allows billionaires to rape child prostitutes without consequence.

She consented therefore it isn't rape by defnition.

She's 14 and therefore below the age of consent and therefore sex with her by an adult is rape by definition.

That depends on which country you are in.

If she was 4 then it would be much more obviously evil. 14 is too close to 15 (most common global aoc) for 10M usd not to muddy the picture. I'm sure there are 15 year olds with the mental age of 12. Or 18 year olds with the mental age of 16.

No, money doesn't muddy the picture. It makes it worse.

Prostitution is worse than normal sex. Child prostitution is worse than normal statutory rape.

The use of money and power to achieve immoral ends is itself immoral.

More comments

Keeping your facts the same, your arguments are an apology for child sexual abuse.

Children cannot give consent.

In the myriad of child sexual abuse cases that have been reported in the news, statuary rape is certainly among them.

Are you of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is contingent on monetary compensation to the victims?

child sexual abuse

I'm going to come out and say this: when debating with opponents of Anglospheric AoC, this term currently obscures considerably more than it illuminates.

The reason is that it is defined in two ways:

  1. legally, as sex with children under the age of 16-18 depending on jurisdiction and context
  2. etymologically, as sex with children that is bad ("abuse")

But the people you are arguing with are claiming that these two things do not coincide! We believe that things satisfying #1 do not necessarily satisfy #2. So the use of this term essentially assumes the falsehood of our claims.

Are you of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is contingent on monetary compensation to the victims?

I can't speak for others, of course, but I'm of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is for the most part dependent on whether it's consensual - i.e., whether or not it's "real" rape. The monetary compensation is not super-relevant; I would consider it morally wrong, for instance, to rape a screaming/struggling 14-year-old and then pay him/her $10,000,000, and I would consider it NBD to have consensual sex with a 14-year-old without money changing hands. The only relevance here of the $10,000,000 is that people will consent to many more things for $10,000,000 payment than for $0.

Children cannot give consent.

I am so incredibly disillusioned by the persistent poor use of language on this topic and the fact that the only tool in the toolbox for the current Morality Police is consent. I've read the professional philosophers on the topic, and once you see it, this sort of base simplification is big oof.

The first basic classification is whether you mean, "Children cannot give factual consent," or, "Children cannot give legal consent." If it's the latter, then the response is simply not relevant to these sorts of hypotheticals about morality. If it's the former, then huge questions remain. Why can't they? What does factually consenting consist of? What capacity do they lack that prevents them from doing so? Why is this particular use of "consent" so different from many other areas where we might use the term "consent" to mean things that everyone agrees a child would be capable of doing? What's the difference?

Now, we could have rich discussions on these questions. I don't know that I personally think they can all be answered in a simple way that comes to the result that you might like, not because I think that child sex is good, but more because I think the "consent only" sexual ethic is probably wrong. But we basically never even get to the meaningful questions, because this oversimplification is viewed as an atomic first principle. It's just a thought-terminating slogan that kills any meaningful progress rather than elucidating anything interesting.

This is why I also think that Hanania's efforts are more low-effort trolling unless he follows it up with something that really pokes people to consider how this question really rips raw their deficient conception of a sexual ethic.

My thinking was both legal and factual, if I understand you correctly. I do not think a 14 year-old is mature enough and understands the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with an adult, simply because of their inexperience. Even if the adult they is a billionaire in exchange for payment. This is not to say younger person could not agree to partake in the activity, but the difference in age and social stature on the part of the child renders any of their agreement to be coerced and manipulated.

By "consent" you mean "consent (correctly)", which means you're independently judging there's a non-consent reason the child shouldn't be having sex, which is the reason the child shouldn't have sex. Why not just say '14 year olds shouldn't have sex with 18 year olds for '? Why say they 'can't consent'?

I do not think a 14 year-old is mature enough and understands the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with an adult, simply because of their inexperience.

And I don't think black people are mature enough and understand the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with a white person (or other black people), especially because they commit a lot more sexual crime than the average white person (and crime in general, suggesting a lack of impulse control, understanding of social consequences, and general maturity), and have lower IQs than the average teenager. Allowing them to experience such a powerful stimulus like sex, or have someone else use them to access such, is therefore bad for them.

If we're going to start drawing lines on "social consequences" and "maturity" you ultimately run into the problem where there are objectively better lines to draw on than mere age- so what's different here other than "society now believes it's more proper to discriminate based on age rather than race when it comes to what we think they're capable of [consenting to]"?

(Of course, I'm sure our modern phrenology asserting the subhumanity of the under-25 set is totally correct this time.)

I do not think a 14 year-old is mature enough and understands the social consequences to consent to sexual activity with an adult, simply because of their inexperience.

Ah, something like the "knowledge" prong in Westen's parlance. So, then, suppose that we instituted a top tier sexual education to help children understand the social consequence of consent to sexual activity with an adult. Would that make it fine?

This is not to say younger person could not agree to partake in the activity, but the difference in age and social stature on the part of the child renders any of their agreement to be coerced and manipulated.

...and we've taken a massive left turn, actually. This is a totally different and contradictory basis on which to make the claim. It sort of also comes from nowhere. We basically never say that age/social stature differences inherently make agreements coerced/manipulated, invalidating consent. We don't even have to go to hypotheticals about Taylor Swift wanting to have sex with someone... though we could; how could a "normal" person possibly consent to having sex with Taylor Swift, given her immense social stature advantage? This sort of reasoning kills a normal person's ability to consent to the transaction of buying a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert! How could they possibly consent, given the massive different in social stature?!

Instead of bringing up Taylor Swift you should have brought up R. Kelly he demonstrates your point better.

More comments

Replace 'billionaire' or 'Taylor Swift' with gym coach, music teacher or religious leader, I still think the age and status difference between a child and an adult makes such an agreement coercive.

More comments

Are you of the opinion that the morality of statutory rape is contingent on monetary compensation to the victims?

Very much yes. If its worse to rape someone AND steal from them. It's better to rape someone and pay them. The rest of it is just algebra.

The $10m is just a bullshit mind worm to make readers think about “what price” is worth any psychosexual damage. In practice, any legalization is just an inevitable one-way trip to kids pulling tricks for $50 knock off bags or whatever.

Obsessing over the very high dollar amount is what Hanania’s post is trying to make you do, to question your beliefs. A “fair” question would reduce the amount to $5000 to see what people say.

I absolutely agree that in practice what will happen is that you'd get poor kids prostituting themselves out for trivial sums and that it would be a bad thing overall for society. However when have "the results in practice" ever stopped modern westereners from loosening sexual mores before?

This here is yet another example of something that I would be highly against if it was proposed back in my home country, but would support in the west. Back home we see sex as special, it is a sacred bond between two people who love each other very much, and bringing money into the equation is just soiling this link. I would be dead against this shit, the societal damage caused by weakening the sexual mores of society are far far greater than the $10 million benefit to the girl in question.

However in the west where we have "it's not a big deal, it's just sex duh" ruling the roost sexual intercourse is completely profane when young women can sleep around with guys their alcohol addled brains temporarily found hot, only to never hear from them again and not consider this to be a big deal. In this society the sexual mores have been already scattered to the winds, and so the $10 million benefit to the girl in question is the main consideration when deciding if something is good or bad, because according to the westerners own rhetoric, "it's only sex" so how bad can the consequences be (in reality, really bad, but westerners have long since reached the point where words have no effect on them, only the rod of consequences can teach them anything now).

To any westerners who were fine with the rest of the sexual revolution but don't want to see it taken to its logical conclusion all I have to say is: actions, meet consequences.

What do you see as the practical benefits of stricter sexual mores as practiced in your home country?

Not at all. I think the big number is the point. Infact those who are not willing to move the number slider around are conceding that they are not capable of not thinking in black and white and dare I say by extension, thinking at all. There is no free lunch and everything has a price and a cost, if not evident by real cost, then opportunity cost and cost of substitutes. (You clearly don't condone spending the entire worlds budget to fight children selling sex, so the necessity to fight it is finite)

I think the 10M USD beautifully illustrates that the moral high horse sitters are so irrational that they can't think past "selling sex bad" even when the positive so far greatly outweighs the negative that it's borderline comical.

Let me flip this. We rid the world of hunger, poverty, and disease, but Epstein and only Epstein has to be given free rein to rape any child he wants. You have the power to make the judgement call. There are absolutely no nth order effects.

Also at 5k USD. I would still vote yes. Because I'm a libertarian. The actors in the scenario know better how much X is worth to them than me. Even at 25c. Even if they have to pay for it. But putting all of that out there is just going to bring forth too much noise that I CBA to deal with.

The big number is the point, but in exactly the opposite way. The big number bulldozes opposition, the big number is designed to make you drop all opposition. Is a man GAY if he says he would SUCK ELON MUSK’s DICK for ONE BILLION DOLLARS? Is a woman a WHORE because she would FUCK a RICH GUY for OWNERSHIP OF HERMÉS? These are all ridiculous troll questions.

In practice, it’s a question about prostitution, age and consent. The slippery slope argument applies and is valid. Dealing with a hypothetical that gets the result Hanania wants is giving in.

Is a man GAY if he says he would SUCK ELON MUSK’s DICK for ONE BILLION DOLLARS?

He is gay if he is attracted to men. What he does for how much money is irrelevant.

Is a woman a WHORE because she would FUCK a RICH GUY for OWNERSHIP OF HERMÉS?

A woman is a whore if she sells sex professionally. The rest is irrelevant.

Only absolute brainlets would be stumbled by any of these troll questions or Hanania's question. It's really not that hard. It's a simple yes/no question and thinking otherwise your brain malfunctioning as intended by the poster.

In practice, it’s a question about prostitution, age and consent. The slippery slope argument applies and is valid. Dealing with a hypothetical that gets the result Hanania wants is giving in.

If you are part of the high school debate club then sure. Every twitter post out there is an opportunity to dive into the finer details of ethics and have a stimulating discussion about political morality.

I'm pretty sure Hanania wants majority No's as evidenced by him making fun of the moralizers. This is that red/pill blue pill shit all over again where the moralists can't choose the rational option even when their life depends on it.

Seeing as approximately no one ever will offer a life-changing sum of money to an underage girl in exchange for sex, much less in a scenario where both parents are fine with this, I'm quite comfortable rejecting such a hypothetical offer and signaling contempt towards the notion of elites literally buying our children.

Contrary to what some rationalists think, you cannot simply win any argument just by inserting arbitrarily large numbers.

Doesn't know the value of 10M USD with 7 years of compounding.

The value of $10M with 7 years of compounding (accessible in 7 years) is exactly $10M, as measured by Net Present Value. Actually it's probably a hair lower, as the beneficiaries likely have a different discount rate than the investment.

And why does the NPV matter at all? Other than mental masturbation? Also did you not read the hypothetical, it can't be withdrawn for 7 years, present value is irrelevant, the money doesn't exist in the present.

  1. 7 years is a a reasonable amount of time where most peoples discounting doesn't really tip their yes/no decision.

  2. Holding 10M for 7 years is perfectly profitable under a 1000 realistic scenarios. After the 7 years you will be able to buy more things than not. Thats value, everything else is fugazi.

I don't get it. Why wouldn't it be worth more after having compounding interest for 7 years?

I'd like to offer you a trade: You give me $20 now, and I'll give you $21 in 1000 years. $21 > $20, so surely my half of the deal is worth more.

The value of $10m invested for any amount of time starting now is (by the linked definition) $10m. If you could guarantee 10% returns, then $10 million today = $11 million next year = $12.1 million in two years = $19.49m in 7 years, etc.

I still don't get it. We're talking about concrete value of money invested, and what it is now, vs what it will be in 7 years. You seem to be talking about some sort of philosophical experiment about what money might hypothetically be worth if we accept certain premises, or something.

I was initially as perplexed as you were, but it seems the crux is present value, which in this case is precisely the amount handed to you today.

But @ulyssessword said:

The value of $10M with 7 years of compounding (accessible in 7 years) is exactly $10M

It seems like either he's saying that after 7 years of $10M collecting compounding interest it's worth $10M for some reason, which is wrong, or he's saying that he doesn't believe in calculating value of predictable future values of money, which seems like an esoteric argument for philosophical purposes, without real-world application. Maybe that 2nd argument is the present value argument, but I still don't get it, or don't understand why it's a useful argument at all, unfortunately :(

Are you sure you are not confusing the Future Value with the Present Value? The present value of $x today, is x. It's future value is the present value compounded over the hold period.

The discount rate you should use to convert between the two should probably be your expected rate of return. If you really want to get into it, it's possible that the expected rate of return and your personal discount rate are different. If you believe even in a very weak form of the Capital Asset Pricing Model though, you should still discount that excess return back to the risk-free rate, because the difference should explained by the difference in risk (Lots of details about the Capital Market Line omitted). Or, put another way, all assets have the same effective discount rate to a risk-neutral measure. The conversion should not depend on the assets you plan to hold over the period.

More comments

Because the net present value of me giving you a dollar right now is a dollar.

In one sense you're right, but his implication is that different people have different (and arguably more or less correct) preferences about when to spend money, or personal discount rates, and that his personal discount rate is much lower than usual, in that he's willing to let it sit for a long time and enjoy it later.

That's a very strange financial outlook, and I didn't get the impression it was implied. You should be spending money during your (or your child's) youth because the returns on a better childhood/adolescence far outweigh the returns on the stock market. As the most obvious example, that's why college loans exist. That rationale could just as easily apply to highschool or earlier, and to non-academic pursuits as well.

I don't think that's true when you're talking about ten million. Like, sure, some excellent tutors and a college education are valuable, but that's not ten million, and there are things you will want to spend money on as an adult that you can't as a teenager.

Hm, sometimes one has thoughts that are stupid, doesn't think about them too much, and writes them on the internet. Grandparent was one of those times. Sorry!

Or people who vote 'no' value their morality and beliefs over capital and short-term self-interest. I rather value that most people are unwilling to compromise, at least hypothetically, for something that increases short term capital wealth. Selfish individualism is why I can't get behind objectivism, so the fact that twitter males largely deny the right gives me hope for the respondents of the poll.

I'll bite. I say no.

Age of consent for adult-child intercourse should be treated as iron clad. The second child abuse (especially child sexual abuse) becomes quantifiable through a monetary value, pandora's box opens. These kinds of thought experiments should always be rejected by answering with a blanket no. It's on principle on what laws, morals and values mean to be society. The free-market value of human dignity is pathetically low. That is reason enough to not allow it to interact with money. Nothing good will come out of it.

People conflate questions phrased like 'should X be allowed' with 'should you do X'. What you choose to do with your own free-will is your choice. Whether society chooses to support you is a whole another question all together.

We already quantify it by setting budgets for how much we're willing spend to enforce the laws against it.

Exactly. Everything ever is quantified implicitly if not evident. The quantification isn't visible in what you do, but what you don't. (Not spending trillions of dollars fighting X)

(Around 15.5M after fees and taxes)

I do think there's a pretty big gap in sexual maturity between 14 and 15-16. I feel no guilt for going "nice" whenever I see a hot teacher get fired for having sex with a male student 15 or older, but when he's 13 or 14 that seems fucked up.

$10 million worth of fucked up?

His follow-up made me chuckle. Decent trolling:

"I love how all the people mad at this have names like Bob456Flyers and their photos indicate that they can’t afford a recent phone. Moralism and inability to consider hypotheticals are hallmarks of the lower classes."

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1721306928108954104

Why are the lower classes and dysfunctional people so obsessed with pedophila? I think two things are going on. First, they have low IQs, so can’t understand statistical reasoning and how rare it is. Second, they feel like losers and pedophiles are the one group society ranks lower, so they need to imagine they’re fighting them everywhere.

This is almost certainly true, especially in prison, where murderers and violent drug offenders luxuriate in having someone below them on the totem pole to bully.

Moralism and inability to consider hypotheticals are hallmarks of the lower classes

Yeah, yet another reason why lower classes being handed power via the ballot box is bad for humanity as a whole long term, however equally pandora's box is now open and there is no way that we're getting votes taken away from them.

It's another reason why I am in favour of artificial wombs btw, all you need to do is continue feeding the lower classes memes to reduce their natal birth rates, ideally bringing them to a point as close to zero as possible, while you grow genetically selected superior humans at such a rate that the political power of the low intelligence people is diluted out to basically nothing because there is a large mass of high IQ selected humans out there that can deal with basic economics who will outvote their bad policies.

You don't even need to discourage child rearing in the lower classes, it's fine to let them raise genetically selected children as their own (because growth environment has little impact on adult inteligence and therefore propensity to understand economics once you are beyond a certain floor), all you have to do is convince them to not have biological children and this could be phrased in terms of women's liberation (they no longer have to suffer the curse of Eve), easier parenting (why risk having children with genetic defects when you can get basically a perfect baby delivered to you via courier) or even generic wokeness (why do you care about your own genetic legacy, thats like selfish and bad, mmkay?).

Two generations of this and low info voters will be an irrlevance, much like the Druze are in Israel.

The lower classes will simply not do this, because to the extent they want to raise children, they, like everyone else, want to raise their own children. I suspect the main users of such a system would be homosexuals and infertile couples(that is, it would be a substitutionary good for adoption/surrogacy). Unless you simply plan to sterilize everyone under 100 IQ, you won’t wind up with stupid people choosing to raise someone else’s smart kids.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats