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Notes -
A bunch of ancient Greeks liked having sex with boys. Does that mean that all ancient Greek social/political/economic views are suspect?
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson held people captive and forced them to work by threat of violence. Does that mean that all of their social/political/economic views are suspect?
I agree with you broadly but:
I have absolutely encountered people making basically this argument.
Sure, but I think that they are wrong. And I think that the same argument, but used against leftists, is also wrong.
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No, not necessarily, unless we're talking specifically about social/political/economical views regarding sexual mores. ie you can make a reasonable argument that somebody supports importing enslaved young boys because they have a history of pursuing having sex with young boys
In the case of these French leftists, we have a combination of people who advocated changing French laws regarding the age of consent/sexuality in general and people who were going on vacation to Tunisia or other foreign countries to have sex with young boys (and girls).
In some cases, some of these people explicitly argued that they wanted an existing oppressive social and legal system changed in order to make it more convenient and less risky to fulfill their sexual desires. This ended up being called the Sexual Revolution.
My point is that it makes no sense to say that leftism as a whole is suspect because some leftists are pedophiles.
As for the Sexual Revolution specifically, I am sure that you could have removed every single leftist pedophile who existed back then and the Sexual Revolution would still have happened almost entirely the same as it actually happened historically.
Well you've successfully defeated the argument that I was not making, thank you for correcting the record.
Of course if you only remove the pedophiles you're not resolving 100% of the issue. If American universities started purging pro-pedophile thinkers from their programs like European institutions Russian-related material after 2022, there would be a lot less progressive propaganda going around.
As the meme goes, 'first they came for the pedophiles, and I did not speak out, because I was not a pedophile...'
'(...) then they stopped coming because every problem had basically been resolved'.
Yes, but my comment was addressing the arguments being debated in this thread as a whole, not just your particular comment.
Regarding your particular comment, I thought that you were implying that pedophile leftists were the main driving force behind the Sexual Revolution. If I misunderstood that, then my apologies.
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