pedophile
MartianNight
3mo ago
just think it's a bit rich that commenters here are waving the flag for this dude without even the barest pretence of having any motivation other than owning the libs
For the record, I'm not “waving the flag [..] to own the libs”. I just want the discussion about eligibility of Olympic athletes to be more principled than the current “this guy's past behavior was appalling so obviously he shouldn't be allowed to compete now!”.
You can make an argument around how serious criminals should be barred from the Olympics, but then you should flesh it out in an objective way. Part of justice is applying rules equally and fairly, and not in an ad-hoc manner as seems to happen here. Insisting on that is not the same as blanket support for pedophiles to participate in the Olympics.
By the way, I really don't think it's only liberals who are upset about Van de Velde's participation. It's just that the liberals are more vocal now that the perpetrator is a straight white male, rather than if it had been a black or trans person or a drag queen or something.
if they were to interact with this guy in person, if it was their kid at risk of being interfered with [..], their revealed preferences for how they think he should be treated would be functionally indistinguishable from those of the Guardian journalist who wrote this article.
Again, you are conflating two very different things. I wouldn't hire Van de Velde as my baby sitter, and I'm not saying anyone else should, but I might well hire him as my tax accountant, and I wouldn't mind playing volleyball with him. I don't think there is any hypocrisy there.
I wrote a four-part post here about exactly this a while ago, with a focus on the Grayson/Quinn conflict of interest, and some of my responses in the thread address the pro-GG response to harassment. For bonus points, I have also summarised cases of unethical conduct among the anti-GG side here, for example an instance where they rallied around a known pedophile in their ranks.
God fucking damnit, I got so much shit for writing these. Who's laughing now?
To be fair to woke people, this attitude is at least consonant with one of their other typical opinions: that gay people are "born this way", that sexuality and gender identity are congenital and hardwired. If this is true of gay people, why wouldn't it also be true of paedophiles?
This is conflating sexual preference with criminality. It's not a crime to have a sexual preference for children. It's a crime to molest children.
Pedophile is to child molester as heterosexual male is to rapist of women. While it might not be possible to change the sexual preference, that doesn't mean we cannot rehabilitate criminals. If rapists of adult victims can be rehabilitated, then why not rapists of children?
(This conflation is very common in discussions surrounding pedophilia, by the way. My theory for why that happens is that people have such an irrational, visceral hatred of pedophiles that they just do not want to consider the possibility of a non-offending pedophile. But the distinction is important nonetheless, if you want to maintain a justice system where people are convicted based on their actions, and not just their thoughts or inclinations.
Something similar happens with other hated groups like “incels”, where being involuntarily celibate is almost a crime in and of itself, regardless of whether you've actually harassed any women.)
For all of you people wishing him well and crowing about woke hypocrisy, I have to ask - how comfortable would you feel about leaving him alone with your twelve-year-old daughter or niece?
This is an irrelevant hypothetical. You can argue that because of his past crime and the possibility of recidivism, Van de Velde should not be alone with twelve-year-olds in the future, but what does that have to do with him playing volleyball in a team full of adults?
The people who oppose Van de Velde participating in the Olympics seem to do so on the basis of some poorly-articulated principle that someone who has committed a horrible crime should never be allowed a place in the spotlight, regardless of whether they are likely to reoffend or not.
faceh
3mo ago
These crimes indicate something much more severe
There's an extent to which I agree with this general point, but I also assume that the law was designed so the punishment fits with the alleged severity of the offense, so that really means your issue is with the law itself being too lenient?
It’s fair to note a pedophile long after the fact in a way that noting a tax cheat isn’t.
Hmmm. I think it is wise to keep your kids away from him as a general rule, and we should assume a certain propensity for bad behavior and not really give him the benefit of the doubt...
But it is not clear that this should impact his ability to compete in a sport he's actually very good at if he's maintained good behavior since.
sun_the_second
3mo ago
From the comments on themotte.org (comment quoted in its entirety):
From the comments of "The wonderful clarity of white genocide":
The nation is the hand of the race, the family is the finger of the nation, the individual is the fingernail. If your vocation is to fight, tell your cow whatever it needs to hear while you avoid seeding its’ fallopian tubes and instead mine more minerals and prepare to fight. Otherwise, tell your cow whatever it needs to hear while spawning more overlords.
Don’t talk politics with your cow. At best, it confuses it, at worst, it makes it difficult for your cow to chew cud with the other cows, and cows need to be part of a herd.
The level of politics to talk with your cow is, America is good, we are an American family, nice things are good, criminals are bad because they ruin nice things, having nice things is the only valid virtue signal, tasteful religious displays on nice things are great, ugly religious and political displays on ugly things are stupid evil heresy, ignore any advice from the news and entertainment media because it’s a bunch of pedophiles raping each other.
I guess this would be a bad political hit ad because it's not even funny in the "look at the creep" way.
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
It seems like there’s a distinction to be made on the basis of crimes which indicate something broken about a person and crimes which have perfectly legible motivators.
A thief, a man who commits statutory with a 16 year old(illegal in my state), a drug dealer, a serial red light runner- all of these indicate bad decision making skills, but normal people wanting to do them is not an indicator against normality. These people can be taught to behave in a civilized manner, at least potentially- it may not be something we as a society have the stomach for, but you can eventually beat or re-educate these categories of criminals.
On the other hand, normal adults don’t want to have sex with children- like actual children and not teenagers-, or do serial killing, or use hard drugs. These crimes indicate something much more severe. It’s fair to note a pedophile long after the fact in a way that noting a tax cheat isn’t.
From the comments of "The wonderful clarity of white genocide":
The nation is the hand of the race, the family is the finger of the nation, the individual is the fingernail. If your vocation is to fight, tell your cow whatever it needs to hear while you avoid seeding its’ fallopian tubes and instead mine more minerals and prepare to fight. Otherwise, tell your cow whatever it needs to hear while spawning more overlords.
Don’t talk politics with your cow. At best, it confuses it, at worst, it makes it difficult for your cow to chew cud with the other cows, and cows need to be part of a herd.
The level of politics to talk with your cow is, America is good, we are an American family, nice things are good, criminals are bad because they ruin nice things, having nice things is the only valid virtue signal, tasteful religious displays on nice things are great, ugly religious and political displays on ugly things are stupid evil heresy, ignore any advice from the news and entertainment media because it’s a bunch of pedophiles raping each other.
I started to feel better about the current state of political discourse when I realized that probably a large fraction of the online political discourse is created by astroturf campaigns, not by people arguing in good faith. This is probably part of the reason why one sees so many online accounts make stupid arguments that fall apart after just an instant of thinking. It is not just because there are many stupid people, it is also because, since there are many stupid people, astroturfers have an incentive to craft the kind of simple, catchy arguments that appeal strongly to emotions even if they do not hold up to rational analysis.
Besides astroturfing, another issue is that actual organic online political discourse on both sides is dominated by people who sit online for hours a day making political content. And people like that are not representative of the overall US population. I think that on average, they are less mentally stable and more prone to wild irrational theories. After all, you're probably more likely to spend hours a day writing about politics if you actually think* that Project 2025 will put gay people in concentration camps or if you think that the Democratic Party is a front for a cabal of pedophiles who communicate by talking about pizza than if you think that no matter who wins, it doesn't really matter that much. It also goes the other way. Being constantly exposed to other mentally unstable people's political arguments online can have a radicalizing effect, especially if one gets caught in an echo chamber.
*Or if you have LARPed yourself into almost-thinking it, into enjoying it as an exciting fantasy while perhaps not truly believing it in the depths of your mind. Which I think is probably true of many people.
Silverdawn
It's a DOGE eat DOJ world.
3mo ago
Thinking in terms of responsibility seems pointless to me. Ultimately, there are goals and actions that bring us closer to or farther from those goals. Saying "X is guilty, he chose to do something" doesn't get you closer to your goals. This type of thinking does make sense on a societal level, as a way to reduce independent actions that might hurt the tribe but it doesn't make sense for an individual. You punishing someone else can only help you indirectly, in a manipulative way. Like, if you "expose" a pedophile, your social status might increase slightly. But I don't like where this type of thinking leads to, so I don't do it.
So my solution is to simply think about guilt as little as possible and only under the context of "If other people think Y person is guilty, how will they behave?".
In your example, that means:
"The older generation worked under specific circumstances that made them act a certain way, it's too bad if their actions caused harm." and likewise for the younger generation.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
4mo ago
When the pendulum precesses , you don't know when you're on the receiving end until too late.
The more conventional the opinion, the more cartoonishly sadistic its enforcement. They love to talk about what ought to be done to pedophiles — not because they have unusually strong opinions about the well-being of children, but because pedophiles provide the broadest possible canvas on which to fantasize about social cruelty.
I think this has more to do with rallying support among a shelling point: pedos deserve to have violence inflicted on them, so as a way of making their other views palatable by first establishing a common ground..
Idle culture war prediction: "stochastic terrorism" is quietly retired as a term. 95% of people who ever used that unironically have spent the last few months saying Trump is a fascist who is going to end democracy and everyone should be doing their best to make sure he doesn't win.
Or, per recounting by @stolen_brawnze above of NPR's reporting, one can place any attempts by people on the right to draw this connection squarely in the classic "Republicans pounce!" frame.
Edit: also add in comments like this one on Reddit, in keeping with Sailer's "frontlash" model.
And now I see Steve himself on X predicting such a frontlash.
Edit 2: Plus, among the many gems on Reddit — declaring this is a false flag by Trump to distract the public from his felony conviction/project 2025/the Epstein files/whatever; how it's oh-so-convenient that the shooter is dead; that this is just another example of how Trump "just attracts bad news", this is a symptom of "the rage he projects," that Trump "enabled this culture," and he's to blame for 'making politics dangerous in America'; that it's entirely understandable given that "people don't like pedophiles or rapists"; that if elected, Trump's going to use this as an excuse to silence the media 'exactly like Putin does'; how our priority must be stopping Trump from 'take his anger out on opponents'; how this is going to be our Reichstag Fire and we're about to become Nazi Germany 2.0; and so on, and so on, I'll specifically highlight this one in its (brief) entirety:
Amazing, the Republicans, who have developed a list of 350 political opponents that they believe should be incarcerated and/or put to death, and assert they have the right to be violent to achieve their goals of overthrowing our government, have the nerve to complain of political violence tonight. 😡
Edit 3: add in another proposed reason for it to be a "false flag" — so that Trump can drop out of the race without losing face:
He probably faked it so he can call off his campaign for being in fear for his life. Probably because we are coming too close to actually putting his criminal lying as in jail. I wouldn’t hold it past him for one second that he didn’t outright say to go ahead and shoot someone innocent to bring it all home.
From 1/6 one thing we have never been given any information on is the alleged pipe bomber. Zero. Nada. The only planned terrorist activities on that date.
I have no idea what happened here. Was it the CIA. A lone wolf Democrat activist trying to paint maga as terrorists? Some smart maga extremists crazy enough to do the strategy but smart enough to do it right?
person of interest https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-identified-person-interest-capitol-pipe-bomb-case-jan-10-2021
Conspiracies do hide in plain site. Eipstein being a pedophile and getting a sweet deal was well known. Hunter Biden laptop to a lesser extent.
The left also hasn’t tried to hammer the right on the issue of a pipe bomber being there. And the left often tried to play up things that weren’t done/known like Trumps covid disinfectant drink bleach thing, Ivermectin as dewormer, or the fine people hoax. Maybe it’s not enough of an edge case to get people to fight over it or the powers that be knew not to publicize it because if people looked into it more it would be bad.
Edit: I guess you could argue Russia/State Actor did it. Saw that America had gone crazy. And wanted to escalate. Could have their Michael Westen whose good enough to do it right without being caught.
Is a dollar on sale for 40ish cents? Talk me out of maxing out PredictIt contracts relating to Joe Biden, if you would please.
The numbers are super volatile, but right now, PI thinks Joe is 60c for becoming the Dem nominee, so "no" costs 40c. Now, this likely pays out upon the formal nomination at the convention, the final day of which is 45 days away, as the rules clarify that the replacement of the nominee prior to election day has no impact on resolution. But if the daggers are to come out, they really ought to come out before Joe formally nabs the nomination--otherwise you end up with total chaos and only 75 days to select a nominee, raise money, and campaign to the general public. Sure, a hot swap generates excitement, earned media, and a real chance to beat Trump, but if you're going to go that route, you reap way more of the rewards and less of the cost to do it asap.
It looks pretty impossible to me for the dems to let Biden run unopposed. Sure, one Dem rep thinks Trump will win and the sky won't fall, but everyone else is shouting from the rooftops that America will be doomed, and surely a large portion of these are true believers who will do all that they can to avert said Armageddon. Does anyone actually think Biden can beat Trump? He's down more than 3 points nationally, double that in battleground states; he's only getting older with ever more adverse scrutiny, which also shifts the focus away from Trump, which was really the only way to win, to make it a referendum on Trump's character, since his presidency itself is remembered fairly positively by the crucial independents; there is no end to Ukraine or Gaza; inflation is easing but nothing is actually getting cheaper, they're just getting pricier more slowly. Trump is so hated that there is a firm floor for his favorability to fall--what else can you throw at a man who's been called a felon, fraud, fascist, rapist, pedophile, insurrectionist, Russian plant, and democracy-destroyer?
So, if Biden can't win, and the Democratic Party thinks Trump must not win, then there is only one logical conclusion, which is Biden can't run, and so he won't be the nominee. Now, I understand the big money is outside of prediction markets. But I'm not smart enough to calculate the secondary effect orders to trade options on macroeconomics or individual stocks as they relate to who wins in November. Sticking strictly to the $850 limit per contract on PredictIt, then--
Tell me why I shouldn't max out Joe Biden "no" for being the dem nominee. The $850 limit at 40c will return 2.5x, minus 10% PI's cut and 5% withdrawal fee (partly diluted by credit card points) in less than two months. How could I lose? Why aren't you heading to PI yourself right now to claim your free money?
(I mean, I know the literal answer is somehow the Dems just ratify Joe's nomination in 45 days, but can even Dr. Strange with a time stone find such an implausible outcome?)
sliders1234
4mo ago
There is something I uniquely hate about using “radical wing” as a term. It’s just feels like you are implying they are crazy people.
In Europe the right is rising. But I don’t like calling them “radical”, they would be normies for most of history. Today’s neoliberal establishment of “open borders” were the radicals until about 1980. I feel like labeling something radical is just means to lazily call a side as not worth considering their ideas.
At some point all the political groups have been the establishment and in power. Even the Pride and a lesser extent the pedophiles found themselves in the establishment since 2020 but were far outside of it in 2000.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
I love the Lovecraftian descriptions. "40% dead." "Not of this earth." "Unnatural gleam." "He did not blink at regular intervals."
It reminds me of the (sadly unfinished) ZHP novel Barron where Bai Den is this font of limitless evil power:
Mueller had warned of this possibility days ago, explaining that the Satanic rituals of the DNC and the international pedophile cabal would send psychic ripples across the entire world, blanketing the country in madness and shadow. The reality of that turned out to be far worse than Barron had imagined, a sensation of something gnawing at him, trying to eat him alive.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
4mo ago
Asserting that homosexuals = pedophiles really requires evidence, not just asserting it because you really super believe it.
On the one hand, it's been months since your last ban. On the other hand, you now have a lot of warnings and bans stacked up and you've already been told that you're running out of warnings, and low effort shitting like this is pretty much all you do.
I'm giving you a 3-day ban and telling you knock it off with the naked culture warring.
2D3D
4mo ago
I am actually thinking of Jessica Yaniv and all the other pedophiles that claimed to be trans all while trying to gain access or actually perving on little girls. Its not straight male sexuality, its trans preferences and bigots should be ashamed of questioning the intention of trannies.
For me the fairly obvious point is that most modern trannies don't fucking bother to pass. They shotgun some clown makeup on and wear a dress, but put zero effort into waxing, dieting or otherwise trying to be women. If they actually looked like submissive and breedable femboys they'd get more acceptance, but modern western trannies are just ugly fatties claiming unverifiable special privilege.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
4mo ago
What exactly have you contributed to the discussion here?
We have Nazis and Holocaust Deniers and white nationalists and pedophiles and Repeal the 19th (and the 13th and 14th...) party members here, and people who really really fucking do not like them manage to refrain from posting "You suck and your arguments are bad" every time they post.
So far, this is not the "mind-blowing" politeness you promised, and this is about your last warning because I'm sick of seeing these low-effort potshots in the queue just because you can't control yourself.
Mewis
5mo ago
It's not obvious at all to me that Houllebecq was writing about the illegally young, or how quoting another author demonstrates that, or indeed how it demonstrates anything other than that it is, in fact, possible to write about pedophilia without being a pedophile yourself.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
CSAM is one of the least rational areas of politics.
In the dark ages before the sexual revolution, there were all kinds of sexual deviants against whom upstanding, proper citizens could unite. Gays, interracial couples, unmarried women having sex, kinky people, people using birth control.
Today, most of these targets have been swept away by a big wave of sexual tolerance. Saying "it is wrong to have sex before marriage" makes you sound like a cringy old person.
However, we have also established that adults having sex with kids is bad because it causes severe psychological issues for the kids.
So pederasts and pedophiles become the lightning rod for most of these innate drives to police the sexual relations of their neighbors -- which did not magically disappear.
This is obviously a very emotional topic, and such topics often allow you to score big political wins. Under an evidence-based system, the focus would be on preventing the actual sexual abuse of children both by exclusive pedophiles and other men who act opportunistically. This would entail de-stigmatizing pedophiles who did not commit any sexual offenses with kids (which in turn would increase the odds of them willing to risk therapy, which would reduce the odds of them becoming child abusers) and trying to get the shared social environment of both perpetrators and victims to speak out if they suspect sexual abuse is going on.
CSAM would be treated like snuff videos. Commissioning a snuff video is commissioning a murder and should be punished as such, and paying for them should be a felony to discourage their production, and if you want you can also criminalize distribution and possession. But if half of your homicide department works on possession of snuff video cases, then I would argue that you have your priorities wrong -- most murders do not happen for the creation of snuff videos, nor does their consumption precede most murders. Fake snuff videos lack the thing which makes them immoral in the first place -- a victim. Even if you want to regulate horror movies, it would be a good idea to not simply classify them as snuff.
Cirrus
5mo ago
His personality is enough to ruin him. The Establishment wants defense in depth. It’s easier to defend your way of doing things when the Schelling point is based on personalities, rather than policies.
If the Establishment didn’t do everything it could to destroy Trump and make an example out of him, then there could be a future Trump who goes a bit further. Someone with Trump’s appeal but who could also seriously change policy and the way things are done.
It’s the same reason why progressives have ratcheted up the social movement lunacy to defend pedophiles (as MAPs) and transgenders. When all of the oxygen in the room is being sucked on these topics, it means that people aren’t challenging gay marriage (which was a controversial topic only 12 years ago). Gay marriage is effectively off-limits until the pedo-question is settled, so progressives have an incentive to waste people’s time on pedophiles so that they aren’t having to defend gays. Even though it’s a harder assignment defending pedophiles rather than gays.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6mo ago
All of these are plausible depending on surrounding factors absent from the example. As written and inferring from base rates, and assuming some degree of mental illness on John's part, I'd think 1 is most likely, but 2 is fairly plausible, if we assume the mental illness is something along the lines of "pathological liar" that keeps him exaggerating even as it starts to fail to gain sympathy.
It could also be a more steelmanned version of 1, what if people do keep trying to kill him? Like, not these specific people at his work, he's still exaggerating about them, but what if it's other people? Maybe John lives in a really bad neighborhood and gets mugged once a week, barely escaping by throwing his wallet and running the other way. Maybe he has to fight tooth and nail and ends up in the hospital regularly badly wounded. Maybe it's not about John at all, it's just a really bad neighborhood and everyone who lives there gets mugged regularly, or maybe John looks like an easy target. But the repeated trauma makes him think it's a conspiracy and he's not smart enough to pick out the pattern: person in dark alley = mugger, person in office = friendly, and he just thinks all people have a 50-50 chance to attack him.
If we reduce his pattern-matching abilities even further, maybe he never actually gets mugged, but he keeps doing something stupid like climbing rusty fences and scratching himself, or drunk driving and getting in accidents that almost kill him, and generalizes that to people trying to kill him.
Or maybe he just watches too much TV and movies and people are trying to kill each other all the time (especially trying to kill the protagonist) and he thinks of himself as the protagonist, therefore people must be trying to kill him.
If instead, we increase his pattern-matching abilities, maybe he does regularly get mugged, or his friends and family members do, and he notices that most of the muggers in his bad neighborhood have a certain ethnicity, and so he becomes a racist. Or maybe he goes to the police to fix the issue but they don't take him seriously because he sounds like a paranoid nutjob (when he accuses the actual mugger and Alice from work in the middle of the same rant the police can't tell which one is real and which is exaggerated), then he becomes anti-cop, or anti-government, or anti-whoever is in charge of making the cops be so lax on crime and oh hey have you read this article about how such and such group is secretly controlling the government to be soft on crime or whatever?
Stepping out of the metaphor, which I think is somewhat of a weakman for this phenomenon, I think this simultaneously explains a large chunk of racists (in all directions), anti-religion, anti-capitalists, etc etc etc. Bad thing happens to person or to people that person knows, or hears from (sometimes signal boosted and exaggerated by the media, sometimes by word of mouth). There is a real pattern causing it to happen repeatedly, though sometimes it's a pattern as complicated as "The Entire Economy", it gets oversimplified, exaggerated, and then attributed to a particular group, and the people who believe this explanation become radical anti-that-group. It's a combination of paranoia and actual pattern recognition, because there usually is an actual legitimate instigating factor that is genuine Bayesian evidence against that group, it's just much weaker than would be needed to draw the exaggerated conclusions they come to. There ARE evil racist white men trying to keep minorities poor. There ARE worthless degenerate minorities who live on crime and welfare and contribute nothing to society. There ARE corrupt police officers abusing their authority. There ARE pedophiles in government jobs. There ARE Zionist supremacist Jews who want to control all of America and manipulate it into being pro-Israel. All you need is for someone to encounter some of these in real life, or evidence of them existing, and then the pattern matching can begin until it spirals out of control.
And some of these people will have genuinely convincing evidence on their side, by sheer random chance. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been mugged. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been unfairly harassed by police. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been stared at suspiciously by shopkeepers despite doing nothing wrong. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been laid off by a Jewish boss. They're going to look at the evidence they've seen with their own eyes and be unconvinced that it might be a coincidence. It doesn't seem like a coincidence, it seems super unlikely. If their life were admissible as a scientific paper it would reject the null hypothesis. p < 0.05. They're Jellybean people!
I think that's what a lot of this is. People who perceive patterns where there are none, people who pick out genuine patterns and misattribute them, and people who have coincidences happen to them that are rational evidence when viewed from their individual perspective but don't stand out when you adjust for multiple comparison tests.
plural
6mo ago
It absolutely is a leftist demand, but it only applies to things that aren't western. Anime style can only be attractive to people who are pedophiles. Therefore anyone attempting to be attractive in anime style is appealing to pedophiles. When I think back 10-20-30 years nobody would give a shit about this at all. Sailor Moon would be re-edited for American audiences now with more modest clothing and all sexual innuendo changed to say "pickles... .. ... farthead" or whatever they change many modern japanese translations to say.
Because it doesn't matter it's just a videogame or an anime and only children watch those and if you watch or play them you're a child and probably a pedophile if you enjoy anything not western.
This is a huge vibe I get from literally anyone trying to crusade against "underaged girls" being exploited in the videogames. Of course they'd never say that but every other aspect of their political and cultural bent is left, they just happen to also think that underage anime girls presents some kind of major moral issue because they're fighting pedophiles.
Not many people gave a shit about trying to censor American Beauty and those that did certainly aren't the same people that give a shit about a 100% more tame anime visual novel coming out now that will get rejected from steam while "Hitler rapes all the milfs" will be sold without problem. A japanese visual novel will get rejected from steam for an underage girl wearing a towel for a scene but a western visual novel about underage siblings engaging in incest and cannibalism, that's fine, the art style isn't even anime. Or even outside of mainly sexual content something like the Witcher or Cyberpunk is fine for twitch but I can guarantee if the characters were anime-looking it would be banned, or maybe if they were simply produced outside of the western-okay-to-be-sexual sphere and anime-looking is just a happenstance.
Sure there are some hardliners that don't want any sexuality in anything and will side with the crusaders but the crusaders are faux fighting pedophilia and they're almost entirely left wing. Why? I don't know in either case but the only people that I've encountered that care and are happy when steam bans a visual novel that has like a two second scene of an "underage" girl in her underwear are all left wing, to the point that it's most of their commentary on reddit dedicated to it.
SSCReader
6mo ago
Why wouldn't we short-circuit that to just "has that desire"?
You probably could, simply say someone who has that addictive desire yeah. I was just editing your example definition, to point out, that there was a potential exit, in that I could be wrong so that someone who once was an addict and no longer has that desire I would consider no longer an addict. For addiction you can't generally know if you will be an addict until you have experienced it, whereas a pedophile can (and usually will) have those desires before they ever abuse a child. A pedophile who never abuses a child is still a pedophile, but there is no such thing as a cocaine addict who has never tried cocaine because the experience of what it does to you and how it makes you feel is part of developing the addiction.
My point is the zeitgeist already was that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, I am in my 50's and that is certainly what we were taught about addiction when I was a kid. "Not even once!" Whereas current doctors (like self_made_human) seem to think addicts CAN become not addicted to drugs. So is there some kind of "new science" and does it run the direction you think it does?
My experience would say the opposite, that we USED to believe addicts can't be cured and now we are beginning to believe they can. Which could mean that there never was a really settled zeitgeist in the first place, for things to move on from. And therefore politicians and activists can simply use the version that best supports whatever position they are trying to argue in the moment (or more charitably that whatever belief they have is WHY they are taking the position they are taking).
I agree with your distinction between pedophile and child molester, but not with this equivalence. A pedophile is someone who wants to have sex with children. A heterosexual male is someone who wants to have sex with women. Having sex with children is by definition child molestation. Having sex with women is not by definition rape, unless you are Andrea Dworkin. So your theoretical ethical pedophile who never acts on his desires (I assume such exist, though I admit I'd be skeptical of any individual's claims that they never ever have or will) is still someone who fundamentally wants to molest a child.
Whether you can "rehabilitate" them depends on whether you believe that sexual attraction to children is something inherent in their sexuality (which would make it equivalent to a sexual orientation) or a dysfunction that will respond to psychological treatment. From what little I know of the literature, most psychologists are not optimistic about the potential to "cure" pedophiles. They seem more similar to sociopaths and narcissists, in that you really can't counsel them or medicate them into being something else.
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