The Rectification of Names

The sage Confucius was once asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. He understood what General Semantics teaches; if your linguistic map is sufficiently confused, you will misunderstand the territory. And be readily outmaneuvered by those who are less confused.

And that brings us to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In particular, the widespread tagging of Epstein as a pedophile.

No, Jeffrey Epstein is not a pedophile. This is important. If conservatives keep misidentifying him as one, I fear some unfortunate consequences.

Pedophiles desire pre-pubertal children. This is not Epstein’s kink; he quite obviously likes his girls to be as young as possible but fully nubile. The correct term for this is “ephebophile”, and being clear about the distinction matters. I’ll explain why.

The Left has a long history of triggering conservatives into self-discrediting moral panics (“Rock and roll is the devil’s music”). It also has a strong internal contingent that would like to normalize pedophilia. I mean the real thing, not Epstein’s creepy ephebophilia.

Homosexual pedophiles have been biding their time in order to get adult-on-adult homosexuality fully normalized as battlespace prep, but you see a few trial balloons go up occasionally in places like Salon. The last round of this was interrupted by the need to take down Milo Yiannopolous, but the internal logic of left-wing sexual liberationism always demands new ways to freak out the normals, and the pedophiles are more than willing to be next up in satisfying that perpetual demand.

Liberals have proven themselves utterly useless at resisting the liberationist ratchet, so I’m not even bothering to address them. Conservatives, if you want to prevent the next turn, don’t give the pedophilia-normalizers maneuvering room. Rectify the names; make the distinctions that matter.

Epstein’s behavior is repulsive because we judge young postpubertal humans to be too psychologically immature to give adult consent, but it’s nowhere near the evil that is the sexual abuse of prepubertal children.

Part of the problem here is that our terminology for some of the distinctions is multivalent. Sometimes “child” refers to a legal status, sometimes to the developmental stage before sexual maturity, and sometimes to a less well defined stage of psychological development, with further confusion because these don’t happen on the same calendar-year schedule for all individuals.

Epstein recruited girls as young as 14. Yes, really icky and I think it is quite right he was prosecuted for statutory rape. But women that age who are not only nubile but psychologically adult do exist, even if they’re very very rare – in 60 years I think I’ve met exactly one. Alas, women a few years over the nominal age of consent who are still immature enough that they are not really competent to make sexual decisions are rather more common.

Until we have a rectification of names in this area, great care is warranted about who we call a “child”, and where we draw the line between creepily asymmetrical relationships and outright perversion. And this matters above the personal level.

There are real rings of pedophile monsters out there, notably in Hollywood where sexual abuse of child actors has a long and sordid history that has recently begun to resurface. Dammit, conservatives, don’t spend your credibility in an overheated fling at Epstein lest you find you’re out of rhetorical ammunition and allies when the real monsters need to be taken down.

351 comments

  1. Very important point, thank you. Perversion of language is the indispensable tool of authoritarians everywhere and throughout time. All resistance to tyranny begins with clarity of thought, so the attempt to mangle the semantics of language should be regarded as strong evidence of battle-space preparation. (By the way, the particular baddie which sparked your post is Jeffrey rather than Richard)

  2. And to any Conservative who thinks this is not that important, consider this: Has your movement ever not been out-maneuvered by the left?

    Maybe just once you could stop running on your emotions and actually think.

    Because it wasn’t the left who invented the reeeee.

    1. > Has your movement ever not been out-maneuvered by the left?

      Not before Trump came along. Now it’s happening, a bit.

    2. At lest we actually tried to oppose this and correctly predicted the consequences of gay “marriage”. As opposed to the libertine/libertarians who were all for it up until it became obvious where that road leads.

  3. Over here, age of consent tends to be 14-16, not 18. Corresponds to the pattern that the age to legally buy alcohol is also lower than in the US. But what really weirds me out is that I think here people understand that this is just a technical rule. You gotta draw the line somewhere. You just try to find a trade-off between putting men into prison who don’t deserve it vs. not putting men into prison who do deserve it. What weirds me out is that apparently in the US a lot of people take that 18 as age of consent not such a trade-off rule but something like a holy rule sent from heaven on a fax and cast in stone, that anyone under 18 is a child and anyone having sex with someone under 18 is a pedo. Why? Sounds like they are deriving a moral rule from a law, which is always a bad idea, as if anything it should be the other way around.

    Do those people really refer to their own 17 years old daughters as children? Don’t they scream back “I am not a child, mom/dad!!!!” ?

    I generally oppose the whole concept of the age of consent in its current form, but it would take too long to explain why. On a practical side, 14 is OK because most parents are able to keep 14 year old daughters out of night clubs and parties. Curfew at 21:00 and so on. Most parents are able to treat a 14 as still very much like a child with those kinds of rules. At 16 it is harder, at 17 it is very hard. They demand to go out, to dance, and party. Loudly. And they want sex. Especially after drinking, which is solvable if older girls are buying or simply a busy bar has no time for carding them. They seduce guys in night clubs. Do those guys deserve prison? Don’t think so. Should they card the girls? Nothing would destroy a romantic mood faster than going “Your papers, please!”.

    There is also the thing called Fast/Slow Life History Strategy. It is fascinating causal link between a lot of apparently different but correlated things. Basically folks who had a stressful childhood do stuff faster. Not only they are likely to have high time preferences, be impulsive, but also in the physical sense, get to puberty faster, and look older than their age. In our school puberty tended to be 12-13. But it can be as early as 9 and as late as 15. And I think the theory checks out, it is always those kids from the super highly functional rich and well educated families who look like children at 15. Both girls and guys. Meanwhile, you go to some thrashy area, and you see 13 years old boys pretty much looking like mini-men and the girls mini-women. I should add: the speed of Life History Strategy is *correlated* with childhood stress, and the usual nurture-only social scientists tend to assume it is caused by it. However it is entirely possible it is genetic, have impulsive genes, age faster, while your parents’ impulsive genetics make your childhood stressful. Kinda like that study that showed that it is not getting spanked as a child that leads to bad life outcomes, rather it is having the kind of genetics you get from parents who are most likely to often spank their children does. Kids with impulsive genetics kids misbehave, parents with impulsive genetics spank them.

    1. Yah, but the Epstein case is very different from your normal statutory rape prosecution. I think even most people who think it’s morally unproblematic to set the age of consent to 14 have issues with 14 year olds engaging in prostitution especially in situations where they might be subject to substantial pressure from older men (e.g. taken offshore to a strange location they can’t return from on their own).

      I don’t think it’s unreasonable to decide that the age of consent for sex could be 14 but that prostitution requires the prostitute to be 18.

      1. It’s also worth noting that modern statutory rape statutes typically require an age gap of some sort so that teenage lovers aren’t committing felonies.

        1. Not all states have close-in-age exceptions. California and New York, for example, do not. That is a lot of teenagers committing felonies (and registerable sex offenses at that!). What’s more, you can be liable for statutory rape under these laws even if you’re a minor yourself. Both partners could be prosecuted for the rape of the other.

          I’ve heard it expressed, wrongly, that having sex with a sufficiently drunken, but still conscious, person cannot be considered rape. Usually the person making such a statement says in their defense something like “So if Alice and Bob both get drunk and have sex, did they rape each other?” The correct answer to this question is YES.

          1. No, a law that gives the answer YES to the question “Did they rape each other?” is a revoltingly bad law – one below the mere “the law is an ass, an idiot” level – and the correct response to such a revoltingly bad law is to revolt against it.

          2. I hope you do not practice criminal law in California.

            The age of consent in California is 18 and all sexual activity with a person under the age of 18 not their spouse is a criminal offense called “unlawful sexual intercourse”. However, most are are wobblers. The specific case of two minors of three years age difference or less is a misdemeanor. The specifics can be found in CA Penal Code sec 261.5.

    2. >Over here, age of consent tends to be 14-16, not 18.

      It’s not fixed in the U.S. Function of state law, varying between 16 and 18. It used to be lower in some Southern states, but they were roundly mocked for it and succumbed.

      >What weirds me out is that apparently in the US a lot of people take that 18 as age of consent not such a trade-off rule but something like a holy rule sent from heaven on a fax and cast in stone, that anyone under 18 is a child and anyone having sex with someone under 18 is a pedo.

      Yes, you’re right, we do have that tendency and I (with a bit more cosmopolitan background than most Americans) find it a little odd myself. What is just as odd is in almost all U.S. jurisdictions the age of sexual consent is younger than the drinking age. That never made any sense to me at all.

      1. > What is just as odd is in almost all U.S. jurisdictions the age of
        > sexual consent is younger than the drinking age. That never
        > made any sense to me at all.

        Makes total sense to me.

        The “age of consent” is to protect the child from predators. The “age to drink” is to protect society from drunken children.

        We believe that generally the impact of sexual mistakes are less severe than the mistakes made while drunk. If a 18 year old girl consents to sex with a 45 year old douche nozzle the *worst* she’s got to worry about is HIV and/or getting pregnant–both of which can be ameliorated with a .50 piece of latex purchased at just about anywhere. Emotional trauma isn’t counted because that’s going to happen eventually anyway.

        OTOH, alcohol leads to fighting, drunk driving etc. Also you *can* drink yourself to death, either chronic or acute, while fucking yourself to death takes some effort to arrange.

        1. I do believe that the main concern wrt. drinking age is drunk driving. It kinda goes hand in hand with driving at lower ages being much more common in the U.S. than Europe, due to lower pop density and more direct dependence on the car in the U.S.

          1. Are the pop densities so low that taking a taxi is a considerable financial burden? I was a teenager growing up at the suburbian outskirts of a European city, where night-time public transport wasn’t too good, living about 13km or 8 miles away from the good bars in the city center and my parents would always give me taxi money (and have me show the receipt, of course) on Saturday nights because they didn’t want me to get a ride from a drunk driver. Too many “disco accident” deaths in the local news.

            1. You are missing an important piece of cultural context here: In the U.S. getting one’s own car is seen as a right of passage / unlocking tremendous freedom.

              And now the tremendous car hatred our self appointed elites show ought to make more sense.

            2. >Are the pop densities so low that taking a taxi is a considerable financial burden?

              Outside a few major cities, yes. I probably took a taxi less than once/year in my 20’s and 30’s. Taxi are (perhaps ‘were’ given Uber) mostly for tourists on expense accounts.

              There is a bit of a negative feedback loop in play. Because taxi use is uncommon, they are priced at the ‘desperate customer’ level, which makes people avoid them for minor conveniences.

              1. No, taxis are a vector for graft. There are (usually) a fixed number of taxis in a given metro area, and hence prices stay high.

            3. > Are the pop densities so low that taking a taxi is a considerable financial burden?

              Yes.

              In some states you can drive farm equipment (including certain kinds of trucks) on public roads at 14–but it has to be for farming purposes.

            4. “Are the pop densities so low that taking a taxi is a considerable financial burden?”

              Yes. Speaking from the experience of a two-week vacation in the US with lots of driving, 20 miles is considered “next door” by many people. Which means that driving such a distance (or even more) just to go to a movie (eg) is quite common. Now consider the taxi rates for such a distance (which would be higher than normal, as there is no chance for a return hire), and you’ll see how important driving is for young people.

              But: over here in Austria people from 16 up may drink beer, and from 18 up everything that’s legal. If they are in company of their parents (or legal guardians), what they consume is up to those.
              As far as I can see, we do not have more of drinking problems than there are in the US, and our market for illegal drugs is considerably smaller.
              My daughters were given an example of responsible drinking by their parents. Although we do have a very nicely equipped bar that would make most restaurants blush, and that is freely accessible by everybody in the house, we never had even one drunk kid (not ours, not their friends). Mostly because they never saw their parents beyond the stage of “slightly tipsy and having a great time”.

              Personally, I find the 21 as legal age for drinking in the US ridiculous and counter-productive.

            5. As others have said, yes. In some places, it’s more like !!!!!YES!!!!!

              With all due respect to our British cousins and our more distant European relations, their mental model of automobile use and ownership, and their inverse (public transportation) have no bearing on American realities west of the Mississippi. The only folks likely to understand our needs are the Diggers and the Canucks. Maybe the Kiwis also understand, since they’ve got an archipelago to manage.

              Here in Texas, we frequently measure our journeys in time, not distance. Depending on needs and schedule, a jaunt of a couple of hundred miles might be a day trip. Even in the large western cities, which are geographically enormous by European standards, getting from one side of a city – a straight-line distance of perhaps 20 or 30 miles – can be longer than that, both in distance and minutes of travel time. Paying someone else to drive one around would get ruinous quickly. To illustrate that enormity, the greater Houston area has a surface area slightly north of 10,000 square miles. That’s about the size of Belgium. That 10,000 square miles is only one sixth of the Texas Triangle.

              Back east, things are a lot closer together, which is probably why Europeans and Yankees from the Atlantic and New England states look at each other’s problems and solutions, see something they understand, and then fail to grasp why the yokels in Flyover Country don’t get with the program. The things they can’t imagine living without are laughably unrealistic here. The greater Houston MSA is twice the size of Connecticut and ten times the size of Rhode Island. Eastern solutions don’t get anywhere near solving western problems.

              1. While not at all on this enormous size of scale, I have seen something similar in Denmark. Copenhagen politicans who really don’t have much of a need for cars in the city charge excessive taxes on cars. But out in rural Aalborg, while far more densely populated than Texas and prolly has more public transport, they are still a necessity. You either drive straight to your work or often have to take three buses in an I _ I shape. The result was that the Aalborgers do buy cars, but buy old ones that are cheaper, both the price and the tax. Denmark ended up with a car fleet far older than the Western European average, looking closer to Eastern Europe, where driving 10-12 years old cars is normal. And because older cars have higher emissions and are less environmentally friendly, this was entirely counter-productive even for the original purported environmentalist goals of taxing them so high. But at least they are spending the taxes on public transport at least in Copenhagen? Nope, my Copenhagen friends say public transport is too expensive and ride bicycles instead. So it is an utter failure.

                I have heard somewhere that the reason the average US car has an automatic transmission is stop and go traffic, easier to inch forward that way. That sucks. I would probably ride a motorbike between the lanes.

                1. Lanesplitting is mostly illegal in the US. It is legal in California, where it’s constantly blamed for accidents, and I think *one* other state.

                2. There is no part of this that surprises me. Politicians with ideas so good they must be mandatory make rules. The rules backfire in many ways. People who can’t afford to live the way the politicians think they should instead find ways to live within the rules and their means, even if the means they find run counter to the stated intent of the rules. A few people get rich, a lot of people are inconvenienced or have less of their own money to spend, and things are generally worse than they would be had the politicians had the good sense to do nothing at all about problems, real or imagined, that they can only make a pretense of solving.

                  If there’s an upside, I would guess that a lot of Danes are in better cardiovascular shape than they would otherwise be. On the downside of the upside, I wouldn’t want to bike to work in the rain, or try to make a weekly grocery run on a bike even in ideal biking weather.

                  Frankly, anyone who proposes to solve $ProblemDuJour with ‘Command Economies!’ should be mocked until they go away. If they won’t go away after being mocked, their constituents should ponder the application of civil disobedience, tar-and-feathers, or more emphatic forms of political expression.

              2. Living in western Canada, Winnipeg to be exact, the nearest city is Brandon at 2 hours. The next nearest is 8 hours plus.
                people in the east don’t get it.
                BobD

          2. > I do believe that the main concern wrt. drinking age is drunk driving.

            How is that not protecting society?

            Also note that the legal drinking age *used* to be 18, which was still higher than the age of consent in most states.

      2. Well, raising the drinking age to 21 nationally was predicated on ideas about drunk driving (and indeed it was forced on the States by threatening to withhold Federal highway funds.) You could make the argument that the state has a greater interest in preventing people from harming others than it has in preventing them from harming themselves. I’d even agree with that, as a general proposition.

        I’m not sure I think that our current system is effective in this regard, but there is at least a coherent rationale for it.

    3. > Over here, age of consent tends to be 14-16, not 18

      Age of consent in many states in the US is more algorithmic than fixed.

      It’s usually something like “from 14 to 18 there can’t be more than 2 years age difference between the partners, then at 18 you’re on your own”. This to me is reasonable.

    4. Age of consent varies by state. It’s 16 in most, 17 or 18 in a few.

      It is a federal offense to shoot pornography of someone under 18, or to pay someone under 18 for sexual services or entice them into prostitution. These laws are justifiable, as you do not want someone who is not self-determining to be involved in sexual exploitation.

      1. And while this might be good law in many cases it can also lead to perverse outcomes. For instance, if two seventeen-year-olds exchange nude selfies both can be charged under these laws and made to register as sex offenders. In fact, a minor can be charged with a serious felony and be required to register as a sex offender just for taking nude selfies of him or herself.

        One might hope that prosecutorial discretion would prevent perverse outcomes like this, and I imagine it mostly does (we don’t hear about those cases.) But it doesn’t always, and there have been a number of cases like this in recent years where the teens involved were charged.

        Human sexuality turns out to be remarkably difficult to police using simple hard and fast rules if you want to avoid perverse outcomes.

        1. Eh, minors exchanging sexually-charged selfies *is* kinda scary, because it does open them to bad-intentioned leaks of those images/media. It’s mostly a theoretical problem, but the general practice is scary enough (particularly in the absence of obvious-in-retrospect best practices) that maybe the law _should_ get involved.

          1. Well, I agree that it’s certainly ill-advised. And perhaps the law should be involved in some cases, especially those involving younger teens, though sexting seems to be very common- some studies suggest that 30%, perhaps more than 30%, of teenagers engage in it.

            But it seems utterly perverse to charge teenagers for distributing (or even just possessing) selfies of themselves with the same crimes we would charge an adult sexually exploiting a small child with. The penalties in such cases can be, rightly in the latter case, draconian. Having to register as a sex offender is by itself almost certain to be more harmful to a teenager than any likely consequence of sexting.

        2. Most of the anti-porn laws were written before nude selfies were a thing, other than maybe Polaroids.

    5. Until very recently in Canada the age of consent was 14. The rubric at Common Law was, “if she’s big enough, she’s old enough.” A short while ago I read a description of the manner of formation of mated couples among the Bushmen: It was that when a girl had begun to menstruate at about 12, she would shortly thereafter pair off with a boy of the same age or slightly older, and they would form a mated pair. Of course, by the age of 12 she would already have learned everything a woman in her circumstances needed to know to go about the business of making a living in her ecological setting. Modern life makes demands on the economic skills of modern people that today’s 12 to 16 year old females are almost certain to be incompetent to meet, and so the better reproductive strategy is to delay childbirth, and because copulation without pregnancy tends to erode pair-bonding, to delay copulation as well, as a pragmatic adaption to current circumstances, but that does not make sexual congress with young but nubile females an immoral perversion. It remains the “natural” ie, old-stone-age, order of things for the human animal.

      1. For millennia, boys at age 13 have stood before the congregation and said “Today I am a man”, and girls were considered women a year younger than that (neatly aligning with your reference to 12-year-old girls). It’s an established fact that the average age of menarche (onset of menstruation) has fallen in recent centuries, precisely at the time the complexity of civilization you refer to has increased. Thus, we have to deal with the disconnect between physical and emotional maturity. I think we need to speed up the process of teaching girls how to be women, because trying to “keep them innocent” isn’t working. There is evolutionary advantage in finding young fertile females sexually attractive. There is no such advantage for the prepubescent, which is precisely why we rightly consider such an attraction perverse.

        I remember being in my upper teens, seeing girls with all the right parts in all the right places, but finding out their age and knowing that made them “jail bait” and should be avoided, no matter how much interest they showed me. I do not think for a moment that finding them appealing was perverse or unnatural. The unnatural thing was the restraint I had to apply to avoid unpleasant consequences.

        Sadly, whenever I try to discuss this subject with most people, they insist that trying to distinguish between ephebophilia and pedophilia just makes me a pedophilia apologist, if not a pedophile myself. I got GIFs that either suggested I kill myself, that someone else would kill me, or both.

        Most people just can’t have an intelligent, rational discussion on this subject. Their emotions are just too powerful. The irony goes to 11.

        1. I’ve read credible sources that say the average age of menarche, historically, is around 14-15, not 12. This is also a more common age for age ceremonies and marriage worldwide. Women are at their healthiest childbearing age in their early 20s when all the bones have fused.

          1. I didn’t say 12 was historically the average age of menarche. When it was 14-15, a statistically-significant fraction of females did experience it by age 12 (and others didn’t hit it until 16 or 17), which is why societies had to get girls fully prepared to be women by that age.

            Now that the average is 12, that means a significant number of girls experience menarche even younger.

              1. But I’ve also heard it’s a function of family size. Young ladies with lot of brothers in the house tend to experience menarche later than those without. Since there are very few large families any more, the average age would go down.

                I have 4 kids. Today that is considered a large family.

              2. But I’ve also heard it’s a function of family size. Young ladies with lot of brothers in the house tend to experience menarche later than those without. Since there are very few large families any more, the average age would go down.

                I have 4 kids. Today that is considered a large family.

  4. While you are correct that he is an ephebophile pointing this out is a much greater blunder than anything else mentioned here. People can’t help but associate this kind of response with the people online who defend this kind of sexual relationship (as they tend to be the ones who care most about making this distinction). Moreover, Epstein is someone who already is viewed as the equivalent of the anti-christ by the left (the fact that he’s a billionaire and can be arguably linked to Trump helps) and detested by the right as well so placing him in any category only helps convince people it’s an awful thing.

    But your idea about where the left is going is dead wrong. If anything the left is moving in the direction of being less accepting of sexual liberationism. While it’s right to worry about sexual assault and coercive sexual relationships that has spread into a larger skepticism of sexual encounters that don’t have active verbal consent at the time and demonization of BDSM style fetishes and pornography.

    Hell, as someone with libertarian sympathies regarding personal interactions I’m more worried about the left clamping down on sex and sexual media than the right at this point.

    1. The direction of politics has become fascinating. It looks as if the left will be socially conservative, but the right will also become more socially liberal. A repudiation of Reagan and Obama, almost.

        1. A few years ago, I’d assumed that polyamory would be the next boundary to be crossed, but I don’t think that will happen for two reasons.

          First, no one cares except a few of those offshoot branches of the Mormons. But, more importantly, it doesn’t really evoke any kind of visceral revulsion among conservatives. Sure, we believe in one man/one woman, but while polyamory is icky, it’s not unnaturally icky. After all, several of our biblical heroes had multiple wives…

          1. You haven’t been paying attention to the self-proclaimed “rationalists” have you.

          2. >But, more importantly, [polyamory] doesn’t really evoke any kind of visceral revulsion among conservatives.

            You almost put your finger on it there. The Gramscians won’t valorize polyamory for the same reason conservatives don’t feel serious threat from the possibility; it’s not destructive enough.

            They’d much rather normalize pedophilia or necrophilia or coprophilia and throw cake-bakers into jail for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about this year’s frontier of sexual liberation.

            Don’t get the causality wrong. Gramscians don’t exult in perversion because they’re perverts (though some of them are), but because requiring non-perverts to embrace lies about perversion furthers the goal of making resistance against the totalitarianization of society more difficult.

    2. > People can’t help but associate this kind of response with the people online who defend this kind

      You _can_ make this distinction without defending the behavior, or Epstein himself – and it is a critical one, so that’s what you should do. Most _actual_ – and active – pedos are essentially criminal psychopaths, and that’s reason enough to be dealing with them quite harshly. The typical ephebophile is definitely acting in a sexually predatory manner, and one that _should_ be legally punishable in many cases – but he has significantly better prospects for reforming.

      1. The typical ephebophile is definitely acting in a sexually predatory manner, and one that _should_ be legally punishable in many cases – but he has significantly better prospects for reforming.

        Given the nature of the beast, I doubt they “reform”. They either get better about not getting caught, get their fix from prostitutes who either are, or look underage, or they vacation overseas.

        1. >Given the nature of the beast, I doubt they “reform”.

          Remember, actual pedophiles have actual brain damage. To “reform” in any real sense they’re have to be neurologically rewired. Ephebophiles aren’t like that – their sexual targeting is Darwinian normal. The qualitative difference is such that I think guest is right about “better prospects for reforming”.

          1. To “reform” in any real sense they’re have to be neurologically rewired. Some volunteer to be chemically or surgically castrated. They hate what they do, and that’s the only way to stop.

            Ephebophiles aren’t like that – their sexual targeting is Darwinian normal. On the fringe of “normal”, IMO. Attraction to youth/virginity can roll from nubile to barely pubescent to pre-pubescent. Note that many male homosexuals are attracted to youths or boys, and of course the “Darwinian” basis for this is carried across from heterosexual patterning.

            BTW, the same distinction (“ephebo”/”pedo”) applies to nearly all the homosexual Catholic priests. They preyed on teenagers, not little kids.

            As to statutory rape law: if there is no “bright line” marking off the protected, then every case becomes a subjective evaluation of the “maturity” of the target. The “bright line” needs to be absolute, with no exemptions for low age difference. (A 17-year-old shagging a 15-year-old may be just as much of a manipulative exploiter as a 30-year-old; it just doesn’t feel as squicky.)

            If both parties are underage, then both are victims (until proven otherwise), and therefore both are perpetrators. Just because someone is underage doesn’t mean he can’t be an exploiter.

            Back in the early days of on-line chat, a fellow discovered that by logging into chat rooms under multiple names, he could generate plausible “buzz” about penny stocks he had previously bought and bump the price up. By the time the SEC caught up with him, he’d made about $800,000. He had to disgorge most of his profits, but IIRC he kept enough to cover his future college expenses. He was 16 years old.

            If that kid bedded a 15-year-old – was it Romeo and Juliet, or a cunning predator and a vulnerable child?

            Very hard to determine – but the age of the party or parties is known accurately. Anyone under the “bright line” age should be presumed a victim, and the other party presumed a perpetrator, until definitely proven otherwise.

            1. > Some volunteer to be chemically or surgically castrated. They hate what they do, and that’s the only way to stop.

              Yup, this is why I’m willing to speculate that the ones that _are_ active as pedos are _very_ likely to be criminal psychopaths, or at least to have other Dark Triad traits of sone sort. Because to those who have the misfortune of feeling _ego-dystonic_ urges in that direction, chemical castration is a _no-brainer_. As someone said, “It is better for you to lose one part if your body, than for the whole body to be thrown into hell.” Harsh, but arguably true. OTOH, a full-blown criminal psychopath would be the _clearest_ example of the “grooming” sort of sexual predator, with zero empathy towards their prey. It’s just what they do.

            2. >BTW, the same distinction (“ephebo”/”pedo”) applies to nearly all the homosexual Catholic priests. They preyed on teenagers, not little kids.

              I thought so, too, until I analyzed the figures from the John Jay report – look upthread.

              Given their reporting categories, abuse of prepubescents was a dead minimum of 22%. If the cutoff on one of their age categories had been 13 rather than 14 we could say with confidence that prepubescent abuse was three times that, not far shy of 77%

              Where between those extrema the actual figure lies is dependent on the age distribution in their middle cohort of 11-14s. But there’s no plausible way to make it out to be “not little kids”.

              1. I read, or at least skimmed, most of the John Jay report as well. The age selection makes some analysis a little difficult.

                I think the people who categorize the crisis as a homosexual problem _today_, however are correct. The abuse had decreased by around 80% between its high point in the 70s and 80s to when the story broke big time in the media around 2002. It’s dropped quite a bit again since then, as some of the policy changes have been quite effective.

                However, there is a significant contingent in the Catholic clergy (small, but very loud), Father James Martin being perhaps the best well-known, that is clearly pushing to normalize homosexuality within the Church.

                And it cannot be denied that they have made some progress. And it also doesn’t help with some of the really skeevy promotions the Pope has been making.

                I think the problem’s gotten significantly worse since Francis was elected, not in terms of numbers, because I don’t know that, but in terms of more and more pro-homosexual prelates being given a platform.

                While I understand that homosexual doesn’t mean child-molester, there is a non-zero correlation, and that casting aside any aspect of sexual morality always leads to more.

                1. >I think the people who categorize the crisis as a homosexual problem _today_, however are correct

                  It was a predominently homosexual problem yesterday, too; remember the split between 1950 and 2002 was 81% to 19%. I concur with your suspicion that the ratio has probably gone up rather than down in this century.

                  >casting aside any aspect of sexual morality always leads to more.

                  I think “morality” is the last category to apply to an analysis like this rather than the first. Sexual perverts (by which I mean specifically people with an anti-Darwinian sexual targeting system) have brain damage. Compulsive homosexuals and pedophiles don’t choose not to form normal heterosexual relationships with reproductively eligible partners so much as they experience a diminished or absent capability to be aroused that way.

                  1. (Note to readers: “brain damage” conveys to some people a connotation Eric does not intend, given what I’ve known of him over the years.)

                    How sure are we that this is damage, per se? Is there a possibility that such traits are gene-linked to other, pro-Darwinian traits? I.e. to be more fit to survive, humanity needed a gene that incidentally made ~2% homosexual, a smaller fraction pedophilic, etc.? Have any enterprising researchers looked into that?

                    1. >(Note to readers: “brain damage” conveys to some people a connotation Eric does not intend, given what I’ve known of him over the years.)

                      I have congenital brain damage myself, in my right parietal lobe. That’s what spastic palsy is.

    3. And that’s exactly what I was talking about above. That bad people want to make a distinction does not make that distinction itself bad to make. Pretending that unpleasant truths are false cedes the truth to bad people, giving them some kind of weird moral high ground.

    4. Moreover, Epstein is someone who already is viewed as the equivalent of the anti-christ by the left (the fact that he’s a billionaire and can be arguably linked to Trump helps)

      WHAT? Maybe in the last 8 minutes or so, but it’s TRUMP who threw his ass out of his resort so many years ago. It’s the leftist fuckwits–including Clinton, who took a few trips on the lolita express himself–who hung out with him after he got out of jail.

      1. Wishcasting, and Trump did have social contact with Epstein from time to time.

        But mostly wishcasting

  5. It seems to me it’s the equivocation on the word ‘child’ that is the problem. Resume referring to people under 18 as ‘minors’ and this will release ‘child’ back to its primary meaning of prepubescent juvenile.

    1. There’s an underlying move to infantalize children more generally, treating them as younger than their actual ages. Or worse, treating them (as David Friedman put it) as “pets who can talk.” The equivocation on the word ‘child’ is just being used to push this infantalization forward.

      In the new view ‘Ephebophile’ has become a null concept, as 13-17 year olds are now treated as we once treated 8-11 year olds. And it’s not just age-of-consent-for-sex; it’s a broader push to treat adolescents as pre-adolescents more generally, and to treat pre-adolescents as toddlers.

      1. There’s an underlying move to infantalize children more generally, treating them as younger than their actual ages. Or worse, treating them (as David Friedman put it) as “pets who can talk.” The equivocation on the word ‘child’ is just being used to push this infantalization forward.

        Or as I put it, “wearing your babies as accessories”. You see this a lot on social media.

        Baby pictures are embarrassing enough. Having your mom show your girlfriend/best friend your baby pictures is so universally cringey it’s a trope in comedy. But there is a whole generation of kids who will become adolescents and later adults, and all their baby pictures and videos will still be on Facebook, replete with comments from fawning parents, aunts, and uncles to the effect of “There’s my little bean!”, “Such a handsome little man!”, “I just want to pinch those cheeks!”, “Totes adorbz!” et weary cetera. Either they will quickly regain the lost taboos against oversharing, or they will consider it the new normal. I’m not sure which. But I want the entire social-media-industrial complex to burn in a fire.

        1. >Having your mom show your girlfriend/best friend your baby pictures is so universally cringey it’s a trope in comedy.

          That’s because they used to shoot those pics naked. Not anymore. Not that people got more prudish, but realized this is cringey, so I keep seeing (and making) only clothed baby pics.

      2. @Deep

        “The equivocation on the word ‘child’ is just being used to push this infantalization forward.”

        Yes. I was trying to formulate a similar notion last night but failed to find the words. I do think many people exploit the equivocation to further an agenda.

        1. Agreed in general with this thread. For those who want a way out, look for “free range parenting” (and be careful CPS doesn’t come after you.)

  6. My hope is that when the media makes the move to the narrative “pedophelia is cool”, that normals will slap them back hard, but it’s not a forgone conclusion anymore and that’s shocking. There were many powerful leftists who celebrated with Epstein after he was released. They do want what he did legalized and want as ESR noted, even more.

    The irony, as noted by some here, is that the left wants almost all sexual deviancy allowed, but also want ridiculous crap like affirmative consent. In the end this is a control move. In the end everything is allowed, but state permission is required.

    Modern progressives are in an effort to perfect totalitarianism and control absolutely freaking everything….

    1. My hope is that when the media makes the move to the narrative “pedophelia is cool”, that normals will slap them back hard, but it’s not a forgone conclusion anymore and that’s shocking.

      If it gets to that point, they won’t stop at slapping. You’ll see an uptake in the number of shootings, grisly castrations, and — in some jurisdictions — successful invocations of the “needed killin'” defense.

      The irony, as noted by some here, is that the left wants almost all sexual deviancy allowed, but also want ridiculous crap like affirmative consent. In the end this is a control move. In the end everything is allowed, but state permission is required.

      Well, yeah, we are apparently supposed to see women simultaneously as strong, fierce, supreme badasses whose talons can crush galaxies; and as fragile things needing protection from the violence of men speaking to or even looking at them the wrong way. It’s classic doublethink, and it has the same end that all doublethink does: control and power.

      But it gets darker, my friends. People who adhere to the doublethink receive cover from the Collective, that you won’t get if you adhere to logic — and I’m not just talking about the long list of “male feminists” who turned out to have sordid histories of sexual harassment and assault. If you are a paedophile with the Right Political Views, they will go to bat for you. If you have the Wrong Political Views and even so much as say something “less bad” like “I was molested as a teen and it wasn’t all that bad”, like Milo did, expect to be ruined. One of the things to come out of Goobergrape was the curious case of Nicholas “Sarah” Nyberg, a person who, over a decade ago, had frank discussions with his friends over IRC about his shameless lust for his 8-year-old cousin whom he called his “little girlfriend”. Despite the seriousness — and credibility — of what has been leaked about him, Zoe Quinn and her friends circled the wagons around Mx. Nyberg and began their chants of “Sarah Nyberg dindu nuffin”, which were repeated by the online press who mainly treated him sympathetically — all because his status as a powerful ally in the struggle against NetNazis trumped his perfidy and perversion.

      (Given the circumstances I’ve dispensed with the usual decorum surrounding names and pronouns, especially as I think he started identifying as trans in order to get closer to victims and/or cash in “oppressed victim” status for sympathy.)

      1. Back when I was still reading SJW blogs I remember someone, not Milo, making that same argument and, oh the resulting outrage! It doesn’t seem to me that practically ordering a rape victim to have a complete breakdown and telling them their whole life is ruined is constructive. In fact it’s not essentially different to those cultures that view rape victims as tainted, even to the point of killing them rather than living with the shame.

    2. My hope is that when the media makes the move to the narrative “pedophelia is cool”, that normals will slap them back hard, but it’s not a forgone conclusion anymore and that’s shocking.

      Well, the lack of a huge reaction to their pushing kids into transgenderism is not encouraging here.

      There were many powerful leftists who celebrated with Epstein after he was released.

      This may have something to do with the many powerful leftists who were his clients.

      The irony, as noted by some here, is that the left wants almost all sexual deviancy allowed, but also want ridiculous crap like affirmative consent.

      The left, or at least its low level members want to be able to do whatever they want and have somebody else deal with or at least take the blame for the negative consequences. Hence, it encourages girls to have lots of sex, but since that’s not actually psychologically healthy for them, they can then blame the men for the resulting problems.

      1. The public embrace of transgenderism and medical intervention in its name has staggered me. Has anyone researched whether this is more prevalent in certain demographics? I don’t want to make assumptions.

        1. > The public embrace of transgenderism and medical intervention

          There really isn’t that much embracing going on.

      2. > Well, the lack of a huge reaction to their pushing kids into transgenderism is not encouraging here.

        It’s there. You have to ask yourself: Where are you going to hear about it? Unless you hear it in person, you won’t.

  7. Although the OP is right about pedophilia, it makes the mistake of attributing any sense or logic in the debate on the right. There is no such thing. On the right they are freaked out over Epstein while not so much over Republican nominee Roy Moore who has dated a 14 year old.

    And that is not even that uncommon in the US South (and under the Republican Party).
    “The youngest wedded were three 10-year-old girls in Tennessee who married men aged 24, 25 and 31 in 2001.”
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/200000-children-married-us-15-years-child-marriage-child-brides-new-jersey-chris-christie-a7830266.html

    What makes Epstein really a worthwhile target for all he is now getting is the fact that he ran a sex-trafficking ring with underage girls. That is, he recruited dozens of underage girls into prostitution.

    Compare this to the fate of Roman Polanski, who is still hunted down for having had intercourse with an underage girl that allegedly fooled him into believing she was over the age.

    1. Roman Polanski drugged and repeatedly forcibly raped a girl whose age he knew, over her explicit protests. Statutory rape is merely what he pled it down to.

      1. But Whoopi Goldberg gave him a pass, and a bunch of people in Hollywood are afraid of getting busted themselves, so the leftards have to pretend that he’s wrongly condemned for his desire to drug a girl into submission and ass-rape her.

        1. Most of the Leftists I read are appalled by Roman Polanski and don’t have any belief that he should be treated with kid gloves. In Hollywood, of course, YMMV.

    2. Also, what on earth is wrong with dating a 14-year-old? What objection should we have to it?

      1. American yokels are supposed to uptight about the age of consent, so their cosmopolitan betters have another reason to look down on them. Sure, a lot of the yokels are from southern states that have lower ages of consent than California or New York, and get annoyed with coastal urbanites freaking out about legal adults dating legal minors, but that’s still the role the yokels are supposed to play.

        Roy Moore was known to date teenagers, but the age of consent in Alabama was 16. He was creepy, but being creepy should be no bar to serving in the Senate (nor the Presidency. I used to think otherwise, but the Democrats convinced me other for Bill Clinton, and the way that they won that argument but want me to continue holding my old beliefs when they can use them as a cudgel against my interests is irksome). There’s no credible accusation that Roy Moore dated anyone below the age of consent.

      2. In this day and age, dating implies intention for a sexual relationship. Brigitte Macron at least had the nous to keep it in her pants until Emmanuel turned 18.

        This is why Mary Kay Letourneau had no excuse. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was once a cause célèbre of American liberals with guys like Bill Maher wailing “they’re criminalizing true love!” If that 12-year-old kid really was her soulmate and they were in love, they could wait until he turned 18 before pursuing it. But of course, female paedophiles are seen as somehow okay — it’s only the male paedophiles who need to be dealt with harshly.

        1. >In this day and age,

          I’m not sure it did in Mr. Moore’s (relative) youth and culture. IIRC, he married one of his subsequent dates.

        2. It’s my understanding that MKL married her soulmate.

          The reason for the double standard is that sex itself has very different consequences for men and women. An adult woman who is able to consent to doing something that can get her pregnant is not even close to the same thing as an adult man consenting to doing something that can get an underage girl pregnant.

          But once we accepted feminism’s core premise that men and women are interchangeable, we had to come up with laws that treat these situations the same, even though we know they aren’t.

      3. Even if it’s legal in a particular jurisdiction for a 30-something to date* a 14 year old, it’s still kind of creepy. A lot of people don’t like voting for creepy politicians.

        * – Yes, I’m using “date” as a euphemism here. There’s obviously no laws against social interactions, so I’m referring to the activities that it’s assumed a dating couple gets up to.

    3. @winter

      I know you like to be the devils advocate on this blog but you’ve overstepped the line here. Polanski raped that girl. He pled guilty to the crime and then compounded his crime by fleeing overseas instead of taking his deserved punishment.

      The fact that ever since leftists have been passionately supporting him, while at the same time urging us to shun much milder offences in their opponents, disgusts me.

  8. You don’t have to go back too far in time to when 14 y/o couples were getting married and having families. It seems as though kids matured faster back then…out of firm necessity no doubt.
    Nowadays, I have encountered similarly mature kids. Without fail they are the product of families that do not mollycoddle them, talk to them like adults, give them responsibility, and yes…they are all taught to shoot/hunt.
    Conversely, the children of families that attempt to nerfify the world, shelter the kids from exposure to any form of harm – physical, psychological or imaginary – tend to be immature and childish, regardless of relative age.
    Why wouldn’t we think of them as ‘children’ when so much has been done to infantilize them?

    1. > You don’t have to go back too far in time to when 14 y/o couples were getting married and having families.

      Yeah, you do. https://www.thespruce.com/estimated-median-age-marriage-2303878

      It was incredibly rare that a 14 year old male would get married, especially to a 13 or 14 year old female.

      In fact it was unusual for a 14 year old female to get married unless she was with child. When it did happen it was often due to polygamy, or money changing hands.

  9. I have been working on web sites for Graham Ovenden who if the press are to be believed is a pedophile, however all of the child abuse charges were binned by the judge after the cub reporter covering the case stopped attending. Two of the girls he was alleged to have abused refused to testify on the basis the police had simply fabricated evidence. The original charges are still presented as fact in the newspaper archives, but the only charges eventually presented to the jury related to images taken many years before and which had already been cleared as not being child pornography. Also missing from the press record is the fact that eventually all the images for which Graham served a year in jail for where eventually returned as not being illegal! They are all still showing on the website as the Internet Watch Foundation who is tasked in the UK with policing child abuse and pornography has given them all a clean bill of health … yet we continue to get some quite vile threats despite this. https://graham-ovenden.uk/wiki/AFTERWORD

  10. Moira Greyland’s The Last Closet documents actual Pedophelia and her and her brother’s abuse and in the SciFi-Fantasy. Isaac Asimov’s son was found with a large trove of pictures. Epstine had pictures at his mansion. And Anthony Weiner on his laptop. What are the pictures of?

    For Moira’s story, here is a brief version:
    https://www.menofthewest.net/video-the-last-closet-moira-greyland-peat/

    He MAY be an actual pedophile. That he only actually abused and trafficed post-pubescent teens doesn’t mean his kink wasn’t worse. And there is something more – you can blackmail someone who thinks a young girl is 18, then tell him she is 15. It gets more obvious when there are 8 year olds.

    Beyond that, for over a DECADE, the Catholic church had a problem with “PEDOphile Priests”. And they were almost all homosexual – never mentioned – and post pubescent, but that was called “pedophelia”.

    “Drag Queen Storytime” isn’t aimed at teens.

    Sex is to the left what Guns are to the right. The right to have any kind of (consensual) sex shall not be infringed, and any attempt at limitation is met with court challenges and hate campaigns. Must have abortion, transgender bathrooms, and lower the age of consent.

    We have defacto lowered the age of consent. The “sex ed” is basicallly porn saying go do it, but use a condom if you remember. 14 year olds are getting pregnant and PP is covering up, especially when it is an older man, though they are legally required to report it to authorities – doctors are also required to report gunshot wounds. But they simply don’t. Before, having a kid before marriage (or siring one) was shameful. Now it is a rite of passage. And even transgender – some schools are pushing grade schoolers to transition if a boy tells the counselor he likes to play with dolls.

    Worse than the stretching of words is hypocritical laws – yes, some states raised their age of consent, but then it is mostly ignored. And is a problem with some refugee cultures that consider puberty as young enough for marriage.

    Hollywood, Tech, Literature, Politics, Finance – they all liberals, accept free sex, the younger the better.

    1. > And even transgender – some schools are pushing grade schoolers to transition if a boy tells the counselor he likes to play with dolls.

      Sounds like a new twist on “gender appropriate.” Suggesting that a boy who likes “female activities” become a girl is insane.

      “Gender appropriate” makes no sense to me. Just because I’m female doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy doing “male activities.” And I see no real reason that males can’t enjoy doing “female activities.”

      > some states raised their age of consent, but then it is mostly ignored.

      From what I have seen, it’s partly the relative power of the minor’s parents vs the the power of the perp. Also, it depends on whether the minor’s parents chose to press charges. In high school, one of my classmates was dating – and having sex with – a younger boy. As soon as she turned 18, the boy’s parents persuaded the DA’s office to charge her with felony rape, despite the recommendation from Child Services (who interviewed the boy) to only charge “voluntary misdemeanor sex.” Her lawyer ultimately got the charge down to misdemeanor sexual conduct.

      (The law, in that state, had and still has a close-in-age exception that applied to the situation. But, the boy’s parents had hired experts to contradict Child Services evaluation. The recommended charge has a lower sentence and no registration as a sex offender.)

      1. I never cease to be astonished that the exact same people who have spent decades trying to destroy the ‘tyranny of gender roles’ and how they were purely bullshit, would now have us believe that gender roles are now absolutely prescriptive of actual gender.

        Now a biologically male child seen playing with dolls is now told he is a gender dysmorphic female, because playing with dolls is now BY DEFINITION an absolutely female activity?

        This is utter madness.

        1. It’s not always the exact same people. Radfems remain firmly and bitterly opposed to the idea of innate gender preferences (e.g. playing with dolls or liking soft clothing) that underpins the current transgender craze. The dissonance is entirely with the trendy libfems who have no coherent ideology.

    2. I believe that the left used the term “pedophilia” regarding the Catholic Church scandal as a deliberate weapon to harm the Church. Pedophilia is abhorrent to all, but ephebophilia less so, especially to the left. Also, it lets the left hide the fact that most of the offenders were engaged in homosexual behavior, a behavior sacrosacnt on the left.

      The weapon has been used very successfully – few Americans know that over 80% of the Church “pedophilia” crisis was homosexual statutory rape, and that only a small part was pedophilia.

      Propagandists twist words to effect, and the left in the US are good at this, especially since the media goes along with it.

      1. Could you clarify what you mean by ‘homosexual statutory rape’? It could be taken as you saying the kids involved were consenting.

        1. That’s one problem– there’s no data on whether the boys in question were consenting or not. The majority of the cases up to the 1990’s were boys above the age of 11; after 1990, the majority of the cases were boys above the age of 15 (and out of a much smaller rate of accusations as well). If you look at Milo, as an example, he admits that he was consenting to some, maybe all, of the sexual contact that he had.

          But, here’s problem #2: this is 100% typical of grooming. The abuser can get the kid to “consent”, even actively assist in the abuse, by manipulating the kid’s emotions. Claiming he’s special, that he’s so mature, so handsome, so smart, so ready for this, etc. Withholding emotional support if the kid doesn’t do what the abuser wants. Get the kid to do something he knows is wrong, and hold it over him by slyly making sure he knows he’d be in big trouble if anybody else found out. Get him keeping secrets and lying about little things to “outsiders”. Oh, and drinking or drugs, of course.

          This does permanent damage. It permanently stunts the victim’s ability to trust, to relate responsibly with authority figures (or to be a good authority figure to others), to achieve a deep and stable romantic/sexual relationship and to be a successful parent.

          We’ve made a long detour here, but look, we’re back at Jeffrey Epstein, and what he was up to with all those girls. This is why I don’t have much truck with a distinction between a “pedophile” and an “ephebophile” here. The root of it is, these abusers are manipulating the innate need for, and vulnerability to, a father-figure– either a literal father, or a substitute father (priest/pastor, teacher, coach, mentor, etc.) Society can’t function if this relationship is perverted to the sexual gratification of selfish men (and women) like him. Society can’t function if rich men can get away with this, against poorer men’s daughters.

          1. >The root of it is, these abusers are manipulating the innate need for, and vulnerability to, a father-figure– either a literal father, or a substitute father (priest/pastor, teacher, coach, mentor, etc.)

            Heh. No. Epstein’s girls were preselected for being pubescent, horny, loose, and willing to fuck for money. You don’t need to play I’m-your-daddy mind games with girls like that, it’s way more work than just buying them in whatever denominates their price.

            Now I’ll unpack that…

            I was almost with you until you got to this point, but you lost me here. You correctly describe a characteristic pattern in pedophilic grooming, but ephebophiles are not necessarily doing it at all, because they don’t need to. If you seriously think the kind of post-pubertal soiled angels with histories of prostitution and minor drug busts that Epstein recruited were looking for for a daddy to orbit in the way a pre-pubertal girl would, I can only conclude you’ve never met an example of the type.

            (I have. Had one try to join my coven many years ago. Have run into others. Managed to avoid bedding any of them, because even as a horny adolescent I had a pretty well-developed sense that sticking it in the crazy/dysfunctional is unwise.)

            1. > You don’t need to play I’m-your-daddy mind games with girls like that

              _You_ didn’t need to do this as a horny adolescent, but we don’t know about someone in Epstein’s position. You’re assuming that every single one of these young ladies would be street-smart enough _not_ to get involved emotionally with the guy, but we can’t really know this. Just as it is unwise to stick it in the crazy/dysfunctional, it is _also_ unwise to get involved in some characteristically dysfunctional relationships even, and perhaps especially, with highly charismatic and high-status folks. You knew this as an adolescent, many young ladies probably know this at some level; I’m not sure that all of them do, and that this sort of naïvety wouldn’t be a pre-selecting factor acting on its own.

              1. >_You_ didn’t need to do this as a horny adolescent, but we don’t know about someone in Epstein’s position.

                Yes we do. Dude’s got a ton of money. His least-effort, least-complication tactic is to buy the ones that can be bought with money, rather than spending the time required to fuck with their heads a la pedophilic predator. And this is exactly what he did; we can tell by the qualms the prosecutors had in 2008 when they thought about putting the victims they could find on the stand.

                I can in fact think of a recent case that fits Janet’s model better. Back in May there was cluster of female murder-suicides around a medievalist shop in Germany run by some guy who apparently had these women hypnotized into a state of cult-like devotion. There I will buy the proposition that the head games were a lot like pedophilic grooming.

                But I am pretty sure that’s not the typical case. Post-pubescent girls have too many other handles that are easier to crank.

                Ian Bruene tried to point out that large-age-gap sexual pairing is a strategy with a long history that is accepted as normal in a lot of cultures, including our own until relatively recently. Some girls who aren’t available to be be crudely bought are going to have the “seek security” coefficient in their mate-evaluation function set high enough to seek out successful older men, and some men are going to buy that because those of us with Y chromosomes are in fact wired to be attracted to signals of a nonexistent or short sexual history.

                Thus, relationships we consider creepily ephebophilic are extrema within the range of normal mating behavior rather than requiring something to be perverted in the sexual-targeting circuitry of one or both parties. Which is not to say they shouldn’t be forbidden, but it’s a qualitative difference from pedophilia.

                1. > are going to have the “seek security” coefficient in their mate-evaluation function set high enough

                  But that’s precisely what makes these girls vulnerable to opportunists, sometimes of the dangerous sort. You call it “seek security”, but the underlying psychological machinery _cannot_ tell the difference between genuine benevolent security and mere charisma or superficial charm – not without far more life experience and/or education (of the formal or informal sort) than a young adolescent can reasonably be expected to have!

                  Even those cultures where supposedly-benevolent ephebophilic relationships are normalized have to fall back to exceptionally heavy involvement by the young partner’s parents, shading into outright arranged marriage, _simply to make the whole thing halfway workable!_ (The underlying assumption being of course that the parents will be acting in something close enough to their offspring’s long-term interests, even though the person themselves cannot be expected to). It’s a huge mess.

              2. You’re assuming that every single one of these young ladies would be street-smart enough _not_ to get involved emotionally with the guy, but we can’t really know this.

                Which is an entirely separate issue from whether Mr. Slime was manipulating them in that particular way or not.

                Adolescents get emotionally attached to people they catch a glimpse of once. Stability of mind is not a hallmark of the age range.

                1. Surely you didn’t mean to write “entirely separate” there – if they were emotionally unconcerned, that would make them far more immune to this sort of manipulation!

                  1. Bleh, yes of course.

                    What I mean is that if one of his victims got completely emotionally dependent on him in all the worst ways possible that would not therefore mean that he was deliberately mindfucking them as a means of control. There is even the possibility that he or someone like him would avoid girls like that as a dangerous and unquantifiable risk.

                    Stop it: you are making me defend Jeffery Epstein. There are limits to how devil’s advocate I’m willing to go.

                    1. > There is even the possibility that he or someone like him would avoid girls like that as a dangerous and unquantifiable risk.

                      That does seem incredibly optimistic. People get complacent, and high-status people with clear sociopathic tendencies even more so. Jeffrey Epstein was _already_ doing shady stuff with these girls; “mindfucking” them in that manner, however “deliberately” would merely be a matter of sliding down a highly slippery slope.

    3. >The right to have any kind of (consensual) sex shall not be infringed

      Not really. These days consent isn’t that simple obvious thing that deserves only a side mention in parentheses. Rather they keep inflating the concept of consent until in theory just looking at a woman requires written contract lest it be considered sexual harassment. Thus as the concept of consent gets inflated ultimately all sex becomes non-consensual and then it is up to the state or the elites to decide which cases to prosecute and which not.

      I think their principles, to the extent they have any, do condemn sex with minor girls as in their kind of logic they are not supposed to be able to withstand the immense power of patriarchy to manipulate or pressure them into false consent. Remember, they are saying that if a man is bragging that is rich and powerful and a woman has sex with him and it turns out he lied, it was rape. It’s rather just that these principles get frequently ignored by the Hollywood and similar types, who simply think they are the elites, thus they can get away with ignoring the principles they are professing.

      1. I think it’s important to remember that a lot of the stuff about “consent” is coming out of colleges, which have a unique problem; that of horny young people whose parents are paying for the college to engage in some supervision, plus the willingness to sue, plus experimentation with drinking and drugs, plus the college is frequently built on public land, and privileged (spoiled) young people who drink/drug and wake up with someone they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole are likely to throw tantrums and their parents are likely to sue.

        It seems obvious, when considering these factors, that some kind of puritanism would arise out of colleges, and that it would affect the worldviews of those so propagandized.

  11. “The correct term for this is ‘ephebophile’,”

    If we’re really going to rectify the names, it’s “epheberast” (“?????” being familial love or fondness, while “??????” is desire, sexual attraction, or lust). “Pedophile” (or “paedophile”) is a term invented by politically active pederasts in the 1970s as part of the push for “normalization” that you talk about. Astonishingly to modern ears, for whom the term has, understandably, become synoymous with the older and more correct one, it was intended to make them seem more caring and less like predators.

    The plan, then, backfired, with “-phile” now taking on the connotations of “-erast” in virtually all usage. But it’s wrong, and confuses this and many other issues.

  12. You’re fighting an uphill battle here.

    I think most of the people who read you will get what you’re saying and will accept it.

    I even agree with you and have made this point before.

    But the average American has knows about 20k words, and has about what, 5k words as their working vocabulary? Once you put in all the stuff you need for the various sportsballs, the variety of words for genitals, and for foods you REALLY don’t have a lot left over for being overly specific about what kind of child sexual predator you’re talking about.

    For them the difference between “pedophile” and “ephebophile” isn’t really important. What is important is that Epstein is a predator, and his prey are under age females.

    1. For them the difference between “pedophile” and “ephebophile” isn’t really important. What is important is that Epstein is a predator, and his prey are under age females.

      Then we need to remind “them” that eliding information about degrees of evil is dangerous. Here’s a scenario:

      Boy and girl are both eight. Boy kisses girl on a dare. Girl doesn’t like it (and, let’s be honest, neither does boy, because of the ever-present threat of cooties). In the past, this would have been considered fairly typical child horseplay, perhaps in need of correction from a teacher or the principal. Kids — being kids — don’t know much about personal boundaries and have to learn this stuff as part of their socialization. But today, surveillance cameras are a common feature of schools. So are cops. So the school cop, charged with enforcing the law above all else, decides to go above the principal’s head and report the incident to the district attorney’s office, with the surveillance footage in hand as evidence. The DA is up for re-election next year, and has to make good on his campaign promise to crack down on sexual predators. So he agrees to prosecute the eight-year-old. The boy is arrested, booked, brought before a judge, and sentenced to a term in juvenile hall which will be expunged when he turns 18 — but because of the state Megan’s Law, the eight-year-old must also register as a sex offender, which registration is lifelong and is not expunged when he turns 18. Do you think his sex-offender file will give the circumstances of the case, that he was a kid who kissed a girl on a dare because he was too young and dumb to know the rules about personal boundaries and not caving to peer pressure? Fuck no. It will say:

      OFFENSE: INDCNT ASSAULT MINOR, VICTIM UNDER 14

      The kid wanted to be an astronaut. Now that won’t happen. He may not have much in the way of career prospects outside of “drifter who lives under bridges” — that is, assuming he’s lucky enough to never meet the business end of some vigilante wannabe’s Bowie knife or hunting rifle.

      1. I realize that this is an extreme case compared to Epstein vs. a hardcore paedophile. But if we get into the habit of eliding information about the severity of a misdeed, this is where we’ll end up. Especially when it comes time to hunt some witches.

      2. And that bridge had better not be within 1000 yards of any school or playground, which means it probably isn’t anywhere inside the city limits.

      3. Then we need to remind “them” that eliding information about degrees of evil is dangerous.

        What you’re missing is that they can’t get it. They simply don’t have enough head space for that much complexity along a vector that has so little bearing in their lives.

        It’s like when your hard drive is full–you can’t write any more stuff there until you get rid of some. And with about 75% of the people they REALLY can’t afford to get rid of most of their files.

      4. That sounds like a society turned extremely low-trust. The blind application of laws and rules without regard to common sense, without the ability to make a personal decision, discretion, to look the other way, to throw out the case because it is ridiculous, is the sign of a people who are no longer a people, do not have enough in common to have common sense, and do not trust anyone with the power of making such discretions that do not entirely follow the letter of the law. Of all the actors, it is first and foremost the judge who should have released the boy and probably reprimanded all others to use their brains and follow the intent, not the dumbest possible interpretation of the letter of the law.

        EvoX had this truly great article: https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/increasing-diversity-fascism-the-difficulty-of-enforcing-social-norms-via-rules/ and note the this is not even about diversity in the usual, racial sense, just diversity in the sense of people with different ideas about social norms living together. It is simply impossible to have rules that work well if executed entirely blindly. You need discretionary power, power to look the other way and you need share social norms for that. Her trash bags on porches example is very, very good.

        1. The blind application of laws and rules without regard to common sense, without the ability to make a personal decision, discretion, to look the other way, to throw out the case because it is ridiculous, is the sign of a people who are no longer a people, do not have enough in common to have common sense, and do not trust anyone with the power of making such discretions that do not entirely follow the letter of the law.

          This was the subject of a best-selling book from 1994(!), the death of common sense, which discussed practices all the way back to the first half of the 20th century. When you look past the hilarious (for a non American) examples, you indeed see a society that does not trusts its judges and juries to behave reasonable. The attempt to make the law apply “automatically”, without intervention by human sense, is a real disaster.

          What I find surprising is that 25 years after the appearance of this best selling book, people here are still surprised about the phenomenon.

          THE DEATH OF COMMON SENSE How Law Is Suffocating America
          By Philip K. Howard Random House, 1994

  13. I always like it people make fine distinctions, and this one is important, in that we should certainly be looking at “statutory rape” rather than some other charge.

    But you’re missing the forest for the trees. The real Epstein scandal isn’t the misuse of language, however correct you may be about those details, nor is it in the question of Liberals vs. Conservatives and their differing concepts of pedophilia and consent, however interesting that might be.

    The real scandal is the very, very sweet deal he got after multiple statutory rapes (by an attorney in the Bush Administration in 2008.) Getting distracted by the other issues is very dangerous. Epstein got 13-months, with work release from the beginning, for a case in which the Feds identified 36 victims. If any of us on this blog were arrested for similar crimes, we’d still be in jail and would probably die in jail!

    Yes, language is important. But so is the ability to remain focused on the important aspects of any case, which in this case is the very, very sweet deal and the man who gave him that sweet deal, and attorney named Alex Acosta, who occupied a very high position in government where he might just have given other people similarly sweet deals! You can call it apple pie, or you can call it a malus domestica pastry, but it’s primary characteristics are that it’s rotten and it stinks!

    1. >attorney named Alex Acosta,

      Yeah, I remember reading about Epstein’s non-confinement terms at the time and thinking they stunk.

      But I’ve since looked into the actual fact pattern on this and I don’t think blame lands on Acosta. He reports that he was told to lay off Epstein because “it was an intelligence matter”. Which is uncomfortably plausible; I can easily see the U.S.’s spook-land wanting to use him to collect kompromat on wealthy foreign nationals and not being very bothered if it got handles on Americans as well.

      Also there were things about the principal witnesses at the time that could have come back to sink the case at trial. Supposedly, the lead witness had traded her testimony for leniency on a drug charge and some of the other girls had been busted for prostitution. Again, plausible – if you’re Epstein and recruiting for sex, I’d say a priori that the girls most likely to fall into your net are ones for which landing there is the latest in a string of *ahem* bad lifestyle choices. This is not something a prosecutor wants coming out in the courtroom when swinging at a politically-wired billionaire.

      Acosta resigned today. I’m not exercised about it one way other except for the weary suspicion that the outrage recently over him was mostly a pretense ginned up in hope that some of the mud would stick to Trump. So predictable…

      1. Look at where this is being prosecuted. It’s not *conservatives* pushing this, at this time.

        This is a torpedo put in the water to sink Trump, that is inevitably circling around.

        1. >Look at where this is being prosecuted. It’s not *conservatives* pushing this, at this time.

          No, but there’s a lot of screaming about “pedophilia” on conservative blogs and websites. The point of the OP is that this is yet another case of where conservatives’ addiction to cranking up moral panic to the max is likely to damage their own future effectiveness at fighting something much worse than what they’re currently exercised about.

          1. *cough* Pizzagate *cough*

            Which of course makes me think it was disinformation designed to taint all future allegations of pedophilia against powerful, politically-connected people, as whacko conspiracy theories.

            The above paragraph is, of course, itself a whacko conspiracy theory.

            I denounce myself.

            1. *cough* Pizzagate *cough*

              Which wasn’t actually ever actual discredited. Nor have I seen any better explanation for the underlying evidence. We just had the guy who was apparently a former actor run up to the pizza place with a gun, thus provide an excuse for the powers that be to clamp down hard on anyone talking about it.

              1. Evidence? You mean the “secret dungeon in the basement” of a pizza place that doesn’t even _have_ a basement? Come on, everything we’ve seen about Pizzagate is that sort of garbage.

                1. Well, let’s start with all the references of “pizza” and “cheese” in the leaked emails that clearly we’re referring to pizza or cheese.

      2. After thinking about this for a couple days I think you’re at least half-right on the intelligence issue. Where you may be fully right is on the blackmail issue; it’s not just intelligence services that want in on some good Kompromat.

      3. He reports that he was told to lay off Epstein because “it was an intelligence matter”. Which is uncomfortably plausible; I can easily see the U.S.’s spook-land wanting to use him to collect kompromat on wealthy foreign nationals and not being very bothered if it got handles on Americans as well.

        Or they were told he already *had* pictures of congressmen and former presidents. Afterall, Clinton was on the Lolita Express a couple or three times.

  14. “The real scandal is the very, very sweet deal he got… “

    Yes, but that’s exhibit B.

    Exhibit A is the list of politicians, elites, etc. who participated in his activities with underage girls. I hope, hope, hope that list becomes very public with none of the gut-puking details redacted.

    Exhibit C is whoever was the real power behind Acosta giving him that sweet deal. It likely wasn’t Acosta himself who made that decision (which is not to say he is any less guilty).

    1. My expectation is that anyone who got the orders Acosta got should reply, “Here is my resignation.” Maybe I’m just naive, but that’s how I’d want the conversation to go.

        1. And how the lower echelons get dominated by sociopaths – the knife you’re using cuts both ways and you know it.

          1. >And how the lower echelons get dominated by sociopaths – the knife you’re using cuts both ways and you know it.

            No, it doesn’t. Think process, not events. Modeling this is easy.

            Self-antiselection of underlings by refusal to follow immoral orders implies over time a gradient from the population base rate of psychopaths at the bottom to some multiple of it at the top, with the multiple (or, equivalently, the slope of the gradient) proportional to the frequency with which such orders are issued.

            1. Psychopathy is an anticoncept. Empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for behaving ethically. Consider why normal people don’t even steal insured corporate inventory, even though that would spread the pain so thinly that even the finest mirror neurons could not detect any particular person experiencing any suffering from it. There are other reasons, not empathy, why we are not stealing corporate property.

              Granted, the normal person has an instinctive understanding why torturing people is worse than stealing corporate property and the psychopath might lack it. Might lack the extra factor. But that extra factor is not very big. Children understand empathic rules of ethics like why not pull the cat’s tail while fail to understand other rules of ethics that a require a more intellectual understanding, like why not steal corporate property. Psychopaths or people who lack empathy have it the exact other way around than children, lack the instinctive understanding 4 years olds have about why not pull the cat’s tail, while do have all the other, more “intellectual” or rule-driven ethical inhibitions that people develop between 4 years old and adulthood.

              Empathy alone leads to a primitive, childish and very narrow understanding of ethics. It is not a big deal for a well-raised, intelligent adult to lack this. We aren’t normally relying on it much.

              1. > Psychopathy is an anticoncept. Empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for behaving ethically.

                You’d think this, but you’d be wrong! Empathy is part of the basic psychological machinery that you need to be born with if you’re to end up with a theory of mind that’s highly-developed enough to let an agent seek _win-win_ outcomes with other agents as a matter of course, instead of clumsily trying to get what she wants by resorting to generalized cajoling or outright exploitation (as psychopath do – and yes, they are far clumsier than you would think in how they act wrt. others! They just do it all the time, and get used to it.).

                Pithily, psychopaths lack _both_ empathy of the “common sense” sort, and what Adam Smith called the _natural_ human tendency to “truck, barter and trade”. The _latter_ impairment is what affects them the most in practice and makes them so hard to reform. They emotionally regard the world as populated by manipulative people that they have to get the better of, _not_ other agents they might want to cooperate with. They have trouble pursuing their own self-interest in ways that we would consider rational, and they don’t even trust us when we try to teach them, say via CBT.

                1. WTF. People normally do not behave ethically because they seek win-win outcomes. You are assuming very independent and imaginative agents. 99% of ethical behavior is “I was not raised so.” Doing what were told.

                  1. The typical psychopath was not _raised_ to torture kittens, set stuff on fire, steal from others, etc. etc. Yet that’s the sort of stuff many of them do, starting from a rather early age. So I’m not sure how your reply is supposed to address my point. Whether we realize it or not, we do in fact seek win-win outcomes when we interact with others, as a general rule. We do this to such an extent that we think of it as remarkable when people _don’t_ !

        2. Thing is that you either resign, get fired, or essentially *become* a sociopath.

    1. I do not think jumping jailbait is a hanging matter, unless it’s rape. Public humiliation and a prison term will suffice.

      1. I agree with you that precision in language is valuable, regardless of how you rate things on a moral, ethical, or legal scale. Regardless of how serious you consider Epstein’s crimes to be they are not the _same_ as the crimes committed by someone who sexually abuses a pre-pubescent child.

        That said, I think they are very serious, even compared to most cases of adults having sex with minors.

        First, if Jennifer Araoz’s accusations are to be believed (and given the context I think them credible) Epstein did in fact forcibly rape minors. And if Epstein forcibly raped one girl I would bet dollars to doughnuts he forcibly raped others. I wouldn’t suggest hanging him, but based on what he seems to have done given what we currently know if the 66-year-old Epstein receives what amounts to a life sentence I won’t consider it unjust.

        Second, while I think that talk about power differences is sometimes taken so far it becomes twaddle that doesn’t mean that the idea should be discounted entirely. There is a big difference between an eighteen-year-old guy meeting and having sex with a consenting fifteen-year-old girl (not that I’m saying that is OK) and a very wealthy older man exercising his wealth and influence to, with the help of confederates, prey on and manipulate dozens of vulnerable and impressionable young girls in a systematic fashion. Especially given how he seems to have kept young girls on his island in a way that put them entirely in his power.

        I was a very precocious kid, at least physically and intellectually (emotionally perhaps not so much.) When I was still fourteen I dated (and pretty much lived with, for a while) a woman who was eighteen. You could say that she was jumping jailbait (though I’d think it a bit odd if you did) but I think it would have been unjust to penalize her in any way for it, and I would consider that situation entirely different from what Epstein is alleged to have done.

        1. >First, if Jennifer Araoz’s accusations are to be believed (and given the context I think them credible) Epstein did in fact forcibly rape minors.

          That is information I did not have, and does indeed raise the level of evil in Epstein’s behavior towards that of actual pedophiles.

          I still think the ephebophile/pedophile distinction is important, but it’s swamped by the forcible rape angle.

          >Second, while I think that talk about power differences is sometimes taken so far it becomes twaddle that doesn’t mean that the idea should be discounted entirely.

          I’m certainly not going to disagree with you in Epstein’s case. Even if the rape allegations are entirely false, Epstein’s ability to exert power over his girls, and the determination with which he sought that power, has a very nasty edge to it.

          However, I also think in the more usual sort of older-man/younger-woman relationship it’s not wise to jump to conclusions about the direction of the power asymmetry. A while back I was quite struck by an article about a site that arranged matchups between …um…I think its terms were “sugar daddies” and “sugar dolls”. Essentially it was female students renting themselves to older men as mistresses to cover their college costs.

          The (female) reporter examined several such relationships and discovered that quite often the sugar doll was writing the rules of engagement, with the older man having become quite pathetically entangled in a relationship he no longer controlled. I believed this because I once directly observed a similar dynamic in a relationship between a 19-year-old woman and a 42-year-old man; she pursued him, she used him, and the end of the affair left him emotionally damaged in a way from which I never saw him fully heal.

          1. “A while back I was quite struck by an article about a site that arranged matchups between …um…I think its terms were “sugar daddies” and “sugar dolls”.”

            If Epstein had limited himself to sugar babies over the age of 18 we wouldn’t be having this conversation and he would be a free man. I might think the sugar thing a bit skeevy, but if an adult young woman wants to trade her favors for rent, tuition, and trips to exotic locales it’s none of my business is it?

            Epstein, on the other hand, exploited very young girls. A fourteen-year-old girl is still a child, impressionable and manipulable in ways she won’t be even at seventeen.

            1. >If Epstein had limited himself to sugar babies over the age of 18 we wouldn’t be having this conversation and he would be a free man.

              Indeed. I think you may have misunderstood what I was driving at. I was saying that in less aberrant, more statistically typical older-man/younger-woman relationships with a significant age gap, it can be unwise to jump to conclusions about who has the power.

              I did not mean to imply any doubt that Epstein held a disturbing degree of power over his girls, and apologize for any confusion.

              1. Oh, please don’t apologize- I don’t think I misunderstood you, and I wasn’t disagreeing with you. I think we’d agree that young women’s sexuality gives them a fair bit of power in many cases, power that they ought to take responsibility for.

                And I think we also agree that this is not very relevant when it comes to cases like Epstein’s.

          2. A long time ago my fifteen-year-old little sister started dating my twenty-eight-year-old housemate. My first instinct was to kill him, but I talked with my sister and realized that she was going to be “dating” someone no matter what I did. He was a nice guy, so… I didn’t kill him.

            My mother’s instinct was to call the cops, but I convinced her that would be a bad idea. Eventually he lived with them for a while, and eventually my little sister broke his heart.

            I told him that would happen- “She’s fifteen man. You talk about getting married, but she’s just going to dump you one day.” Poor fellow.

          3. I’ve read numerous reports from such women (some of whom explicitly identify as prostitutes) that bears this out. Men who fall for much younger women can be naive, no match for the ruthlessness of youth. One of the reasons I don’t support #MeToo is because it demands we always categorise the woman as prey and helpless victim.

            1. On a similar topic, I always have a WTF?? reaction to these articles portraying johns (i.e., customers of prostitutes) as vicious predators. Most johns are the dorkiest, least alpha males you’d ever meet–which is why they have to pay for sex. It’s probably more common by at least 100:1 for a john to be robbed by a prostitute than for him to harm her physically.

              1. I’m sure that there’s a lot of variation; it would be quite weird if people with sexually predatory tendencies _didn’t_ sometimes patronize sex workers! These articles have a point; since prostitution itself has been made illegal in most of the U.S., a sex worker has a lot of trouble seeking justice when she _is_ victimized by an abusive customer. And this in itself is what creates the incentive for an extra-legal “protection” racket, much like in the drug trade.

  15. When was the last time Conservatives (as a group) showed intelligence where sex is concerned?

  16. To “rectify names” in this case, you need to dig deeper. “Age of consent” and definition of “pedophile” are red herrings. Why did Roy Moore get a free pass?

    What was Socrates accused of? Why was he sentenced to drink the hemlock? The charge was “corrupting the youth”.

    That is what angers people about Epstein. Judge Roy Moore was looking for a wife; he found one, and made a family with her. Epstein, on the other hand, was corrupting the future wives and mothers of the nation, effectively taking them out of the breeding pool.

    People are angry about slow-burn genocide, where you kill off a people by limiting their reproduction. If you can’t castrate them, you can make them unattractive in their behavior and attitudes. First thing a pimp does is get his girls hooked on dope if they aren’t already hooked. No sane man wants to wife that up. Pedophilia is a type of corruption of youth; it is an insidious one. The child may think it wants the sex, but in almost every case of child abuse I can think of, the child grew up to have disfunctional relationships and low fertility.

    Pedophilia isn’t just a crime against the individual; it is a crime against society.

    The best technology in the world won’t win a war for an army that can’t get enough fresh recruits. Look at Pyrrhus of Epirus against the Romans. Rome had high fertility on its side. Pyrrhus had technology and skill on his. Corruption of youth is the slow death of a nation.

    Therefore, any pimp, is an enemy of the state and should suffer a traitors death.

      1. >Roy Moore didn’t get a free pass. You can tell by the fact that you didn’t call him “Senator Roy Moore”.

        TBH, I didn’t like either Roy Moore or his politics, but I still think he was probably innocent. That whole affair just reeked of fraudulent political hatchet job. The GOP’s failure to back him up seems like yet another shameful episode in a long history of spinelessness.

        1. I don’t know that Moore was innocent, but -That whole affair just REEKED of fraudulent political hatchet job- indeed. I don’t think the centrist GOP is spineless, they just work for the D party.

        2. That, and Moore seemed to be his own worst enemy when trying to deal with the media attack.

          Of course, having most of his party associates unfriending him probably didn’t help things.

          1. That, and Moore seemed to be his own worst enemy when trying to deal with the media attack.

            So you are saying that he was a completely ordinary and unremarkable Conservative?

      2. > You can tell by the fact that you didn’t call him “Senator Roy Moore”.

        From what I heard – surprisingly from a leftist news commentator – Democrats ran an ad campaign, in the guise of a fictitious, far right organisation, praising Roy Moore for his support. The idea being to drive moderates to vote against him.

        If this is true, then his election loss is tangential.

  17. Because the distinction between what Epstien did and pedophilia is clearly the most important example of a confused linguistic map these days.</sarcasm>

    Seriously, the way I see your attempt to promote the distinction between ephebophilia and pedophilia playing out is leftist agreeing and arguing that ephebophilia isn’t as bad. Then using the remaining ambiguity over the what a “child” is to leverage acceptance of ephebophilia into pedophilia.

    1. Seriously, the way I see your attempt to promote the distinction between ephebophilia and pedophilia playing out is leftist agreeing and arguing that ephebophilia isn’t as bad.

      Most straight men, when shown sexualized images of post-pubescent women will exhibit at least some signs of sexual excitement. Those same men, when shown similar images of pre-pubescent girls show no sexual excitement.[1]

      Engaging in sexual activity with a pre-pubescent child is often *physically* dangerous for the child. Not so for the post-pubescent.

      Most men find young women attractive. Most porn stars are young women–and note these days the preference for the razor-shaved genitals.

      So yeah, I would say that pederasty is worse than epheberasty, at least in the sense that melanomas are worse than basal cell carcinomas.

      [1] As a side note, I know someone who used to work for the FBI in the deparment that

      1. As a side note, I know someone who used to work for the FBI in the [department] that

        That…?

  18. Holy shirtballs I never knew he was this big of a sexist, homophobic, pedophile apologist right wing grasshole! You are a terrible human being.

  19. I think you should clarify that not all gay people are pedophiles.

    I also think you should try and take you own proposed lession to heart: saying that getting people normalized to having Gay people around is part one of a plan to get people normalized to haveing Gay pedophiles around, clearly indicates that you have little to no understanding of the LGBTQ community, and think people are just plain stupid.

    Nobody is gonna stand for Pedophiles, gay or otherwise, and you need to wise up before accusing an entire community of being Pedophiles.

    1. I think you may be the one who has to clarify their claim. I reread the OP carefully but could not find anything that could be construed as “all homosexuals are pedophiles”.

    2. >I think you should clarify that not all gay people are pedophiles.

      Well, now, the two-word phrase “homosexual pedophiles” would hardly be necessary if one category entailed the other, would it?

      The plan I’m referring to isn’t the entire gay subculture’s, of course, and I didn’t say it was. Are you denying that there is a pro-pedophilia faction within that culture? No sale, I’ve read the FBI report on the symbology and code phrases they use.

      You can back-read their strategy from the occasional pedophilia-ain’t-so-bad think pieces that float to the surface where mere heterosexuals can see them. I mean, it isn’t like it’s any different from the simple, obvious long-term plan I’d be running if I had their objectives.

      1. Yes I deny it.

        The idea that the LGBTQ has embraced pedophiles is a smear campaign run by far-right extremists to demonize LGBTQ people. It’s not true and never has been.

        1. >Yes I deny it.

          OK, disconnected from reality, then. Not much I can do about that. Dude, the pedophile subculture has its own jewelry. That says wealth and organization and a persistent network.

          >The idea that the LGBTQ has embraced pedophiles

          Did I say that in this thread? Did anyone say that? Your indignation is making you dimwitted. Non-pedophilic gays don’t have to “embrace” the gay pedophiles for the pedophiles to be using the larger group to move the Overton window towards “pedophile tolerance”. They just have to not notice or not care that it’s happening, and not try to stop it.

          To be honest I do think there is some “embracing” going on, at least in the sense that many gays have adopted a metalevel stance that all sexual minorities however weird (including pedophiles) are victims of oppression by the Normals and thus presumptively virtuous. But that indulgence by other gays isn’t necessary for the pedophiles’ normalization campaign to work; after all, gays are only 1.6% of the population.

          No, the game the pedophiles are trying to win is convincing a much larger group – the establishment Left that controls the media and pop culture – that being “pedophobic” is bigoted and wrong for exactly the same reasons that being “homophobic” is bigoted and wrong. I believe that they believe that they can replicate gay activists’ success at changing social and legal norms to the point where if a Christian baker refuses to bake a pedophile a cake the government will step in and sue the baker into oblivion.

          And hey, they might be right. Those skids have been pre-greased – the successful gay-lib campaign did that, whether intentionally or not. Everybody knows the script. I think I could write the pro-pedophilia propaganda of five or ten years from now, put it in a vault, and there would come a day when you could set my anticipation beside what’s hot off the presses and not easily be able to tell the difference.

          1. And hey, they might be right. Those skids have been pre-greased – the successful gay-lib campaign did that, whether intentionally or not. Everybody knows the script. I think I could write the pro-pedophilia propaganda of five or ten years from now, put it in a vault, and there would come a day when you could set my anticipation beside what’s hot off the presses and not easily be able to tell the difference.

            The Great Failing of the Conservatives (aside from achieving perfection in worthlessness as culture warroirs), is that they all too often instinctively understand that something is wrong and part of why. But their inability to articulate it makes them sound bonkers. Sadly their failing is now being inflicted on the civilization they claimed to be defending.

            This is of course part of why Jordan Peterson is able to tap into such a hunger for wisdom: he is… not so much providing, as illuminating the path towards long overdue reasons Why.

      2. Where do heterosexual pedophiles fit into this? Are they that much more rare, or are they just more hidden and less organized than homosexual pedophiles? Or are they quietly fellow-traveling and letting the homosexual pedophiles take point?

        1. In practices, they do seem to be quite uncommon. Pedos target pre-pubertal _kids_ who lack secondary sex characteristics – as such, this can be expected to make them rather indifferent to the victims’ actual sex. In practice though, they find it easier to prey on male kids, so that’s whom they go for.
          Even the phrase “homosexual pedophiles” may be somewhat of a misnomer for _this_ reason – it seems to be a matter of convenience, not sex-specific orientation. It’s an understandable simplification on ESR’s part however, because even pederasty (sex in a _active_ role with post-pubertal males) was very commonly pursued in a similar manner, and still is _outside_ the modern West – the latter has somehow managed to develop a set of uniquely-egalitarian and agency-respecting memeplexes around the “LGBT” sphere that have few or no equivalents elsewhere, or in the historical record.

        2. >Where do heterosexual pedophiles fit into this? Are they that much more rare, or are they just more hidden and less organized than homosexual pedophiles? Or are they quietly fellow-traveling and letting the homosexual pedophiles take point?

          My knowledge is limited, but here is what I think I can say.

          The FBI report on pedophile symbology strongly implies that homosexual and heterosexual pedophiles are networked with each other – otherwise they wouldn’t need or use recognition signals like jewelry with common motifs.

          If I were a heterosexual pedophile, I would be all about letting the homosexuals take point. They’re better positioned for it; the homosexuals-are-holy-victims narrative prevalent in the press and overclass gives them a degree of immunity during attempts to push the Overton window that no het pedophile will ever have.

          I don’t have data about relative numbers. There’s a claim running around that homosexual vs. heterosexual pedophile isn’t a meaningful distinction, with pedophiles being relatively indifferent to the sex of their targets – I’ve heard this from people who had intervention training from supposed clinical experts. If they’re right, “relative numbers” isn’t even meaningful – “pedophile” is a (rare) primary orientation of its own. Lacking any counter-evidence, I used to believe this.

          I stopped believing it when I noticed that the record of priestly pedophilic and ephebophilic abuse within the Catholic church doesn’t split anything like 50/50, it is overwhelmingly one of homosexual abuse by men who identify as homosexuals. (As someone else pointed out upthread, if you don’t know this it’s because the press has been covering it up – holy victim narrative, which see.)

          So either that sample of the general pedophile/ephebophile population is is badly skewed in some way I don’t understand, or the general population of pedophiles/ephebophiles is predominantly homosexually oriented. I don’t know for sure that the latter is the case, but…when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.

          After I thought about this for a while I developed a generative hypothesis about it. Your limbic system has somewhere in it a representation of your ideal sexual target. The evolutionary design, the normality, of that representation is very clear; it wants you to make more babies. If you’re targeting anything but people you can make babies with, it’s damaged. (You may not experience this as damage, but that’s irrelevant.)

          So, the skew in priestly ephebophila/pedophilia is elegantly explained if damage is damage and all forms of sexual-targeting deviance are significantly co-morbid. Until recently this culture had a folk category of “sex pervert” without a lot of fine distinctions among types; I now think this has more correspondence to neurological reality than I used to assume.

          Mind you, this doesn’t mean I think all “perverts” exhibit all forms of deviance. It’s more like the situation with drugs where there is way more cross-addiction to multiple drugs than one would expect if (say) caffeine and nicotine stimulate different reward systems.

          1. > So either that sample of the general pedophile/ephebophile population is is badly skewed in some way I don’t understand

            Surely the general lack of women in the priesthood would be expected to be a factor – as would the priests’ enforced unmarried status and norms of celibacy (making pursuit of unsanctioned sex from outside the priesthood inherently risky from a social POV)? You might as well wonder why “homosexuality” is so common among male prisoners… Are you sure that you don’t have your horses and zebras backwards?

            1. Surely the general lack of women in the priesthood would be expected to be a factor – as would the priests’ enforced unmarried status and norms of celibacy (making pursuit of unsanctioned sex from outside the priesthood inherently risky from a social POV)? You might as well wonder why “homosexuality” is so common among male prisoners… Are you sure that you don’t have your horses and zebras backwards?

              If group membership were causative – even statistically – one would expect non-normal sexuality in any group that filters and sequesters its members in similar ways, unless something about that filters out such deviancy.

              A list of selective groups, OTTOMH:

              * Boy Scouts
              * Girl Scouts
              * US armed services
              * subsets thereof (Rangers, SEALs, etc.)
              * Kiwanis
              * Knights of Columbus
              * monasteries
              * nunneries
              * college fraternities
              * police academies
              * space station crew
              * fishing crew

              1. None of these groups have to make a promise that they won’t have sex with women *ever*.

                My view is that the heavy, difficult vow of celibacy tends to attract men who think they bear it lightly because they have little attraction to women, they think they are kinda asexual, but only later on they find out they are gay/pedo.

                While the *ideal* of priestly celibacy is historically fairly early, it’s actually effective enforcement happened fairly late in the Middle Ages. Compare: vegetarianism has always been a Christian ideal, but it never got enforced outside some monastic communities.

                I think from that on the Church tended to attract many non-gay, non-pedo but low-testosterone men too. I think this is why they could not crush Luther. Protestants attracted “ballsier” men, who found a celibate life an unacceptable proposal. And they were generally tougher and everything T predicts.

            2. >Are you sure that you don’t have your horses and zebras backwards?

              Yes. I thought this one all the way through.

              Priests aren’t like prisoners, isolated from women and thus compelled by circumstances to seek sexual release with other men. They have as about as much access to female prepubescents as they do to males. Enforced unmarried status and norms of celibacy should exhibit about equal counterpressure on overtures to either. And yet when they target child and adolescent victims their choices are overwhelmingly homosexual.

              If pedophilia were a third primary orientation you’d expect their victim choice to be less skewed to one sex, and you’d expect lots of reports of severe recidivists having molested both boys and girls. This is not what we see.

              You can also account for the data by supposing that while pedophilia is not a primary orientation the general population of priests skews heavily gay to begin with, so the pedophile subset is almost all gay pedophiles. The problem is that only means something if the general pedophile/ephebophile population doesn’t skew homosexual, which is exactly what we don’t know. Assuming it doesn’t seems awfully like handwaving in unobservables to avoid an unpleasant conclusion.

              (Statistics in this area are thin, because child abuse seems to be heavily underreported – pretty much anything we think we know about pedophiles could be an artifact of sampling bias. Also politically fraught, so they get screwed with.)

              1. “They have as about as much access to female prepubescents as they do to males”

                I’m not so sure about that. The Roman Catholic Church has historically been reluctant to grant roles to women and I’m not aware of any traditional lay role for girls.Whereas boys could join the choir or be altar boys or the like. The highly publicised male-on-male pedophilia found in priests may be an artefact of access.

                From what I’ve read, and from training received in a job at an organisation dealing with such issues, male-on-female pedophilia is believed to be much more common but well hidden within families. It’s a different model of predation.

                1. >The Roman Catholic Church has historically been reluctant to grant roles to women and I’m not aware of any traditional lay role for girls.Whereas boys could join the choir or be altar boys or the like.

                  What makes you think priests only have contact with kids who have formal “lay roles” in the church? I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic schools and that assumption seems just silly to me.

                  1. I was raised Catholic and *didn’t* go to catholic school. The priests had VERY limited access outside of the servers, and those (as noted below) were limited to boys through 1983.

                  2. I didn’t say those were the only kids they had access to. I am only familiar with the Australian situation but here our Catholic schools tend to have brothers, not priests, and most of the cases of abuse by priests did target boys who were actively involved in the church.

                    1. >I am only familiar with the Australian situation but here our Catholic schools tend to have brothers, not priests, and most of the cases of abuse by priests did target boys who were actively involved in the church.

                      In the U.S. it’s very different. At the Catholic high school I went to in Pottstown PA the teaching staff was all priests and nuns. That was in the 1970s but I believe this is still typical. So we have relatively large numbers of priests who are in daily contact with and authority over children of both sexes.

                      According to one major report on the problem, there were 10,667 reported victims (younger than 18 years) of clergy sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002; of these, 81% were male and 19% female. That’s 2026 female victims, which is way more than is plausible without daily contact with children and teenagers who didn’t have a formal church role.

              2. > They have as about as much access to female prepubescents as they do to males.

                Not quite.

                Until 1983 “Altar Girls” were not allowed. There would have been some access in catholic school situations, but not nearly as much as in the broader community.

              3. We know a lot more about ephebophiles than about pedophiles. Homosexual pedophiles might be a majority or supermajority of all pedophiles. Or not. We don’t know.

                But the idea that the overwhelmingly homosexual ephebophile priests are representative of ephebophiles in general would mean that heterosexual ephebophiles like Jeffrey Epstein are rare outliers. And that doesn’t pass the laugh test.

                It’s possible, even probable, that homosexuals are overrepresented among ephebophiles. But not by that much.

                1. >But the idea that the overwhelmingly homosexual ephebophile priests are representative of ephebophiles in general would mean that heterosexual ephebophiles like Jeffrey Epstein are rare outliers. And that doesn’t pass the laugh test.

                  That is true. But the interesting question is whether overwhelmingly homosexual priests are a representatiive population of pedophiles – that’s what’s relevant to the question of whether all forms of sexual targeting disorder are co-morbid. For this purpose we want to treat ephebophilia as noise to be masked out.

                  Looking back, I see I wrote the comment you’re replying to badly and in some places pointed at both categories where I only intended one. So let me run through the reasoning again, with some concrete figures I didn’t have last time.

                  I used to believe the model that pedophiles are relatively indifferent to the sex of their victims. Then I noticed that priestly abuse of children and adolescents has been overwhelmingly homosexual – according to the John Jay report, the split between 1950 and 2002 was 81% to 19%.

                  Again according to the John Jay report, 22.6% were age 10 or younger, 51% were between the ages of 11 and 14, and 27% were between the ages to 15 to 17 years. So we’re looking at a very high percentage of pedophilic incidents – over 77% if puberty in boys were at 14, which isn’t average now but was pretty close to average in the 20th century. This will be slightly off because menarche averages sooner, but the report also mentions that the average age of abused girls was lower, which is consistent with predominantly pedophilic rather than ephebophilic targeting.

                  Under the least hypothesis (each pedophilic abuser responsible for a roughly equal number of incidents) about 77% of the priests were pedophiles and the minimum likely skew toward homosexuality in the pedophile priests comes out to 62% = 81% * 77%. I think I’m missing a correction for unequal victim populations that would pull that estimate higher, but 62% is high enough to make the point I’m after.

                  Which is this: in the general population male homosexuals are about 1.6% That means that, in order to believe that homosexual pedophiles are as low as 50% in the general pedophile population, you have to believe that homosexuals are overrepresented in the priesthood by more than a factor of 30! As your guess at overrepresentation falls to a more plausible level, that percentage must rise.

                  ADDENDUM: I note that this analysis tells us nothing about female pedophiles. But pedophilia is almost exclusively a problem of males; estimates of the female incidence run from 1% to 6%.

                  1. My expectation would be that given Catholic opposition to homosexuality that plenty of homosexuals take holy orders in the hope that God will cure them of their urges (this is obviously irrational thinking, but typical of the highly religious.) From there the journey to “I have easy access to the altar-boy isn’t a long one, unfortunately. So it may be that homosexuality is a primary driver towards chosing the priesthood.

                    The sad thing is that the Catholics have access to a lot of intellectual firepower, and they could have studied this…

                    1. I think they don’t know they have homosexual urges. All they know is they have little desire for women which makes them expect they would relatively easily bear the burden of celibacy. This is why the problem is unknown in other forms of Christianity that have no celibacy requirement. Then they learn later on that they have those urges.

                      Hoping God will purge them of their urges if they take the holy orders sounds like something uneducated Fundies would think, not Caths who have a rather sophisticated philosophy and think God does miracles very rarely,they think most of the time God’s will is expressed in the laws of nature without any direct intervention, so to resist the siren song of sin is mostly up to them.

                  2. < you have to believe that homosexuals are overrepresented in the priesthood by more than a factor of 30!

                    And there are a lot of people, and some evidence to back this up, that make this claim.

                    1. >And there are a lot of people, and some evidence to back this up, that make this claim.

                      Doesn’t pass the smell test for me.

                      You got a pointer to some evidence?

                    2. “You got a pointer to some evidence?”

                      This is rather uncontroversial. I have a Catholic background and the number floating around last century was ~50% of clergy and monks/nuns.

                      It seems to be higher in the Vatican:
                      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/12/four-in-five-vatican-priests-are-gay-book-claims

                      Homosexuality is not even a problem for the church. Only acting on it. The Netherlands had a well respected bishop (Bär) that told the world he was gay, but celibate.

                    3. >This is rather uncontroversial. I have a Catholic background and the number floating around last century was ~50% of clergy and monks/nuns.

                      Unfortunately, that’s not a specific enough number to work with. We’d have to know the specific number for male clergy. Otherwise we’d be led astray by substantial differences in (a) percentage of male gays vs lesbians in the general population, and (b) ratio of male to female religious. I did some modeling and the estimate we’re looking for is sensitive to small differences in those figures.

                      I can readily believe the Vatican 4-in-5 claim, but that’s credible because there is pretty good evidence that a “pink mafia” has been favoring gay clergy in church promotions. Which makes that number a bad guide to conditions elsewhere: in fact, a concentration of gay clergy in the Vatican would make a ratio above 30:1 less likely at the lower levels where the abuse has been going on, which in turn would actually raise the consequent we’re looking for.

                    4. Just an anecdote in support of the 50% figure: I know a woman with a day job where she works with Jesuit priests. She once claimed that there were not a lot of gay Jesuits around, as only 50% of the people she works with are gay.

                      She did not take well to us telling her that 50% gay is much higher than normal.

          2. How do you square this with the repeated reports coming out about school teachers–mostly female–having sex with (mostly) young males?

            1. >How do you square this with the repeated reports coming out about school teachers–mostly female–having sex with (mostly) young males?

              Every such case I can think of is ephebophilia, and so has no bearing on whether pedophiles are predominantly homosexually oriented.

          3. “So either [the Catholic Priest] sample of the general pedophile/ephebophile population is badly skewed in some way I don’t understand, or the general population of pedophiles/ephebophiles is predominantly homosexually oriented.”

            Except that we already know that the general population of ephebophiles is not predominantly homosexual, and therefore that the Catholic Priest sample of the general ephebophile population is badly skewed.

            I’m inclined to believe that the pedophile priest sample is skewed the same way the ephebophile priest sample is skewed. But that’s because I’m inclined to believe that pedophiles have a hetero/homo split similar to ephebophiles, and I know that if I use either belief to defend the other, I’ll be sucked into making a circular argument. But that cuts the other way as well, if you’re inclined to believe that pedophile priests are representative of pedophiles more generally.

            1. >Except that we already know that the general population of ephebophiles is not predominantly homosexual

              How do we know this?

    3. “Homosexual” and “gay” are modern, WEIRD concepts. Go back to Ancient Greece, or heck go to present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still think that “not all gay people” (or rather, males-who-sex-males) “are pedophiles”? Maybe, but it does get harder to make that case doesn’t it? “Homosexuality” as we know it today in the West (starting late 19th century) was one of the greatest wins against pervasive, hypermasculine rape culture in the history of human societies. It’s also a remarkably fragile one, which benevolent gay people should stand ready to defend at all costs. “Sexual liberation” is not always 100% socially beneficial, even many people on the left will tell you that.

  20. Fighting back smarter is almost always more successful than fighting dumber, and the use of accurate language has many advantages in addition to conveying high intelligence. Unfortunately, Progressives (and their allies in the media) simply ignore such tactics and the average citizen is often intimidated by esoteric language.

    Nevertheless, your comment could find traction in our current culture if deployed in an effective fashion. Trump loves impromptu pressers and he could conduct a two sentence primer on the proper use of language which might then resonate. In a related context, Epstein is fundamentally an apex predator in our modern affluent society in which wealth substitutes for brute strength. His power derives from blackmail leverage on highly influential people and words alone are a weak counterattack.

  21. I’m all for accurate descriptions of reality, but when an Epstein-esque situation occurs and your first instinct is to “rectify the names”, you send out the message that you’re more concerned about making sure that a class of people we’ve decided are dangerous to children aren’t lumped in with another group of people that we’ve decided are dangerous to children. Regardless of whether it’s true or not, it shows a greater concern for people who harm children (and yeah, I get that the word “child” is overloaded, but I’m using the legal definition) than the children themselves, and that makes it basically impossible to have the conversation. If this is an important distinction to make (and I question if it is on anything more than pedantic grounds), it’s worth not trying to derail actual discussions about ways to actually prevent the harm. In essence, it’s like piping up that a particular murder’s cause of death was a broken neck instead of strangulation. There’s absolutely a difference, but it’s subtle and irrelevant in the discussion of how to prevent humans from being put in the noose in the first place.

    1. > it shows a greater concern for people who harm children

      It shows no such thing, of course. What it actually shows is a clear awareness that people _will_ be raising such concerns at some point in the future (however speciously!) _whether we like it or not_. These apologists _are_ around, and many among them are politically powerful (heck, maybe the Epstein case itself ought to be proof enough of _that_!) – so this sort of clear-headed prioritization work is _essential_ if we are to effectively fight and counter the _most_ unsavory and most highly dangerous types first and foremost. ESR is making his argument admirably clear in his post – he would have no chance in hell of convincing anyone otherwise, given how incredibly sensitive this issue is.

  22. ESR:

    Part of the problem is that many “conservatives” are either (a) grifters who don’t give a rat’s ass about conservative (or libertarian–the misappropriation of *that* word is worthy of a whole other post by itself) politics; or (b) active infiltrators like David Frum or Bill Kristol who are trying to destroy the right from within.

    One good result of the Trump presidency is that at least group (b) is mostly out of the closet now. Contrary to common belief, there is no guarantee that society will keep moving to the Left; that may be as temporary a condition as the growing power of the USSR was in the 1970s. Having said that, honest people on the Right–be they of the conservative or libertarian variety–need to take a long hard look at unlearning some of the things we’ve been told by Conservatism Inc. (or Libertarianism Inc.–see the Koch brothers). For instance, the idea that we should, in addition to (correctly) rejecting pacifism, always be gung-ho for whatever war the ruling class is trying to push on us needs to go. War is necessary in some cases; it is rarely a net positive, not so much because PEOPLE DIE!!!!!!! (they do anyway) as because it tends to be a huge negative for personal freedom.

    Another thing that has been pushed that we should be more skeptical about: Mitt Romney’s “47 percent”; that is, the idea that people who have received more government aid than they have paid in taxes are goners who are firm voters for socialism and will be from here on out. Romney was quoting a common meme on the online Right at the time, but he, like they, was full of shit.

    First of all, I can’t begin to describe just how insulting this sounds to many working class people who have fallen on hard times. The reason the number was increasing at the time wasn’t because of some huge moral decay among those decadent poor people who’d rather have sex on meth than work for a living. Rather, it was increasing in the late 2000s and early 2010s because *there was a huge recession at the time.* Because there was a fatalism that those 47 percent were On The Other Side forever, the general feeling was that we were fighting a losing battle and had to make compromises. (This is why you had Cuckold Mitch Daniels calling for a surrender, I’m sorry, a “truce” in the culture wars).

    In fact, the truth was almost 180 degrees away from this formulation. Many of the *real* 47 percent were desperately looking for a candidate who could end the Bush/Obama recession; Romney, by quoting a popular but unexamined and incorrect meme, convinced them that he was not that man. In fact, the most virulently leftist psychopaths generally are not only in the 53 percent, but often in the top 10% in terms of wealth.

    Honestly, in addition to the obvious frauds like Frum and Kristol, and the ones I suspect of being frauds (anyone remember Sean Hannity “evolving” on immigration in 2012?), there are a lot of real conservatives out there who seem unable to question the latest popular meme. One such is Mark Steyn, in my opinion a highly overrated pundit–I can still remember when he was essentially endorsing Tony Blair’s reelection because the Iraq War was The Most Important Issue In The World.

    I could probably name some other things conservatives should be open to unlearning, but I’m not here to do others’ thinking for them.

  23. This is going to be cited by your antifans as a defense of pedophilia, *and* as an assertion that all homosexuals are pedophiles. Could almost accuse you of trolling.

    1. >Could almost accuse you of trolling.

      I swear that I don’t actually set out to provoke dimwits like beedogs and Arron Grier. The likes of them are self-trolling. I think such creatures run around in a perpetually fevered state of PC moral indignation, looking for something – anything – to discharge on, and never noticing that the bogeymen against which they contend so heroically are projections of their own needs.

      This instance is particularly funny, because they’re making the exact category error they’re accusing me of by assuming that the phrase “homosexual pedophiles” has “all homosexuals” as a referent. Somebody ought to whack them both upside the head with Grice’s Maxims before they embarrass themselves further.

      1. This is exactly how the Perpetually Outraged pretend that the term “Muslim terrorist” has “all Muslims” as a referent. You can’t talk about a “$foo $bar” because to do so is to say all $bar are $foo. You can’t talk about violent crimes perpetrated by YBMs or Antifa. Trump got in trouble for talking about illegal immigrants who also commit other crimes, and the objection was precisely that he was saying all illegal immigrants are murderers and rapists, etc., which he clearly did not say.

        This has been repeated so often that it’s a cliché.

        1. If you listen to a typical rant or read a typical letter of demands by the professionally aggrieved you will encounter the construction $foo $foo $foo $foo $foo $bar, where $foo is adjective and $bar is the noun. F.ex “Racist, oppressive, heteronormative, plutocratic, neocolonialist police”. Every $foo is clearly intended to be descriptive of the $bar, and the more intersectional they are the more $foo’s there will be.

          They are not saying “We only dislike the police that are racist, oppressive, heteronormative, plutocratic and neocolonialist. The other ones are ok!” They arn’t even saying “We only dislike the police that are racist, oppressive, heteronormative, plutocratic OR neocolonialist. The other ones are ok!”
          What they clearly mean that every $foo applies to $bar as a whole.

          But when more technically minded persons, cf ESR, use the $foo $bar (or even $foo $foo $bar) construct, $foo means subset or selection criteria, and $bar is a noun. But when the aggrieved or those taught by the aggrieved hear “$foo $foo $bar”, they immediately think “$foo is invective and $bar is target, because that is how WE use language! OMG! He is insulting $bar! The bastard!”

          Whether this was a consequence desired by “perverters of names” or ‘just’ a case of mistaken imitation, “Everyone I know uses it to mean this, so this is what it always means!” is more or less irrelevant.

          As an aside another group that use the $foo $foo $foo $bar construct in the “pile invectives on a target” sense seems to be paranoid schizophrenics. Remember Frances A. Dec and his “communist gangster computer god” dispensing “deadly poison nerve gas smoke”! from USENET…

          1. At the very least, too many people delight in interpreting ambiguous language in the worse possible way. It’s like they get an endorphin rush from ‘debunking’ the resulting strawmen (and maybe from simply being offended?)

            The amusing part is that the people doing this are beclowning themselves, not demonstrating their superiority. Everyone with even basic skill in English knows that it’s rife with ambiguities.

    2. Nah. He’s doing what very intelligent people frequently do, which is to get picky about the differences between similar concepts. Engaging in this particular behavior is one of the “tells” for superior intelligence, and I’d be very surprised if Eric didn’t do it sometimes.

      Where I do disagree with Eric is that I don’t think the current framing about Epstein is a particularly “leftish” framing. I think this is more a matter of the commentariat not noticing (deliberately, because they don’t want to get letters) or otherwise, the difference between how the law frames such things and how the sexologists frame such things. All the leftists I know are looking at Epstein and noticing the corruption; nobody is going “Whoa, check out the semantics.”

  24. Eric,

    In the third paragraph of your OP you have written the WRONG NAME. I suspect the person whose name you used accidentally may object, and that person does exist in the public sphere.

    Just wanted to be absolutely sure you caught this. Two other commenters have already mentioned it, but in somewhat obscure fashion that would be easy for you to miss while skimming.

    Thank you for all you do.

  25. While we’re rectifying names, can we please do something about “serverless”? It makes me want to punch a marketroid every time I hear it.

  26. Amazing, you immediately launch into an unprovoked attack on gay people, with absolutely no evidence or proof. You’re really telling on yourself with this one, Eric.

    1. >Amazing, you immediately launch into an unprovoked attack on gay people, with absolutely no evidence or proof. You’re really telling on yourself with this one, Eric.

      Aaaand another idiot fails basic reading comprehension.

    2. What is it that makes showing off as total idiot in front of a large audience so attractive to fools like you?
      You act like the people on afternoon shows on RTL (German TV for the far left end of the bell curve)

      1. The thing is beedogs has probably spent his life surrounded by leftist propaganda. Given the “education” system in most western countries that’s not unusual. So he doesn’t realize he’s being an idiot and expects to get rewarded for his “wokeness”.

  27. We also see the overloading of the word “child” with respect to gun violence. The gun-controllers are fond of quoting statistics to the effect of “[large number X] children are victims of gun violence every year!!!” while skipping over the fact that an overwhelming majority of those are 16- or 17-year-old gang bangers (recruited because if they’re arrested the worst that happens to them is a year or two in juvie) who probably gave as good as they got.

    1. They also have a habit of overloading concepts like “mass shooting” or “school shooting.”

  28. There is another way of expressing this problem which completely ignores the moral issues, but sharpens other aspects….

    Ephebophilia, however creepy and disgusting, is still within the “normal range”* of human behaviors. As evidenced by almost the entirety of human history.

    Pedophilia on the other hand requires something to be broken inside.

    This should not be a controversial idea when one remembers what sex is for. But because people seem to be unaware of history they freely mix the concepts. And doing that means they have to tar a huge swath of history as pro-pedo. And from there a clever propagandist could have a field day twisting conservatives up in knots.

    * Just to try and head off the idiots (as if they would listen): by “normal range” I am not saying “good”. It is also within “normal range” to want to murder your enemies and steal their wives. I am simply referring to things that do not require special breakage of the mind.

    1. “Normal range” is an ambiguous concept – as you say, plenty of despicable behaviors are “within normal range”! Predatory ephebophilia is basically in the same boat as pederasty (and in fact, early universalizing ethics did condemn both pederasty/sodomy and what got variously called “fornication” or “sexual misconduct” _in practically identical terms_, which surely ought to count for something!); yes it’s part of the historical record, you might even call the basic tendency towards it a human universal– but no, that absolutely does not make it something we should call “normal” in a civilized society!

      1. ……….we really should have set up a scoring system to see who could get the most responses from people who had clearly not bothered to read what they were responding to.

        It’s not even like anyone has been using difficult language.

      2. >and in fact, early universalizing ethics did condemn both pederasty/sodomy and what got variously called “fornication” or “sexual misconduct” _in practically identical terms_

        I had to consider it for a while, but I don’t think this is actually true. In every culture I can think of that has both taboos, the pederasty taboo is much stronger than the epheberasty one. What example(s) did you have in mind?

        1. >>early universalizing ethics did condemn both >>”pederasty/sodomy” and “fornication”
          >>_in practically identical terms_

          > In every culture I can think of that has both taboos, the
          > pederasty taboo is much stronger than the epheberasty one.

          These aren’t contradictory claims. Take out the technical jargon. Blow jobs and adultery are equally sinful? Okay, I don’t know, but that’s a claim to think about. Buggering a pre-pubescent boy is a bigger sin than popping the hymen of a post-pubescent girl? Okay, I can think about that one, too . I don’t see that the two equations include four equally sinful activities.

      3. “””that absolutely does not make it something we should call “normal” in a civilized society!”””

        Modulo /particular senses/ of the word ‘normal’, I agree.

  29. Interestingly enough (though it’s obviously anecdotal), my social media feed has the push for calling Epstein a pedophile coming from the Left-hand side. Context suggests they still are hoping Trump will go down as well, under the “dead girl/live boy” rubric.

    And, as noted, Roy Moore did go down due to his apparent tendencies. (Fun fact, Trump campaigned AGAINST him in the primary, and did not campaign for him in the general. Trump appeared to be fairly disgusted with Roy Moore, though whether that was because he upset a Trump ally or because of Moore’s personal tastes, I do not know).

  30. > But women that age who are not only nubile but psychologically adult do exist

    14 years old arent “women”. you probably have meant females.

  31. You talk about sexual inclinations being “perverted”/”damaged” vs “natural”. Homosexuality and pedophilia are “perverted”, while heterosexual ephebophilia falls within the “natural” range.

    You seem to present the fact that heterosexual ephebophila is “natural” as a reason why it’s not as morally bad as pedophilia, and should be punished less severely (though it should still be punished).

    But there are “natural” sexual behaviors that are morally bad and rightly punishable, for example rape and, indeed, the manipulative seduction of clueless teenagers. And there are “perverted” sexual behaviors that are morally OK and legal, such as gay sex between adults (at least I consider it to be morally OK, I’m not totally clear on your view).

    So being natural is neither necessarily nor sufficient for being morally good or rightly legal. And being perverted is neither necessary nor sufficient for being immoral or rightly punishable.

    So why care about the “natural” vs “perverted” stuff at all? Or, alternatively, why attach any normative connotations to it, the way you seem to do? Why not simply say that:
    * Pedophilic acts are bad because they harm the child. (And not because they’re “perverted”)
    * Ephebophilic acts are bad because they harm the young person. The harm is a little less on average than with pedophilic acts, so ephebophilia is a little less bad than pedophilia, but still bad. (And the fact that it’s “natural” doesn’t enter into it.)
    * Homosexual acts are not bad because they don’t harm anyone. (And the fact that they’re “perverted” doesn’t enter into it.)

    1. >You seem to present the fact that heterosexual ephebophila is “natural” as a reason why it’s not as morally bad as pedophilia, and should be punished less severely (though it should still be punished).

      No. My moral judgments are all around consent and the presence or absence of coercion. The evil of pedophilia stems from the fact that adult consent is impossible in that situation and coercion gross or subtle is almost inevitably part of the adult’s behavior.

      In ephebophilia there is a difficult gray area around which we place legal and customary guard rails. Some such relationships may be healthy and noncoercive, but most cultures taboo ephebophila in order to prevent the more common case of victimization.

      The evolutionary “naturalness” of heterosexual ephebophilia is morally significant, but only in the indirect way that it predicts less harm from immoral/nonconsensual behavior and thus reduces its gravity a little.

      1. Also: naturalness is one of the (weak) pieces of evidence for whether an act is consensual.

        The more ‘perverted’ an act is, the lower the burden of proof for showing coercion.

  32. I’ve been reading more on this topic and found some interesting things:

    Sources:

    [1] https://www.abusewatch.net/pedophiles.pdf

    [2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-science-reveals-about-pedophilia

    50%-60% of pedophiles have a drug-dependency problem. [1]

    Fifty percent to 70% of pedophiles can be diagnosed as
    having another paraphilia, such as frotteurism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, or sadism [1]

    But most interestingly, “The brain has a network that’s responsible for detecting what in the environment is a potentially sexual object,” he said. “And when there’s not enough white matter, that network doesn’t function like it’s supposed to.” [2]

    DING DING DING! Looks like my hypothesis about all sexual-targeting disorders being co-morbid is not only correct, but backed up by neurological evidence you can see in a brain scan. “Perversion” as a general category is not a spook.

    It’s un-PC to point out that homosexuality, even the now widely tolerated adult-on-adult-kind, falls within this cluster of disorders. But that’s what the correlations with pedophilia and other paraphilias are telling us.

    If you are a gay person reading this and your impulse is to be angry with me for writing what I just did, bear in mind that I don’t consider it a moral failing to have congenital brain damage – I’m a congenital palsy case myself. It’s not having perverted urges that’s wrong, only acting on them in a way that causes harm to others.

    1. Testosterone is statistically and biologically linked to a bunch of bad things, and we don’t go around calling being male “endocrine damage”, do we?

      There’s a whole bunch of behaviors that reduce reproductive fitness, and a lot of them correlate directly with conscientiousness, and we don’t go around calling conscientiousness a syndrome, do we?

      I’m not saying that everything’s a spandrel so it’s impossible to say what’s good or bad, but calling something “brain damage” when that’s a pretty ragged category is sort of like putting words in nature’s mouth, I think.

      1. >Testosterone is statistically and biologically linked to a bunch of bad things

        And a bunch of good things: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/testosterone-benefits/

        I am not so sure about the bad things either. There is no evidence it causing uncontrolled aggression. Roid rage comes from anabolic steroids suppressing natural testosterone production. In experiments, testosterone was linked to altruistic punishment and enforcing fair rules. Look more into it, you might have accidentally be duped by the types who bullshit about “toxic masculinity”.

        Cochrane (West Hunter) blog buys into the gay germ theory. All theories like gay uncle theory about it having an evolutionary genetic basis smell of bullshit. We are talking about indirect, not direct germ causation. Like narcolepsia. Narcolepsia is caused by something, likely a germ, triggering an overly enthusiastic immune response and wiping out a bunch of neurons. Something like that can be the cause. Toxoplasma, another germ, attracts mice to cat pee so that they get eaten, and it is done by triggering a sexual type of desire. So it is at least possible.

        Finally, low prenatal or serum T does not directly cause homosexuality, albeit it makes it more likely. We know plenty of wimpish guys with low serum T who are not gay. I have nearly equal 2D:4D digit ratio, indicating low prenatal T, and am not gay. I am not saying everything about me was perfectly masculine when I was a kid or teenager (rather timid etc.) but never ever had a desire for dick. And in the age of online porn it is pretty easy to figure out what your real desires are.

        The causation might be the opposite: if a man is not attracted to women, his body might decide to not invest much into T production.

        1. >I am not so sure about the bad things either. There is no evidence it causing uncontrolled aggression. Roid rage comes from anabolic steroids suppressing natural testosterone production. In experiments, testosterone was linked to altruistic punishment and enforcing fair rules. Look more into it, you might have accidentally be duped by the types who bullshit about “toxic masculinity”.

          Gyroget Grigor, TheDividualist is correct in this. If he hadn’t posted about these facts I probably would have.

          >Cochrane (West Hunter) blog buys into the gay germ theory.

          More than that, he seems to have originated it. Good roundup here:
          https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/greg-cochrans-gay-germ-hypothesis-an-exercise-in-the-power-of-germs/

          I find it pretty persuasive myself. Cochran’s central argument, that a truly inherited trait with that adverse an effect on reproductive success would be rapidly selected to a much lower level, seems quite sound.

    1. >Looks like Eric is not the only one making this distinction.

      Referenced article is pretty good, except for the last sentence: “So while Epstein may not be a pedophile, in many ways, he’s something much worse.” That is pious piffle, a kind of PC eat-the-rich genuflection that casts a pall of retrospective stupidity on everything that went before.

      Epstein is not “worse”. Creep though he is, it is highly unlikely that anything he gets up to with his pubescent soiled chickadees will inflict the kind of physical and psychological harm that is routine in sexual abuse of pre-pubertal children.

      1. The article: “So while Epstein may not be a pedophile, in many ways, he’s something much worse.”

        ESR: “the kind of physical and psychological harm that is routine in sexual abuse of pre-pubertal children.”

        I don’t know if there is any disagreement of substance between Eric and he author. Eric is speaking of abusers, and the author is speaking of those who, /clinically speaking/, suffer pedophilia, and not of abusers per se.

  33. >Dammit…don’t spend your credibility in an overheated fling… lest you find you’re out of rhetorical ammunition and allies when the real monsters need to be taken down.

    See also our tendency to suggest rape/racism (e.g., ‘equivalent of rape,’ ‘Bushitler,’ etc) in way too many situations, typically as a way to win an argument via emotional appeal.

    1. >How is your hoof, by the way?

      Getting better, slowly but satisfactorily. Am walking. Still being careful of steps.

  34. I agree that pedophilia is not always cut and dry. We wink at the 19 year old who has sex with the 15 year old, yet we feel repulsed when the 43 year old has sex with the 16 year old, even though it’s consensual.
    I understand the concerns of parents. No parent wants their loved 16 year old daughter to have sex with the 39 year old volley ball coach, yet it still happens, probably in almost every public school, or at least in many of the public schools.
    In my opinion, men shouldn’t be ruined for these acts. Men are men, and always have been. I’m no pedo, and I never pick up on women younger than 21, but I’m not an angel. I’d find it very difficult to say no to a 16 year old hottie who just sat on my lap and started grinding me.
    Journalists love the word “pedophile”. They flash it around in the papers like some kind of tornado just hit the high school. I think statutory rape should be treated more like a DUII than a felony. Of course, if the girl was unwilling, then yeah, put the guy in prison, but if she was willing, for God’s sake, stop calling it rape. Instead, give the guy 200 hours community service and a $5,000 fine and he’ll probably never sleep with a sixteen year old ever again.

  35. Let me be clear: I don’t have a problem with gays in general. In fact, I may well have more lesbian friends than straight male friends.

    However, there is a large subset of gay males that I think would love to make pederasty legal and common. I’m not talking here about those who are personally hot for little boys. I’m talking about the rather large group that are so hateful toward mainstream society that they would do anything to cause it pain and destruction.

    Follow Dan Savage sometime. He once wrote an article gloating about the children of gun owners who are killed in gun accidents. He has called for mandatory universal abortion.

    Do you remember how Lena Dunham bragged in a book how she’d felt up her baby sister? That wasn’t an indy publication, IIRC. So at some point a publisher was talking to Dunham and saying, “I LOVED the part about fondling your sister. That was deliciously subversive.”

    The thing is, unlike most Republicans, aka the Beta Male Party, I don’t just want to adjust my bow tie, take a sip of my champagne, and say, “Alas. I weep for my country.” I want to FIGHT BACK against these monsters. And when I say fight, I am pretty literal.

    1. Following that up: I wonder if the GOP talking heads have ever realized how ridiculous–how WEAK–they appear to their own voters. Case in point: the way they were telling us that Mitch Daniels would clean up in the women’s vote *because*–and they actually said this–he took his wife back after she dumped him for another man. Can you honestly imagine just how that would go down in a general election? Bill Maher would be publicly offering a sexual vacation to Mrs. Daniels.

      Also, I don’t think they realize how violently we hate the Left. We don’t want to win the next election and then have an empty victory. We want to BREAK these motherfuckers.

      1. Given how Shocked! and Appalled! the self-appointed punching-bags of Conservative, Inc. have been over the last ~30 months concerning Trump, I think they have no idea that what the voters are on the American right want more than anything are representatives who will fight for them. The other, more dangerous, side of this coin is that the Left also probably doesn’t understand how thoroughly, and in some cases how irreversibly, they’ve alienated those who disagree with them.

        Of the two, I think the squishy center-right will understand why we are disinterested in compromise and how ill-used we feel long, long before the NPCs realize that the other side sees their “resistance” as a toxic soup of subversion and temper tantrum. Lindsey Graham’s rise from punch-line to hero during the Kavanaugh proceedings should have been a clue to both sides, though. The NPCs may whinge about ‘right wing violence’ and how hateful and dangerous we are, but I don’t think they actually believe it. If they did, they wouldn’t be telling us how much they hate us for fear of provoking us.

        They’ve made the mistake of spending the last few years showing people who just want to be left alone that they mean to rule and don’t mind verbally, socially, economically, or personally destroying anyone who objects. I don’t know if, or when, or where, the shouting match will become a shooting match, but I won’t be shocked if it starts in Portland with Antifa goons and some peaceful citizen who decides his life is in danger and says ‘leave me alone’ at ~1200fps.

        1. >the Left also probably doesn’t understand how thoroughly, and in some cases how irreversibly, they’ve alienated those who disagree with them

          It’s a different tipping point for everybody. I thought I hated the Gramscian long-marchers as much as anyone could short of foaming at the mouth, until they corrupted the Hugo awards. That was when I discovered a new level of cold rage.

          It might seem to be a trivial thing to get upset about given all the Communist genocides on their backtrail, but, dammit…SF fandom was my culture. My home. By wokeifying the Hugos they went a long way towards twisting SF and its fandom into a travesty I can no longer enjoy or identify with. That hurt me where I live.

          1. It’s a different tipping point for everybody. I thought I hated the Gramscian long-marchers as much as anyone could short of foaming at the mouth, until they corrupted the Hugo awards. That was when I discovered a new level of cold rage.

            And has this rage inspired you to actually take any action?

            1. >And has this rage inspired you to actually take any action?

              I haven’t found any way to get leverage on that problem yet. I don’t have the kind of influence in SF fandom that I do among hackers.

              1. I used to really enjoy buying the latest Baen book without worrying about the politics and how my money might be spent. I can’t/don’t do that any more.

                The problem here is that the Left was equally outraged in the other direction over the Puppies, (I was literally angry for exactly the same reason as you were, but from the other political direction) so if you want to have a fandom which is “neutral,” your best move might be to let it go, allowing the flames to subside.

                Of if you don’t want to let it go, do what you can to encourage better plotting, prose, characterization, world-building, etc. from your fellow Libertarians/Conservatives – the only current author (with whom you might share politics) I can think of who has a really fun, listenable authorial “voice” is John Ringo. (His prose isn’t great, but it is relaxed and fun, which is also important.) He’s the only conservative author who can deliver the goods (politically speaking) who doesn’t read like he’s writing a polemic, and that’s really kind of sad.

                The conservative authors who do read well are some of the older generation; Weber (before they stopped editing him,) Niven, Dan Simmons, Gene Wolf, etc., but there’s a clear difference; they aren’t setting out to write conservative literature – they just do whatever they do and do it well, and the conservatism comes along for the ride.

                And just to be clear, I have no problems with Conservative/Libertarian literature. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is still a great read. So is Starship Troopers. With regard to more recent work, I literally read Weber’s Honor of the Queen until the book fell apart. Then I went out and bought another copy and read it another dozen times.

                But consider the following. Heinlein won a Hugo for Starship Troopers. Then he won another Hugo the very next year for Stranger in a Strange Land. And the politics of the one book was directly orthogonal to the politics of the other. If he’d done a similar thing today Baen would publish the one book, then refuse to publish the other, then Conservative fans would burn the first book because he’d turned traitor with his hippie-dippie free-sex epic and never read anything he wrote again…

                1. >the only current author (with whom you might share politics) I can think of who has a really fun, listenable authorial “voice” is John Ringo.

                  Ringo is actually much more of a conservative than I’ve ever been, I do enjoy his stuff but the political chuntering often makes me cringe. I’m not interested in reading “conservative” SF – it’s too easy to anticipate what axes will be ground and boring even when I agree with it.

                  > they just do whatever they do and do it well, and the conservatism comes along for the ride.

                  That I’ll read and enjoy.

                  >If he’d done a similar thing today Baen would publish the one book, then refuse to publish the other, then Conservative fans would burn the first book because he’d turned traitor with his hippie-dippie free-sex epic and never read anything he wrote again…

                  You don’t…actually…know any conservative fans, then? Bearing in mind that I am not a conservative myself, I find that assertion just bizarre. I don’t think they’d do that. SF attracts a pretty high grade, flexible-minded sort of conservative, always has.

                  What I don’t want in my SF is politics and sermons overwhelming story and sense of wonder. I almost never had that problem with the conservatives because they usually had the restraint not to beat core genre values to death trying to peddle a message. They respected what came before them. The PC wokesters have no such couth.

                  There is such a thing as good left-wing SF – Ken McLeod leaps to mind – but the crop of screechy diversity chicks and oooh-ooh-look-at-my-skin-color grievance peddlers that have acquired some kind of weird lock on the Hugo process is pushing utter crap by comparison. They can’t actually sell books, but, yeah, they can shit all over what used to be my home. I am really quite heartsick about this.

                  1. I don’t think our latest Hugo claque is crazy, I think they are D party flacks. Jemisin can’t write fiction, but she has real powers as a D party flack- I’ve read intelligent, been-around people honestly grateful to her for giving them the D party line on gender kerfuffles. Catherynne Valiente is not a SF writer, and I bounce off her fantasy, but I think she’s got real talent. That said, she’d never get anywhere near a Hugo without flacking the D party line – ‘As a progressive D, I say we must vote for the Party selection, even if it’s Biden’.

                    Gramsci, scramsci. They don’t praise Stalin, they flack the Tammanay Sachem.

                    1. What you have to consider are the major changes in the political parties over time. What we’d now call a “Blue Dog” democrat essentially occupies the same position we’d have attributed to a “country-club” Republican forty years ago. At this point I don’t think you can find a single important Republican who’s to the left of Ronald Reagan, and it used to be possible to find plenty of them!

                      So when you say “the Democratic position” what you’re really talking about is something someplace between the center and the crazy left. It’s not actually that radical.

                    2. Open borders are backed by all the D Presidential candidates. That’s a fairly hard left version of the bipartisan consensus in favor of lower wages through higher immigration. But if the D party line goes hard right tomorrow Jemisin and Valiente will flack it. As D party flacks they get good press in D party media.

                    3. At this point I don’t think you can find a single important Republican who’s to the left of Ronald Reagan

                      Except most of them aren’t willing to repeal Obamacare, or push back against the left on any major issue. They’re barely willing to push back against the transgender nonsense or question the leftist position that kids “changing gender” is a human right while gay-to-straight conversion therapy is a crime against humanity. Much less gay “marriage” or G-d forbid point out that putting women in combat roles wasn’t a good idea.

                  2. I can see this from both sides, (and I’m including some of the comments below as I write this.) There are problematic places on both sides. On the Liberal side, there seem to be a lot of writers who come more from college literature courses than the science fiction community. Rachel Swirsky, with her awful Are You A Dinosaur, My Love? comes to mind, as do the Nebula committee and similar bodies.

                    On the other hand, Baen books has changed a lot in recent years, being a lot more likely to publish stuff that reads to me like Conservative Christian Sci-Fi than they were a few years back.

                    My attitude, a couple authors excepted, is to say “A pox on both their houses!”

                    If you’re looking for an example of really positive, good work along those lines, Jay Maynard’s work with the awards at Dragoncon was a very good thing in my eyes.

                    1. On the Liberal side, there seem to be a lot of writers who come more from college literature courses than the science fiction community. Rachel Swirsky, with her awful Are You A Dinosaur, My Love? comes to mind, as do the Nebula committee and similar bodies.

                      On the other hand, Baen books has changed a lot in recent years, being a lot more likely to publish stuff that reads to me like Conservative Christian Sci-Fi than they were a few years back.

                      You honestly don’t see the lack of symmetry here? Something being Conservative Christian Sci-Fi is not mutually exclusive with it being good. Whereas liberals are willing to push and award arbitrarily bad crap as long as it has the right politics.

                  3. On a related note, David Brin has completely ignored your critique of him on Heinlein and guns. Essentially, he has changed history in a very real way; since he has absolute control over information about Heinlein, people in the future will be taught and believe that Heinlein was an anti-gun leftist.

                    1. > since he has absolute control over information about Heinlein

                      Whiskey Tango Foxtrot???

                      Try putting “Robert Heinlein” into your favorite search engine, and then tell me – with a straight face – how many of those links David Brin “controls”.

                      At the least, The Heinlein Society seems to be free of his taint, and is a source of much information about the master.

                2. If he’d done a similar thing today Baen would publish the one book, then refuse to publish the other, then Conservative fans would burn the first book because he’d turned traitor with his hippie-dippie free-sex epic and never read anything he wrote again…

                  As much as I hate using Freudian terminology, this honestly reads like projection. Especially considering all the liberal attempts to read past grand-masters, including Heinlein out of society.

                  1. Then let us de-Freudian-ize the observation. They seem to accuse others regularly of the sins to which they themselves seem prone. They lie about and to themselves as readily as they lie to and about those they have deemed their enemies. Thus people who pride themselves on their open-mindedness and tolerance can accuse others who display more real tolerance and openness of mind of closed-minded bigotry. The best people they themselves know have treated everyone who disagrees with them to a three year barrage of relentless verbal abuse, and then treat the predictably hostile reaction as proof the original false accusations.

                    They can see very clearly the motes in others’ eyes, without ever noticing that everyone around them spends a lot of time ducking under the ship-timbers erupting from their own eye-sockets. They mistook all our ducking for submission and are now in high dudgeon that we’ve had enough of negotiating life doubled-over.

                    ‘Racist’ is now a word that means, in effect, ‘anything offensive to Leftists’.

                  2. “Especially considering all the liberal attempts to read past grand-masters, including Heinlein out of society.”

                    I must say, speaking specifically as a Liberal, that I hate that crap with all the fury of an exploding supernova! Getting rid of Heinlein (or Lovecraft for that matter) is like blowing up the foundation of your house because you found out that the contractor who laid it fifty years ago was a racist!

                    And note that in comparison to many of his peers in the genre, Heinlein was a flaming Liberal who actually included Black and Asian people as the heroes of his books!*

                    * “Johnnie” is called Juanito by his mother, speaks admiringly of Ramon Magsaysay, and speaks Tagalog at home.

                    1. Even H Beam Piper, who really was a righty –Murder in the Gunroom has a hero named Jefferson Davis who is nostalgic for the Confederacy- assumed race mixing in his Space Viking future history.

            2. > And has this rage inspired [ESR] to actually take any action?

              Well, when Eric published his first SF sale, he did it with an utterly non-Woke, strongly polarizing publisher. This was not an accident, I’m sure.

              1. >This was not an accident, I’m sure.

                Publisher chose me, actually. Vox asked me if I’d be willing to write for his anthology, then did more to help me get through that first-sale barrier than any other editor ever had.

                1. > Publisher chose me, …. then did more to help me get [sold] than any other ….

                  Possibly because he recognized a fellow non-SJW, and thought you were worth the special effort?

                  1. >Possibly because he recognized a fellow non-SJW, and thought you were worth the special effort?

                    I’ve forgotten the details. I think it had something to do with an essay by A&D regular Ken Burnside on the physics of space weapons that also ended up appearing in the book. Didn’t seem at the time like politics had much to do with it, though I can’t read Vox’s mind. He did later get me nominated for a Campbell Award, and that was clearly a political move, so it’s not like I was oblivious to such implications.

                    Vox first asked me to write an SF story for his anthology, and I told him I didn’t feel competent to do that – nothing but a long trail of rejection slips. Then he asked me if I’d do a nonfiction piece. I was all set to say no when the concept for an essay on the implications of anti-air lasers popped into my head. The trigger was a news story I’d read a few days before about a gangbanger who got busted for zapping a police chopper with a laser pointer.

                    I sat down, pounded that out, and shipped it. Swiftly got back a reply saying his military expert (co-editor Tom Kratman) liked the piece a whole lot and was I sure I didn’t want to do a fiction piece? I was about to say no, then realized I could fictionalize one of the scenarios in my essay. Did that, shipped it, and got back the following reply:

                    “Who told you you couldn’t write? That story is better than mine!” And he put his money where his mouth was, leading the anthology with it.

                    In general I think Vox is somewhat crazed – a mind full of weird contradictions under extreme pressure – but his behavior as an editor was supportive and faultlessly professional. and I owe him a debt of karma for actively working to get me over the first-sale hump. No politics were discussed at any point.

    2. >However, there is a large subset of gay males that I think would love to make pederasty legal and common. […] I’m talking about the rather large group that are so hateful toward mainstream society that they would do anything to cause it pain and destruction

      I hope you understand that those gays are just a symptom. The disease is the Marxist/nihilist indoctrination machine pushing them forward, the domestic enemy the “movement” conservatives became too cowardly to name after about 1956.

      We didn’t de-Communize our intelligentsia when we won the Cold War. We’re paying a heavy price for that failure.

      1. Given the profundity of Marxist infiltration and the invisible ubiquity of Marxist anti-thought in academia, I wonder if we have only won the Cold War in a superficial sense, and if we must now win it here, at home, at the feet of a hundred thousand ivory towers.

        1. Thor, they say, will slay the Midgard Serpent, only to be slain himself by the poison that flows out of its corpse. I still have hope we can do better.

        2. Amusingly, you might get some 5th column support from the vast hoards of adjuncts. I’m sure they consider themselves superior to many ‘tenured slackers’ that currently occupy the top slots in many Ivory Towers.

          1. I’m pretty certain that replacing tenured leftists with leftists aspiring to be tenured is an open-and-shut case of “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.” Any academic who’s had Gramsci’s Long March stamped on every facet of his education is a liability, not an asset, unless and until he unlearns all the indoctrination he’s acquired. They shouldn’t be teaching the next generation anything. In fact, they would be of much better use to themselves and to society performing unskilled or semi-skilled manual labor. They might learn something about real people, hard work, and basic economics if they spent a few years doing things like laying sod, digging holes, and maintaining lawns and parks.

            Long story short: the Ivy League is a plague ward full of raving lunatics which is has been reliably producing new crops of raving lunatics for decades now, and should be (metaphorically) fixed from 20,000 feet by the application have vast quantities of high explosives.

      2. In this one case, I wouldn’t be so quick to blame Marxism. Lots of gay men carry plenty of anger and resentment towards society in general, whatever their political leaning.

        It’s no surprise. Being gay sounds, quite frankly, awful. How do you create a satisfying pair-bond with someone when 4-digit partner counts are commonplace? How do you fulfill the male instinct to be a protector and provider when gay “marriages” are a complete farce?

        Marxism may amplify this anger and resentment, and you could well blame it for creating the circumstances that generate much of that anger, but the raw material is there in spades to begin with.

        1. >Marxism may amplify this anger and resentment, and you could well blame it for creating the circumstances that generate much of that anger, but the raw material is there in spades to begin with.

          The Gramscians never start with nothing; they don’t have to. Black people had real grievances, too. A major axis of the Gramscian program is to co-opt these mascot groups, hone their sense of outrage, and shape it into a weapon for destroying any cultural basis on which resistance to totalitarian control can be mounted.

          See for example the current use of “hate” as a rationale for the wholesale suppression of political speech outside of approved left-wing channels. Conservatives react to the head-fake, the particular content of the current set of fashions in victimhood (anti-racism, transgenderism, open borders), or to the antics of a particular mascot group, and too often don’t grasp that institutionalizing speech and thought control – corrupting our language and our channels of discourse, making people fear to speak their minds, compelling them to lie – is itself the actual goal and the greater danger.

          Here is a a guy who gets it, Theodore Dalyrimple:

          “Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

          That’s exactly it.

          Gays, like blacks, are disposable, readily abandoned, and will be whenever a new mascot group (like illegal immigrants, or transsexuals, or Muslims) looks like a better lever to use in corrupting our discourse and demanding conformity to lies. Any reality to their pre-existing grievances does not matter to either the intent or the effect of the Gramscian program (“A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”). Sure the raw material is there in spades to begin with! That’s true, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is identifying and stopping the totalitarianizing machine that now uses them for its ends.

          1. You are getting it very well, you are only missing two very important details. Then again everybody was missing it until NRx figured it out.

            1) Western intellectuals were not the useful idiots of Moscow, rather Soviets were the pets of Western intellectuals, a client state, roughly how in the beginning Communist China was a Soviet client state. E.g. Alger Hiss didn’t consider himself the agent of a foreign power, rather he thought he can use the Soviets for his own purposes of global “progress”. McCarthy was right, but got the which one is the dog and which one is the tail that gets wagged completely the other way around.

            2) The goal isn’t totalitarianism, not in the usual sense (see below) although still something very bad. Totalitarianism requires organization, something like a conspiracy. Leftism does not work like that, rather, they keep competing with each other, trying to out-do each other in wokeness. Every new term of political correctness introduced is an attempt for one person or one sub-faction of the Left gain more prestige and power than the rest and over society in general of course. The problem with seeing the Soviet Union as totalitarian is missing the early part of the chronology. Say, it began with Stalin’s Great Purge in 1934. What happened between 1917 and 1924 under Lenin, and between 1924 and 1934 under Stalin? The answer is not coordinated totalitarian control, but violent chaos. Communists were competing with each other who can kill more kulaks, constantly trying to out-communist each other by going harder on the “enemies” of the “working class” and similar stuff. Power struggles with brutal consequences for everybody else. Non-communists have actually suffered the most in this 1917-1934 period. This is when the bourgeois, the kulak etc. were destroyed. Stalin’s Great Purge and totalitarianism was a response to this violent chaos. Stalin mostly killed communists – he killed everybody who was to the left of him. Hence he stabilized the system, nobody could gain power or prestige anymore by out-lefting Stalin, say, coming up with a more vicious way to torture the kulak. Because he killed those guys. It actually made things somewhat better for normal people. If that violent chaos, struggling for communist cred by killing more and more kulaks – Trotskysm, more or less – would have continued the bloodbath would have been far far worse. Something similar can be said about Cromwell. This does not make them good guys of course but they did reduce the damage. Well, it is not entirely true the way I have put it above, that the goal is not totalitarianism. It is, but not by all of the left but each person and each small groups wants to have their own totalitarianism. So they fight for power by out-lefting each other. This fight is what has the worst consequences for everybody else. When some person or subgroup of the left wins over the others i.e. a Stalin type consolidates his power and implements his totalitarianism, things get somewhat less bad for the normal people.

            We call this priestly competition. If one priest gets prestige points for fasting for five days, the other fasts for seven days. The issue with political religion is that when they have an enemy, like a class enemy, or suchlike, mostly normal people as an enemy, they compete in fighting them the hardest thus hurting them the most vicious ways.

            1. >The problem with seeing the Soviet Union as totalitarian is missing the early part of the chronology.

              No, all that means is that the totalitarianizing machine took a while to fully spin up. The factional competitive dynamic you describe is real, and it implies that the most vicious and repressive killers are most likely to end up in overall control.

              >Non-communists have actually suffered the most in this 1917-1934 period.

              The victims of the Great Purge (1936-1938) refute you. Violent chaos is never as effective as a fully realized totalitarianism organizing death on the megascale.

            2. >Western intellectuals were not the useful idiots of Moscow, rather Soviets were the pets of Western intellectuals

              A distinction without a difference. Alger Hiss may have thought he was running the Soviets, but he ended up behaving exactly as though they were running him. It’s all collectivism, all evil, all the way down – who mind-buggered who first signifies much less than the action of the whole machine.

              Shit like this is why ultimately I couldn’t take NRx seriously enough to finish my analysis of it. Too much of it is just intellectual masturbation, cute hot takes that are the exact opposite of shock-your-parents socialism but just as superficial.

              1. I don’t understand why you are missing the important difference. If the Soviets were pulling the strings, the whole thing would gradually disappear after their fall. Zombies without masters wander around a while, but eventually run out of energy. In this case we could comfortably predict, well, 30 years weren’t enough but in 50 or 60 it is surely over.

                But if the whole thing is centered somewhere in the West, there is no reason why it should weaken or go away on its own. It can get worse actually.

                It is a totally important difference if the animating energy of the whole thing is still around or not.

                1. If the Soviets were pulling the strings, the whole thing would gradually disappear after their fall.

                  That assumes that the disease could never develop roots.

                  It is a totally important difference if the animating energy of the whole thing is still around or not.

                  Oh that isn’t a hard question to answer: of course it is still around. The “animating energy” is all of humanity’s worst traits. Once the memeplex is there it has a near everlasting source of fuel unless destroyed.

                2. Let’s try this little argument a little differently. We start with Blacks, who as Eric said, have real grievances. They (arguably) come into contact with some Soviets intent on attacking American culture. The Soviets teach the Blacks counterproductive tactics and strategies, do what they can to make those strategies are received as holy doctrine, and move on.

                  Lather, rinse, repeat with Gays, Hispanics, Women, etc. Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union we end up with the modern SJW; not a serious political animal, but an ugly, whiny, hypercritical creature who can’t conceive of any form of political action which isn’t divisive.

                  The timeline works for me.

                  The problem lies in separating the “real grievances” from the idea that there are/were Gramsican forces at work. The utter failure to successfully manage this task is one of the most horrible weaknesses of Libertarian/Conservative culture.

                  1. Yes, but the actual fact is that white lib American elites were behind the black civil rights movement. For example, the great foundations, Ford and others.

                    Damn, there was a very good NRx blog post about it somewhere quoting plenty of evidence, but I cannot find it anymore. The gist of it was that Malcolm X in the Message to The Grass Roots speech said that King and others are paid by the Ford Foundation and the likes, and King’s lawyer also said this in an interview, and also by Kennedy, and the whole march on Washington was organized by these elites, to demand what they wanted to do anyway but needed justification. Likely for Kennedy, it was mostly a tool to make the Feds more powerful over the states. Anyway, Malcolm X’s speech on the March on Washington is very instructive in itself:

                    https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/message-to-grassroots/

                    “They had a meeting at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. The Carlyle Hotel is owned by the Kennedy family; that’s the hotel Kennedy spent the night at, two nights ago; [it] belongs to his family. A philanthropic society headed by a white man named Stephen Currier called all the top civil-rights leaders together at the Carlyle Hotel. ”

                    Currier was the Taconic Foundation guy: https://dimes.rockarch.org/FA407/biohist

                    “And he told them that, “By you all fighting each other, you are destroying the civil-rights movement. And since you’re fighting over money from white liberals, let us set up what is known as the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership. Let’s form this council, and all the civil-rights organizations will belong to it, and we’ll use it for fund-raising purposes.” Let me show you how tricky the white man is. And as soon as they got it formed, they elected Whitney Young as the chairman, and who [do] you think became the co-chairman? Stephen Currier, the white man, a millionaire. Powell was talking about it down at the Cobo [Hall] today. This is what he was talking about. Powell knows it happened. Randolph knows it happened. Wilkins knows it happened. King knows it happened. Everyone of that so-called Big Six — they know what happened.

                    Once they formed it, with the white man over it, he promised them and gave them $800,000 to split up between the Big Six; and told them that after the march was over they’d give them $700,000 more. A million and a half dollars — split up between leaders that you’ve been following, going to jail for, crying crocodile tears for. ”

                    “[As] soon as they got the setup organized, the white man made available to them top public relations experts; opened the news media across the country at their disposal; and then they begin [sic] to project these Big Six as the leaders of the march. Originally, they weren’t even in the march. ”

                    “The same white element that put Kennedy in power — labor, the Catholics, the Jews, and liberal Protestants; [the] same clique that put Kennedy in power, joined the march on Washington.”

                    “They controlled it so tight — they told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make; and then told them to get out town by sundown.”

                    I.e. the whole thing organized by the Washington type elites for their own power purposes.

                    This is _exactly_ what NRx theory (Bertand de Jouvenel) predicts: that it is never the “oppressed”, the “low” are fighting the “high”, but it is the “high”, the elites fighting either each other or the “middle” which in case would be Southern conservative whites. And they are only using the “low” as pawns.

                    So who needs Soviet influence when Washington and the circle of elites linked to Washington could do it by itself?

                    1. Generally speaking these kinds of things are always of the elite’s doing and not due to sheer popular unrest or foreign meddling.

                      Want to know why the original Communist revolution in Russia happened? There was effectively a power struggle between the Kerensky and Kornilov. The important part was:

                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kornilov_affair#Consequences

                      ” Kerensky released Bolsheviks who had been arrested during the July Days a few months earlier, when Vladimir Lenin was accused of being in the pay of the Germans and subsequently fled to Finland. Kerensky’s plea to the Petrograd Soviet for support had resulted in the rearmament of the Bolshevik Military Organization and the release of Bolshevik political prisoners, including Leon Trotsky. Though these weapons were not needed to fight off Kornilov’s advancing troops in August, they were kept by the Bolsheviks and used in their own successful armed October Revolution.”

                    2. I’m not sure what your point is here. Collective action is _always_ organized by some actors you could call an “elite” of sorts, if sometimes only in retrospect (in that the ‘elite’ emerges via competitive dynamics); there’s nothing surprising about this. But the Soviet influence ESR talks about is something altogether different; it’s not just conjecture, but something we have pretty solid proof of.

                    3. >So who needs Soviet influence when Washington and the circle of elites linked to Washington could do it by itself?

                      All interesting behavior is overdetermined.

                      I think the Jouvenel analysis, that political struggles on behalf of “the poor” or minorities are almost always factional struggles within the elite using the poor and minorities as mascots, is broadly correct. There is no reason to expect the American civil rights movement to have been an exception.

                      On the other hand, MLK’s lawyer was an overt Communist and many of his associates had close ties to the Soviet influence network. The FBI had very good reason within its mission to be keeping a close eye on him.

                      So in this case (and many others) you can see the Soviets effectively exploiting American domestic factionalism among its elites to their own advantage.

              2. Actually, and this relates to my previous post, a whole lot of right-wing commentary today–not just NRx–is essentially intellectual masturbation. My problem with, say, Walter Williams isn’t that he supports the Confederacy. It’s that he never seems inclined to support actual ACTION to counter the left. His ideal society seems to be like a fantasy novel to him–something he daydreams about but doesn’t take seriously.

                I think there’s a sort of mental No True Scotsman going on in the mind of conservative intellectuals–if libertarian concepts don’t seem to work out in real life, it’s because they aren’t libertarian enough.

                FWIW, I *do* believe that in most cases, a more libertarian society is more prosperous, more free, happier, more stable internally, and more safe from invasion than a less libertarian society. But a lot of thinkers on the Right are only that–thinkers. They seem less inclined to make our society more libertarian than to compare it negatively to Libertopia.

                1. How do you exactly want to make Libertopia happen? Just go on convincing everybody until they vote for it? It didn’t work so far and it is unlikely it will.

                  Moldbug’s original idea was that within certain conditions authoritarian rule is exercised in quite libertarian ways, namely when authority is absolutely secure inside, yet faces a lot of competition from the outside. David Friedman came up with the same idea: “competitive mini-dictatorships”.

                  The advantage of this would be that the way to make it happen is to convince actually existing elites to formalize their informal rule. This could be workable because generally elites make history. Easier to convince people with actual power to make it more formal than to convince voters to vote for Libertopia.

                  Popular uprisings without elite support don’t work. For example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

                  This the problem with all the rightist grassroot movements like the Alt-Right. When they get annoying enough for the elites, they get crushed.

                  While Hitler and Mussolini are not rightists in my vocabulary, it is important that like all movements that win, at least temporarily, they had elite support. When they were fighting on the streets with Communists, police tended to not arrest them, judges tended to let them go. The same exact situation the Antifa is in today.

                  @guest it is not elites in a certain sense but elites in a very actual sense, people who went to the best schools and so on. Satirical website The Onion got it really well when Obama won the election: “Hope and Change: one Harvard Law student [and teacher] takes over the White House from another Harvard Law student.”

                  I should add here that socio-economic class is a bullshit concept, there is social class and economic class, like Slate Star Codex had a discussion about that, a woman saying that as a librarian she does not make much money, but if she goes to the clinic for painkillers she gets some, if a tattoed, obese, trashy woman tries to get some they will think she is an addict trying to get opiates. So the librarian has a higher social class. Not economic.

                  Now in the modern world, social class = education. Like one of the coolest articles ever says: https://psmag.com/social-justice/half-lifts-workout-says-social-class-85221

                  “especially those like my friends and myself, richer in fancy degrees than in actual dollars”

                  Yet is there any doubt that the author has a high social class?

                  So these days it is very simple. Elites are defined as people with “fancy degrees”.

                  Note that I am not denying Soviet meddling, the evidence is indeed very clear. My point is simply confusing the dog with its tail. The evidence says tail-wagging, the question is, who-whom.

                  Anyway, what to do then?

                  1) Try to convince elites.

                  2) Prepare for a collapse and then take over. By actually building something good, I mean. Build it and they will come. Build a good order and they will come.

                  1. > namely when authority is absolutely secure inside, yet faces a lot of competition from the outside.

                    This doesn’t work at the level of sovereign polities – it’s simply impossible to keep the “competition” among polities well-behaved in that sense! To the extent that we’ve managed to approximate this, we have done so _via_ the liberal international order _and_ via grassroots-based liberal democracy, _NOT_ in opposition to those. This is a well-known argument, and NRx have not offered a sufficient counter to it. You think dictatorships and oligarchies are “absolutely secure” inside? LOL, they’re all-too _easy_ to subvert.

                    1. I admit this is a difficult problem. This would require very careful engineering with many potential failure modes. At this point it is just an idea that the solution could lie in this direction.

                      However I think our diagnosis itself is correct: all non-secure power are dangerous, because it engages in destructive fighting for power. The classic case is civil war, and yes in this sense even monarchies and oligarchies are not safe. Game of Thrones can happen.

                      Yet, liberal democracy has the root problem that because, almost “per definition” it is always elite who rule (like how almost “per definition” bakers bake bread and shoemakers make shoes), in liberal democracy this means *changing* the people, the demos. This means propaganda, changing their views. This means changing their whole make-up: immigration.

                      So the libertarian desire to be left alone by government is per definition impossible in a liberal democracy, as the government has to manufacture legitimacy by manufacturing support.

                      Modern dictatorships are actually a form of democracy. The engaged in propaganda and genocide to change the demos, to manufacture support. Liberal democracies do that too, dictators simply took it to an extreme level. Nazism should be seen through these lenses: everybody who was unlikely to support Hitler killed or nearly killed in the KZs, everybody else massively propagandized.

                      Prince Hans-Adam in Liechtenstein, King Whatshisname in Dubai, Governor Whatwashisname in Hong Kong are/were fairly good at leaving people alone. Hence the idea of small-scale monarchies. But I admit it is not yet worked out very well. Mostly it is just the diagnosis that is very clear.

                      There are two kinds of liberal democracies today, the US and the US Empire, although that is a bad way to put it as it is clearly not an empire of the American people. It is of the permanent Washington bureaucracy – people whom libertarian Americans consider quite harmful. You could put it this way: the US is a formal empire of the Washingtonites and the rest of the libdems are an informal empire of them.

                      At any rate, in all other libdems what will happen is based on what will happen in the US. In the US, our prediction is power-struggle intensifying and fragmenting, see the internal Democrat spat lately, Pelosi vs. women of color. The Left fragmenting is NOT good for the Right or normal people in general. Counter-intuitive, yes. But the nature of priestly competition is that if that guy fasted for five days, I will fast for seven days to be holier. To get holiness points on the Left, one has to out-tough the other on persecuting the enemy, i.e. the straight white male . This is not a recipe for totalitarianism, not in the beginning, but random death-squad level violent chaos. If the Left wins eventually a totalitarianism will emerge by someone pulling a Stalin and consolidating power by killing everybody to the left of themselves.

                      If they don’t win, because gun-owners tend to be against them etc. etc. there will not be much other choice than to set up some kind of more authoritarian, less democratic system.

                      Pinochet’s case is instructive. Because the elected leftist government kept violating Chile’s Constitution, they was a formal vote in their Senate or something like that authorizing Pinochet to take over and protect the Constitution. The idea of a semi-dictator protecting the Constitution of a democratic country sounds weird and it sounds entirely preposterous that it could happen in America. Yet, I don’t see any other kind of outcome if the Left does not win.

                    2. > bakers bake bread and shoemakers make shoes

                      Critically, bakers and shoemakers are _contestable_. This is what a well-functioning liberal democracy is: a reasonably fair contest for the position of ruling elite, _within_ a framework of “absolutely secure authority” set by a written constitution. Why do you think this is not good enough? _How_ do you think we could make things better? NRx do not say. But “absolutely secure authority” in the _absence_ of institutional devices for controlled contestability is a recipe for disaster. The rot will set in, and you will have struggles for power all the same, simply because the stakes are that much higher. (That’s another way to ameliorate things – lower the stakes as much as possible! This is what the separation of powers, as found in the U.S. is all about. Gridlock can be a good thing, who would’ve thought!)

          2. Darymple.

            Also, though that paragraph is quoted all over the internet, the original FrontPageMag interview seems to be unavailable, even on the Wayback Machine. (Wikiquote has a link, which isn’t working for me.)

            Which is a shame, because I was looking for anything Darymple had to say about countering this effect, and it’s not the sort of thing I can do a search for, and it’d be nice to have a convenient response for people to share if they want.

            As recently as last year, for example, my Facebook feed is populated by posts from friends claiming some form of “‘Political correctness’ is easier to understand if you replace it with the phrase ‘giving people respect'”, accompanied by examples.

            Part of me does my usual duty and entertains the point, and yes, in many cases, the term does make sense, and I believe a lot of people who claim that when they use that term, that’s where they’re coming from. Another part of me is inclined to reply to the post with “Motte and bailey”, but I invariably decline in order to spare myself the inevitable time-suck. I tell myself that’s liable to make the problem worse down the line. I’m one of those who “are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies”.

            On the gripping hand, it’s Facebook, and I have shit to do in real life.

            One such thing to do is to find a link to that ready-made convenient guide to countering the bad side of PC, without scaring off the people who genuinely believe in giving people respect. Darymple might have it, but I can’t find it. I also can’t find it anywhere in the original post Eric made about Gramscian damage. Buried in a comment somewhere, perhaps? Not the best place for it.

            1. At City Journal, you can read Dalrymple’s columns going back into the 90’s, here (this includes everything from Life at the Bottom). Only problem is they changed the format…used to be, you didn’t have to keep hitting “load more” to get the long list…

              His writings give plenty of examples of where PC takes you, and “respect for others” or even “peaceful coexistence” is not that place.

              1. Thanks for the CJ reference.

                That said, you’re not answering my question. I can show PC proponents examples of PC gone wrong all week, and it won’t refute whatever examples they have of PC doing the right thing. They think of PC protecting groups that would be wiped from existence otherwise. Better to have a billion people feel resentment for being oppressive, than to have a thousand people feel a bullet, fired to thunderous applause.

                You’re preaching to the choir. Now I’m giving you a hostile audience. Now what do you do?

            2. I don’t think Dalrymple said anything about countering this effect, other than maybe building small circles of passive resistance where you still talk real talk. I think Scruton wrote about visiting those circles in Checzoslovakia.

              Because nothing else was really done in the Sovietosphere until it collapsed. Power is power. If they could not enforce their lingo, they would not have power, and not having power means the system collapses and eventually it did.

              To the extent something was doable (spreading samizdats to small numbers of intellectuals), it was doable because although Soviets had power, the West had higher prestige. Status. Everybody understood that ,even the Soviet leaders themselves. Everybody understood what it means that they are not allowing people to emigrate. Voting with feet, having to lock people _in_ vs. having to lock people _out_ is an absolutely good indicator. Talk is cheap, emigration and immigration are revealed preferences. (We are moving from our current life in Western Europe into the V4 – actually it is kinda moving back but I would rather not disclose my nationality here. Anyway, I think it does add some weight to what I am saying. I am giving up on Western Europe. Revealed preference. Not on America yet, but at 41 not moving there either, maybe if I was 20 yes.)

              The issue is the West today does not have its own West, i.e. a higher prestige, obviously better comparison that helps people realize the sham things. No, China isn’t. Some things can be enviable there, but the situation is not even comparable. Not until the West bans emigration to China because otherwise it would happen in huge numbers. And that is not even on the horizon. The first signs will be Chinese-Americans, Chinese-Europeans moving back because they find life that is better there. That is not happening either, but I can at least imagine that happening in 10-30 years.

        2. How do you create a satisfying pair-bond with someone when 4-digit partner counts are commonplace?

          They maybe more common in the gay community than the straight community, but most of the research I’ve seen shows that gay men are no more promiscuous *on average* than straight men, especially if you consider single straight men.

          I think a significant part of the problem is that there is no societal pressure for gay men to “settle down”. No reason external reason for them to do so.

          There is a HUGE hidden culture of straights that engage in all sorts of sexual deviancy (and I don’t say that with any malice or animus. In fact I’m a bit envious of some of if)–swinging, wife swapping, hot-wifing, a dozen different kinds of “non-monogamy”. It’s just that for the most part they can pass day-to-day as “married” doesn’t mean they behave that way.

          And sure, it may only be 2-3 percent of the “straight” population, but the hyper-sexual homosexuals aren’t that numerous either.

          How do you fulfill the male instinct to be a protector and provider when gay “marriages” are a complete farce?

          Gay marriage isn’t always a “farce”. My “Best Man” at my wedding was (and is) gay. He’s been with his partner for as long as I’ve been married to my wife–over 2 decades now. They have both quit jobs to follow each other around the world (as my wife has done with me). The only difference is we have kids and they don’t.

          1. Semi-joking, but I wonder if the whole gay marriage thing was actually more about lesbian women, because if you look up “Lesbian Bed Death” it sounds like they are functioning like most married couples anyway i.e. no sex.

            1. There’s an old joke about lesbians that refers to a lesbian driving a Ferrari on her first date and a U-Haul on her second date.

              There’s a corresponding joke about gay men, but the punchline is “WHAT second date?”

              There are gay men who stay with their partners forever — who certainly do benefit from gay marriage — and lesbians who can’t seem to commit, but in general the male bell curve peak is on the “seeks exciting sex” side of the spectrum and the female peak is on the “seeks commitment and stability” side, and it’s pretty remarkable how invariant to sexual orientation this is. If anything, it’s exaggerated among gay people, who often end up hooking up with someone after the same thing they are.

              1. Interesting how you are definitely more red-pilled about sexual matters than economic or political ones. For me they are all the same. There is truth, which people always knew, and there is leftist propaganda, which are lies for the sake of getting power. I see no difference between saying men and women are different and saying capitalism is better than socialism. Same thing entirely. Just anti-propaganda.

                1. (BTW it is not like I am in love with US-style corporations. Nor is Eric, he wrote once that he hated working for them and “the scars are still showing”. Our difference is that that stuff is not real capitalism and more importantly more government does not make it better. Much of that suckage is because of government intervention.

                  The difference between Eric and me, libertarians and reactionaries is that we the later think non-modern (neither democratic nor dictatorial) governments could have some minimal but important interventions to make it better. Like, route around the whole college bullshit and both force them to take apprentices and force apprentices to stay there for a given amount of time. A pure free market would evolve that anyway but since that never exists, go this short-cut. For Swiss banks it worked even up to 1970 or so…)

    3. Si vis pacem para bellum
      If you do not already exercise your right to keep and bear arms, there is no time like the present.

  36. Hmm. Nobody’s mentioned Walter Breen, Marion Zimmer Bradley, or their daughter’s exposure of their crimes yet in this thread?

    It’s a hard read, but important if you want to understand the Berkeley predator “culture”. Before I became aware of her writing, I wasn’t aware that Harvey Milk, the gay martyr, had a penchant for fucking adolescent boys, two of whom later committed suicide.

    1. Predator culture certainly. I’m not sure the “Berkeley” isn’t prejudicial. It seems a little unfair considering that these predators somehow have a way of finding each other regardless of where they live, and I know of two other location-specific “predator cultures,” which aren’t Leftist Meccas. Fortunately both of them are in the past.

      1. There are a lot of sick fucks in Berkeley, and many of them were there because of MZB and Walter Breen. There are people there who still think Breen was unjustly punished, and that Moira was wrong to turn him in.

        The incredible thing to me about Breen is that he was still allowed to attend SF cons, and be around children, for a couple of decades after all the SMOFs knew he liked to rape kids.

        1. I’m sure that every ring of pedophiles gets bigger as it ages; how could they not.

          As to MZB and Breen, if I still owned any of her books I’d probably be lighting them on fire right now. And yeah, codes of conduct, 30 years too late.

          Yay.

          1. I never had any of her books, because the people urging me to get and read them all had a rather nasty streak of misandry about them that I found quite off-putting. My take was “well, if the feminazis love MZB, her stuff will most likely bore me to tears.”

    1. Oh noes! Evil masterminds are secretly bankrolling a scary agenda — to get the idea that “transfolk are people” accepted in mainstream society! Call out the torch and pitchfork mob!

      1. You’re missing the point. It’s not just that. They’re taking advantage of transfolk. Their goal is to get transfolk on things like hormone therapy so they can extract rent from them (or their insurance) for the rest of their lives.

        And then there’s the negative side effects, like forcing people to use particular pronouns when referring to transfolk–and throwing those who refuse in jail, and fining them excessively. Or the psychological and physiological damage done to people in whom the gender dysphoria would’ve resolved on its own, but who transitioned and came to regret it immensely. But TPTB don’t care about any of that. They’ve got to have… money. And power.

        1. I think it’s more virtue-signalling on a grand scale. Traditionalists have often treated gender dysphoriacs with intense repressive violence. The virtue-signalling says “I’m not like that – I’m a good guy.” Also it’s a way to épatez les bourgeois. And TGs crave validation (understandably) and tend to view any skepticism about any claim of GD or suggested response other than transition as equivalent to that repression. So they welcome the support of the virtue-signallers, even to being incited to maximalism.

    1. Whether Epstein’s a ped, he’s got a job to do. He’s a pimp. Pimps need to keep getting more young stuff in their stable. Because pimping is easy compared to how hard hooking is on women- they age out before they are legal. Even the ‘happy hookers’. Look at Sasha Grey’s mouth now- she started out a tough smart well-connected chippie, got wildly lucky and got rich and famous. Face and figure still good, knows how to dress. And I’ve seen more smug, happy, content feminine triumph in the mouth of a rusted rat trap.

      Epstein’s had his first ‘suicide’ attempt. If you want him gone, spread the word that he’s got something on Putin as well as Hillary.

      1. Hillary, Bubba, and the rest of their criminal enterprise all know that he can land them all in prison for life. I’d say his chance of surviving to trial is 10% or less.

        1. > Hillary, Bubba, and the rest of their criminal enterprise all know that he can land them all in prison for life

          So the Qanon was right, but not the way he thought! So nice.

        2. Well, he’s dead as I guessed. Now I’m wondering who’s taking bets on how long his girlfriend has before she gets suicided with three rounds to the back of her head. I think she’s hiding out somewhere in Europe currently.

  37. If you’re Japanese, and live in the right prefacture the age of consent can go as low as 13 with parent permission. I’m pretty sure the laws for foreigners is at least 18, maybe a bit older, in all of Japan. It’s just interesting that the age of consent is societaly constructed in a sense. Still want almost nothing to do with partners under 25 as people under that age can be difficult to deal with.

    It’s definitely creepy especially how Epstein did it. The fucked up thing with consent laws, in Illinois, is two 16 year olds having sex could technically land both in prison, and a 17 year old sleeping with a 16 year old can do that too. It also matters if you believed the person was 17 or 18 depending on whether your a teacher. My high school English teacher married one of his students a few years after she graduated. Someone I knew in high school is on a sex offender list for life out of him at 19 sleeping with a 15 or 16 year old. Probably a Freshman he met before graduating high school.

    About 20 years ago Colorado was considering lowering the age of consent to 16. If I remember correctly the age of consent is 17 to 18, there, and if you’re within a 4 year range you’re safe from charges.

  38. ESR: What are your opinions regarding this:
    Opensource Xonotic mod mourns Epstein:

    Rest In Peace, Jeffery Epstein.
    Murdered by the proud “upstanding” face-tattooed white man’s religion.
    Remember: by the Proud Accomplished* REAL White Man, the only acceptable relationship is Adam and Mature-BIG-Lady-of-The-Night.
    (*many murders, thefts, drug deals)
    (As the proud White Man’s saying goes: Adam and Established-Paramour, NOT Adam and Young-Virgin!)

    Today the Elite White Men of the world are having (cell)-block parties expressing their happiness for your death, retaking their oaths regarding millstones and the like, drawing more tattoos on their faces and hands to commemorate the day.
    > moddb.com/games/chaosesqueanthology

    Elsewhere this same message was also posted with an addition (4chan programming board):
    warosu.org/g/thread/S72270376
    >—–
    >YHWH allows men to marry girl children, including in cases of rape (tahpahs) in Devarim chapter 22, verse 28: na’ar (child: hebrew masoretic text), padia (child: greek septuagint), puella (young girl: latin vulgate).
    >
    >You are a heretic. Almost all white men and their masters (white women) are.

    Declaring that “white men” are “heretics” for not allowing child marriage anywhere on earth.

    1. >ESR: What are your opinions regarding this:

      Repulsive, semi-incoherent drivel in an all-too-familiar style. I smell MikeeUSA.

      1. ESR: Should open source projects which eulogize Jeffery Epstein be condemned, and maybe punished? That project mourns his death because the author seems to see nothing wrong with Epstein’s pursuit of young women and girls. Shouldn’t such people be ejected from the open source community and maybe from society all-together?

        Anyone man who likes young girls is a danger to society. Society exists to create stability for the family: that means to protect women and to protect children.

        The difference between western society and other more barbaric societies is just that: while the western man’s passions are harnessed and restrained for the good of the many: the barbaric societies allow the man to indulge in his passions. This is why islamic societies falter, while the USA went to the moon.

        1. ESR: Should open source projects which eulogize Jeffery Epstein be condemned, and maybe punished?

          No. Condemn the person, but judge the project by its results.

          I’d take patches for my projects from a Nazi or a Communist and not blink. The alternative is for us to fragment into a welter of ever-tinier squabbling subtribes divided by ever more tenuous grievances, unable to sustain large-scale cooperation.

          1. ESR: Nazis and Communists do not want to have sex with young girls. Paedophiles do.

            Even white convicts who have murdered and tortured people see paedophiles as the lowest of the low and worse then any criminal. Paedophiles want to enslave young girls into servitude.

      2. esr on 2019-08-11 at 16:54:18 said:
        >Repulsive, semi-incoherent drivel in an all-too-familiar style. I smell MikeeUSA.

        ESR: Isn’t mikeusa just a sexist troll? I don’t believe he is a developer of anything, being talentless and surely not a programmer. Who would ever let such a person into their coding boot camp? As far as I’ve heard, that troll has never produced one line of code, nor anything else useful to any project. Programming is a rational art, it makes sense that idiots like that could not understand it.

        The developer here has to be someone else, they won’t give their name though; It’s a shame that even after all the crimes he has committed, some so-called-Liberals still support Epstein just because he gave lip service to the progressive agenda, while living his actual life like a medieval king – (and reportedly getting lip service of another kind). It’s very hypocritical.

        1. >I don’t believe he is a developer of anything, being talentless and surely not a programmer.

          There are Communists who are capable programmers, so you shouldn’t assume that someone is “untalented” simply because they happen to have weird and evil ideas.

          1. ESR: I will accept that there are Communists who are capable programmers: their flagship nation did arguably produce a thermonuclear weapon before the USA did (the layer-cake design; however it was not scale-able like Teller’s design); an understanding of logic is part-and-parcel of their societal upbringing. That being said: show me one thing this mikeusa has produced? (other than a bunch of trolling, misogyny, pro-man-girl-paedophillia, and support for the most evil laws regarding “marital” relationships from long-dead ancient regimes which the civilized nations are wiping from the earth)

            1. > That being said: show me one thing this mikeusa has produced?

              I don’t know what, if anything, he has produced. I just don’t exclude the possibility that he might have merely because I find aspects of his thinking abhorrent. Reality doesn’t work that way.

              1. >Reality doesn’t work that way.
                Wouldn’t we have a record of one line of code, one work of authorship, one something that this abhorrent pedophile-apoligist has created then? Yet where is it?

                There is something deeply wrong with so-called men who like young girls. Our society has succeeded in rooting them out all around the world to some degree, but they persist.

                I think you would agree that if it were possible to eradicate the gene that causes men to like young girls, that this should be done. Paedophiles are a danger to society: they attempt to overthrow the natural order where the man provides for a woman and her children, and respects her in her capacity as the central pillar of the family and of society. The paedophile attempts to replace this natural family system with one where he is the central pillar and rapes young girls.

                1. Credit where it’s due, we don’t have any evidence that mikeeusa has victimized a single underage girl. Perhaps due to his own fecklessness, he never got the chance.

                  Now, Marvin Minsky, on the other hand…

                  1. >Now, Marvin Minsky, on the other hand…

                    Ain’t that a kick in the head, now?

                    I met Minsky once. He seemed exactly as nerdy and unworldly as one would expect.

                    My money is on “he didn’t know”. That is, if one of Epstein’s girls did fling herself at him on orders, he was probably too busy marveling at his unexpected good fortune to even wonder if age of consent was an issue.

                    1. Minsky was at Epstein’s Virgin Islands compound. He probably flew there on the Lolita Express. He likely knew.

                      The Epstein-MIT connections run deep. Media Lab director Joi Ito was palling around with Epstein and taking money from him as late as 2014. He claims to have not known about Epstein’s sex trafficking, but that was well known as of 2008 with his Florida conviction.

                    2. >Minsky was at Epstein’s Virgin Islands compound. He probably flew there on the Lolita Express. He likely knew.

                      Knew what? That Epstein kept a harem and tossed women at his guests like bonbons? No doubt. Minsky wasn’t stupid or unobservant. But that isn’t guilty knowledge. It’s not like this sort of behavior is historically unusual in the rich and powerful. I can think of a dozen places in the Old World where it would hardly raise an eyebrow, and a few where it would be considered normal hospitality.

                      What would have constituted guilty knowledge is that Epstein’s chickadees were (a) legally underage, (b) specifically being abused or coerced, or (c) specifically immature enough that they were incapable of consent as a matter of fact rather than law.

                      A man as worldly as (say) Bill Clinton would have no excuse for failing to notice these circumstances and realizing his moral situation was at best dubious. I myself would have no excuse, either. Minsky, on the other hand, I’ll cut some slack on this. Based on his public record and my FTF impression of him, he may very well have lacked the experience to recognize that whatever particular hottie just fucked his brains out was cooperating in a subtle kind of harm to herself.

                      I’d take a much harsher line if Epstein’s chickadees were pre-pubescent. As it … well, I remember one exceptional 14-year old I met when I was 38. If she had flung herself at me (she didn’t) and I hadn’t dodged (I didn’t have to) it would have been a malum prohibitum, but not a malum in se. Some women ripen in the brain, as well as the body, very early. It is right that we have laws to protect the vast majority who don’t, but that doesn’t mean we should rush to judge the likes of a Minsky who was likely a hapless victim of Epstein’s machinations himself.

  39. You write:

    “The Left has a long history of triggering conservatives into self-discrediting moral panics (“Rock and roll is the devil’s music”)”

    But unless you’re willing to believe that Ace Frehley and Alice Cooper are some sort of Left Wing Deep Cover Operatives then lets face it – the conservatives did this to themselves without any help from left wing boogeymen.

  40. .
    Knew what? That Epstein kept a harem and tossed women at his guests like bonbons?

    And that said “women” were too young to give legal or even meaningful consent. This isn’t a case of bumping into Epstein at some party and Epstein being like “Virginia, meet Marvin. Marvin, meet Virginia. You two crazy kids have fun now.” Minsky had travelled to Epstein’s Virgin Islands compound, which he maintained for sex trafficking purposes. So even if the girl was above the legal age of consent, he had a duty not to touch her if there was even the slightest whiff of coercion.

    Also, “he didn’t know” is not a defense under the law. It doesn’t matter how nerdy you are — the responsibility to ensure that consent can be meaningfully given before sexual activity ensues is yours and yours alone.

    You may be willing to forgive him, and if this were Libertopia as you envision it, society may even eventually forgive him. But this isn’t Libertopia. Our society loathes sex offenders, and once you commit a qualifying offense, “sex offender” becomes part of your identity for life. If he had had a sex offense conviction, all that Minsky had achieved would be undone. No one would ever speak his name with any fondness or admiration ever again, and most if not all of his awards and accolades would be revoked. Even with his intelligence and accomplishments, he would be effectively unemployable — MIT would cut ties with him in a hot minute. (We’re just beginning to see the fallout as MIT and individuals involved with MIT do damage control to their reputations after discovering that powerful individuals within MIT’s academia ranks were chummy with Epstein.) . He may be ostracized and even banished, not even allowed to return to his own home (it might be close to a school!), and that’s after he had served whatever prison sentence was meted out to him. Most people, if they’re smart and they bank on their reputation, wish to avoid such a fate.

    The practical upshot of this is that it made Minsky very blackmailable, and quite possibly indebted him to Epstein for the rest of his life. If so, crossing Epstein would mean risking exposure, and therefore ruin, and he would be forced to become a catspaw for a child sex trafficker. So what we don’t yet know about what Minsky did and when can turn out to be a lot more damning than what we do know.

    1. >Minsky had travelled to Epstein’s Virgin Islands compound, which he maintained for sex trafficking purposes. So even if the girl was above the legal age of consent, he had a duty not to touch her if there was even the slightest whiff of coercion.

      There is new information. The physicist and SF writer Gregory Benford, who I know slightly and am prepared to trust as a witness, says of the allegation that the girl was ordered to have sex with Minsky: “Note, never says what happened. If Marvin had done it, she would say so. I know; I was there. Minsky turned her down. Told me about it. She saw us talking and didn’t approach me.”

      So Minsky had a clue. Good on him.

  41. Giuffre never accused Minsky of having sex with her. Her deposition said that she was “directed to have sex” with him. Remember, this was a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell. As for why he was in St. Thomas, Epstein funded an AI conference there that Minsky and others organized.
    This was in 2002, years before Epstein’s conviction. Is there any evidence that Minsky and others knew *at the time* what Epstein was doing? Did Minsky continue to take money from him after it became known? I have seen no evidence of that, but given the Ito case, I’m sure investigators will look into the possibility.

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