CUTIES (2020)
Rating: 3/5
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https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1306400507418697729
The latest conservative triggering is over a French film called Cuties (Mignonnes). Having premiered this January without incident, it hit the limelight several days ago when Netflix released it to American audiences. Agitated moralists and boomers briefly pushed the hashtag #CancelNetflix to #1 on Twitter. (Imagine having a Netflix account to cancel in the first place). US lawmakers demanded a DoJ investigation. Conversely, this furore ensured that seems to have been a pretty marginal and ultimately mediocre European “arthouse” film will have been seen by millions more people than would have watched it otherwise. (Incidentally, this happens to describe myself, who watches about half a dozen movies a year, and a French film perhaps once a decade). I also suspect that many of the most agitated critics did not watch it, or watched some different movie, because I don’t think most observers will perceive it as the celebration of pedophilia that it has been presented as. Or perhaps conservatives simply no longer have any other avenue to express their dismay with liberal cultural hegemony beyond “But Think of the Children”, pedophilia being one of the very last aspects of human sexuality where moral outrage is not just still permitted but arguably more required than a generation ago (the onetime alliance of convenience between homosexuals and pedophiles having long been memoryholed by all handshakeworthy society). So, like Qanon, but for the more normie right-wingers.
So what is Cuties? It is a film about Amy, an 11 year old girl, clumsily trying to reconcile her Senegalese Muslim immigrant identity with the thrills and vapidities of life in secular France by joining an all-female dance troupe. Which is not to say her own family and community is not without its boorishness and hypocrisies; while her austere aunt preaches about Islamic values and how women should know their place, her obese single mother has to suffer the faithlessness of her polygamist husband. The “heroine” Amy is not herself a sympathetic character, engaging in serial petty theft and assault. As Richard Hanania observes on Twitter, the supreme irony of Cuties is that it is too politically incorrect, with its criticism of patriarchal Muslim culture and implicit (if inadvertent) HBD realism, to have been made in the United States.
On that note, it is important to note that the director was not some Hollywood Weinstein, but a French-Senegalese woman called Maïmouna Doucouré. She evidently draws on personal lived experienced – her own immigrant mother was tormented by a polygamist husband, and she explored this theme at length in her second short film Maman in 2015. But while she identifies as a Muslim herself, she has also defended Cuties on feminist grounds. This is just about the last demographic and personality type one that would expect to indulge in gratuitous loli fanservice, of which there is, in any case, virtually none. Even actual pedophiles seem to agree on that, at least if this /r/TheMotte comment from a throwaway account by a self-admitted pedophile is accurate (see right; click to enlarge).
The closest Cuties comes to something even mildly titillating is a cell phone recording of a music performance by another girl band, in which one of them briefly flashes one of her boobs. But contrary to Internet rumors and Ted Cruz, the actress in question was not even a minor. Otherwise, none of the “controversial” scenes in question were in the least erotic, ranging instead from slapstick to fan disservice. The most infamous scene, in which the troupe dances with age-inappropriate suggestiveness before a crowd of parents, is met with a pelter of disapproving boos. In another scene that tends more to the slapstick, one of the girl inadvertently picks up a discarded condom and blows it like a balloon, provoking the others to freak out and wash her mouth out with soap to clean out the AIDS. Many of the other scenes are on the cringe-comical spectrum, including two cases in which they tried to flirt with random guys, once IRL, once online (in both cases, the guys wisely bailed). In another scene, our heroines flash their Lolita cards, avoiding trespassing charge by loudly accusing the guard detaining them of pedophilia to pressure him into letting them make a getaway. Some of these are not particularly comfortable scenes. But they are “socially realistic.”
The cringe got dialed up to eleven when Amy assaulted a member of an opposing dance troupe, who punished her by pulling down her skirt and snapping a photo of her panties. They were plain panties, which is apparently no longer cool even in middle school, so to regain her social status she snapped a candid underskirt with a stolen phone and uploaded it to social media. This predictably had the opposite effect, with her being ejected from her dance troupe; in an inversion of the usual tropes, one of her former friends disgustedly told her that her mother would have sent her back to her village for that. The perils of trying to fit in without knowing the finer details of social conventions! Amy’s mother calls her a whore and tries to cleanse her off her demons, but the exorcism turns into a twerk at the end. They then called in a mullah to sort her out. But in another inversion of expectations, the old man explained that she didn’t have demons and walked away without taking a payment for his services. Maybe he was a chill mullah, or perhaps he was one of those mullahs dreaming of opening an LGBT-friendly mosques. Who knows. It’s worth noting that French Muslims are much more secular and less traditionalist than their German and especially British counterparts, their high incidence of terrorism being not so much an expression of traditionalism as a reaction against its disappearance. Moreover, even beurettes (North African Arab girls) have a reputation in France for being loose. This must be all the more true for West Africans, whose females’ penchant for forwardness and sexual precocity – at least once stripped of their cultural constraints – is well known.
As is more common in European movies, there is little moral sermonizing. They are open to many different interpretations and this makes it hard for people without strong moral opinions (e.g. myself) to have strong opinions on them. There is plenty of criticism, almost all of it implied, rather than explicit. There are no true heroes, but nor are there any real villains. Sure, the Muslim community is insular and rustic, populated by shiftless cads, superstitious women, and hollow “moral” authorities. But neither was fulfillment to be found in too deep an immersion in secular decadence. The cruelty and backstabbing of female cliques, which is universal to all cultures, is savagely portrayed. Even at the family level, the mother and aunt even take turns playing Jekyll and Hyde with respect to Amy. The film concludes with Amy abandoning her dance troupe mid-performance and running away to be at the wedding of her polygamist father along with her mother, auntie, and the rest of their community, where she skips happily and innocently with the other children. So, whatever.
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Can’t wait to see this one! 🙁
Very daring of you to come out like this, showing yourself to be a lurker on the fortification subreddit.
That Reddit screenshot just added weight to my previous convictions that Reddit needs do be shut down for the good of society.
Aoodhoo Bil’Lah!
A Moroccan female acquaintance of mine once told me a joke:
Pregnant Siamese, Maine coon, Blue Russian and Japanese bobtail female cats discuss the male cats that would be the fathers of their kittens, whether they are purebred, have a pedigree, have received medals in cat competitions. A Marrakesh female stray cat comes to join the discussion.
After listening to others for a little while, the Moroccan cat says: “Well, you ladies seem quite complicated when it comes to getting pregnant. I’ve already been pregnant a dozen times and I have no idea which one of the many cats I met was the father to my kittens. And in fact I don’t care. All I know is that it was not this smelly old dog I slept with a few times to get some money”.
Ruby, a famous Moroccan call girl who caused quite a scandal with Berlusconi comes to mind:
https://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/68286000/jpg/_68286363_011012991-1.jpg
Also a typical French Algerian Beurette is to be found in Nabila, a bimbo socialite:
https://file1.closermag.fr/var/closermag/storage/images/9/4/1/1/9411137/nabilla.jpg?alias=square500x500&size=x100&format=webp
I prefer the term Francophone-Senegalese.
The producer was an Israeli.
Every attempt to push what it is acceptable to depict is framed in the same way, as not endorsing but just investigating an important social question, because gullible people (like film critics and obviously AK) will fall for it.
Plus the Zahia affair:
https://resize-public.ladmedia.fr/r/320,237,ffffff/img/var/public/storage/images/news/zahia-dehar-le-proces-de-l-affaire-zahia-ribery-benzema-repousse-pour-vice-de-procedure-416895/5120774-1-fre-FR/Zahia-Dehar-le-proces-de-l-affaire-Zahia-Ribery-Benzema-repousse-pour-vice-de-procedure.jpg
The most amusing, if that is the right word, part being to me that it was a “Black-Blanc-Beur” combination.
Also, apparently the shots often focus on the girls as they are ‘dancing’ in a way which meets the legal definition of child pornography and would not even have been permitted on an imageboard like 8chan. But I guess if its presented as just another insipid art film, then you can get some contrarians to shrug at it.
I haven’t seen it but others(with a strong moral compass?) describe it different from you.
Opinions from the other side who sound more convincing.
*Multiple perverted scenes with girls trying to get attention of guys. These are children. Ofcourse in ghettos this is most likely true. That does not mean it needs to be shown or be available for children to see. We don’t play porn on netflix. Yet. Neither should this be played.
That’s it. I thought I would remember more but really the teenage sex push is the big factor. One more thing I would like to add is that while something may seem ok to you it is still subversive. Like the scene with girls washing out another girl’s mouth after she put a condom in it. There are literally pedoes that edit movies for scenes like that. Like a girl being sprayed with snot in jurassic park. These same pedoes get off on sneaking this filth through the filters.
Yes normies are flipping out about this due to hysteria. Is that a bad thing? Would you rather they go back to worshipping globohomo? Globohomo propaganda is not any less braindead. The difference is that anti pedo people have truth on their side. This movie is degenerate. While globohome lacks any truth what so ever. Cleansing fire needs to come sooner.
Zahia is also an animal lover…
https://www.peta.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/PETA-UK-Zahia-Ad.jpg
But despite her big br…, ahem heart, the poor girl feels discriminated against:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.purepeople.com/article/zahia-dehar-victime-d-une-discrimination-douloureuse-a-vivre_a395276/1
I’ll steal a line from Alex McNabb at TRS – there’s no way to “critique” child sexualization in a visual medium depicting, rather than documenting, child sexualization that doesn’t in fact constitute child sexualization in itself. The images speak for themselves.
The scene in which the protagonist seeks to seduce her relative to keep her phone should speak for itself. Creeper-fuel.
The fact that AK and others (myself included) may not in fact be titilated by this garbage means we’re not pedophiles – but it doesn’t mean the movie isn’t in fact click-bait for pedos who do find this arousing rather than creepy.
I think almost everyone I know has netflix, especially as most people share the same netflix account across all their friends and family members. Finding nowadays people have a television in Western Europe, which is not connected to netflix, is almost become surprising or “retro”, like finding a computer without an internet connection.
(Of course, netflix is not very good for cinephiles).
A film about children, should stay a film about childhood, not some allusion to adult mores, neuroses and sexual deviancy. Coming of age movies cam present sexuality of “teenage ” actors, but kids should stay kids. When I was young, the French understood where to draw a line in teenage sexualization to maintain a good taste.
https://youtu.be/klcdp7UXpL8
But nowadays France is a degenerate country, a showcase for globohomo’s achievements.
https://youtu.be/XlzF6vpz0KM
Dmitry, you need to work on your hyperliteral textual interpretation. In context it is quite clear that Karlin is mocking what he perceives to be a foolish subscription.
Lol I know he is saying he disapproves of the service, but it hit my eyes like “imagine having a smartphone”. Netflix accounts are often shared among 5-10 people, most of us are using our friends’ accounts and there’s almost 200 million accounts in the world.
Yes, but i’d say that focusing on the pedo angle is missing the point. Seriously, how common is pedophilia? Do people who have small children spent their days fearing that pedophiles will jump out from the bushes and kidnap their children?
What a movie like this (and the general culture) promotes is sexual liberation of young girls, but that won’t mean they’ll become victims of pedophiles. They’ll just start having sex age 13 with some 15 year old boy they have a crush on.
Good review. I ranked it as better than most movies that come out these days, which doesn’t mean it wasn’t “mediocre” when judged by a higher standard than the incredibly low one I was using.
Very rarely does it really work out like that.
Early degeneracy has significant downstream effects.
https://akarlin.com/piracy-guide/
Here you go.
I agree, but how often will that include being a victim of a pedophile.
I’d say it’s very rare and the prominence of the pedo debate in public is completly disproportionate to reality.
There were approximately 14,000 child and youth victims of sexual offences in Canada in 2012, a rate of 205 victims for every 100,000 children and youth. Roughly one in five (21%) offences with a child or youth victim reported to police in 2012 was a sexual offence.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2014001/article/14008-eng.htm#a1
And let’s not forget that only a fraction of sexual assault on children is reported to police and brought to justice.
“Imagine” is a /pol/-ish turn of phrase meant to express exasperation at something.
I.e., imagine willingly forking over your money to people who hate you and want to to see you destroyed because of muh copyrights. Especially if you’re not even Murican.
Re: Pedophilia: Anatoly, what are your thoughts on making things such as cartoon/animated child porn (so, NOT the real thing!), child sex dolls, and child sex robots legal and widely available to people with pedophilic inclinations? Serious question, BTW.
My thoughts are that these discussions are not worthwhile and subsequent comments on them will be deleted as OT.
When I went to pirate it I found a bunch of actual porn instead. I wonder if any of this outrage is down to boomers not knowing how to use the internet.
I have kids. I don’t sit around thinking about pedoes because I have a good family(no vices etc).
However if the topic comes up my first thoughts are cleansing fire. Just as a matter of something you do, just like if you run across rabid animal. I guess that type of attitude develops when you are responsible for little ones.
One observation. I went to public school and long after I graduated I noticed how often public school teachers get busted for pedo shit. I did not notice that as a kid but looking back and re analyzing there was a lot of pedo activity. And surprisingly over the years some teachers I knew got busted too. Same deal with my wife’s specialized school. We realized this the same way through news.
Then when you listen to podcasts and anyone who ever came out of the hood has a story of how they were molested as a kid. That rate is sky high. And it’s different types of pedoes too. Black uncle’s is different from loser teacher who are in turn different from sjw feminist men.
It seems to at any streaming sites like:
https://bflix.to/movie/cuties-3pzk8/xrnppmq
Annoying lack of netflix option to switch between language tracks. Superficially looking at a few sections of the video – this show just looks like a boring telenovela that will be played in television at 5pm.
Surely most Boomers in America, have netflix, since there are 73 million netflix accounts in USA, and most of these accounts are shared by multiple people. I assume there are something like 100-200 million netflix viewers in the USA.
Why indeed?
Because it works.
Because just like accusation of racism, accusation of pedophilia is the ultimate weapon.
Just like you cannot prove that you are not a racist, you cannot prove you are not a pedophile. Any defence you can put up is only further evidence of your guilt.
For decades the left used the racism weapon to silence anyone they wanted.
Now the most stupid and conspirational part of the right finally learned how to play the game too.
You are used to SJW’s calling you a racist. Get fast used to Qanonists calling you a pedophile.
For all eternity.
It’s also been part of the folklore for decades now, especially in America and Great Britain.
In the 1980s anglosaxon world, there was scandal about “satanic ritual abuse”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria
It seems like that scandal was quite caused by “false memory syndrome” in psychotherapy.
The picture you selected is hilarious, the girl on the left doing the classic bn groin-grab.
Didn’t and won’t see the movie (I have a Netflix). From what I read here I gather there is an element of slippery slope and pushing the envelope in the intention behind making this film. In the Zeitgeist we live bad infections spread fast. Made me think of Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse -Five” where there is this guy who is the first white person who used the cuss term ‘a motherfucker’. It was somewhere in the Ardennes in 1944 before they were captured by Germans.
Here’s a Review that actually goes into detail as to what is shown as to the little girls and their extreme sexualization by adults put on film for “adult” enjoyment — sounds like a PedoFest to me– somehow you missed that?: https://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/netflixs-cuties-is-about-normalizing-the-sexualization-of-children-and-nothing-else/
Wasn’t there also the Pitcairn Island sex abuse scandal in 2004, which saw every single man living on that island (it has a small population of 50 people in 2 or 3 families) accused of sexual abuse?
Sometimes I envy the innocence of others.
It must be a nice world they live in, where most bad things don’t happen and terrible people don’t just wander around behind a silly smile and an easy laugh.
Yeah,, I hit teenager in the ‘glory days’ of google search in the early naughties, and will kindly say that this is child porn ‘with a story’.
.. Just cause your high cost porno has ‘a story’, and ‘a guy that comes to fix your fridge’, does not imply it is not a porno.
A decent chunk of child porn is non nude – along the lines of what this movie is selling. Just cause there is affirmative action enforced by a Jewish director does not remove the fact it is soft-core child porn.
Similar kinda shit was shown on channel 5 in the 90s in the UK at 11AM+ with actual adult females, and then channel 5 was know as the ‘soft-core smut channel’ to the younguns like me!
This post by Karlin is immensely gullible and cringe.
Subversion. Reminds me of a lot of examples of when it was done to soviets and old americana.
I am confident that sexual abuse of children issue attracts way too many nutjobs. I do not trust the articles and statistics which are driven by new broader definitions of abuse. The caution threshold is set so high that it becomes a type of pseudo-science where the emphasis is set on confirmation while almost no energy is put into a disproval. In other words the rate of false positives is very high. Spanish Inquisition had a higher standards of proof than what is currently practiced by various controlling and investigative bodies involved in child sexual abuse because they are populate with the nutjobs.
In your link you find section titled:
Children and youth more frequently victims of sexual offences than adults
It sounds alarmist but is it surprising? If you remove all cases that were prosecuted under “age of consent” law where girls were older that 14 I venture to predict that it would no longer be true. And number of sex crimes against chilled would be lower than that against adults.
“Yawn…” – I know I sound boring. Anything is boring for somebody who is obsessed with sex with children whether as a crusader against it or a perpetrator.
It’s just another in the long series of moral panics that have swept western civilisation over the past century and a half. These were common in Victorian times. There were regular moral panics about prostitution. Moral panics about white slavery were common from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. And remember the great Satanic Ritual Abuse panic a few decades ago? And the Video Nasties panic?
I suspect that as religion loses its hold on a society and is replaced by mass media a society will become more and more hysterical.
In almost every case it starts with something that is real but is either extremely rare or blown entirely out of proportion and the hysteria builds for a few years and then subsides as the next moral panic comes along.
It seems to be a particular feature of the Anglophone countries. It may be a Protestant thing, or more likely the result of Protestantism (and especially the Puritan strain of Protestantism) morphing into an obsessive concern with being moral busybodies looking for someone to save.
In the internet age it has meshed with the growing obsession with conspiracy theories.
1) Only a fraction of sexual abuse against children is reported and prosecuted.
2) Children are nearly defenseless against sexual assault.
3) Young children often do not understand what happens to them when sexually abused.
4) A lot of children who have experienced sexual abuse are traumatized for life and experience deep psychological effects even into their adult life.
I know personally two persons who have been raped at around 10 years of age. One of them has chosen to work as a child trauma specialist to help children who unfortunately get to live this kind of ordeal. Through that person I have some information about what really is going on.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4287184/pregnant-ten-year-old-girl-victorian-street-kids/
The one where tunnels were found beneath the foundations matching the (clearly physically abused) child’s description, before the site was quickly demolished by authorities? Yeah, I’ve heard of it.
Sorry, weren’t you trying to say that these moral panics were unjustified? You think prostitution is some exceedingly rare phenomenon, or that women selling their bodies is just shrug-worthy? The total ease with which you can easily order a prostitute online in any major city is a disgrace, what the hell would justify moral outrage if not that?
I mean, it might have something to do with the recent arrest of the IMMENSELY politically well connected pedophile who was (as well as regularly hosting parties for an international who’s who of politics on his pedophile island) was also deeply involved with several children’s “charities”.
Let me guess, all this is overblown or even innocuous, and he really just killed himself while the camera watching his cell happened to malfunction. He was barely even a pedophile, and in any case his global child trafficking ring certainly died with him. Are you reddit’s ambassador to unz or something?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53224444
We live in degenerate times. We might prefer thinking otherwise, but a lot of people find causing moral or physical harm to others being a source of amusement.
You see some people are hedonistic nihilists, they don’t care about the feelings of others. Even when the others are young children. As Ghislene Maxwell once said: “These girls are nothing, they are thrash”…
Yup, you are one of the nutjobs.
“One of them has chosen to work as a child trauma specialist” – Probably a nutjob too.
Are you getting laid? Studies shows that singles have less accepting attitude towards sex abuse than married people. This is possible because people who have sex fantasize less about it than people who do not get laid. Probably incels might be the ones who are the most agitated about all kind of sex crimes. And when it comes to sex abuse of children the issue becomes a highly moral cause so one can ride really a high horse, so the issue and the activism become particularly attractive for all kinds of losers.
And one more thing. In times when all kinds of moral causes and values have been doubted, questioned or even compromised or for people who are indifferent to the point of amorality but who strive to be good or perceived to be good then the cause of children is the thing because it does not need to be argued about as the cause of children is assumed to be axiomatic and thus unquestionable.
Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are on the sinking ship.
Carter: Women and children first!
Reagan: Fuck all the women and children!
Clinton: But do we have time?
How Cuties should have danced:
It’s like being accused of being a witch in the 17th century. Not only was there no way you could defend yourself, no-one else could defend you either. If you offered the opinion that old Martha Wright was not a witch the response would be, “A-ha! So you’re a witch as well. Only a witch would defend another witch.”
Accusing someone of being a witch, a racist or a pedophile is an effective way to silence and destroy that person without the inconvenience of having to provide any evidence whatsoever.
The problem is that it’s a tactic that can be used by both sides. Someone smears a prominent Democrat politician in this way and Democrats can easily respond by smearing a prominent Republican. It’s mutually assured destruction. The witch craze faded away when people started to realise that anybody could be accused of witchcraft.
Some people are just monsters.
Thanks for the review, Mr. Karlin.
I wasn’t planning on watching this tripe anyway, this just confirms the decision.
The main issue with the film is that it contained errors and implausibilities. The mixed girl is shown to have a social media account yet later she confides that her parents do not allow her to have a phone. Amy’s moment of clarity and tears should not have occurred. Instead it would have been more sound for her to relish in completing the performance with her friends, then later when alone with her thoughts decide to take the middle ground on dress style.
There is also the matter of fighting and law-breaking which is more serious than lewd dancing.
If a woman wants to rent her body out for money that is her business and her client’s business. It’s not my business and it’s not your business.
There are lots of things in this world that I don’t particularly like, and there are lots of things that people do that I consider to be unwise, but I try not to get hysterical about the things that are none of my business.
You misunderstood me, I was being sarcastic. I wouldn’t watch this filthy and distasteful film and waste my time. There are plenty of good films that I haven’t seen. I still don’t understand how Karlin ended up giving this trash a ***rating, especially after reading his concluding remarks?
Makes me laugh every time.
Yes, and it’s not like we’re lacking examples these days.
Oh, you don’t live in a country with gays, arabs, somalis, etc?
Cancer just wants to live, the fact that it kills you is completely incidental.
In the same way, society is a body made up of its individual cells. Letting some things go too far has similar fatal results.
Imagine that, in the immortal words of John Lennon!
But becoming obsessed by cancer is dangerous. You end up being too scared to eat anything (because everything you eat causes cancer) and too scared to go outside (because the sun gives you cancer). You end being miserable and fearful and too paralysed to enjoy life. And you end up trying to stop other people from enjoying life because you’re constantly wanting to play Nanny and protect them from every conceivable threat.
There are some health precautions that are worth taking, and some that aren’t. There are some moral issues worth worrying about, and some that are not worth worrying about. In my view prostitution falls in to the “not worth worrying about” category.
As Karlin is probably only person here who has seen this film, and the film looks too boring to waste time watching (and we could be watching Kurosawa with the time), then easier to assume his deflationary views about this scandal.
What about the scandal of Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan”? It was a political controversy somehow as a result of ultra-sensitive paranoia about whether it was a political commentary that was somehow criticizing Russia (the fact Leviathan inspired by a story in America about Marvin Heemeyer
of Colorado, and only transported the story to Russia because he thought it had eternal themes, was somehow forgotten in the hysteria of the Leviathan scandal).
A comment that misses the point so spectacularly that it’s rather awesome.
If you hire a contract killer there is a third party involved, the target, and that person suffers real and massive harm. Obviously society has a duty to protect that third person.
When a prostitute services a client there is no third party involved. If both the prostitute and her client are happy with the arrangement it is therefore none of society’s business.
A point so obvious that I would have thought even the average Unz Review commenter would be able to grasp it.
I’ve not seen either film, yet somehow from what you’ve written it seems like a stretch to make an analogy between the two films?…
To me a 3 star rating signifies a film that has some merit, but isn’t in any sense a truly great film. A 3 star rating typically signifies a film that is slightly better than it is lacking any merit. If Karlin had anything good at all to say about this film, I seem to have missed it?
There could not be any actual nudity of under 18 year olds in a openly sold film, even if it was explicit porn. I think intentionality of a vicarious type in which one sees someone else’s emotions on display is the most affecting. Guardian reviewer:-
… this close to taking the QAnon pledge.”
Is it ever convincing that we are watching 11 year olds? Only the large faced North African was not two years older than her character. The girl playing Amy was at least 13 years old when the film was made. So of course there is something disturbingly sexualised about Amy, because while behaving with what would be boldness even for a woman, and is completely outlandish for an 11 year old girl whose only knowledge comes from watching hard core pornography with her freinds (not shown but it can be surmised from their comments) the actress portraying her has an anomalous physical reality. Surely the most provocative scene is where Amy brazenly–and completely unbidden–starts to take her clothes off in front of a man. She seems be completely serious about copulating with an adult cousin who is furiously confronting her about his smartphone being stolen, and his account used to post an upskirt photos. Disconcerted, he bolts. I suppose if there is a message it is that men will run a mile. It cannot be that men of that culture are reluctant to have sex with second degree relatives.
The scene with the teen boys would have played out rather differently. But they get a pass in the real world WEIRD, WEIRD West, where are more pre teens in your daughter’s class of 12 year olds will be having sex with boyfriends every year because it is becoming ever more accepted, and catered to by provision of contraception. Yet the fuss is about some film on Netflix being watched by creepy old men. Not mass culture making girls see Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus and the Kardashians as role models
I am being nitpicky but the lower video is not French but rather Quebecois.
You have a libertarian’s imagination of how the world works. 😉
Rating a film literally geared at pedophiles 3/5, gj
What happens when you date middle-aged women may be somewhat
relevant to the current topic. If they had a daughter, then at least in
my experience, they seemed anxious for me to meet her right away,
and sometimes they would even bring the girl along on the date. And since
I don’t date ugly women, their daughters, usually 11-12 years old, were
not ugly either. They seemed almost to push the daughters at me, as
if they were saying, “See if you marry me, you’ll get two girls for the
price of one, and as an extra bonus you’ll get to see my beautiful daughter
in various states of undress. I’ll see to it that it happens.” Of course,
I didn’t marry them. Are people still getting married? Marriage seems
to be going out of style, at least in the U.S.
On the other hand, my experience in dating a woman who had a son
of about 9 or 10 was the opposite. She tried to postpone my meeting him
as long as possible because, she said, her son could instantly get attached
to a new man in her life, and then she’d have a problem if we broke up.
Finally, a relevant anecdote from Israel. This happened about 10 years
ago, and is one of the funniest things I ever heard. Apparently, an 80-year-old
man was taking his 16-year-old niece (or step-daughter I forget which)
to court because, he said, she was walking around the apartment stark
naked, not to get him excited but to give him a heart attack so she could
get his money.
In the upcoming decades, we won’t be ordering women anymore. It will be highly advanced sex robots, probably won’t even look like a woman, more like Pikachu or something.
Our already pathetically poor fertility rates are going to be crushed completely. It won’t be nuclear war or global warming that will cause humanity to go extinct. It will be the adorable yellow monsters.
Uh, so, you’re accusing people who aren’t accepting of sexual abuse of being nut jobs and incels. That’s not weird or anything. Nor does it reflect poorly on you, not in the least. Though I do feel compelled to ask, what kind of experience do you have in the world and with interpersonal relationships? Because if your irl personality is anything like your online persona, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s quite limited.
More well adjusted and perceptive people become aware of the ubiquitousness of sexual abuse quite early on (many, unfortunately, first hand). The commonality of those on here who have strong opinions on the issue is not that they are single, but that they are family men with multiple children. These are people who have developed a sense of vigilance to keep their family members safe. If they err on the side of being too concerned, well, good for them, because that’s better than erring on the side of carelessness.
But go ahead and obsess over nuking Israel, that’s certainly more pertinent and relevant than normal people keeping loved ones out of the hands of sexual predators.
I watched Leviathan with a critical eye and didn’t find much, if any, political commentary in the film at all. Nor was there any in his previous, excellent, film Elena, also adapted from an Americans script. However, Zvyagintsev seemed to feel that his audience was thirsting for political commentary after Leviathan, so he came out and hit you over the head with it in Loveless. The result was a very low quality film, not even close to his previous works. I watched it with people sympathetic to his political views and even they agreed.
To clarify, my agree is with the first two paragraphs (I disagree with the third)
Those “child trauma specialists” specialize in traumatizing the patient by acting as harm maximalists. This induces iatrogenic harm to someone, in many cases a child who was happy in a sexual relationship with their cousin or uncle. The stigma is what causes harm in many cases.
Children have erotic feelings and emotional needs not recognized by most adults. They live in a society which denies their needs from birth, with mothers encouraged to isolate their infant in a different room and allow them to cry themselves to sleep. Children are breastfed for less than six months, when 4+ years is normal and ideal.
Given these social and erotic-physical needs, it would be an improvement to society to allow children to seek volitional relationships with adults. Non-human primates socialize in this way. Bonobos play sexually with juveniles as frequently as with fertile adult partners.
This is also part of the reason for depressed TFR in wealthy countries. Adults simply missed out and ended up desexualized.
You are an imbecile.
4chan level of autism confirmed. Now go and yourself a cookie.
.
Some of these women have been into it since childhood/early teens. There are gangs specializing in grooming of this type of young victims. Once you have been abused as a kid your self esteem gets broken. It is easier to pimp you and make money out of your body. The money of course being kept by the pimps.
I’d prefer to be that way rather than be a moral policeman or a moral busybody.
Moral policeman and moral busybodies are haunted by the fear that there are people out there having fun. They must be stopped! Remember, if you enjoy doing something then it’s wrong.
People like you allow the world to become an ugly and unpleasant place
You are correct. I should have watched the end titles. Quebec is of course more degenerate than other Canadian provinces. But it mainly applies to Montreal that represents between a third and a half of the province population. Nearly a third of downtown Montreal is le Village Gay.
Funny that you mention bonobos to make your point. Didn’t it occur to you that under this angle all human paraphilic sexuality might easily be seen as atavistic?
To say it simply, the monkey in you doesn’t know when to keep his dick in his pants. Me thinks this is nothing to brag about.
Being human (in my book) is to master oneself and steer one’s urges. But if you insist on being a hominid, instead of being a human, then why don’t you move to the jungle of Congo river basin and join the playful bonobos there?
Superb effort at missing the point. Please take up a smoking habit.
The more important point is that a lot of vices(and bad people) is like the body maintaining homeostasis against cancer and it just needs to keep fighting it even if it is “futile”, even as life itself is a futile process against the inevitability of death but that doesn’t mean living creatures should try to truncate its journey to their destinations.
It is certainly possible to overreact, but it is also even more possible to underreact because that appeals dually to the wonderful addictions of cowardice and lassitude that characterize humans. To allow entropy and rot to reach unimpeded only brings us to our final state swiftly and unpleasantly.
Death is the reward for negligence, writ small in a body, writ large in a society.
Libertarians are all autistic to some extent. They live in an imaginary world with an abstract view of things.
Man without children tells father with four children:
“I know more about children than you do. They need sex.”
The point is that our closest senses, touch, smell and taste deeply influence socialization. Close friendship involves these senses. In order to maximize sense of security, a person has to be embedded in these relationships. Currently we offer little of this for children. Mothers are not told of the importance of touch. We discourage, but don’t disallow non-touch friendships between kid and adults.
Also, “pedophilia” is not a paraphilia as it involves both emotional and sexual attraction.
Daniel, it is clear that ownership of children does not equal knowledge of what is good for children. It’s clear by the mental health data that not much is commonly known about childhood socialization.
One can certainly defend mothers cosleeping and increased maternal cuddling with children without going to some totally nonsense conclusion.
I’d prefer this conversation thread came to a close, especially since it has nothing to do with the topic of the post.
The autistic individualist types do not see that human society is a complex system. That it is in fact indeed similar to a living organism. Any cell in our organism that starts ignoring the organism limitations on a purely molecular level is at risk of becoming a cancer cell. Any extreme individualist is at risk of becoming an antisocial person. Balance is good in all fields.
One should apply the simple Golden Rule: do not harm those who do not harm you and your loved ones. For those who harm you and your loved ones there are always the trusted tools of hammer and sharpened screwdriver. A simple solution to a lot of wiring problems in the human skulls. This is what we used in 90ies Moscow (carrying these tools along was not considered carrying steel arms) and it fixed a few people alright…
The majority of prostitution are not cases where one woman voluntarily chooses to sleep with people. There are larger networks involved, which tend to consist of people who force females into prostitution and abuse them. It is also not uncommon for prostitution networks to be involved in other crimes, like human trafficking or drug distribution. By taking a tolerant stance on prostitution, you also encourage more of this kind of behavior.
If I were a liberal nutcase like you, that would suggest what society should do is target those forcing females into prostitution or abusing prostitutes. In other words, unless there is absolutely air-tight evidence of these things going on, then authorities should leave alone every one involved in the prostitution business. Thankfully I’m not a liberal nutcase, so I say society should simply work to destroy the prostitution business as much as reasonably possible. That is simpler, it allows more options, and it doesn’t require the same standard of evidence.
The typical liberal individualist view you espouse where one individual and another make some agreement is a theoretical construct which has little relevance to the real world. In reality, the institution of prostitution has a negative effect on society at large. There are larger externalities. The idea that we should ignore this and just focus on a single transaction which is supposed to involve only the prostitute and client is a ridiculous way of viewing the world.
It is incidentally the same way free market economists view the world. It is a liberal view point, one shared by libertarians, classical libertarians, and bog standard liberals. These kinds of ideas are destroying the west.
One of the things that always amuses about dfordoom is he always knows what other people are thinking and what motivates them. Even if it was hundreds of years ago.
Baseball bats were a best seller in 90s Moscow, despite no one knowing how to actually play baseball.
I doubt many people behave this way about cancer. They would have to be quite deranged, as the kind of response you describe requires people to behave so abnormally. These obsessive behaviors are also irrational. The rational response would be to want to discover the actual cause of particular cancers, since it’s obvious the offered explanations are contradictory and do not predict cancer incidence. But even from a less critical standpoint, if one hears that everything causes cancer, then one should look for which of these “causes” have the largest risk associated with them, and do something about them.
Moral panics can have successful outcomes, a fact which you disregard. The amount of prostitution between societies varies. You keep coming back to this assumption that people do things only because they are angry about the idea that others are having fun. Your views are myopic in the extreme.
Let me also add since I forgot in another post that prostitution is major cause of STD spread. Clearly the medical facilities of countries will be impacted by a large number of STD patients.
Yes, but the hammer and a screwdriver are easier to conceal and carry around. If the police stopped you (which happened often in the commuter trains and in the streets especially in the late evening) and started searching your stuff you could easily pretend that you were tinkering something and needed the tools. Another useful item was the Soviet era matchbox, made of thin plywood, you could put screws, bolts and nuts into it to add some weight then hold it in your fist when you hit. It added kinetic energy to the blow and went along well with the other tools.
https://cs9.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2016/12/06/2/148098690015195045.jpg
Finally, using a big and heavy bolt fastened with the corresponding nut and a wire, a rope or a guitar string you could easily and rapidly make and a type of weapon called кистень / гасило in Russian (don’t know what it’s called in English).
https://avatars.mds.yandex.net/get-zen_doc/251164/pub_5ca2eb6372723e00b331f38c_5ca2f896b59e2e00b3fcd049/scale_1200
That sounds pretty fair to me.
You need to find a balance. You need to protect those who actually need to be protected. If it’s a situation in which nobody is in need of protection then keep out of it.
Protecting those who actually need to be protected is about the most you can do. You can’t create a perfect society. There will always be things about any society that you don’t especially like and there will always be people who want to do things you don’t especially approve of. If no-one is being harmed it’s better to mind your own business. If you try to force everybody to behave in the way you’d prefer them to then you’re going into the social engineering business and that rarely ends well.
Personally I think that if we could get to the stage where the people who actually need to be protected were protected we’d be doing pretty well.
I’m also very wary of efforts to protect people from themselves. That also rarely ends well.
That was the thinking behind Prohibition.
If you go back to the 19th century virtually every industry involved massive exploitation of workers. Many industries (including notoriously the garment business) were still mercilessly exploiting people into recent times. By your logic every one of those industries should have been shut down. Even more notoriously children were forced to work in coal mines. The answer to that problem, obviously, should have been to simply work to destroy the coal mining business as much as reasonably possible.
Generally speaking forcing industries to clean up their act seems to have worked better than trying to shut them down.
I have no problems with the idea of regulating industries. It’s necessary and it works. Some industries need to be tightly regulated. If you don’t have a tightly regulated airline industry you have planes flying out of the sky.
In some ways the enthusiasm for banning things is defeatist. Usually you won’t succeed in eliminating whatever it is that you object to and usually you end up with a worse situation. Such as Prohibition, with people dying from drinking bathtub gin (not to mention that it led to boom times for organised crime and massive corruption). The moralisers failed to foresee those consequences, because they usually do fail to foresee consequences, because they have an unrealistic view of the world in which things they don’t approve of can be eliminated at the stroke of a pen. Their view of the world is just as unrealistic as the view of the extreme libertarians.
How’s that been working for you? Same question for the drug warriors, final victory in the drug war is coming any day now, right?
Wasting resources trying to police consensual relationships (such as prostitution) or whatever people decide they want to consume only ends up creating a powerful criminal underclass and eroding state authority.
“Protecting those who actually need to be protected is about the most you can do. ”
With this amazing level of insight, you belong in more prestigious company, perhaps the Cato Institute.
So, it also a waste of resources for your T-cells to combat infections and your B-cells to detect and destroy tumors. After all, you’re just going to die someday.
Arguments against the lack of a “final victory” are profoundly ridiculous once one realizes that life is typically about homeostasis. One struggles against the pull of gravity, even if it ultimately always drags us beneath.
Fwiw, East Asia pretty much overwhelmingly cracks down on drugs and if nothing else, demonstrates that is incredibly possible. And criminal organizations are fundamentally weaker than state organizations in terms of sheer power, for the same reason why commercial organizations can’t scale up the same way.
Whether the cuties film is meant to normalize pedophilia or not the fact of the matter is that such an agenda does exist and is being pushed as we speak. Just consider the recent boom in child tranny stories covered by the mainstream media.
So while AK may think that so called moralists are at it again with their panic, the reality is that the devil is real, he has agents, and they are pushing for full globo-homo – pedophilia being just another facet.
It’s certainly a bad idea if you catch a mild cold to dose yourself with massive doses of antibiotics.
And if you stub your toe it’s a bad idea to cut your foot off.
The sensible response to illness is to take drastic measures if you catch something deadly, but to basically ignore very mild illnesses that are not going to do you any significant harm. If it’s a really mild illness your attempted cure will probably do you more harm than the illness itself. Many if not most illnesses are minor and your body will deal with them quite successfully without any necessity for any kind of intervention.
See, I can argue from analogies as well. It’s fun isn’t it?
Yes, you can use inaccurate ones to demonstrate your inability to think. How do you think your body reacts to “minor illnesses?” The way that your immune system works is neither subtle nor gentle, but it is exceptionally effective.
In fact, warm-blooded mammals have ever more complex regulatory methods compared to other animals, and the need to maintain them is what makes us ever more capable.
Like many things, an understanding of biology can be very helpful.
Of course, perhaps it was all in error: return to tradition(bacteria).
Or perhaps, modern problems require modern solutions.
That’s usually the case.
Of course you might succeed if you’re willing to accept living in a police state (and even then success is not guaranteed). Unfortunately these days a police state seems to be what a lot of people (from both ends of the political spectrum) would like to see.
After checking your Canadian link with the apocalyptic data:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2014001/article/14008-eng.htm#a1
I was trying to find how many of the cases are the statutory rape. It is very hard; the reports I found obfuscate the issue. But here I found that in 2009/2010
https://knoema.com/atlas/Canada/Rape-rate
there was big jump in rape statistics from 1.4/100k to 1.7/100k in all age groups. So what happened in 2009/2010 in Canada that rapes went up by 21% in one year? Was there an accidental contamination of water supply with viagra in Canada? No, the law has changed:
Is it possible that rapes in Canada increased because cases of 14-16 years old girls now fell into the rape category while before they could not be prosecuted because they were de jure a consensual sex as the girls in that age bracket had a power of giving a consent which was taken away from them by a new legislation?
While I do not have enough data to resolve the issue I remain convinced that a substantial part of sexual crimes against children and youth in Canada statistics is accounted by what are statutory rapes which de facto are consensual sexual encounters.
Except we are not Singapore (and Singapore doesn’t have young people really, TFR is like 1 there) and we don’t execute prostitutes and drug users or dealers.
In your analogy, it would be like your T-cells and B-cells making life miserable for mild infections and benign tumors with court appearances and fines and forcing them to congregate with violent cancer gangs for a few months in jail. It helps no one except violent gangs who get new recruits this way.
I don’t know if we are really struggling against the pull of gravity all that much – we just mostly stand on things and electrostatic repulsion does all the work. I get what you are saying I think, life is about equilibrium flow, but human desires are like rocks on the riverbed – unless they are really harming some unsuspecting 3rd party, it is best to flow around them rather than try and grind humans down.
Are they? What about the Golden Triangle and fentanyl from China? I think Asians are more collectivist and less obnoxious so they do drug running better, all those Triads and Yakuzas etc, and don’t get caught as often. Anyway, prostitution is legal in a lot of Asian countries, doesn’t seem to be a problem.
The problem with your response which otherwise is reasonable though disingenuous is the fact that Ano4 is not normal with his preoccupation with sexual abuse of children. He crossed some lines separating what is normal and hysterical obsession to the point of conspiratorial Pizza Gate thinking. It is not normal to agree to “tunnels were found beneath the foundations matching the (clearly physically abused) child’s description” comment. It is not normal to misread stats data only in one way to get the confirmation of one’s non-normal beliefs. But possibly this preoccupation of his is just temporary and he is a very normal guy who is interested in sex and women and ogling them w/o checking their age though has to be reminded be by his wife of the boundaries:
The unqualified failure of American Prohibition is much more based on folk myth than the reality which was a general success with some failures or an inconclusive result depending on one’s views.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibition-alcohol-public-health-crime-benefits
While a society that emphasises law and order may end up with hidden nefariousness it is a near-given that a society that allows and even praises social decay will attain greater levels of decay than it would have otherwise.
In any case, looking at what you said before, you appear to be engaging in motte-and-bailey style argumentation (“Let’s have a laissez-faire policy”vs “Tightly regulate things instead of banning them”):
If you did not intend this then you should have phrased things clearer.
While I agree that ‘Those “child trauma specialists” specialize in traumatizing the patient by acting as harm maximalists.’ often is the case I do believe that creating desexualized non erotic environment for children is not only a good thing but a must for our civilization. However how to do it in a society that is already thoroughly infected with sexualization and eroticism which children and young adults cannot escape is a question I do not have good answers for. One think I know that you with your bonobos and crusaders like Ano4 are two sides of the same coin which contribute to the same problem.
There are some hills that are worth dying on (e.g. child mutilation), there are others that are patently not (e.g. “Cuties”).
In fact, melting down over the latter provides a good opportunity for those same people to subsequently discredit conservatives on account of their “histrionics”.
This may be true but it is not what the history books say. The historians claim the enlightenment and scientific revolution arrived and the judges and prosecutors no longer believed in the existence of witches or witchcraft as a part of Reality. When they were messing with witches they believed they were doing the right thing and that witches and witchcraft were part of the objective Real World. This is something like a thousand historians think this and none that I know of think otherwise.
It’s now more than 6 years ago since I saw “Leviathan”, so my memory is a bit vague (although I indeed enjoyed this film and told people to see it).
If I recall, it shows quite a lot of dystopian things, including an unfair court, corrupt officials, and myopic priest that supports the powers.
For inserting such things into your film, to constitute rusophobia, would imply that most of Buñuel’s films should be condemned for francophobia, and that Alfred Hitchcock was creating anglophobic propaganda (a special theme of Hitchcock’s films is the imprisonment of innocent persons by incompetent courts).
Another criticism of the film, was that it was showing drunk losers and promiscuity, that promoted a negative stereotype of Russians abroad. But then we would condemn Chabrol films as francophobic (which are mostly based on such romantic affairs), and Kurosawa for japanophia (as he often has scenes drunk peasants in his films).
By the way, at the time of the scandal, I had a friend (who is the most wealthy and liberal person I know) who was very angry about this film, and she refused to see this film because of the terrible rusophobia that people had been talking about. Hysteria in the media, resulted that even educated, liberal vegetarian students developed an impression that “Leviathan” was some kind of evil film designed to demonize Russia.
*Well, 5 and a half years. And I can remember most of the film now accurately after thinking about it for some minutes.
Normal people are concerned with paedophilia. You are the abnormal one.
She’s rocking the Barbie doll look. Plasticity.
One should attend a preteen dance recital to see that this is considered somewhat normal.
Preteen girls gyrating to sexually infused pop songs, such as “Single Ladies”, and performing numbers from musicals such as Cell Block Tango from “Chicago”.
Look, you have written that me and people I know and care about are nutjobs because we want to keep kids out of harm’s way. So I conclude that you clearly lack emotional wisdom needed to discuss complex issues.
Whatever you write from this point on is irrelevant. I am not interested to understand your point of view.
“It seems like that scandal was quite caused by “false memory syndrome” in psychotherapy.”
It was caused by extremely feminist UK social workers (they all are, the female ones at least), quite a few of them lesbian, believing the most bizarre testimony from small children (who may have picked up on what the social workers wanted to hear).
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dlheb/jetrepor2a.htm
Good old British understatement.
Some of the people involved with Broxtowe then figured in the Shieldfield scandal, where a couple of innocent nursery nurses had to go into hiding from an angry mob.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_newca.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/jul/31/childrensservices.childprotection
That’s not to say that abuse doesn’t go on in underclass council estates and other places. I knew a delightful lady social worker who came near to a breakdown after hearing one too many tales from her clients. She’d have been better off having a few babies of her own – too late for her now.
How many young girls did Jimmy Saville boast about raping without ever being prosecuted?
How many girls were raped by Pakistanis while the local councils did nothing?
Wrong. Whores greatly offend me, so my quality of life as a third party is greatly affected. Get bent.
What “historians”? Historians from Clown College, Inc? Witch trials were a thing during the 17th century, squarely in the modern era leading right up to the so-called ‘Enlightenment’.
The Middle Ages had no witchcraft hysteria phenomenon. (Probably because they still knew what witches actually were.)
You sound like an SJW. “Something offended me Nanny! I want it banned!” If the mere existence of something that you don’t like affects your quality of life you’re going to find it very difficult to deal with life at all.
There are lots of things that offend me. If they don’t hurt me and they don’t appear to be hurting anyone else and they’re none of my business I’ve learnt not to worry about them.
It’s amazing how obsessed some people here are with other people’s sex lives.
The idea that opposing degenerate behavior pathologizes you as an “obsessive” is Freudian self-confirmatory arglebargle.
It’s the same Kafka Trap that’s been used to smuggle in the entire Wilhelm Reich regimen of “fighting repression through expression” for decades.
You’re against (Degenerate Practice X)? You must be some kind of Puritanical nutjob – or you really want to do (Degenerate Practice X) and you’re just “closeted” or “overcompensating.”
The whole Authoritarian Personality shuffle that Jewish psychologists cobbled together to pathologize any personality traits that Jews found disagreeable with White societies was founded on a similar shell game.
Anyone using this facile “logic” to push back on a valid argument is either sloppily adopting the worst thought-practices of the zeitgeist or arguing in bad faith entirely.
You apparently think “logic” goes something like: someone says something so let’s attribute to them something else which sounds vaguely similar. No, it does not follow that since I think prostitution is a negative to society, that any other industry which shares some of those negative features is also a net negative to society and should therefore be destroyed. Coal mining or the garment industry have many positives for society that prostitution does not.
Crime was on the rise in the United States over a decade before Prohibition. Your third rate reading of history is not worth the time to debunk.
The United Stats has had anti-prostitution campaigns before. They generally worked. They did not have unforeseen consequences like an increasing in prostitution. There is no need to change the subject to alcohol.
Of course he is arguing in bad faith. That is why I am no longer interested in debating with him. Why he is doing that is another question, but in my humble opinion anyone decrying people protecting children from sexual abuse is most probably himself a pedophile fellow traveller and a potential sexual abuser. Any adult who hurts a child is a scum in my book. Anyone defending such people is also a scum. Case closed…
It’s only your standard which measures any result as a failure unless it is 100% elimination of drugs/prostitution.
Yeah sure, when the Taliban tried to eliminate drugs in Afghanistan, this led to a large increasing in heroin production. Then the U.S. came and eliminated the Taliban, things got more under control. Right.
Are you seriously going to suggest to me the reason Mexico has such problems with violent cartels is because the Mexican state puts too much effort into suppressing drugs?
If you view fathers selling their own children into prostitution as not a problem, then sure.
The high STD rate in Southeast Asian countries is mostly do to prostitution.
“Yeah sure, when the Taliban tried to eliminate drugs in Afghanistan, this led to a large increasing in heroin production. Then the U.S. came and eliminated the Taliban, things got more under control. Right.”
The Taliban did largely eliminate heroin production, until the CIA came and restarted production.
You’re assuming that the internet anti-pedo brigades are doing something to actually combat pedophilia. I think they’re more akin to the feminist anti-rape brigades, worse than useless.
I think EldnanYm was being ironic.
SJWs want good things banned, the previous commenter wants evil things banned.
You stop prohibiting homosexuality and within fifty years, children are being castrated. There is no libertarian middle ground; this has been demonstrated by events.
I do not assume anything. I don’t care about internet pedophiles or anti pedophiles. But I personally know people who have been raped when they were young. These people had a very hard time overcoming this tragedy.
Anyone doing this to a child is not a human being anymore as soon as he acts out. This person becomes automatically a social disease to be cured by any means necessary.
Case closed.
Leviathans depressive nature reminds me of some Russian literary classics, which also depicted corruption and drunkenness
The supposed Russophobia of the film wouldn’t really be a topic of discussion if it weren’t for the info and propaganda wars surrounding Russia, as time passes the movie will be more judged for it’s merits then it’s politics (hopefully anyway)
It is possible that prostitution reduces the incidence of rape. It can also be argued that giving men who would not otherwise have access to sex the opportunity to have sex makes their lives more pleasant. It may in fact, in a small way, increase the sum total of human happiness. Amazingly enough, men like having sex. It makes them more content.
Pleasure is not inherently wicked.
I don’t know if Saville raped anyone, although there were many accusations once he was safely dead. He was certainly a pushy sort with women.
“How many girls were raped by Pakistanis while the local councils did nothing?”
Probably thousands, because for a British “public servant” an accusation of racism is potentially career-ending, and “better a thousand girls be raped than a council employee or police officer lose their pension”.
Yes, there are some men in the world – a non-negligible number – who will never attract a woman for their personality or baby blue eyes. For such men, prostitutes may be quasi-social workers.
SJWs want things they don’t like banned, the previous commenter wants things he doesn’t like banned. The mindset is identical.
“How many girls were raped by Pakistanis while the local councils did nothing?”
Here’s one rapist who actually got caught.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090427145923/http://nightjack.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/only-24-hours-to-crack-the-case-part-2/
Your body simply destroys(with great enthusiasm) , anything that doesn’t match the local signature or is behaving oddly. This is why autoimmune diseases can happen, but in the sum of things, its clearly better than allowing tumors to grow.
Yes.
The CCP eliminated all gangs with ridiculous efficiency, if for no other reason than because they are rival power centers. Drug dealing is not only a historical trauma for the Chinese, but also is a rival source of income for such power centers; the CCP is a jealous parasite and doesn’t want to share.
Drug dealing is still one of the few ways one can earn an almost immediate execution(after getting denounced by your family). The most powerful of the Triad bosses that didn’t flee China into HK, etc, and were captured were laogai’ed and trust me, you do not want to see the result of a laogai. Suffice to say that when the Party truly wants you to suffer, you will not die. They may not even particularly torture you. But you will live to regret that you were born and they will break your soul. That has sufficed to discourage future entrants.
Triads are problem outside of China, not inside.
The Golden Triangle is a lawless area and not under any state control, thus why it can get out of hand. The yakuza are an interesting phenomena but being semi-legal, they are heavily suppressed and do not participate in the drug trade inside of Japan except perhaps the most desperate, as even mild possession of pot is career-ending in Japan.
I mentioned specifically drugs. Prostitution is indeed much more accepted.
Nonetheless it is a source of great suffering, as the yakuza often basically kidnap girls outside of the country(the specific social contract of the yakuza is that they do not harm native girls). Russian countryside in the 90s were also a source of naive girls looking to “be models” who were scouted and often ended up enslaved in prostitution.
The libertarian mindset is not realistic. It is just as utopian as Communism or Nazism. One has to be realistic and admit that some things should be regulated and some of these regulated things should better be banned.
Worth adding: East Asian governments are not puritan in spirit, with only the Chinese hate of drugs possibly stemming from emotional and ideological trauma in history. What they are is in a way, pragmatic even in spite of the harshness.
They generally recognize that people need their vices, and therefore channel them into what the government see as the acceptable vices: alcohol and sex. To those, it controls them within areas and ritual, and accepts a lot of contradictions beyond that in an almost graceful state of hypocrisy.
For those who need to go further, it basically provides an exit to places to Thailand. If you, as a citizen want to get messed up, you can always go to those of those places. But if you, as a citizen want to get messed up and is stupid enough to think that you should join a violent gang to get what you want, then clearly your judgment is so bad that your genes should be removed from society and the laws basically facilitate to that end.
The biological equivalent of this is how the body basically lets the gut go more or unless unpoliced but the bloodstream is in total. One can be aware of the limits and costs of policing while not going on some silly idea that its never worth it at all.
Yeah.
In a perfect world everybody would find that special someone and get married and live happily ever after, finding complete emotional and sexual fulfilment. But we don’t live in a perfect world. Some people never do find that special someone. Some people get married and and don’t end up emotionally and sexually fulfilled.
Some women resort to vibrators. Some men resort to porn or prostitutes. This may be unfortunate but I think we need to accept that it happens and we need to accept the right of such people to find whatever happiness they can. You could ban vibrators but all that would achieve would be to make the lives of those women a bit more miserable. You could try to stamp out prostitution but all that would achieve would be to make the lives of those men a bit more miserable.
I don’t think we should sneer at people who are not lucky enough to find that perfect partner. And I certainly don’t think we should try to make their lives even less pleasant.
I wouldn’t consider my view to be particularly libertarian. I’m not opposed to some degree of regulation in some areas of life. A pure libertarian view would not countenance any degree of regulation.
I’d consider my view to be relatively middle-of-the-road. At best (or at worst) I’d see myself as tending towards the libertarian view without embracing it entirely. From my point of view you shouldn’t ban something without overwhelmingly strong grounds and so far no-one has come up with anything I’d regard as valid grounds for banning prostitution.
I don’t see a desire to ban everything one disapproves of as being all that realistic. I’d see it as utopian. And one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia. People don’t all share the same view of what society should be like which is why compromises are necessary.
Laws prohibiting homosexuality were enforced only rarely in the United States.
We don’t need a law against homosexuality to stop child castration. All we need is a law against child castration.
My standard is that places that have legalized drugs/prostitution generally have pretty good quality of life compared to those that have not. If legalization doesn’t have too much of a adverse impact, government should just legalize, tax, and move to to other more pressing problems.
It’s a bit more complicated than that – if Taliban stuck around longer when they went in and destroyed those poppy crops, they would have anti-Taliban insurgency on their hands, and a powerful one at that. Afghan farmers don’t plant poppies just for the fun of it and Americans don’t let it run loose just because they like heroin so much. For both Taliban and the Americans it would come down to this – let the farmers book their profits or get shot at your bases.
Mexican problem is American demand. If drugs were legal, Mexican pot would be manufactured by Budweiser Corporation or whatever and cartels would have no business. US underwent the same with Prohibition in the 1920’s… Very violent Chicago mafia in those days. Today though, when was last time a Chicago gang machine gunned somebody over a case of light beer? Gangs fight over what’s profitable and the only reason the drugs are so profitable is they are illegal.
Enforcing child sex laws and sex education would help with that.
I do not have a Netflix account, having cancelled it many years ago due to the sort of movies it was promoting.
If you have a Netflix account still, there is something wrong with you.
Children doing creepy twerking performances in school, was already the scandal of 5-6 years ago. (For example, in Orenberg) . I don’t think it would be so difficult to pass a law that children shouldn’t twerk in school, just like you don’t drink alcohol in school, or say swear words to your teacher. Here was a problem of lack of regulation or rules for the school.
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It’s a different topic that pole dance became popular as a kind of exercise class recently, and there is pole dancing exercise studios opening in the city as the new exercise option. I honestly think this exercise fashion is because this is just how some women enjoy exercising, and not some gateway to working as a lapdancer.
I have never argued about banning prostitution. But I absolutely consider prostituting minors vile and subhuman. What needs being banned and suppressed is organized crime that profits from prostitution. Also grooming of minors for prostitution should be prosecuted with utmost severity.
Basically, whatever freely consenting adults do behind closed doors should not be regulated except for some exceptions (Luca Magnotta and the like).
But this stands only for free consensual adult activities.
Children are beyond these limits, they need be protected while they grow up to become free adults.
It’s less about the movie itself, but more about how they made it- making 650 little girls twerk in front of them “jusges”. Seems like a shitty excuse
Of course, cultural sensibilities come into action here. East europeans have a very inverse view of this shit – kids doing all the “sexy” bullshit isn’t seen as such, exactly because they’re kids and therefore automatically unsexualizable. On the contrary, even seeing it as sexualization comes close to pedo thoughtcrime status. A healthier view tbh. Western one results in eternal paranoia and butthurt about everything
That’s true but that’s where decriminalization can help – neither the girls nor the ‘johns’ (customers) will fear going to jail for outing the criminal trafficking gangs.
That’s not how it works. Unless you enjoy getting raped and beaten every day in jail, you are going to join any gang for protection after a few weeks. Once you are out, the gangs will simply pass you along to their confederates outside and you will do their bidding.
Yes, definitely, Zvyagintsev consciously puts into “Leviathan” a lot of stereotypically “Russian things”, and this is part of the reason why some have criticized the film and been offended about it. They were annoyed by the film, like it was Russian stereotyping too much. (You just need to add dancing bears and balalaika)
However, national cinema is often like this, and it’s nothing unusual for Zvyagintsev to make use Russian stereotypes for his film.
Fellini films are full of stereotypical Italian culture, Kusturica films are full of stereotype of Balkans’ culture, Miyazaki anime are full of stereotypical Japanese things. Do Balkans’ politicians feel Kusturica films are racist and balkanphobia (too many gypsies and dancing prostitutes)?
Half of the English film industry, is about snobby aristocrats drinking tea inside their country mansions, and yet I don’t think English are particularly offended about the use of local stereotypes. Cinema is such an art form that it often concentrates on symbols “national character” and it can sometimes also be part of why we love cinema – I like Fellini films in part because they are such a concentrated way to experience stereotypical Italian culture. (I feel like I was transported to Italy after I see one of his 1950s films).
Much of media hysteria against “Leviathan” was directed from the top – from Medinsky (at the time, Minister of Culture in Russia). This is one of the more incompetent and eccentric politicians of recent years. For example, he thought it was a good idea to pay Youtuber-to-hire Sasha Spilberg to interview him so he would be popular with kids, which a little unsuccessful when your video receives more dislikes and “comments disabled”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVLzn0NSSGc.
It is decriminalized in Japan. Now the kidnappings have become systemic and tacitly legalized instead so as long as the social contract is maintained.
Systems do not work the way that you imagine.
The gangs do not run the prisons in Asia. And in case it isn’t obvious, the biggest “gang” is the government and it is designed to kill you sooner or later for not complying(usually through suicide).
Collective punishment(especially to the family) also remains a thing. While the nine familial exterminations doesn’t happen, it is still considered that the criminal’s parents are somehow at fault for how the criminal came to existence. There’s usually some expectation that the parents therefore “owe” the victims something, if only an apology. As such, mutual policing is quite a thing.
Its not pleasant to happy libertarian ideas of humans(which are mostly wrong anyway), but sometimes, a society just needs to be a machine to mill away certain types of people. A lot of these problems are modern, and modern problems require modern solutions.
At the very least, it bears to acknowledge that such systems exist and work. Its really rather annoying to see people claim that “oh, its all impossible.” It isn’t. Perhaps the price is too high.
But the price of letting evil run amuck is pretty high too. Like Ano4, I’ve seen people close to me hurt. I’ve been in some of the dregs of society. It changes you and your awareness of what is needed.
I believe we are dealing with a lot people on this forum who have never really been facing evil face to face. When I say evil, I do not endorse some arbitrary moral system. For me evil is something (anything) that leads to innocent people suffering. I have seen enough evil, enough suffering and neither want to suffer or allow my family to suffer, not want other people being hurt through my actions or lack thereof. That’s the summary of my philosophy: you can say whatever, promise people Heavenly Mansions and Hallowed Lands, but if you knowingly make other innocent people suffer, then you are a subhuman scum.
Children can be annoying, but they cannot be guilty enough to suffer as much as a grown up adult could. Children are the seeds of our future, if we sprinkle them with poisonous ideas and concepts, then our future will be toxic. Poisonous ideas and concepts are the ones leading to suffering. Poisonous ideas and concepts are simply products of our own human deluded minds. Some immature people indulge in delusional feelings and behaviors. A mature person should be able to choose what to think and how to behave. Pedophiles are first and foremost immature, same as narcissistic and sociopathic people are immature. Mature people avoid increasing suffering, except when absolutely necessary.
Increasing suffering of guilty is necessary to lower the suffering of the innocent.
At least, if it helps restore some faith in humanity, as deluded as most people are, there’s at least some essential goodness to tap in(and perhaps, also a hint that the “self-directed good” that libertarianism attributes to humans is not very fulfilling):
-Storr, Will. The Science of Storytelling
Your offense offends me. Get bent.
This is a good example, start with something real in Epstein and then quickly descending into farce. We still have yet to see any of the famous elite pedophiles dragged into court. (Maxwell herself, who nobody would have heard of apart from her connection to Epstein, does not count.) But keep on dreaming. The MSM did get something real out of the affair, the removal of Alexander Acosta, and conned a bunch of inbred retard right-wingers to cheer.
How about those peaceful riots that keep burning the cities down, a crime which actually has victims? Somehow the Democrats managed to get every jurisdiction in America to hand out marriage licenses to gays, yet Trump was powerless to protect his supporters who had the misfortune of owning businesses in “Democrat cities.” A great deal of this is just Trump supporters trying to distract people (mainly themselves) from his failures by picking up a new crusade.
anonymous coward’s comment demonstrates Poe’s Law. Maybe we need a “Poe’s Law” tag.
Japan has some of the lowest sex crime rates in the world? If anything, Japanese are far more into sex pillows than into real women. And they are our future, so that’s concerning.
The gangs do run the prisons in the US though. Perhaps other countries too, though i’m not familiar with the details of other countries’ incarceration systems.
It’s too bad those “certain types of people” also happen to be technological invention producers (techno geeks are less likely to score dates while young and poor but they will be horny just like everybody else) so conformist “machine mill” societies will always lose to the more relaxed ones in the long run. As long as Asia “mills away” their “certain types of people”, the West has nothing to worry about when it comes to intellectual dominance. Though in Asia, i have a feeling the conformity mill grinds for status more than sex, but the result is the same.
The operation against the traditional society by Jews conducted under the banners of Wilhelm Reich and Frankfurt School succeeded because there was some truth in it about the human nature. Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer before he wrote the Hammer of Witches in 1468 was expelled from Innsbruck by his bishop because of his “obsession with the sexual habits of one of the accused, Helena Scheuberin” (wiki).
What does motivate Ano4? Where does the obsession with the Malleus Maleficarum of sex crimes against children come from? Purity of his heart and cries of innocent children? Why his imagination did not conjure for him another cause like fighting crimes of big corporations? Why sex? This is a legitimate question which does not imply following Wilhelm Reich and Frankfurt School agenda to its sad end. No facile “logic” here.
But there is another motive which is a power. Society gives benefit of doubt to people who engage in good causes; we do not question their motives. And when it comes to lofty causes like fighting sex crimes against children any questions are beyond the pale. By asking them you end up being accused of being a pedophile or a fellow traveller at best which Ano4 has already done in his answer to you. So the crusaders like Ano4 get a carte blanche and end up with a lot of power just by using a moral blackmail. And as we know power corrupts. Then we end up with disasters like the McMartin preschool trial. However Ano4 still believes in the nonsense of “tunnels were found beneath the foundations”. So we are dealing here with a not too smart person who is positioning himself at high moral ground. Stupid self righteous people are dangerous.
Tulsi Gabbard D-HI has complained about this movie. I read her comments, but the only thing I could glean from them is that she seemed morally outraged. I also sensed that she may have thought that these young girls were being sexually exploited. So between watching one movie, one pro football game and one NBA game, I started watching “Cuties.” Roughly six minutes into this movie, I perceived no “sexploitation,” although there was a plethora of boredom to be had and turned it off. “Much ado about nothing.”
The 90’s Russia. My views are also informed by 90’s Russia (i grew up there) but the 90’s Russia is a nightmare, an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.
Just because some things can be very bad in the worst time at the worst place, doesn’t mean it’s like that everywhere though.
In the long run, embracing chaos leads to death. And the results are all around you.
I’ve never criticized the overall film, because I’ve never seen it. I’ve seen the clip going around Twitter, which is a minute or two of the girls dancing.
My criticism is in two parts:
In a better society than the current US, perhaps I could live with a show like this, examining difficult topics. But while there’s no respect given to traditional values, we receive a steady stream of shows depicting the honorable single mom, the prostitute with a heart of gold, and the sympathetic gangster. Our society continues moving towards debauchery. We applaud “artisticly shocking” and “uncomfortable examinations”, and I suspect this is mostly an excuse for more perversion and inversion of decency. I have no choice but to lay some, perhaps most, of the blame for our changing values on entertainment like Cuties.
The slippery slope is ridiculed as a concept, but from I can tell it’s true, and has been consistently applied to Western mores. Defending Cuties, in the complete context of the West, simply allows this to continue.
I know that it is hard to believe, but I’ve been places worse than 90ies Moscow. Thing is, if I start spelling out what I know first hand about the world we live in A) people like utu won’t believe me B) it’ll make doxing me easier and C) why should I waste my time trying to explain something to people stupid enough to understand that one shouldn’t hurt young kids?
For fuck’s sake, and the moral relativist paints me as an evil Spanish Inquisition type? He doesn’t know what true evil is.
As big business increasingly makes its hate for middle America plain, there’s an opening for someone with her economic views to appeal to them with pandering on social issues. It can work as a dog-whistle appeal to people angry with certain behaviors in 19-year olds while falling back to the more easily defensible condemnation of those behaviors for 13-year-olds. I say “pandering” because these low-energy twitter campaigns won’t actually do anything to combat those behaviors. You need to go about it in an active, high-energy manner in the way fundamentalist religious groups do.
Sure. Otherwise this world would have been ruined already. I have great faith in Buddha Nature. It helps me quiet hate and do not despise my fellow humans. It helps getting by, day in and day out with all the craziness going around.
In the long run, stasis leads to death. In Asia, conformity enforces stasis by “grinding away the certain kind of people” as you put it. Which is why China lost Opium Wars (despite being vastly superior manufacturing center to the British Empire) and Japan lost WW2.
If you don’t let “people of the long will” (Gumilev’s term for Temuchin’s childhood friends) run along side with you, they will inevitably run against you.
We need Asians and whites to breed more, (can’t have space colonization projects without competent colonists and blacks are not there yet, at least not at scale) more stasis only bores the females. So i would highly recommend embracing even a little bit of chaos. At least it would make “salaryman’s” life entertaining and meaningful.
I detest the drug culture. But I doubt if a prohibition policy on drugs could ever work effectively in a western country. I don’t think you’d ever get political traction for the kinds of measures you’d need to make such a policy successful. And I think that any real success is becoming less likely. Courts are too thoroughly liberal and Woke. Law enforcement is too politicised.
The bumbling bungling response of western governments to the coronavirus suggests that western governments may not be capable of responding effectively to any problems. Democracy in the West is too corrupt and too opportunistic and too cynical. East Asian governments seem to be, for the most part, actual functional governments. I don’t think you can say that about the West.
Whether a prohibition policy on drugs is a good idea or not I don’t see it working in the West.
I thought about “90’s Russia is a nightmare” when I was watching Babylon Berlin on Netflix recently. This is a very good series though the plot deteriorates as it always happens with all series in the later seasons but the filming is very well done. Excellent scenography and attention to details and historical and cultural minutiae of the period. Great art deco interiors and furnitures. It can be watched as vignettes of the period. The period of the extremes: decadence and poverty, corruption and sexual exploitation of women and yes, children with prostitutes, gays, transvestites, morphinists and occultists. There are conspiracies. Nazis are portrayed as patsies (this is still 1929) who are used to frame communists in ‘false flag’ events made by conservative reactionary Prussian officers. There is German movie industry financed by shady mafia just like in Hollywood thought the main mafia boss has a nickname ‘Armenian’ which not necessarily exclude possibility of him being Jewish. The main carrier plot of the first season includes Russian Trotskyist plotting against Stalin and smuggling gold from Russia and Soviet embassy murdering them and the USSR helping Reichswehr and Luftwaffe circumventing Versaille treaty limitation and shipping phosgene gas to Germany. But the film is not about the plots. It is about the background, the historical period which was done in the best way I have ever seen. I was very impressed with German movie making and clarity of thinking and vision as demonstrated by Babylon Berlin. But I fear that the subsequent seasons once Hitlers come on the scene may fall into the more ‘political correct” and “didactic” take on the run-of-the-mill German history take (think of the bores like Reiner Tor and German Reader).
Some watching it may leave with a subversive message that what has come later with Hitler coming to power was a good thing while others may get an acausal notion that as long as we have prostitutes, gays, transvestites, morphinists and occultists we are safe from Hitlers of the world.
The problem with such responses is that if it is in fact a good idea(or any other idea like that), then if “something can never work in the [organization or area]”, then it can mean that the organization or area is fatally flawed. Its always worthwhile to have capability.
Its kind of like, “Whether or not [activity] is a good idea or not, I don’t see how we can avoid it.” Its perhaps mild if it is something if you replace [activity] with “replacing seed oils with animal oils” but it is pretty ending if it is “avoiding being shot in head.”
Various challenges will rise in the course of time. Organizations(and organisms) need to adapt to them to survive.
What would your organization or society do with William Halsted?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted
Any society that is willing to kill off “people of the long will” will lose in the end.
And that’s why we can’t have nice things: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
Any society that’s willing to constantly embrace ever spiraling levels of decadence will die, just as any body that decides one day to ignore developing tumors. Cancers don’t intend to kill you, they just happen to do so incidental to their continued existence. If your organization and society fundamentally must accept degeneration as some sort of essential quality, then the chaos will eventually kill it and something more orderly will rise from its remains.
There’s a balance on both sides, but its vital to maintain that homeostasis even if it seems “futile.” It is a process, and there is a value in the process itself.
There’s not much more point to repeating myself. Feel free to chase into oblivion. I’ve seen enough innocent people hurt to have little taste any of it and am quite aware of the necessity of a countervailing force. In that, I find immeasurable beauty.
I agree.
I agree.
I agree.
I agree. I don’t think any reasonable person would disagree on any of those points.
One of the problems with discussions such as these is that people don’t always clarify exactly what it is that they’re talking about. Are we talking about paedophilia, which is technically a sexual attraction directed towards prepubescent children, or are we talking about hebephilia (attraction towards pubescent children) or ephebophilia (attraction towards young people who are fully sexually mature but may or may not be under the age of consent depending on the jurisdiction)? I’m inclined to think that these are actually quite different phenomena, with different motivations and different consequences.
I’m also inclined to think that they probably need different responses. Paedophilia and hebephilia are clearly monstrous and should be regarded as major problems. Ephebophilia is perhaps not something that requires such draconian responses. And I think there’s clearly a difference between sexualising ten-year-olds and sexualising fifteen-year-olds.
Well, all societies will die, that’s normal and expected, those are merely imperfect adaptations to the environments they had the (mis)fortune to find themselves in.
What matters is the genetic lineages that will carry through. In that sense, feudalism was the apex of human social organization. Anyways, we can’t have that now, so we need to make do.
Long story short, you can’t exclude your most promising “alternative” people from mainstream society and then expect them not to take over. It was the same in Mongol tribal elections in the 12th century and its the same today. In the modern American society, i think you will find that people with arrest or criminal record have more children than those without. Temuchin’s childhood friends are plentiful in the modern world. They need to be integrated or modern world ends.
Another good article from our host, with extremely disappointing comment thread.
People who see through racist panic pushed by MSM, who do not believe that there are racists hidden everywhere who hunt innocent people of color all day and night, double down on the pedophile panic, are eager to see pedophiles everywhere and ready to hunt them.
The fact that some people here still believe the satanic ritual tales from 80’s is probably the most blackpilling.
https://www.chick.com/images/tracts/0046/0046_05.gif
This Qanon-Pizzagate stuff is something I did not expected on AK’s blog.
https://i.imgur.com/pNHarsB.jpg
shUT uP aND dIE peDo! wE WiLL PrOTecT OUr chIlDReN fRoM pEDo SwInE lIke yOU bY AnY meAnS NEceSsARy!
Well, stoking panic about pedophiles is not in anyone’s interest, and least of all if you have children of your own.
Are you aware than there is far higher probability that you, yes you personally, could be accused of being pedophile, than that you personally are going to hunt down pedophiles hiding in the secret tunnels?
Are you aware it takes only word of teacher, family member, neighbor or anyone with grudge against you, that they heard something, that they noticed something wrong with you child, that they saw black satanic altar in your house, and you are now the “satanic pedo”?
There are too many such cases to count, driven by the witch hunt mentality we see here.
Think about it.
You are, in essence, incorrect. Instead, civilization has been synonymous with human domestication for better or worse and sociophobic and criminal characters produce entropy are both antisocial and disgusting. The most successful organizations, including the Mongols, selected for cooperation regardless of how they treated their external foes. My earlier comment on even childhood regard for selflessness is appropriate. Once again, the biological comparison is appropriate; parasites can be successful, but societies(and bodies) succeed by effective adaptations to eliminate such parasites.
I am significantly Mongol, incidentally. Mongolia maintains an impressive tfr at almost 3. And my attitude is pretty much a norm.
But you can discover those errors in your own time and revise your journey in learning then. Perhaps that’s your dharma.
In America, it’s disgustingly common. For one thing, where do the dozens of thousands of children who disappear every year go? Off into the woods, to be eaten by wolves or bears? To start their own “Lord of the Flies” style island? No, they are scooped up by a certain fraternal organization who’s name is unworthy to type and enslaved for their sick “Key of Solomon” 33rd degree ritual.
If you aren’t familiar with that topic or doubt what I’m arguing, just look into the field of Christianity known as Deliverance Ministry (it’s where you cast demonic spirits out of people. It’s real as it gets, trust me I cast demons out myself and have never taken a single dollar for it, I have zero reason to lie). The majority of people who need strong demons cast out were abused as children, often either in the mis-education system or the Babylonian Catholic Church (shockingly sometimes by parents also). Ask any deliverance minister and they will all tell you the horrifying truth. I’d guess 1 in 5 Americans were molested as kids, at minimum. THIS is why I find movies like this to be in bad taste.
Edited for spelling
https://youtu.be/O83vqyd0EWg
Polina Dubkova is awesome when it comes to sexy workouts, she runs a dance studio in Moscow.
This may be relevant to your concerns:
https://scitechdaily.com/most-shoes-have-a-toe-spring-that-may-lead-to-weaker-muscles-and-painful-foot-related-problems/
The biological comparison is not simple as you believe. In anycase it is delusional to think that the libertarian ideology can be an easy target.
What exactly is a homeostasis going to look like in a society? We more or less know that much regarding human health, but do we know that about a society? When US was fast changing around the prohibition period, was a homeostasis going to be like with or without alcohol? It was not as if the period just before prohibition enjoyed a long term stable status that it should automatically and naturally become the homeostasis that should be maintained ever and ever.
There actually is an argument for libertarianism from the perspectives of utilitarianism or pragmatism, although libertarians themselves seem only to invoke those arguments implicitly.
In terms of cooperation within a group, its purpose often is to do nasty things to the outgroup which means that the ingroup itself becomes a parasite to the wider world. Does it not defeat your own argument?
That’s debatable – all civilizations decline and criminals arise to make new things. After all American revolutionaries were criminals per British law, and Chinese Communists (and Nationalists for that matter) were outlaws as well. It’s a fairly universal trend actually.
.
For Mongols, not initially (that took Temuchin who was a bit of an ousider), and for modern world, it creates far too much of an underclass with its policies. I have argued that it is unwise, but it is what it is. Social unrest is likely to increase going forward even after Biden wins presidency.
Well, count me out of the reasonable set then. The idea of “consent” is a monstrous lie that does nothing but legitimize degeneracy. There is no “consent” in nature or in human society.
Thanks for the liberal (lol) dose of squid ink, but in reality satanists have existed forever. They weren’t invented in the 80’s.
The problem with chaos is that there are multiple kinds of chaos.
A monk in China more than a thousand years ago going to India. Columbus and Zheng He. Etc.
Then we have shelves of scholarly written books on masturbation. 😀
If the new frontiers of space eventually open up, much will change for good. It is just too damn difficult. You cannot be the next Columbus with only your will power and that you have read two books by truly crazy minds like Columbus himself did.
All the interesting things are too difficult at this juncture of history.
One big reason that China looks better is that China has a simple purpose that is to get richer. The US no longer enjoy the benefit of such.
I was quite shocked when my female colleagues used to discuss their pole-dancing classes. But then, the girl who was keen on it was a slut.
This is true for populations as well as individuals. Organisms with the fastest path to change are asexual organisms with a clonal path; under certain conditions they are successful as they can optimally capture an environment and can replicate without the need for dancing, sex, competition for mates, etc. It is, in fact, twice as efficient. However, the vast majority of life reproduces sexually, indicating that this is usually the more successful strategy. Why isn’t it more common?
As it turns out, a sexual strategy actually prevents harmful alleles from overwhelming the population while the more independent asexual strategy allows defects to accumulate without correction. So the vast number of rituals that animals participate in, the wasted energy to find mates, etc, all of those essentially promote a more stable phenotype. Change happens, but not wild and self-destructive change.
This is very much observed in a society of eusocial insects, which engage in quite a bit of “policing” behavior. In them, we can very much see that individuals and cells are often not very different, as worker bees will sometimes attempt to sneak in their own eggs and are prevented by attacks by her sisters and the queen.
I mean, a society that recognizes and prevents harmful actors from being dominant is pretty self-evident. Obviously a society can’t long endure, for example, letting murders run amuck. Neither could a society long endure bombs going off at random, even if the bombs are not specifically directed to hurt people. Society is a process like all processes, and it needs to minimize interruptions and try to optimize what promotes itself. For a process that builds tires, the process managers want to reduce the number of conveyor belt breakdowns and optimize the number of tires. For a society, while we can debate what is to be encouraged and discouraged, the first point of awareness is that for it to be cohesive, it has to at least have at least minimal stability for it to produce welfare for its participants, and then to produce its goals(which really have to involve self-survival in some way).
Not in the least. Awareness of increased human domesticity is baked in the data:
Researchers such as Hood argue that modern humans have gone through a process of ‘self-domestication’. Support for the idea comes partly from the fact that, over the last 20,000 years, our brains have shrunk by between ten and fifteen per cent, the same reduction that’s been observed in all the thirty or so other animals that humans have domesticated. Just as with those creatures, our domestication means we’re tamer than our ancestors, better at reading social signals and more dependent on others. But, writes Hood, ‘no other animal has taken domestication to the extent that we have.’
However, much as in ant colonies, while there is ever increasing collaboration within an unit, it does not extend to cooperation with the overall notion of “humanity” and its unlikely we’ll ever get there. A certain form of parasitic or predatory behavior is indeed optimal as a group(a classic example were Roman accumulation of slaves as engines of capital), but as we can see, as individuals, the behavior is selected against.
I don’t really have any consideration for libertarianism for a much more essential reason: I don’t really recognize the notion of the self. If you go by RG Heath’s experiments with brain stimulation, or Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga’s experiments on people, you find that individuals are essentially making up stories of what they are doing, driven by cues ultimately largely controllable by external factors. I don’t actually see any great notion of “self”, not any more than ants in a colony have much meaning in their selves so the idea of individual choice is all rather silly: that choice only exists from signals provided by the environment past or present and by processes completely divorced from anything “rational.”
And of course, you know, knowing girls raped to pregnancy multiple times and then beaten into miscarriage by criminals might give me a pretty dim view on such trash. Evil is not abstract to me. Evil is very real ugliness that happened to innocent people close to me.
That is absolutely true. General thought is – how do me manage chaos of he variety that’s incoming? My humble proposal is lets not feed it more bodies than absolutely necessary. But others disagree. And who knows, they may well be right, accelerationism a thing too. It ain’t gonna be pleasant for sure though.
Aren’t they always? That’s what makes them interesting. 🙂
Well sure the strong can always go around raping the weak. But then what’s the problem with the notion of the strong leaving some money on the table after they are done with the weak? It’s only the business of the strong after all.
There is no problem, except that the fictional idea of “consent” doesn’t figure here at all. Least of all as a basis for morality.
I’m disappointed to find you making such a meaningless point. You might as well say that we need to do something about “bad people” or that we need to combat “wickedness.” A term like “harmful actors” means nothing at all. It means nothing because you’re never going to get agreement on the identity of these “harmful actors.”
Almost everybody would agree that murderers fall into that category but beyond that there’s very little agreement.
To the Woke the “harmful actors” are white supremacists and racists. In Australia today “harmful actors” means the dastardly Chinese. To libertarians the “harmful actors” are the government. To feminists the “harmful actors” are the agents of the patriarchy. To many blacks in the U.S. the “harmful actors” are the police. To globalists they are the evil Populists. To Trump supporters they are the Democrats. To some of the crazier Christians it’s the Satanists. To the alt-right it’s the Jews.
What it comes down to is that for most people the “harmful actors” are “people I don’t like” or “people who upset me.”
Perhaps. But that’s not how our overlords choose to structure social relations, and with good reasons for all involved. While i agree that “consent” is fiction, it is a very useful fiction to maintain. Otherwise, all of us will be receiving cold hard reality and we won’t like it one bit. Hence the fiction as the basis of morality.
Wasn’t the movie backed by the Russian Ministry of Culture and it’s official entry for the Academy Awards? Such a heel turn seems like bad optics to say the least.
I loved Zvyagintsevs “the Return”, reminded me of my own childhood. I think he’s very talented and I hope this petty nonsense will be forgotten and not steal oxygen in the discussion of the movie in the future
I have no idea what you’re talking about now. The only people who don’t believe there’s such a thing as consent are the crazy “all sex is rape” feminists. Every sane person believes there’s such a thing as consent.
There is however no general agreement about the age at which consent becomes meaningful or should be legally recognised. Depending on where you live that age can be anywhere from 13 to 18 (it might even be higher in some places). There’s nothing controversial about this. It’s merely a statement of fact. There is no general agreement about the appropriate age. There is general agreement that the appropriate age falls somewhere in the range from 13 to 19. No sane person would argue for anything outside that range. Some jurisdictions recognise a grey area within that broader age range in which consent is recognised in some circumstances. There’s nothing controversial about that either. It’s merely a statement of fact.
No-one who is even remotely sane thinks that ten or eleven-year-olds can give meaningful consent. If anyone does think that then I would be inclined to regard them as insane.
Lol he is digging deeper in the fundamental reality where all relationships are based on power. He is correct about that (and feminists are dumb monkeys playing with live grenade), but that’s not how we choose to structure our society. Again, for good reason.
Generally, our overlords would rather fight each other once they can be reasonably certain they have pacified us. The “consent” fiction is needed so they can direct their attention accordingly. Destroying this fiction will bring enormous pain to normal people as the overlords will be forced to look down again. Therefore, consent is real and everybody believes in it.
You’re painting the whole nation of France as insane?
Not that I disagree (lol) but rather a broad brush, no?
I’m not sure that I’d use the word fiction but it probably is true to say that it’s a fiction that consent is always clear-cut and unambiguous. The very fact that “date rape” cases cause so much argument demonstrates that it can sometimes be disturbingly fuzzy. And it’s probably true to say that most ordinary people have no clear understanding of what it means in legal terms. In a sexual situation most people are not thinking all that clearly.
The fact that it can be ambiguous is just something we have to live with. We manage to live with it in the case of murder. Is a particular killing murder or manslaughter, or first degree or second degree murder? Or was it self-defence?It’s not always clear-cut. Even theft isn’t always clear-cut. She says her boyfriend stole her car. He says he borrowed it and that she always lets him borrow the car so he didn’t think he needed to ask permission. We don’t throw out the laws on murder and car theft because some cases are ambiguous.
To the extent that consent is a fiction it’s a vitally necessary fiction. I don’t see any alternative to it. Just as I don’t see any workable alternatives to age of consent laws, even if they’re arbitrary and vary widely.
You’re telling me that the age of consent in France is ten?
The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (1957) stated that the aim of the law was:
Prohibiting consensual erotic play does not limit it. We are apes, and we do what apes do. We are also now very well fed apes, so we are falling towards the path of the bonobo, as opposed to the chimpanzee – erotic play over violence, even to settle disputes.
It is quite funny that Russia’s laws are more in line with the above quote than the UK’s laws these days.
It is not for the state to regulate the varieties of erotic play that its individual citizens consider reasonable. The state has laws against violence and deceit. That is enough, and it covers (should cover) behaviour with respect to children and adolescents accordingly.
Our leaders are materialists, our societies are materialist – they engage in the material, craving and lust. Unfortunately it is too easy for us, with our technologies, to fall towards materialism. Eroticism is pure materialism – choosing the flesh over the intellect, or the spirit.
Marriage is now a declaration of lust/love, materialism – not a system designed for raising progeny, something far more spiritual. Words contorted into different meanings. Sex was once the intention to produce children. IVF is more sex than anything homosexuals can hope to engage in.
We, as a world, are stuck in the land of the lotus eaters.
In this world, responsibility is a lost understanding, hierarchy is oppression, and freedom is personal seclusion.
You can have trans rights and law – look at Thailand. Ladyboys abound, but the government – fashioned by a positive faith morality of Buddhism – bans them from being teachers, or serving in the army. They have not experienced the explosion of child genital mutilation that our culture is pushing itself towards willingly! From a fairly uninformed outsider, they seem to follow the above Wolfenden Committe quote too.
It’s not about good and evil, but about what is beneficial and un-beneficial – to the individual and the group.. An individual adult should be free to keep their personal liberty to decide what is beneficial or not to themselves. If their actions spill out onto society as a whole though, society should have a right to restrain their actions. This is where our problem lies – our current western societies allow individuals to proselytise, or more fairly – propagandise, others towards their behaviours.
Of course it is a balance – fair discussion should be open to all, but currently the debate is not balanced. Terms reimagined and enforced by the left (sex, marriage etc) can’t be disputed without discredit, and whilst the conservative side generally suffers the fools from the liberal side, the liberal side doesn’t even suffer the wise ones from the conservative side (I speak as someone who tends towards some aspects of liberalism, and is surrounded by liberal friends).
The purpose of the law is simple – to remove force and deceit. Any propaganda shoved down adolescents with respect to their sex or erotic behaviour is at best deceit – their brains will change in x years and in not accounting for this change, someone convincing minors of engaging in twerking, or erotic play, or ‘sex’ changes, is fooling them. This should not be allowed.
That some small % of adults turn gay or trans? Meh – it doesn’t affect the overall birth rate much, and is unlikely to become the cause for a society snuffing itself out.
Whatever it is, it’s TRASH.
A grim portrayal of the dystopian nightmare that modern France has become. And directed by a “New French”, just as the latest version of Les Miserables was about blacks and directed by a black.
Watch “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday”, made in 1953, and see French people (all white) acting normally.
Cut to a France where the great hit is a film about 11-year old black Muslims twerking. Pro or anti-pedo, it’s appalling and depressing. I don’t now why anyone in their right mind would watch it.
Pedo panic seems to me mostly an American phenomenon. Any adult near a child is suspect of being a pedophile. Maybe some are, who knows. There’s so much mental sickness in America. People in Europe are less paranoid about it, many children go to school by themselves, although of course they have their share of sick pedos too.
Nevertheless, the sexualization of children is real, it started with Barbie dolls and continues with Ariana Glande and most pop music directed at pre-teens. On the other hand, in olden times some women married at 13 or 14. But it was marriage, it was still better than now, were women fuck and suck from 11 to 30, then marry at 35 and try to have one IVF child, or adopt cats, or a pit-bull.
Anyway, it’s all part and parcel of the sexualization, or I should really say pornification of culture. Sex, being a strong human drive, of course was always present in art and culture, but now everything is about the ugliest, coarsest, most depraved and explicit forms of sex, all the time. Depressing.
Prohibiting porn and bringing back censorship on moral grounds would help improve things. Also expelling all Blacks and Muslims and Jews from Europe, but that ship has sailed and sinked.
Even if the dances were, as you say, played for cringe-value in the movie. The trailer made them seems as sexually liberating, empowering etc.
So the real blame with starting the scandal lies with whomever decided to direct the trailer as provocatively as possible.
And I don’t think it was on purpose. It was probably a boomer seeing this movie about child exploitation in instagram culture (or whatever ) and going “oh yeah, it’s a teen musical, I know what will make it fun. Some upbeat music and focus on their cool dance moves!”
The transatlantic divide is deeper than it seems at first glance.
It is defined in the paragraph, including its ambiguities, narrowing from the broad to the more specific. Failure to understand, like how tumors relate to society, is more on you.
The French and their (Neo) Colonial fantasies…..
Spoken like a man who has no children. And isn’t ready to have them.
I also have a book recommendation for you:
Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow
When suggesting policies for humans, its helpful to consider how human brains generally function.
https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/netflix-Political_cuties-1536×1116.jpg
Wait. How can she be a single mother if she has a husband, even if he has other wives?
Clonal path precludes change. A population of different versions of am organism through clonal path select the most fit clones but does not create new versions. So the only change are the proportions in the mixture but nothing new is created.
If defects accumulate and overwhelm the population it means that they survive and thus from the tautology of evolutionary language what survives is fit and thus they can’t possibly be a defect.
Then you try to apply the language of evolution to a society which might be questionable as one society can be considered metaphorically as organism but when there is no other societies the evolution scheme does not apply. Evolution is plural. Evolution is about selection from among many organisms. To select you must have more then one. You need many organisms not just one. If there was only one organism on Earth and his name was Charles Darwin he would not invented the theory of evolution.
All you can do is to try to measure the length of life of culture/society/state and use this as a metric to measure the quality of society. But how would you define when the society terminates. If all Chinese stop speaking Chinese and begin speak English would you say that the Chinese society ended? Or will you define the end of China when the last Chinese dies even if China will be full of Mongolians and Russians doing pretty much the same thing what Chinese did?
You know little bit of biology, you absorbed the language of evolution but use it ineptly and then you venture to the area where you try to use the templates and thinking patterns from what you think know to what you do not know. I am sorry to say but you are not very good at it. Which is not surprising as you are Mowgli who was raised by computers, iirc. Go back to your computer games.
So you could try define society survival in terms
Some say Humans are rationalizing creatures rather than rational creatures.
They act, and then try to come up with rationales for their actions.
What is not being addressed here is which society is better.
prohibition vs. legal alcohol
illegal prostitution vs. legal brothels and free lancer whores
illegal gambling vs. lottery, casinos on every corner
illegal drugs vs. legal drugs
illegal usury vs. day loans on every strip mall
What else could possibly be legalized what still remains illegal?
The arguments for legalizations are libertarian ideological and utilitarian in terms of costs. The former can be easily dismissed while the latter need to be recalculated with a merit function that include long term costs. Nobody knows the long term costs of legal drugs or legal usury. Therefore we need to return to what we know that worked which is the deontological ethics on which various prohibitions were based in the past.
Libertarian and utilitarian argument are leftist in nature and intend to undermine Christian based society. One of the chief rhetorical devises was shaming by pointing to hypocrisy while forgetting that hypocrisy is a litmus test that point to what is good as a homage to virtue. Libertarianism is not an answer for the basic facts on human nature that humans are weak and need to be guided, however the guidance must come with an ample room for forgiveness. Catholicism is much better on forgiveness than Protestantism.
I think the more important reason for sexual reproduction is to ensure that parasites, bacteria and viruses have a very hard time in attacking us, because they have greatly shorter evolution times …
My guess is the kind of guys hoping for sexbots will find that in 20 years, all they’ll have is an Alexa that specializes in talking dirty to them.
I’m as horny as the next guy, but I really don’t need to see sluts and smut on unz.com (or on R T, for that matter). Some ranting and venting amidst the mutual education, entertainment, and debate, for sure, I mean check my comments and my harsher proposals.
But this is a special place: couldn’t it be one of the decreasing number of places not tainted by needless sexual exhibitionism? Will it be only Talha backing me up on this?
Spoken like a man for whom having children is his only significant accomplishment. Having kids does not put you in an exclusive club:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m generally pro-natalist. But this valorization of anyone who reproduces, so that they feel comfortable asserting that the mere fact that they have kids proves they are responsible, intelligent, and care about the world, is dysgenic. You can think of the red-tribe promoting “positive dysgenics” through encouraging the incompetent to reproduce, while the blue tribe promotes “negative dysgenics” by discouraging the competent. For instance, take this scene from the Big Bang Theory:
Yes, it’s a joke, but that is really how a lot of nerds think. That procreating is a low-skilled job that should be done by low-skilled laborers, while the intelligent focus on “preserving the knowledge of mankind” for the benefit of future generations of smart people who will just magically sprout out of the ground.
It’s not a simple choice between prohibition and legalisation. There are actually at least four options.
Technical prohibition but with no enforcement. Decriminalisation is a kind of variation on this option. Making something not quite legal, but tolerated. Turning a blind eye. That’s been the situation with possession of drugs in Australia for decades. It was also the situation with homosexuality for many years.
Legalisation. Buy the product whenever you want from whomever you like. The libertarian option.
Legalisation combined with regulation. As we do with alcohol. You can buy alcohol but with age restrictions, licensing hours, only available from licensed sellers, regulation of quality, etc. This option can be used for drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc.
Reducing the issue to a question of prohibition vs legalisation can be a bit misleading.
Almost everything that is legal is regulated to some extent. There aren’t many things that are legal with no restrictions whatsoever.
Any utilitarian argument has to balance costs and benefits for all four options.
Also, when it comes to prohibition or regulation, you really need honest competent government and law enforcement. One of the strongest arguments against prohibition is that in the West it has very often led to corruption and abuse of power.
You still needed to peer under the MORE tag, didn’t you?
You want her picture in a niqab brother? Make her go back to Ghriss then, so she can marry her cousin and produce a dozen harragas to cross over in the next 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghriss
Better yet, go there yourself. You’ll see less sluts there. You know, shariah and stuff…
Wa Salam!
Greatest/Silent: "That selfish, dissolute, radical baby boom who want to cut our Social Security checks…"
X/Millennial: "Those selfish, puritanical, reactionary Boomers who won't give up their Social Security checks…"
Spencer’s Gifts used to sell a similar, less preachy poster fifty years ago. In every major mall in America. (Remember malls?)
The most pornographic part of this shot is her slutty makeup.
Get real. The reality is 2 or 4 only. 1 and 3 are theoretical constructs only.
Exactly. From the in-depth account of the “story arc” at Vigilant Citizen, it seems like the same “afterschool special” movie Hollywood has been churning out for decades now: stupid, “traditional” parents (Muslim this time, not Christian) won’t let their little girl act out her sexuality. Liberation Now!
https://vigilantcitizen.com/moviesandtv/netflixs-cuties-is-about-normalizing-the-sexualization-of-children-and-nothing-else/
I guess this time they “went too far” but it’s not like this hasn’t been standard Hollywood for decades.
The “feminine” image presented by pornstars is a grossly-exagerrated form of classical femininity, cf. the breast implants, overuse of makeup, plastic surgery etc. etc.. There are also fresh-out-of-high-school 18 and 19-year-olds in porn, which is quite saddening to say the least.
August Ames, the pornstar who killed herself after getting hounded by the gay lobby for refusing to film a scene with a bisexual man, was only 23 when she died.
There seem to be quite a few people here who think Option 1 is possible and desirable. I’m inclined to think it’s not possible.
So would you pick Option 2 or 4?
We already have VR porn. I’m typing this as i’m sitting in Oculus VR headset about to head out to search for ruthenium on 31 Aquilae A1 in Elite Dangerous lol. Not quite porn but if you ask my wife it’s just may well be. (I still prefer my porn in 2D, but that’s merely a fashion statement).
In the future, i often wonder who will have easier time – my son or my daughter. While the son can get MeTooed, the daughter may well find nobody to date. Its a tricky situation.
Option 2. Prohibition with turning a blind eye.
I think it worked with homosexuality. The fact that it was illegal forced homosexuals to be discreet about their activities. It kept them in the closet. And if they went after kids they could still be stomped on. As long as they were discreet they were not persecuted and they had their own subculture and everybody (including probably most homosexuals) was reasonably content.
It’s a reasonably good way to keep potentially problematic subcultures contained.
It failed with drugs because the media was allowed to glamourise drugs through movies and especially through pop music. So the small and relatively harmless drug subculture expanded and moved into the mainstream. Maybe it could still work if the media could be prevented from promoting drug subcultures. Maybe it could gradually be contained.
It could work with prostitution if the laws were only enforced against people coercing women into prostitution but not against prostitutes and their clients.
Biden likes cuties.
What would one rather do with a beautiful woman – make love, play chess, or get down on one’s knees with her and pray? One could do all three, perhaps not simultaneously.
Like what? We don’t live in caves? Wtf
French are quite famous to create controversial and shocking films.
Some of their films are banned in multiple countries.
Just 2 example:
Baise-moi:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0249380/
The story of two female serial killer, actually roles played by real prostitutes.
Off course reaction was: outrage.
Martyrs:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1029234/
A secret society which uses torture on victims for the goal to push them till the border of death, when they able to see what is in the another side.
Reaction was: many who did watch part of it get so shocked, also many flee the cinemas vomiting.
French sometimes do controversial films – not for all (audiance) and not for weak stomack.
For sure French, German, Russian films are different from Hollywood films.
It is also possible that sending miners to work long hours in coal mines reduces the incidence of drunken wife beating, but that’s 1. speculative and 2. not the reason we have coal mining. Prostitutes are frequently forced or tricked into their professions anyhow, so more than likely prostitution does not decrease the incidence of rape. Think of the Rotherham scandal.
“It can be argued” is a very weak form of argument. I can be argued that access to prostitution discourages males from working harder to seek out relationships. It can be argued that prostitution encourages infidelity. I’m however not interested in counter arguments of the form “it can be argued.” I don’t have to for example say: “it can be argued that coal mining increases our ability to produce steel,” as it does in fact do so. Your arguments are simply speculative and weak.
The idea that society should allow a deleterious institution because certain loser men receive temporary pleasure from it is not a good argument. It is especially not good when one considers the amount of people who suffer because of prostitution, including many of the prostitutes themselves. There are more important things in the world than the “happiness” of loser men.
Yeah you got me, I haven’t achieved anything except raising children. Not a logical inference from what I said.
What I said is that someone who doesn’t take offense at this child-abusing filth is not ready to be a father. I never stated or implied that the man doesn’t have achievements.
If you are pay more attention, you will see that my Unz.com comments repeatedly praise AK’s intellect, humor, writing, perspective, and even personality. I find him talented and interesting, and I just plain like the guy.
Plan to meet him in Moscow someday and hope he will meet a good woman and have children by then. Hopefully he will be more discerning and more protective against the exploitative sexualization of young girls by then, and I imagine he will.
Drug legalization in most places is a recent phenomenon which occurred in the lifetimes of people alive today. Those places had high quality of life compared to other countries long before any drug legalization occurred.
I don’t feel much need to argue anything here because I think you are conceding the point. The Taliban, a government with weak state capacity, was able to shut down the heroin trade in a lawless country full of militias and clannish conflict. For powerful, industrialized states which do not have the same level of violence, shutting down the drug trade would also be easy, if the will was there.
Wrong. Criminal cartels would simply move into new markets, like they have done before, and like any other business does. You make one type of drug legal, the will simply push another. Or they will switch to human trafficking. This has happened before. Mexican cartels have been around a long time, they haven’t been pushing one product for that entirety. The lack of border enforcement plus large numbers of Hispanics in the United States also makes the jobs of Mexican cartels easier.
You are assuming the demand for drugs has nothing whatever to do with the availability or social acceptability of them. I would suggest your assumption is wrong. Those who want to sell drugs, whether legally or illegally, want to create demand by convincing/forcing people to use it. By allowing this, you allow for the potential of increased demand for the product. If the product has deleterious effects, then you are increasing the rot in society by allowing this. This tendency applies whether the product is legal or illegal. Think of the example of Oxycontin.
The ending of Prohibition had nothing whatsoever to do with the decline of the mafia. The mafia was destroyed by active state repression.
Prohibition created an illegal market for alcoholic beverages. That is true. What is not true, is that it was the cause of organized crime itself. The cause of organized crime was the immigration of troublesome groups from Europe, like Sicilians for example. The solution was increased police activity against organized crime. Another solution is shutting down the market itself, by active repression.
The more drugs(or anything else) become embedded in a society, the greater the cost to suppress them.
You seem to think that our only choices are the crazy inbred islamic scenario you paint or our current degeneracy, promiscuity, ruining childhood with ugly meaningless sex. That is the fallacy of the false alternative. I choose neither.
Also, please pay more attention to my long comment history if you think I am advocating sharia. I occasionally make jokes like “Kadyrov 2024” when I see sickos aggressively promoting unclean dead-end sexual “lifestyles” (homosexuality) and mental illness and self-mutilation (“transgenderism”) to our children. But there is an obvious middle ground between brutal sharia and our culture’s glorification of sin and disorder.
What I want is Muslims out of our countries (and to be fair, our militaries out of their countries). That doesn’t mean I somehow logically need to accept hypersexualization of what should be innocent young girls and slutty displays of women’s bodies to total strangers.
I can absolutely relate to what you write above.
What I can’t relate with, is a guy (you) peering under the MORE tag and then making moralizing pronouncements.
Everything else we do agree about. Shariah is no alternative to our current predicament in the West and Russia.
What would have been a viable alternative would be: A) non-biased factual education of children B) maximum possible protection of childhood from all possible harm C) a social system promoting healthy lifestyles D) recognition of the high social value of family E) celebration of parenthood F) increase in birth rates for native populations G) decrease of immigration except for the rare, skilled and high IQ professionals (don’t think there are many of them in the third world anyway).
I could go on, but you can see where I stand: build strong societies through strong families and strong education and healthcare for the younger generations. Of course it ain’t gonna happen under the current regimes both in West and Russia. And without the needed social change the native populations of Western European and Slavic descent will continue decreasing and weakening, while Islamic populations will continue increasing in numbers and gaining more influence.
Very well said. I’m with you on every sensible proposal you just made. I am wary of censorship, but when adults involve minors, especially younger minors, in portrayals of ugly demeaning (and premature) sexuality, we should act through government as well as through social pressure and boycotts.
You’re relying here on arguments that are emotive, vague and unprovable.
You may think that something is deleterious but you need to demonstrate that this is so. Simply stating an opinion as a fact is not good enough. Is it deleterious just because you don’t like it? You make a statement about the many people who suffer from prostitution. I will concede that some prostitutes are forced into the trade but you go way beyond that and make claims about large numbers of other people who suffer. Who are these people? How precisely do they suffer? Precisely how many people?
Your repeated reference to loser men makes it clear that your arguments are purely emotional. You’re saying that something that a certain class of person does is bad merely because you don’t like that particular class of person, or perhaps the existence of that class of person upsets you.
Your repeated reference to loser men also suggests that you lack empathy and compassion, and lack any understanding of the complexities of the human condition. Do you also despise “loser” women who resort to vibrators?
There are more important things in the world than pandering to the whims of moralisers who cannot even make a coherent argument.
It seems quite clear from this comment thread that the reason that we as a society cannot solve social problems is that there is no chance of having calm rational sensible discussion about any social problem. People immediately get hysterical.
And if the social problem has any connection with sex the hysteria becomes extreme.
It’s also clear that people are no longer interested in the possibility that there might be two sides to some stories and that there might be a number of different potential solutions to a problem.
It’s also amusing to see social conservatives and moralisers adopting precisely the same style of argument that is so popular with SJWs and Wokeists. “Anything that offends me should be banned.” And “anybody who disagrees with me is a bad person.” It’s also depressing to see people trotting out the “if you don’t think witches should be burned then you must be a witch as well” argument.
I disagree strongly with your final point. I think it’s immoral to poach skilled high IQ professionals from other countries. Rich countries like the US should pay to educate their own skilled high IQ professionals.
I agree with all your other points but they’re extremely vague.
Did their quality of life go down after drug legalization for that particular reason? Also, the mindset for legalization was already there for a while, those kinds of decisions don’t appear overnight.
.
One season of crops burnt doesn’t equal to heroin trade shutdown. US burns down corps in Colombia on a regular basis, but the business adjusts. US spends countless $billions, so the will is there alright. But the will of the cartels to supply the market is stronger.
Is there a huge demand for niche exotic drugs that absolutely must be banned? The fact that the must be niche and exotic answers this question. As for human trafficking, that need is already being addressed by coyotes as they smuggle agricultural and construction workers into the country. If you legalize pot and coke that doesn’t mean that American households who buy this stuff will all of a sudden crave additional Mexican construction laborers.
.
If people get addicted to Oxy, they should go to rehab, not jail. Meanwhile, production and distribution of Oxy is legal and regulated. Why can’t we do the same for other drugs? The problem with Oxy is criminally greedy doctors pushing it on unsuspecting public. But that’s American healthcare for you. Stuff like cocaine or pot won’t have the same effect – pretty much everybody knows what those are and do, and the risks involved.
Prohibition ended because people realized what a dumb idea that was. Mafia was simply replaced by the Mexicans and Columbians etc.
Lol ok genius, lets run some numbers here. US currently has some 2 million in prisons and jails, 7 million on parole and probation, and 10-15 million arrests annually. One third of US population has criminal record already and that number is rising fast. Among young people, arrest/criminal record rate is probably over 50% already (and no, it’s not just drugs, but you are proposing to add more drug convictions on top of that).
And you are asking for more repression? What are you going to do when majority of the population in the country are criminals? What’s a good rate? 70%? 80%?
In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t like police already. And while BLM = Soros blah blah blah, Soros isn’t stupid, he knows pain points and how to press them. The pain point is real.
Good luck with increasing police activity and repression. We will be applauding Mexican cartels as they machine gun cops in the streets if we take up your advice.
The end result will be the kind of society that many social conservatives seem to want. A small free population of moralistic churchgoers with the other 90% of the population in jail.
The education is mentioned as being of foremost importance in my points. I am sorry, but I don’t have the time to write a political treatise to detail my points. Nevertheless, I believe the logic of my convictions is quite clear: you start with families and children and then you build a healthier society year after year. Those who seek to weaken a society also start with families and children, you destroy them first and you are certain to kill a culture and debase a civilization.
Its done. Its over. I comment much less these days because there is no longer any point in saying anything.
Rod Dreher is right and in these times the only smart thing is for intelligent people to retreat to quasi monastic communities of like minded people to wait out the barbarism. The mainstream is given up to the SJWs and their right wing counterparts who may even be more insane – they are certainly nastier and creepier. (Unz website is the right wing version of antifa)
And all of us who are not lost to sectarian insanity of Left and Right have to develop the skills to survive in this new age of totalitarianism. The Daniel Chieh’s are coming for you from the right, and the SJWs from the Left. You will not be allowed to peacefully live your values.
You must learn dissimulstion and subterfuge – to outwardly comply (minimally) but remain inwardly free and free physically in private and among friends as much as possible.
The Chinese are already implementing the the most thorough and total system of social surveillance and control the world has ever known, and people like Ron Unz are promoting the Chinese system as ideal and pushing for its adoption in the US.
And it’s only a matter of time until it will be adopted in the US. A big part of this website is to promote the adoption of the Chinese system. Social Credit scores will become a thing in the US.
But there is reason to hope. Control freakery never lasts very long in history and always ends up destroying itself. Its comforting to know that Legalism was the shortest lived regime in Chinese history and was immediately followed by a Taoist ruler who repealed nearly all the stifling laws of the Legalists (I think the new regime had only 3 law as!) and ushered in a new era of flourishing that lasted very long
The technologists dream of total control, but cybernetics shows this is just to be involved in an endless feedback loop (who controls the controller?) and total stagnation and immobility. So they will end up killing themselves and their societies the more they try to impose total control. Control means immobility.
So this age will be brief but intense, and followed by an age in which the insane quest for control will be relaxed and human nature will have the freedom to flourish again.
But in the meantime, anyone who still values freedom – or is eccentric and doesn’t conform to the insane Right or the insane Left, which are basically mirror images of each other (if you change the victim and oppressor groups on Unz it would read exactly like an antifa SJW site), will have to learn to survive in the new totalitarianism.
Lol ok genius, lets run some numbers here. US currently has some 2 million in prisons and jails, 7 million on parole and probation, and 10-15 million arrests annually. One third of US population has criminal record already and that number is rising fast. Among young people, arrest/criminal record rate is probably over 50% already (and no, it’s not just drugs, but you are proposing to add more drug convictions on top of that).
This wildly overstates the issue. Felons got to prison. Those committing misdemeanors might spend some time in county jails. Getting drunk in public is a misdemeanor and is part of your “criminal record”. The vast majority of these “criminals” are guilty of a misdemeanor or two and are not repeat offender felons of which the drug trade makes extensive use of.
Most of the violence committed in the drug trade is one drug gang fighting another. Making drugs legal doesn’t make the problem go away. California has legal pot and cartels still bring it in because they can always undercut the legal price.
Drugs aren’t a problem in Singapore. Japan had a meth problem after WWII. Both were solved by quickly getting rid of traffickers.
I want to add that the triumph of totalitarianism is not necessarily the death of freedom and eccentricity (and incidentally, science and creative thinking).
What is dangerous is threatened totalitarianism. Secure totalitarianism tends to wink at infractions and allow considerable latitude to disobey in private what you uphold in public. All strength is liberal and tolerant ultimately.
It might be better for the culture wars to end and for society to have an “official ideology” so we can have some peace and quiet and focus on more important things. It almost doesn’t matter what the official ideology is – we know from history that official ideology is just symbolic. Christian Europe certainly didn’t follow Jesus’s rules.
The function of an official ideology may be only to provide a consensus around agreed symbolic formulas that the community can unify around, and hence a measure of stability, in which the actual content of an official ideology may be irrelevant.
Ultimately the desire for totalitarianism is based on fear of chaos and entropy, and ultimately death, as Daniel Chieh has so eloquently explained (and I want to thank him for so clearly explaining the mentality of a right wing totalitarian). This fear should be taken seriously as it afflicts many people. But this is a negative motivation, not a positive vision for human flourishing.
Ones attitude to death dictates how one lives ones life. If one sees death as a natural and normal part of life and nothing to be feared one can focus on living life to the fullest and flourishing. One has a positive motivation. If one sees death as the most terrible and fearful thing possible, one lives a crimped life. One focuses not on flourishing, but on preventing death as much as possible, which means rigid control. One is negatively motivated.
So ones attitude to death is probably the primary question that will determine the whole course of life, down to ones political views.
Its questionable how much ones attitude to death can be learned and how much is an inborn intuition. But it would certainly be worthwhile for schools and cultural institutions to teach as far as possible the acceptance of death as a normal part of life. Perhaps even a kind of pantheism, that humans are part of a larger whole and the death of the body means nothing is really lost, may serve as one possible basis for promoting a fearless attitude to death.
But at the same time we must accept there will always be people for whom fear of death is their primary motivation in life, and we should develop cultural methods to calm them down so they don’t strive to gain control of the rest of us.
Unfortunately I think that’s correct. You need to learn to keep a very very low profile.
That’s something I’ve been noticing more and more. Both sides now have an identical take-no-prisoners mindset. Both sides would like to stamp out dissent.
On every political issue (and today every single issue is political) the middle ground has largely disappeared. There are just two armed camps of extremists, and their thinking is identical.
There is little point in being politically engaged.
And in the US there seems to be a growing enthusiasm for the idea of war as a magical solution for all problems. I remember the Cold War. It was an era in which every sane person thought that war between nuclear powers must never ever be contemplated. Now it’s seen as a perfectly acceptable risk and by many it’s seen as desirable.
I think you’re probably correct.
I have a theory that democracy leads inevitably to the most oppressive kind of totalitarian regime. In a democracy everything becomes politicised which means that everything is everybody else’s business. Opinion polls are frantically conducted to find out what public opinion is on every conceivable subject (or if you’re a cynic the purpose of opinion polls is to manipulative public opinion). Either way it’s disastrous for freedom because disagreeing with public opinion is seen to be an anti-social act that most be suppressed.
A “free press” is also dangerous to freedom because again it encourages the idea that everything is political and everything is everybody else’s business.
And picking up on your point about strength being liberal and tolerant, democracy is dangerous because it is inherently weak and unstable.
Yes, I agree. Its why eccentricity was never really tolerated in democratic America, whereas a monarchical regime with a landed aristocracy like Britain had in the 19th century was produced so many memorable eccentrics and oddballs.
It seems to be the Law of Paradox at work.
That is why ultimately I’m not so concerned long term. The important thing may to just have one side of the culture war achieve a complete and decisive victory.
Sure doesn’t seem like it.
But you have, of course. Tell us about it. Jesus, you are insufferable.
We have been putting drug dealers in prison for what, over a century now, and there are still more of them. You are going to need MUCH bigger jail to make a dent in drug trade as long as there’s still demand.
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Sell it cheaper then to undercut the cartels. Generally though, most people would buy from legal sources if price was competitive – cartels have some bad reputation.
Singapore and Japan have no future and no young people with their TFR stuck around 1.3 for decades. I mean, cemeteries don’t have drug problem either. Trivially true but who cares what the dead do in their spare time? Same with Singapore and Japan, nobody cares what the walking dead do. Unlike them, US actually still has a future, for now at least. It would be worthwhile not to waste it in prisons.
Followed soon by
I fail to see the relationship between an “alternative” website with rowdy comment[er]s and a communist-inspired street militia. Perhaps you are not as smart as you think you are.
Claire Lehmann is so hot. I don’t usually go for older women, but there’s something about her.
Turns out she’s only a couple of years older than me so I guess never mind.
Okay, now I read the review. Yeah, thanks for watching it, so that I didn’t have to. Not that I’d have watched it anyway. At least I can now understand the controversy more in depth. Unfortunately it’s already half forgotten (and will be completely forgotten next week), but still, it’s something.
Appreciate your comment and sober attitude.
I would suggest that our Constitution already contains a clear mechanism for allowing different approaches to social problems and moral controversies: the Tenth Amendment.
For example, I want my State’s laws to reflect that marriage is a sacred commitment that is only morally right, sensible, and socially useful between a man and a woman, and that homosexual “marriage” is a perversion and an absurdity not worthy of recognition or “toleration.”
But I will gladly defend the Tenth Amendment right of people in other States to enact laws diametrically opposed to my views in THEIR States, allowing homosexual “marriage.”
Similarly with marijuana. I want it to be completely legal for adults 21 and over in my State, without punitive excise Taxes or onerous regulations. But people in other States are constitutionally entitled to tax and regulate marijuana differently, or to prohibit it entirely.
Neither of us should force our view on the other polity, the whole huge and diverse country, and it is UNconstitutional to do so.
This can work with State autonomy and State-determined, not federally dictated, laws governing abortion, prostitution, seat belt and helmet laws, drinking age, tobacco, medical insurance, consumer protection against fraud and intrusion on privacy, and just about anything else.
Agree with much of what you say here. But this quibble from a fellow Angeleno: cartels would find it much harder to undercut the legal price of marijuana enough to induce most people to deal with them again, instead of a legal disepensary, if the taxes weren’t so astronomical.
California and other States would pull a lot more people away from the illegal pot market if they didn’t impose taxes like 37% (Washington State) or 30-35% (Los Angeles and elsewhere in CA) on retail recreational (non-medical) sales.
Non-medical retail pot buyers shell out a 15% State excise tax, plus sales tax (9.5% and rising in LA, 10 to 10.50% in places like Pasadena and many other suburbs), plus a city tax (often 5-6%).
Treat non-medical pot like other products, just sales tax rather than a ton of state/city excise taxes, and the legal price gets a lot closer to the black-market price.
As an anti-tax but definitely not anti-pot friend remarked, “California can even screw up legal weed.”
The problem with any legalization scheme is that those using it safely SHOULD pay the costs of those who don’t. Of course, the taxes being paid for legal pot don’t even come close to that. Even the money collected now is not used for this purpose but stolen by the government for their pet projects.
You might argue that policing is costing us money that, should we no longer need it, can pay for part of those costs. The reality is that drug abuse costs will always be much higher than anything the government can collect in a legal drug use system. That is why the attempt is always to stamp it out as the better long term strategy. But outlawing without quickly executing drug dealers will never work.
The bottom line is that there is no solution to the drug problem.
How is marijuana “abuse” costing you and me more money than prohibition was?
And, are you calling for the execution of people who sell marijuana, tobacco, and alcohol? If one and not the others, why not the others?
The tens of millions of Americans who destroy their bodies with gluttony and morbid obesity surely cost us FAR more in increased costs on the Medicaid, Medicare, and private medical insurance systems than pot smokers do. For one thing, there seem to be far more morbidly obese Americans than Americans smoking pot. Their diabetes, hypertension, gout, and premature arthritis are largely self-inflicted and readily avoidable. Where are their “sin taxes”, prison terms, or (!) executions?
(Moreover, millions of people now consume marijuana in edible form, not by smoking or vaping, eliminating the health damage that we’re assuming results from smoking or vaping marijuana.)
If we are going to target pot users due to alleged increased medical costs on others:
(1) the taxes should be on smoked pot and perhaps vapes, not edibles;
(2) much higher taxes should be imposed on junk food and fast food .
And if we are going to talk about insanity like executing people who sell marijuana, then you need to also advocate executing people who sell the far more widely destructive junk food and fast food.
Once you make it legal it is much harder to stamp out the illicit market so the penalties have to increase to stop it or soon everybody will grow some for “personal consumption” that ends up competing with the legal market.
Making moonshine is still illegal is it not? That is much tougher to hide than marijuana, especially since every legalization proposal always includes a “grow your own” provision in the law. When I was a kid you had to apply for a license to make up to 200 gallons of beer or wine for personal use. That is gone today but distilled spirits for personal use have never been allowed.
As for the costs, recent studies have shown an increase in schizophrenia among chronic pot users. The costs to this are high. Legalization will result in thousands if not hundreds of thousands of these cases more than we have now and homelessness is a big problem.
I was in college with a lot of smart people who thought they could handle their pot use. They always told themselves they would just cram right before the exams while finishing the joint.
I knew one guy who was rejected by Caltech only because of his lackluster enthusiasm for the place on his entrance interview. His first 4 quarters at UCLA were all straight As. He discovered pot and proceeded to flunk out. Given his obvious talent they did everything they could to keep him enrolled. They finally threw him out right before what would have been his last quarter but let him stay in the dorms because it was too late to get a replacement. He had to tell his parents to cancel that graduation party they were planning. I saw plenty of F-ups like that. Many probably did straighten their lives out. However, anybody saying pot is not harmful is a moron.
Except when those different approaches interfere with a person’s individual rights, then our the next recourse per our Constitution is to push for national legislation or seek redress of grievances in a court of law. “Federally dictated laws” was the proper remedy when state actions had broached individual liberties.
fair review Mr Karlin, but this Euro arthouse film being modernist “no winners nor losers” filler, it simply wants any review as long as it gets views. true, the conservative controversy created many more views than it should have. but there is enough controversial material in the film nonetheless, to make the film draw attention regardless. if conservatives just had fair reviews, the lonely arthouse majors that would watch this film anyway wouldn’t have been drawn out of their Islamophilia and secular-philia in their future careers, while pushing forward pedo messages covertly anyway through “socially realistic” scenes (see Taxi Driver). so perhaps the outrage was good, but only if enough netflix accounts were cancelled. the HBD truths about blacks and Muslims were buried beneath the mixed-muddled femi-muslim messaging anyway.
besides, the powers that be allow controversy to explode on their networks (for example, allowing the hashtag to remain) precisely in these muddled cases, so conservatives can be made to look backwards. i would have liked similar or even bigger outcry for that American comedy movie a year or two ago where prepubescent boys were shown watching porn, trying to get with older legal girls, etc. in fact, that film was probably more brutish and degenerate than this one. but i guess that the reverse cases never warrants as much backlash, as South Park showed us with their “niiice” parody episode of female teachers molesting young boys. just like when they wanna push homos in movies and tv, they do it with cute lesbians first.
That is, of course, correct. But to some degree even the determination of the nature and proper scope of individual liberties and responsibilities traditionally was a State affair, and should remain so. What “degree”? That’s still a matter for reasonable debate.
Adults certainly should not need government permission to grow their own marijuana plants.
For each person whom you know who supposedly ruined their studies, career or life “because of” marijuana consumption, there are many who had no such problem. Like me, many of my friends, several of my relatives, my former MD, and my current dentist. I do know people whose lives were severely and unnecessarily damaged by the criminal penalties for marijuana possession.
I have never known or even heard of anyone who became utterly dysfunctional to the point of homelessness because they smoked (or nowadays, ate) marijuana. Talk to homeless people and those who help them and you will routinely find, instead, preexisting mental illness from childhood/youth and consumption of “hard” drugs like methamphetamine, heroin, and PCP.
Anyone who claims that marijuana use cannot ever exacerbate existing psychological and emotional problems, might be a “moron”, but your skewed apocalyptic view of the typical or common effects of marijuana use is not borne out by my experience, by medical science, or by observation.
If someone flunks out of school or loses his job, it is not pot that “made him” do so, by any stretch of the imagination.