Liyowo wrote: Tue Sep 30, 2025 11:47 pm
Yep, bring up pedophilia and watch most "radical progressive leftists" instantly turn into hardcore conservatives. It's like magic.
Conservative: "Degenerates should be locked away"
Leftist: "The prison industrial complex is modern slavery and I believe in rehabilitation rather than punishment"
Same leftist after bringing up pedophilia: "These degenerates should be locked away"
Conservative: "Gay people should get help to cure their mental illness"
Leftist: "Conversion therapy is torture. You can't change someone's sexuality and trying to do so is unethical."
Same leftist after bringing up pedophilia: "They should get help to cure their mental illness"
Conservative: "Children can't understand being gay or transgender, it's just confusion and grooming"
Leftist: "Children can understand attraction and gender, and they are able to determine which one they identify as."
Same leftist after bringing up pedophilia: "Children's brain are too underdeveloped to consent to anything, it's just confusion and grooming"
There are probably a ton more exemples possible using this format. In fact I think the above could be used as an effective meme format by MAPs activists.
I think this was well said. With the first point I think the contradiction is less likely to lie in wanting prison for some but not others but in opposing prison for anyone while encouraging some kind of punitive treatment in other ways (so it's not just about harm reduction. I can remember many, many years ago someone arguing for prison abolition and saying that the community has other ways of exacting justice, i.e. mob violence, so the opposition to prison isn't necessarily rooted in compassion for prisoners, never mind all prospective prisoners, alone).
However, antipunitivism is still considered a positive value... so we have this huge contradiction, a left that prides itself on being antipunitivist while not being so at all.
Sometimes they try to rationalize it, which is pathetic, because then it's even more contradictory. They end up saying things like “you can't reintegrate sex offenders” when, in reality, the recidivism rate for people convicted of sex crimes is lower than for many other crimes.
I've never understood how some Christians will downplay the idea of loving your enemy, loving thy neighbor, charity, forgiveness, mercy, etc. If you knew nothing about Christianity and heard some Christians talk you would never in a million years make the connection between the religion they're talking about and much of what Jesus said (I'm not explaining myself well but it's felt surreal to me at times when someone would bring this up and the response would be something like, "actually, it's a common myth that Jesus was all about love and compassion etc. etc." No, it isn't. It's true that Christianity can't be boiled down to 'love others' alone, there is the concept of sin and Jesus/God is judgmental toward it, but Christians are supposed to have a 'love the sinner, hate the sin' attitude and leave rightful punishment up to God, who still loves and cares for the people he punishes (or allows to be sent to hell, if you want to frame that as just a consequence of separation from God that they brought on to themselves) because the idea is that justice demands it, but the whole revolution that came with the New Testament seems to imply that he doesn't
hate those people, it seems more so that duty calls him to punish them). We will always rationalize away our inconsistencies because we're emotional creatures, so I think that's true for every ideological group.
With leftism (which I disagree with on principle, what I understand to be 'leftism,' it's not just that individual leftists can be inconsistent with their ideals but what the ideals themselves seem to be; and I think that they are
internally inconsistent) it seems that the emphasis is on compassion for the perceived underdog (more precisely, perceived underdog groups) and not just a universal humanism (i.e. compassion for people of color and the working class and low income people but less so for white men who are white collar criminals or who come from a financially privileged background unless maybe they commit some kind of anti-conservative political violence but then that's not a matter of 'forgiveness' or trying to figure out why they've done what they've done and how it's ultimately the result of society having failed them because we're incentivized to 'humanize' them and see them as patients).
I don't want to elaborate on this right now (it might be somewhat off-topic although it relates to leftist inconsistency) but I've always thought that the preoccupation with homosexuality was shallow when the same people who champion the lgbt might generally have nothing to say about incestuous couples (who don't plan on reproducing and are even in the same age-group), non-active pedophiles, they might shame men for their sexuality (for consuming pornography, expressing attraction to women in scenarios where doing so is harmless and I don't just mean in terms of outward expression but the private sexualization of women that it reveals, obviously age-gap relationships between men and younger women are taboo and I suspect that many people would care less if we were talking about older men with younger men and even less so with older women and younger men, etc.) or in general don't necessarily have a 'love is beautiful, love is love' attitude (e.g. they might be judgmental about someone who has a crush on someone other than their spouse; which I understand in the context of the monogamous ideal but the point is there are limits or conditions on when 'love' is ok, or they might criticize someone for being attracted to this or that individual person for whatever reasons because they can't connect it to the marginalization of a visible group, etc.). There's almost never this sense, as far as I can tell, that it's never inappropriate to be attracted to absolutely anyone. I've never really understood why gay people are so special (I mean no disrespect, it's just that it seems more about supporting a visible protected class than consistently applying a principle that justifies destigmatizing homosexuality to sexual ethics in general. I'm all for gay representation in the media but you're probably never going to see, again, a consensual incestuous relationship between adults or a virtuous non-active pedophile, or some taboo relationship that is mutually desired by both partners or even just someone with an attraction to someone they're not supposed to be attracted to who never pursues a relationship with them for whatever reasons. The latter exists to some degree, 'the forbidden love' theme, but only up until a point). I'm not sure if this is the thread for that.
